Alexios crawled to my side. “It’s a current. A warm one. Feel.” He leaned over the side of the boat with a cupped hand and brought it to me. The water was silty, and when I dipped my hand into it, far too warm for any ocean. I’d felt lakes this warm, in midsummer. But the water had a sulphurous tinge to it, and the current was so strong, it stung my fingertips.
“Do we have drinking water?” I asked.
Alexios crawled to the small hold, pulled out a jug, unstoppered it, and handed it to me. I drank sparingly, not knowing how long we’d need to make it last. “Drink more, and eat, mistress,” he urged.
“Not unless you do, too.” He nodded once and brought out a small package of dried fruit. I shook my head. “You need that. I’ll eat fish, if we can catch some in this current. It’s so fast.”
Alexios’s lips tightened. “Too fast. Not natural.”
“It’s him. He’s bringing me to him.” We both went quiet, lost in our thoughts.
“Your pendant,” he said at last. “You really didn’t know it was protecting you? You never took it off.”
“I really didn’t. The only time it came off was when the Mirrenese guards took it.” An odd thought surfaced. “When you met up with Goran in Mirren, you gave him my cloak.”
“Yes,” he murmured absently. “I had to go back for the bags, though. They’d fallen onto the pyre.”
That didn’t make sense. “My cloak, boots, and my pendant. The guards took them—I’m sure I heard them say they were giving them to the Mirrenese king, proof I was the real Ratter of Rimholt. How’d you get hold of them?” When he didn’t answer, I asked again, “Where’d you find them? How?”
“Does it matter?” His voice sounded weird. “Didn’t the kraken say he made the pendant to protect you? Who knows what kind of magic he used. He made you invincible.”
I scowled, wondering why he was avoiding my questions. But then my mind snagged on that last word. “He did what?”
“He told us about the pendant before he brought us to you.”
“Yeah, the one that made me forget about him? What about it?”
“It made you forget, but it also made you invincible.” He lifted an eyebrow. “You didn’t know?”
My mind spun for a moment, remembering the past five years. So much made sense now. The poisonings that should have been lethal, but only gave me the runs. The wounds that had healed far faster than they should have.
“You really didn’t,” he murmured.
I laughed. “Do you know how lucky you are that I had no idea? If I’d known I couldn’t die when I had it on, I would have done the craziest shit imaginable. Can you imagine how much I could’ve won in bets alone? I could have fought my way through to the crown jewels of every country I worked in and not had to sneak around so much.”
“You love sneaking around.” He stuck a piece of dried fruit between my lips.
I chewed it, thinking. “Yeah, still. I wish I’d known.”
He yawned and muttered, “Good thing She did.” His voice trailed off, but I caught the flash of panic in his eyes.
I was shocked. Alexios never kept secrets, but he was definitely hiding something from me. Something about the pendant, maybe? I couldn’t be sure. No matter how I pestered him, though, he wouldn’t tell me what he’d been about to say.
But I had ways of making a man talk, and I wouldn’t even have to use one of the serums I’d devised to loosen the tongue. Not that I had any of those anymore.
I made a rude gesture in the general direction of the island we’d been on, and the scaly thief I’d left there. If Lusca didn’t kick Skadi’s ass for me, I’d go back to do it myself for stealing my supplies. Who knew which one would win in the fight? What happened if one of them killed the other?
Lusca wasn’t a god. He was practically immortal, but not truly all-powerful. And on land, he was far too weak, even if he did have my dagger.
A dagger that could kill Skadi. Damnit, if anyone stabbed him, it was going to be me.
I breathed deeply, fighting a wave of fear that one or both of them would be hurt. Fighting the creeping certainty that they were both my Goddess-destined mates. “What was She thinking, giving me two monsters?”
“That you needed protecting,” Alexios replied, staring to the east, where the plume of smoke narrowed as it got closer to its source.
I glared at him for a long moment. “I do wish I still had that pendant. What with the Goddess not watching over me anymore.”
His head turned to me so fast, his neck popped. “Why would you say such a thing?” His brow dipped in a frown when I only shrugged. “Mina, you’ve hinted at that before, that you thought She couldn’t hear you since you left Goran. You have to know that’s not true.”
