Chapter Thirty-Four
I gasp, arms reaching out instinctually. The trident drops from my grip as I try to catch Lieve, but the rules of the spirit world have not changed and he stumbles right through my arms and falls to the ground.
I’m at his side in a heartbeat, on my hands and knees. Aurelius must be allowing it, because his spatha hasn’t plunged through my throat.
My eyes are locked onto Lieve’s as he struggles against his bonds and my heart is aching with every flicker in the depths of his brown eyes.
He was meant to be safely in the Nightwaters, somewhere far from the cares of this world.
That I have been eating and sleeping and plotting revenge while he suffered, trapped with his tormentor, is criminal.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” I gasp out, and my voice is faint with shame.
There’s nothing else I can do. I try to grab for his tentacle bonds—those, to my horror, I can touch—but I cannot pull them free.
Lieve is shaking his head, his eyebrows drawn low and his eyes filled with a determined passion, but I don’t know what he’s trying to deny—my help, my affection, or this whole situation.
I wrench my gaze from his and look up at Vesuvius. I am trembling. Never have I felt so much like an animal that might charge and rip out someone’s throat. I could lunge at him from here. I could rend him bone from bone with my teeth.
“Release him,” I demand. “Release him from these terrible bonds.”
Vesuvius’s expression is aloof.
“I cannot. For I am pinned to this mortal world in the flesh. If you want to unbind him, then stab him with your trident, too, and make him the same living horror that I am—or better yet—much better, bring him back to life. Give him back his mortal body and future with all that power you’ve been storing up for your sea god husband.
Mayhap he’ll forgive you yet for the betrayal of marrying another.
Mayhap you’ll live your days together with joy. ”
Some instinct of mine is screaming in the back of my head that something is not right.
I look from Vesuvius’s face to Aurelius’s—both incredibly calm.
It’s as if they’re holding their breath.
As if they’re anticipating. As if far more rides on this decision now than my own happiness or the fates of two good men.
I glance to Okeanos, too, but his face is set, his eyes squeezed shut, and his breath rasps in his lungs in an uneven rhythm.
“Why would you offer me back my husband?” I ask, but I know he won’t tell me the truth, I’m simply trying to grasp at strands of time while my mind races to think it through.
I turn my face to Lieve, agonized. He is still shaking his head, his eyes seeming to plead with me. And I know he saw me look to Okeanos first and I hope it doesn’t sting for him like it does for me.
“We simply don’t want you to bring the sea god back to life with the culmination of your five tasks.
We want you to loosen your grip on godhood and his grip with it.
Is that so terrible?” Vesuvius says, and there’s a dangerous gleam in his eyes as he speaks.
“You were, after all, the one who killed him in the first place. Surely you are not so fickle that you have changed your mind?”
Aurelius almost seems bored when he adds, “We are gods. We are not monsters. With one hand we might take, but with the other we give. Let us give you what you want most. Your old life back. Your husband. Your crown. Your mortality. Godhood never suited you in the first place.”
And now my heart is thundering, because of course he is right. I never wanted to be a god. I am terrible at it and all I ever wanted is exactly what they’re offering me. Why would I not take it if I could?
I look long into Lieve’s frantic eyes, and if I thought my heart was broken before, it is pounded to dust now. I wish he could speak to me. I wish even more that I could fall into his arms and he could make everything bad disappear. But he has never had that power.
And even if I could save him, and bring him back to life, what then?
When the two of us are cast living and mortal upon the shores of the Crocus Isles, will the people turn their prayers to Aurelius?
They will go unanswered. My folk will be swallowed by storms and sea with no one to save them, plunged into a war that chews them up hundreds at a time, lashed by grim tides and the machinations of gods with no stronghold to which they might flee.
But they are nameless, faceless people. Why should I sacrifice everything in my heart for a chance they might be safe? It’s too much to ask from a person.
And what would be the result of bringing Lieve into that?
Would he not also become nameless and faceless?
His mortal life might be spent in a year or a day or an hour in the turmoil of the world in this god war, and I would have thrown aside everything Oke saved up to free his people only to buy Lieve a scant breath of time.
These two enemies of mine have ignored the third option.
That I have not the power to save either husband.
I can only walk away just as Okeanos pleaded for me to do and finish the tasks somehow.
For I have only four: the vow of a god, the marriage of the drowned queen, the dead collected to serve, and the filled thimble.
I didn’t succeed in healing the Crown of the Sea. No wonder Oke called me betrayer.
Betrayer. I close my eyes and let the word hurt the way it should.
Wait. My eyes snap open again.
It is as if I have stepped on the trigger of a trap and felt it click. I swallow hard and try to disguise what I have just realized, what he was trying to tell me with his last breath. “Turn the betrayer’s heart” is our fifth completed task.
I speak quickly, trying to make them talk while my mind races.
“Why offer me this chance at all? Why not kill me now if the tasks are so great as to threaten you?”
“We are not so cruel,” Aurelius says with a benevolent smile, but his smile is brittle and I know I’ve struck a nerve. Somehow, they do not think it would work simply to kill me. Or there is some nuance I am missing that makes my death unpalatable to them in this moment.
I swallow again and try to think, but my frantic brain can only see one way this can work and I know my time is running short.
I smile at Lieve and pour into my smile all the love of my heart, and I hate how it makes his expression shift from earnestness to something bleak.
Gritting my teeth, I hold out my palm, but I keep my eyes on Lieve, trying with all my might to be his anchor.
“I’ll take the pearl, then,” I say to Vesuvius. “I can hardly give Lieve back his life without freeing him from captivity. Though I think I’ll need to seek instruction on how that’s done.”
Vesuvius smirks, but I can see the tension going out of his shoulders. I’m making the choice they wanted. I’m following their plan. It’s only a matter of the details now. It galls me to bring him joy like this.
“Only the one who put the soul into the pearl can take it out again.” Vesuvius hands the pearl to Aurelius. “If you’d do the honors.”
Aurelius holds the pearl up between thumb and forefinger, looks me in the eye to be sure he has my attention, and then breathes delicately on the pearl. As he breathes it melts away as if he is blowing away dust.
My breath catches in my lungs and I shift, moving to turn my back to them so that my whole focus can be on my Lieve as we do this part.
They have guessed—correctly—that I could never leave him to suffer.
That I could never bear to watch him kept from his life.
I’m memorizing his dark hair and the lines of his face.
It’s like I get to make this terrible decision all over again but better this time because this time he doesn’t have to go drown beneath the waves far from the arms of the one he loves.
I lean over him and press my forehead to where his should be, but my tears fall right through him and he’s fading now that the pearl is gone. I must act quickly before he drifts to the Nightwaters.
“Do it quickly,” Vesuvius snaps. “Or he’ll fade and it will be too late. Once he’s mortal again you’ll be able to rip my tentacles from him. Mayhap I’ll even be able to reattach them.”
“Unlikely,” Aurelius opines.
I whisper so quietly that I barely hear the words myself, “I love you forever.”
And I can tell by the look in Lieve’s eyes that he understands. But what I can’t tell is whether or not he forgives me.
I don’t look away. I don’t dare. Not even when I clench my jaw as hard as I can and turn my heart.
The fifth task.
And as I repent of killing the God of the Sea and make my choice, I also do the one thing that has never come naturally to me at all—I pray.
It’s a prayer of desperation to a King of Heaven I hardly believe exists.
It’s a wild entreaty: desperate but doubting, vulnerable but firm.
I offer him up the five tasks—complete now—to take and use. And I bid him use them as I ask.
It’s so simple—too simple. And I hope that I haven’t been misled in this as I have in so many things. I hope that I haven’t been made a fool again. I hope these five tasks and all the suffering that went into their completion will culminate in this one vital thing—bringing one man back from death.
Nothing has ever wrenched me as this does.
I am lightheaded, as if I am watching someone else commit this act.
And I steal one last, longing look into the eyes of my Lieve and choke on my sob as he looks beyond me to the Nightwaters.
His face is lit with something not unlike the aura of divinity that fell on the gods during the Resurgence—and then he’s gone.
The tentacles collapse to the ground as his spirit fades away and I swear he’s taken my heart with him.
For it is not Lieve I have chosen to restore to life. He’s slipped free and I’ve lost the last sight I’ll ever have of him. Again.
Vesuvius lets out a sudden, sharp curse.
By the time I twist toward the noise, my vision is so warped by the welling tears that I don’t immediately see that Vesuvius has snatched up my trident from where I dropped it to try to catch Lieve, or that he is rushing toward me with it lifted high in his hands, his many tentacles dragging across the marble.
I fling my hands up, but I’m too late.
The pain hits hard and sudden, overwhelming me before I know what has happened. I’m choking on it, gagging, seeing only black. I can’t quite seem to drag in a breath and my heart… my betrayer’s heart… it’s not quite… my vision finally clears and everything is bursting in sharp violent color.
Vesuvius’s face twists as he holds me down with his grip on the trident. I’m choking on my own blood. It’s hot and iron-flavored between my lips.
Behind him, the moon is coming up. The garish red sky has bled out into black.
He’s stabbed the trident through me by the handle, the weapon reversed, I stare at it as if this tiny detail is of enormous importance.
Is he afraid that killing me the normal way will bring him bad luck?
There’s a story about that, I think, but when I reach for it, my memories are tattered and inaccessible.
I claw weakly at the shaft of the trident.
It gleams in the first glow of moonlight.
I’d laugh at the irony, but I feel so very weak.
There’s blood on my chin. I can taste it with every sucking half breath.
Vesuvius’s tentacles wrap coldly and far too intimately around me, pinning me down in case the trident isn’t enough to hold me, as if I would be as strong as Okeanos to climb back up the shaft stuck through me and strangle him with my bare hands.
I am certainly dying.
Just like Lieve did. Just like my mother and my father did and all those I have failed as both queen and god. My thoughts spiral down that track for a moment before I force them to focus again. Death is a fitting end for me, though I do not desire it and it has a very bitter flavor.
Vesuvius twists the trident and I scream as visceral pain twists through me, clogging all thought so that my whole world is red agony and his shadowed face is swimming before my eyes.
I’m so glad I freed Lieve from this.
So glad.
He can never be touched by these monsters again. If I still had a god, I’d pray I could join him.
“Just finish it. I grow weary of the display.” Aurelius’s voice is so distant that I barely can make out the disdain in it.
Everything is black. Everything is pain. I drag in one more burning half breath and then even that is gone and my brain panics, screaming as my mouth no longer can, and the scream seems to go on and on and on and on forever.
Forever is a terrible, lingering thing.
There is no relief in forever.
There is no forgiveness in eternity.
I do not know how long I persist through that black fall, but I can count every star, feel each individual nerve of my body and mind as they go out one by one like fires lit and snuffed over the breadth of history.
I do not plead for help. I do not pray at all.
I deserve this, I try to remind myself, but it isn’t working.
I chose this, I try to explain, but in my panic, no explanation sticks.
I am small and pitiable, so very insignificant, and yet all my fear and pain and loneliness is of utmost significance to me and I am drowned in it. The Drowned Queen.
And now Vesuvius will be God of the Sea again.
For, just as in the story Markanos told me, he has come back to life by virtue of the trident barb and he has slain Coralys, who had inherited her godhood from Okeanos, and thus it will revert back to him.
My tasks must not have been applied. For if they had worked, Okeanos would have taken his godhood back from me. But they have not worked.
This had to have been their plan all along.
Lure me here with the bait of Okeanos or Lieve or both.
Trick me into either a mortal existence, giving Vesuvius his godhood and letting Okeanos die since my immortality no longer sustains him, or as a backup, they could kill me, too, if I didn’t use the tasks as they liked.
I shudder. Even in this world of darkness and forever, I shudder.
I never want Vesuvius’s gaze on me again, for I can only imagine what other horrors he would visit on me given even half a chance.
He has already broken my heart and then speared it through, and that seemed to cost him nothing at all.
But I am not sorry for what I chose, even though I will pay for it forever. Lieve’s soul is safe where none can harm him. And I did try to do right by Okeanos.
I drift. The pain fades.
It’s over now. I have crossed into the Nightwaters.
And just when I have accepted that this is the end, just when I feel as if I am spooling out like a lure on the end of a line tossed to catch a fish, flying into the unknown, pain hits me again like a blow to the chest and drags me back.