Chapter Twenty-Three
I return to my home—for that is what Okeanos’s island has become for me. I no longer feel at home in the Crocus Isles. My people have filled it with their virgin sacrifices and god wars, and I do not yet know how to turn them away from those things.
I’m exhausted, alone, and out of sorts. I almost wish I could drag Vesuvius out of his pearl just so I could have someone to talk to about what I’ve seen, but I’m not quite that desperate yet.
I collapse into my bed dirty and despairing.
My people cower and do evil in my name. Others are dead because of things they said I ordered them to do.
The damage done is irrevocable. My only bright light this night was a lonely priest and a little girl carrying a ball of fabric and even they are threatened by the actions of others who mean to start a war.
Is this what Oke dealt with when he was God of the Sea? No wonder he paid no mind to my accusations. It seems that mortals lay any number of things at our feet.
But I am Coralys, the Drowned Queen, and I do not give up. So, the next morning, I rise early and I fish. I fish all day. I do not know if I must keep my catch to fill my people’s nets, but I do not want to risk it, so at the end of the day the dock is heaped with the silvery bodies of dead fish.
I cook one for my dinner, collapse into bed, and do it again the next day and the next and the next.
It is a full seven days that I fish from the moment dawn breaks until the moment the sun falls into darkness.
I fish until my hands are red and blistered and aching from seawater and rough ropes.
I fish until the catch stacked on the docks reeks and rots and fills my harbor with gulls.
I fish until I know Oke’s boat like I know my own bones.
I fish until I fear I have caught every fish that ever existed.
I fish and I think about gods and men and how people seem to worship whatever is the most convenient for them.
And I think about how I killed a god and nothing changed.
It only made things worse. I wish I hadn’t been so hasty.
I wish I’d gone with him that morning of the Resurgence instead of going off on my own.
I wish I’d shown even a little humility, but then I wouldn’t be here, would I?
Because humble people don’t decide that they’re going to kill gods and take their places.
Or if they do, then they’re not called humble anymore.
Only then, after I’ve done all I can, worn, weary, and filthy, do I set out to find my people again.
The king they’ve crowned in Delarte’s place is a disappointment. He seems more concerned with restoring the ruined palace that was once mine than with the fates of our people. I suspect he is only a figurehead set up by the priests and controlled by them entirely.
I find him in his palace, where he cowers and abases himself. I never enjoyed being bowed to, and it is growing so thin now that my temper feels as frayed as Oke’s bedding.
“We honor you, Goddess. Spare us your wrath.”
There’s more. I don’t listen to it all because it’s the same as it was with Turbote. He refuses to stop killing helpless victims. He refuses to listen when I counsel him against war.
“But our enemies are amassing on the coast, Great Goddess,” he says.
I have told him I am Coralys, but he will not call me by name.
“It is said there are so many ships in the harbor of Bel Amos that an entire forest was leveled to make their masts.” This is patently untrue as rumors of war have only been a few months in the making.
No one levels a forest in a month. “If we do not choose a side, we will be forgotten. Our time of glory is now. Let the Crocus Isles go down in history as the great land of Okeanos, God of the Sea. Is it not right and good to fight for the honor of the gods?”
“It is not either of those things,” I snap. “And Okeanos is not your god anymore. I am.”
“Of course, Wife of Okeanos. Your great bounty has blessed us.”
I still don’t know how that name slipped out, but someone said it the last time I was on the islands and now the name is everywhere. I glance over my shoulder at the sea. Already, I wish I were back within it rather than here. Oke’s hermit ways are becoming more and more appealing to me.
“Our nets have been full to bursting. All are fed and our wealth grows.”
Good. There will be no more hungry children. No more refugees with nothing to eat. I’m just beginning to smile when he wipes the expression from my face.
“With this bounty we grow rich enough to foot a navy. A navy of almost every able-bodied man and boy. They will sail for the mainland, where we will slay anyone who stands against Okeanos. Our allies in the Andalappo Isles have sent an ambassador begging for our support and we will give it wholeheartedly.”
“What?” I roar, and I don’t mean to do it. I don’t. But he wants to kill in the name of his god. He’ll kill and say it was me—or my dead husband, which amounts to the same thing. My fraying temper dissolves like mist in the sun. “You will send no ships.”
“I cannot rescind my orders. I have made promises. I have written irrevocable commands.” He’s white-faced and shaking and he doesn’t meet my eyes—thank the gods. If he did, I might throttle him for what he’s doing.
“Then at least bring back Gheric Rodehands as I ordered Turbote to do the last time I was here. He and his thousand followers might help fill the gap left by the men you’ll send away.”
With the actual leaders of my people in such shambles, the man might be their only hope for a government not intent on murdering its own people.
His hands shake, but still he defies me. “We will never tolerate the heretics on our shores. Trust that we honor you in that. We reject them for all time.”
I leave without another word, leaping into the sea like a diving bird does. I am furious. But what am I to do? Punish them? Force their obedience?
If I do that, then it is not the king who will suffer, it is the very peasants whose cries and prayers have motivated me to feed them.
I am starting to be able to pick out their individual prayers when I am in the sea and they cry to me day and night for help.
Just the few weeks since I was their queen are awash with trouble and there is no end to those who reach in faith for help with it.
I could go to each one and bless them individually, but the moment I turned to the next in line, the very bounty I gave them would be seized by these corrupt rulers for the war they hope is coming.
I cannot solve their individual problems without solving them at the source.
This is all a tangled knot I cannot untie.
Frustrated, I slice though the sea, feeling for the prows of the ships, and when I find them being built in the harbors, their waiting weapons stacked high on the shores, I set about stymieing them.
Wave after wave I send against the ships.
A ship swamps and then another, pounded in their builder’s cradles until they are nothing but splinters.
But the next day when I return, the debris is being cleared away and new timbers brought to replace what was ruined.
They will not stop until every mast is broken and every scrap of wood destroyed.
And then what? Will I see my islands stripped bare and impoverished to keep them out of this looming war?
I crawl home, spent and bitter, to lie on my bed miserable and alone. An escape from magic, from gods, from those who would speak for gods is beginning to have an appeal after all.
Mortals. What terrible creatures they are.
Almost as bad as the gods themselves. Do none of them care that they will break themselves upon the cliffs of war and that—just like the ships—there will be nothing left of them?
How many nations have broken that way? How many cultures lost forever due to the arrogance and overreach of their leaders?
And so I listen. Every day I sit on a rock by the water before I go out fishing, and I listen.
I do what I can. I find lost fishermen and guide them safely home.
I find a missing child swept away by a strange tide.
But I am powerless to help with so many things.
How can I return a drowned friend? How will I bless a barren womb, repair a spoiled fortune, bring home a shipment of silks safe?
I also read the books Oke left behind. Especially the book about the Lighthouse.
He was not wrong to set me to them, for by them I learn how to find the shipment of silks upon the sea, how to nudge a ship just so to avoid a storm—how to push smaller squalls away and bend the current where it must go. Small things, but each one eats at me.
To bend the squall, I give my voice for a day and find myself breathless at every task until I must take to my bed and draw in slow thready gasps thinking I will die of lack of air.
To guide the ship, I must lose my own balance for an hour.
My twisted ankle is enough sign that I do not operate well without balance.
I wish I knew how to change the hearts of kings and counselors and seduce them into peace over war, but I still have not learned it.
I hate the idea that Okeanos might have been able to do just that—that if he were not dead, he might have stopped this from happening in a way I cannot.
Bigger works require more from me. When, finally, I can tackle them, I am left trembling and vomiting for six whole days because I shove the red plague from the coastal cities along the Rust Coast.