Chapter Twenty-Five
I emerge from the water dripping and in a foul temper. It is no delight to be a crab. I still feel as though I ought to have more legs than I do and the balance of my body is all wrong.
I creep sideways from the sea, my human feet soft and slippery on the smooth rock, and stop dead.
Someone has lit a driftwood fire of blue-and-purple flames. That someone sits on the far side of it from Okeanos and both of them are lit by the dancing light. It’s a strangely companionable situation. My trident lays beside my husband on the rocks, as close as if he set it there.
My eyes snap to Okeanos’s bare muscled chest. The wound I gave him is yet set into the flesh, ragged and unhealed.
He is still strung up by his hands and they twist painfully in their tethers.
Even with the sea creatures driven away by my sacrifice, he must be in agony.
He sits though, not at ease, but not in as much visible pain as he was before, and his eyes watch me with a hunger that makes me uncomfortable.
“You must not do that again,” he tells me gently over the soft patter of water running from my slick body and dripping on the rock.
It mingles with the mellow crackle of the fire.
He is always so very gentle, this new husband of mine.
“You will waste your days paying for my comfort and your days must be better spent. You must be better spent.”
“How desperately romantic you are, Okeanos, telling a woman she must be spent like a coin in your purse.” Okeanos’s visitor is Markanos.
He lounges on the rocks like he plans to stay here a long time.
“Is this why you’ve never taken a lover?
Do you repel them thus with such vinegar words?
I could teach you better. My reputation in romance is only exceeded by my reputation in battle—as you would know if you sought any company but my own. ”
I am frozen, staring at him. If he tries to kill me again, I suppose I could dive beneath the waves, a crustacean indistinguishable from the others.
I don’t think I’m fast enough to retrieve the trident before he might stab me.
My breath comes quickly. Awareness of my limitations is a clamp around my throat and yet…
“What are you doing to my husband?” I ask quietly, but I put a threat in my voice.
Markanos laughs. “Feeding him wine, naked queen. And some kind of pastry with salmon in it.”
He holds up both for me to see before turning to dribble a little wine in Okeanos’s mouth.
The sea god offers me a wry look, swallowing the wine with calm acceptance.
“Someone must see to his needs,” Markanos taunts. “Not all of us choose to be crabs.”
A wave rises up over the shore and slaps hard when it comes down, splashing on Markanos and sizzling across part of the fire with a puff of steam that clouds the air.
I take that cue to scoop up my tunic, belt, and cuirass from where they fell when I transformed and I quickly dress. To their credit, neither man watches me.
“Are you insulting my wife?” Okeanos asks in a restrained voice.
Does he still have some control over the waves?
I try to sense it within myself, for if I am the sea, then I should feel any hold he has on me, but I cannot.
Either that was coincidence—unlikely—or his grip remains on the reins of the ocean and I cannot sense it, for we are too intermingled.
The thought gives me pause, but I must drag my gaze back to Oke’s almost instantly, for his words are thick with some emotion I can’t read when he says, “Wife, I must confess, not once in the centuries that I have been a god has another offered her safety for mine or her comfort to ease my pain. Or seen me as a man in need of succor or kindness. The last to do such for me was my mortal mother. I am… humbled by your gift.”
His words are sweet, as is the look in his eyes when he offers them.
I stop dead at what I was doing—fumbling with the buckle of my belt.
I’m taken aback. If generous gifts are new to him, sweetness is not new to me.
My Lieve was a good friend—strong, kind, tender.
I cannot compare him with another. It is not fair to do so, and yet what I see in Okeanos’s eyes is the same as what I knew from Lieve.
He shows me a facet of vulnerability so endearing it hurts, aches, cuts something deep inside me.
I wince because I can feel how it affects me.
It makes me want to open myself up in kind, to accept what is being offered and return it.
Our gazes meet and mingle for a long moment, and I feel as though I am breathing in time with him, as though I am thinking in time with him. Unbidden, the memory of his kiss returns and my lips are suddenly dry.
I love my husband, I remind myself. I love Lieve.
My breathing is heavy and uneven.
“Leave off,” Markanos mutters, shaking his soaked arm with a grimace.
The water sloshes from his sleeve as from a jug.
“Tortured you may be. Dead in all but spirit, certainly. But I’ll not have the legendary Okeanos debase himself to a mere mortal queen.
” He turns to me and I force my attention to him.
Anything to recover my self-control. “Do you not know him whom you have married? I think you do not, for all you try to buy him with petty gifts.” He stuffs one of his salmon pastries into Okeanos’s mouth to silence the start of a protest. As if that’s not petty.
He’s one to talk. “Let me enlighten you, Drowned Queen. Okeanos, God of the Sea, is the greatest god of the pantheon. I have watched him single-handedly turn back a fleet of eighty ships launched to invade his islands. He settled them with one careless flick of a wrist and the storm that arose swamped them, sank them, and swallowed up the survivors.”
I inhale sharply through my nose and out of the corner of my eye I see Oke stiffen. He knows how I feel about careless violence.
“Is this so?” I ask. I feel as if I balance on a taut rope.
Markanos is undeterred. “Did not Aurelius try to take his holdings not fifty years ago? And did Okeanos not hammer those temples of the air to dust beneath the pounding of his breakers? He led the vanguard himself, a dozen mad sea priests charged from behind his banner, all of them mounted on giant squid. They rippled up the shore, unstoppable, terrifying, trailing a wake of salt water and blood as they ripped Aurelius’s temple apart. ”
“I would have heard of that,” I say dryly.
My tone may be the only dry thing on the island. Waves whip up around us, pounding the shore, and it is not my emotions that whip them up. I slide a side look toward Okeanos, and his glowering brows knit tight together.
“You have heard of that,” Markanos says with a rumbling laugh. “They blamed it on a storm. A very precise storm that destroyed the temple entirely.”
Fine. I did hear of it, but he is wrong. It was not so precise. It leveled half the city.
“And the innocents swept up in the chaos?” I ask, but he’s not listening to me.
“I’ll not bother listing the Battle of the Shoal Reef, or the matter of the dispute between Heskatan and the Scarlet Ram.
I’ll not list for you the kings he set up and tore down, the counselors tricked or judged, their bodies washed overboard to bloat upon the waters when they ignored his words.
I will not list the nations saved and ruined, the shores pounded to nothing, the islands swallowed up, or fellow gods bowed under the power he brings to bear.
I may be God of War, but my friend is God of the Sea and well does he hold his spear and trim his sail, for he reigns with strength and justice, and in the end nothing in all the world compares to the power of the deeps. ”
In the silence after this declaration, Oke’s quiet voice sounds loud.
“The innocents haunt me still, Coralys.”
Oke has eyes only for me and I shift uncomfortably at the emotion in them. I believe he is sorrowful over the loss of these people. But what good is that beside their suffering?
Markanos scoffs. “The pair of you have your sails trimmed the same, I see. Forget the past. Let us speak instead of more dire things. Treseano and his rebellion, for instance. It’s clear now that he is the one who murdered El’Dorian, knowing as well as any of us that she would side with you, Okeanos.
I always thought her sweet on you, Goddess of Virginity or not. Wine, Drowned Queen?”
How does everyone know that name for me?
He holds up a goblet with a single raised eyebrow, but I shake my head. One of my feet is still in the sea, poised to flee. I still do not trust that he will not catch my hand and tie me up beside my husband. I do not trust this god at all.
He shrugs and drains the goblet himself. He certainly loves to hear his own voice.
“Treseano has tied you up fairly, Okeanos, that is a certainty. I thought at first it was your woman who wove these magic knots, despite your protests to the contrary.” He flicks one of Okeanos’s chains and I flinch.
“But if she’s paying a price to keep the creatures from eating you heels-to-heart every day, then it must not be her who has affixed you so, and if not her, then it must be him. ”
“Did I not tell you so?” the sea god asks.
Markanos keeps talking as if he wasn’t interrupted. “He’ll bring you to heel to serve his rebellion one way or another. Has he sent his dog back begging yet?”
The waves calm slightly as if Oke’s emotions have calmed with them.
“If you mean Aurelius,” Oke says carefully, “I will not name him dog to any man, but he was here this morning demanding again my submission.”
Was he, now?
“Was it not Aurelius who found my corpse with you?” Oke continues. “I think he hoped to find my pearl within it.”