Chapter Thirty-Five
My eyes open suddenly, painfully, and I suck in a long, burning breath.
“… a very convoluted way to get what you wanted,” Aurelius is complaining. His back is to me, outlined in silver light. “I mislike that it ended this way.”
I try not to choke on the blood in my mouth. I must be silent. I must not draw their wrathful gaze.
Vesuvius’s voice drips with bitterness. “Do not scold me when you’ve benefited just as thoroughly as I. My strength is vital to your plans.”
I suck in another breath, shuddering around my broken chest. It feels like I have a gaping hole piercing right through it.
Oh.
Oh.
I do.
I’m shaking violently all over, but my lungs are working, dragging in each breath as if breathing is its own impossible task. The pain has changed. Rather than blurring everything around me, it has made my vision jagged with sharp focus. I can see every edge and sharp line in stark relief.
And that is how I am the first to see Okeanos leap over my body and lunge for them.
It is a dream, of course. I am seeing only what I wish was true.
He’s gripping the trident. It is slick with my blood. It must have been when he ripped it from my chest that my consciousness returned.
He’s shockingly adept with the weapon, but there’s something slightly off. He favors his wounded leg more than ever before and it slows him more than I remember. The wound in his chest is gone, but the ones in his wrists remain, half-healed and crusted over.
He thrusts the trident into Vesuvius’s side before that monster knows he’s under attack, and while Vesuvius shouts his fury, Okeanos is already landing two more blows in quick succession.
The new sea god is flung back, stumbling over his own tentacles and falling to the ground heavily.
He thrashes, leaving great crimson arcs smeared across the marble of the floor, and Okeanos lunges forward to take advantage of his triumph.
And it’s not a dream. I have lost on every other level, but I succeeded at this one thing. I brought Okeanos back. The fifth task worked.
I’m just beginning to sag with relief when Aurelius flicks a finger and Okeanos flies through the air, hits the marble, skids, and bowls into me.
I see black splotches across my vision and my hands claw in an effort to fight the spasm of agony that washes through me. I blink through it, concentrating on keeping my mind with me, on not giving way to the darkness. I do not want to make that long fall a second time.
I come back to stark reality just in time to see Vesuvius leap toward us. It’s me he’s aiming for and I can’t so much as flinch.
But Okeanos thrusts himself upward, scrabbling across the marble to rise awkwardly, his trident drawn up and angled perfectly just in time to break a second point in Vesuvius’s flesh.
Vesuvius roars, his tentacle frill expanding and rippling with the sound. He raises his arm, and in the distance I hear the roar of many waters.
Realization hits me like a punch to the chest. Vesuvius is the sea now and it is a furious, merciless sea.
That means I died. Just as I thought. But while the marriage vow tied me back to Okeanos and revived me with him by the blessing of the King of Heaven, it could not prevent the loss of my godhood or how it reverted back to Vesuvius.
I can feel the wind sweeping into the temple, and on it is the smell of the sea thick with death, and then Aurelius is there, gripping Vesuvius’s arm and dragging him backward.
Okeanos springs forward after him, but Aurelius flicks up a hand, and just as his wall of air stopped me, so it stops Okeanos.
“Leave them,” Aurelius orders, and his small smile is taunting and directed at my husband.
“It brings me great pleasure to quit Okeanos in this state. Alive but mortal. Stripped of all power and glory. A faded flower. His dead bride on the floor in a pool of her own blood. What could be better than to watch your enemy die the drawn-out paltry death of a mortal and to know they taste their own frailty, choke on their own dust, and are powerless to save those they love? I might not have planned this, but now that it has arrived, I will have it exactly thus. Though I think I’ll leave the wound.
” He pats his own thigh as a reminder. “It hardly bothers me, but as a mortal, it will certainly be the slow death of him. And this way, I’ll know when it has done its job. ”
Vesuvius tries to shake him off, but Aurelius’s grip tightens and in his eyes a warning flashes.
“I’ll have it exactly thus, God of the Sea. And you shall gift it to me after all I’ve given you. Or are you not mindful of how I have brought you vengeance and godhood and a return to power all in one great maneuver?”
I reach for the sea in despair, testing his words. And he is right. I cannot feel the ocean. It is as if an empty void has filled the place in my heart that once sloshed with brine.
I shudder as I draw in a ragged breath. For if Vesuvius is God of the Sea, then Okeanos is not. By my choice… my choice… I chose wrong a second time.
And then the God of the Air forms a bowl with his hand, twists it, and they’re gone, leaving me to cough a wretched, bruising cough that sprays my lifeblood across the white marble.
I do not know what happens for some minutes as I am consumed in a deadly battle to keep soul and body together. When I emerge, Okeanos’s face is there.
I blink up at him, and maybe I am not thinking well, because his face is sweet to me, as if it is what I was searching for all along. His life is painfully sweet to me.
“You stupid, stupid girl,” he’s saying between clenched teeth. His shorn hair is as wild as the look in his eye, and I flinch away from something hot that falls from his cheeks and lands on mine. It tastes of salt and it stings. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
It’s a mantra: calming, detaching, a sweet rhythm to die to. He’s trembling with it, too.
“Do not think you have my leave to die, Coralys.” His voice comes out in a growl. “Do not believe I’ll ever allow it now.”
He’s dragging me up into his arms and I choke on the moan trying to escape my chest. It’s no matter. He’s very warm. I think I’d like to die warm.
But why are his eyes swimming with tears and why is his expression so black?
“What have you done, Cora? What have you done?” he mourns.
I’m swaying ominously as he rises and stumbles, holding me in a sliding, lurching carry across the floor. He’s so terribly gentle with me.
I want to tell him not to spend himself so, that I did not purchase his future so he could waste it in a futile attempt to save mine. But my life is leaking away like the tide washing out of the bay. I use my last breaths as best I can.
“I chose you,” I murmur. I want to explain why, but the words cannot be grasped.
There’s a hitch in his voice. “You should not have chosen me. And I curse you forever for choosing wrong.”
But his hot tears spilling over me feel more like a baptism than a curse and the tender way he cradles my limp body to his chest feels more like guarding than damning. And I feel the hot press of his lips against my forehead as if he can restore life to me with nothing but a kiss.
He’s whispering something fervently, but it sounds more like he is rendering a judgment than speaking to a dying woman. I think it is part of his wedding vow to me.
“Wherever your soul lingers, there will mine be, and if it slips into the Nightwaters, even there will I join you.”
I am not comforted by the idea of him sailing off with me into the seas beyond this life. I gave too much to prevent that fate, though he murmurs it so sweetly.
He carries me out to the edge of the open-walled temple where I can see the wide sky.
Though my neck will not support my head, the darkness of the ocean spreads out before me.
On it bob the lights of ships far away, caught in the roar of the breakers.
I feel again the terrible ache that I am exiled from the sea, for though I might sail upon her again, though I might dive into her waters and even drown in her depths, she is no longer me, she is no longer Oke, she is lost to us forever.
As if he hears my thoughts, Oke is whispering to me as he lays me down on the cold marble.
“Hold on, Drowned Queen, this is not the end. Hold on.”
And then he’s gone for a moment. Or maybe many moments. It’s hard to be sure when every breath is agony and pain.
When he returns, he kneels down beside me and his hands are full of golden flowers, bloody around the edges.
His wounds, I remember, were full of them, and some had fallen from where he’d been draped and had scattered across the marble floor.
They smell of honey and frankincense—and no wonder when they are sprouted from the lifeblood of a god.
Perhaps they are like the flowers you lay upon the dead.
His face hovers over mine, lined with worry and so terribly beautiful.
I had not expected that. I thought the beauty was because he was a god, but all the glory is faded and still he drags at the anchor line of my heart.
There’s a vulnerability to his face that wasn’t there before, a deep sadness that makes him seem—for the first time yet—older than I am.
“Let’s pray this works,” he says, and he’s mouthing some kind of prayer as—to my horror—he jams the flowers into the wound on my chest, packing them in like one might tamp a crack between cobbles.
I would scream with the pain of it, but I can’t quite catch my breath. I’m choking, gasping, caught in the grip of death and shaken hard.
My gaze is stuck on him, and I see when his face twists with despair and a single tear rolls down his cheek and lands in his messy handiwork.
I’m warm. Hot, even. As if my heart is the sun. It burns me up and flushes every inch of my skin, and I’m lost in the heat, the pain suddenly evaporating as if even it cannot stand against the inferno. I think I will live.
I have lost all sense of time and space, but I feel it as he binds up my ruined chest, packed with the remnants of his second death.
And as he works, he makes me outrageous promises of revenge and a hope not yet entirely lost, though his eyes are as haunted as I’m sure mine must be.
And the kisses this cold fisherman sets on the skin of my brow and my cheek feel as molten as hot gold.
We are a matched set, we two contradictions—the Drowned Queen and her Fisher King.