Chapter One
Iwas born into the embrace of the sea on a moonless night in the month of the Ragged Tides. My mother did not bleed out her life into the sea with my arrival, nor was my father visited by a terrible curse.
In fact, neither one of my parents passed away until the summer of the Year of the Peacock brought yellow fever to our fair shores. By then, I was a woman grown, and when I took up the Pearl Crown and settled the mantle of woven seed pearls over my shoulders, I did not need to have either cinched to accommodate me.
I was not forced into an arranged marriage to a man the age of my father, nor obliged to dance attendance on an emperor who might make demands on my kingdom if he couldn’t make demands on my person. Instead, I married my childhood friend Lieve, a man of smiles and teasing jokeswho filled our short marriage with laughter.
One might think I wasn’t to be at the heart of a fairy tale at all. One would be wrong, as I was. And the discovery of how very wrong I was nearly became the end of me.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
This tale starts with the sea and with a storm.
If you’ve spent any time at the sea, you know its smell, but if you’ve spent time travelingmanyseas, then you know that the smell of the sea is different in every port. Here on the five Crocus Isles, the sea smells of brine and spices and a little of the honey-sweet crocuses that grow on all five islands.
“Coralys.” Lieve’s voice is rough, but it has to be to pierce through the howl of the wind.
My eyes snap to him. He sets the back of his knuckles against my cheek in a moment of public intimacy he’d never normally allow. He is always tightly controlled, my Lieve. Always a ship smartly rigged.
His brown eyes soften for a half a breath, he almost smiles, and then he brushes a kiss across my lips.
“I will be back shortly,” he says, and I think this time that some of the roughness is emotion.
I tangle my fingers in his, unable to find words. If I beg him to be careful, it will only instill the idea that I doubt him. If I make him promise to come back to me, it will put weight on his shoulders that does not need to be there. If I tell him what an honor it has been to be his wife, it will feel like I am already reading his eulogy.
Or mine.
He has no choice but to go. Or rather, he has a choice, but he’s Lieve and he’d never take it. We thought we saw a capsized boat on our way here. It was too far away to divert to when we were racing for the island of Talasa, but there were people clinging to the hull and Lieve must go back for them.
So, I muster a smile—seas and skies, where do I even find it?—and it seems to be enough.
Our fingers tighten. “I will be here,” I say—my normal response when he leaves me, but today it feels like some kind of declaration. Some kind of challenge to the wind and seas that lash our islands with increasing furor.
I will be here, I tell them. I will not be moved. Keep trying all you want, you will not budge me.
“Your Serene Majesty.” Turbote shifts from foot to foot just one step above me. His white beard is so wet it looks like the foam collecting in tufts on the edge of the sea. “Please. We must hurry. You dare not wait!”
Our fingers untangle and Lieve’s strength slips away from me. He tosses a last warm look over his shoulder and then hurries down the steps. I’m memorizing him without meaning to, tracing his muscular shoulders and tight, lean frame. He’s purpose come to life, leaning forward as he jogs back to the boat.
I wrench myself up another stair and away from him.
I try not to look back, but I do. Twice.
We sent away the last of the ships yesterday after the harbormaster brought me a fish with a coin in its mouth—a terrible omen of devastation for my people—and we sentaway the last of the seaworthy boats this morning. They’ll have raced to find shelter outside this storm, fleeing to our neighbors in hopes they were hit lighter than we and still have fresh water supplies or piers left to tie a boat. Talasa is our tallest island and even here we’d docked against the temple steps halfway up the holy hill. The pier is deep below the waves.
Now, all we have remaining are boats so unseaworthy that they cannot be trusted to set out into the surf with our precious people for anything other than the shortest of journeys. They’re all that’s left to take Lieve out to search for those we saw stranded.
One more glance over my shoulder. I’ve lost sight of Lieve in a wall of blowing water. I try to tell myself I’ll see him again, but my inner voice is a liar.
The storm has not relented in three days—not only that, it grows more angry as the hours pass, swelling up over our islands, battering every bit of our lives until they crumble and fail or sink beneath the furious waves. The line of dockside fish markets is nothing but matchsticks. The pottery market lost the roofs off every shop. My own palace is knee-deep in brackish water, the imported rugs ruined, the riches buried in the green brine of the sea.
We are already climbing the hundred stone steps faster than I imagined was possible. Turbote’s wet robes slap his legs in an arrhythmic beat. He’s panicked. He’sbeenpanicked since we left the main island on Lieve’s wreck of a boat and came here to the island of Okeanos’s Temple. The boatdoesn’t carry many people. A mercy, perhaps. Instead of my entire council of bickering advisors, I am accompanied only by Turbote, my most annoying counselor and the priest of Okeanos.
Our ancestors carved the temple from stone, following the natural ebb and flow of the white rock bones of our islands. The steps swirl up like waves tousled by a benevolent breeze to where the temple rises—enormous in scale in a way that bids the worshipper to wonder if the gods had actually met man here once, and if this place had been carved to suit their size rather than ours.
At the center of the temple is a single statue of Okeanos, carved of white marble. If the god truly lives and if he looks like this, then I am impressed. The image is two men tall and boasts intricately carved tangles of long hair fanned out to one side as if he was caught by the sculptor in the middle of twisting, trident in one hand, a set of five chains in the other. His blank marble eyes house a fury impossible to portray in stone, and yet it is there.
I, who once told Turbote to his face that the gods were nothing but a beautiful dream, am here to plead with him. I, who refused on the first day of this cataclysm to so much as offer a single prayer, have come now on my knees. I know this for what it is. Futile. Desperate. The last thrashing of a dying whale trapped on the shore.
