He glances up at me almost shyly, a small half smile on his lips. The expression seems incongruous when set against his rough beard.
“Binding two disparate souls? You find this practical?”
I don’t want to tell him that my marriage to him is nothing but grim practicality. To the degree that my last marriage was for friendship and affection, so this one is for convenience. If he feels some measure of wry humor in our circumstance, well, he’s entitled to coping with an unwanted bond in his own way.
He moves to reach for a coiled rope that has slipped out of place and is tangled. I reach past him and coil it for him, frowning when I look up and see satisfaction in his eyes.
He shifts suddenly as a wave hits our prow a little more forcefully than the rest, and my hand stretches out to support him before I realize what I’m doing. All my mind can see is that terrible injury to his thigh. I wince in harmony with him as he takes up a cross-legged position on the hard bench. That can’t be comfortable. The wound needs stitches at the very least. How has he not yet bled out?
“Is your wound magical, then? An act of a god?” I ask.
He makes a gesture of acquiescence. What kind of fisherman tangles with those powerful enough to inflict such damage?
“How did you come by the wound?” I press.
“I have enemies. One surprised me. In the dark. When I thought I was in a safe place.”
An injury made by an enemy who has the power of a god? This is a disaster. I can barely get my next words out. “Which god has wounded you? Or was it one of their god-touched servants?”
Oke lets go of the tiller and leans forward.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“If we are to trust, then one of us must trust first.” His earnestness is almost innocent. It stands in stark contrast to his physical power and dangerous secrets. He has a strange way about him, a stillness like the calm beneath the surface of the sea. It colors his every flicker of expression, his every movement, shading them with a depth and purposefulness that speaks of consideration and suggests more premeditation than I’ve seen in any other man.
Perhaps he is not as old as I judged him to be. Perhaps it is only this strange depth that makes him seem so. Now that I’m sharing such a tiny boat with him and watching him sway to its every movement, he seems younger than me. His torso moves easily with the boat, and it is tanned, lean muscle and taut, firm skin under all that bruising. The only lines around his eyes are the lines of sun on the skin, not of age. He is not an unattractive man.
Regardless, more than any husband, distracting or not, I need an ally.
He clears his throat. I blanch a little as I realize his woundhas soaked through his trousers again. I don’t care what he says, he’s going to need that tended. Or he’ll die and leave me in this hulk alone.
“The truth is,” he says suddenly, looking furtively around as if he might be overheard. “What is coming next may be too unsettling—even for you, who has been a queen and dealt in power for all your life. I do not want you to recoil from me when you see it. I would like you to be an ally.”
“As you’ve said,husband, I am…” I stumble here. “Iwasa queen. I am certain that with time I will learn your profession. I respect your work upon the water.” I spread my hands as if to indicate that all this is his. Flattery? Perhaps, but I do not want to offend him from the very start. “But I can assure you there is very little you will have seen in the rest of the world that I will not already know. And whoever your enemies might be, they are mine now, too, and I will not flinch from them.”
His mouth quirks into a half smile. Not offended, then, but not believing me, either. “You’ll learn my profession?”
I smile a little queasily. “If you wish it.”
“I do.” He sounds very sincere in the fervent way of the young, whom life has yet to beat into a more measured approach. “But not right away. And we will not discuss my… dangerous entanglements… immediately, either. I know grief. I know it most intimately.” The sympathy in his eyes makes a lump form in my throat. “I would not burden you yet. Not until you’ve had time to make your peace with your loss and your new station.”
That is surprisingly kind. But I am not yet ready to speak of my loss; it fogs my mind and blots out all other sentiment. I try to change the subject.
“Did you say you’ve never been married?” I ask gently. “Have you never, then, been in love?”
He frowns. “That is my tale to tell. And love does not factor in. Instead, I’ll speak to you of my home, which is not far from here.”
We’ve set a course due west of the Crocus Isles. I frown, trying to bring up sea charts in my mind. What is nearby? There is the Isle of Glass, which some say had been made so during a terrible cataclysm—but that is nothing but a smooth green stump of glass that rises only far enough out of the water to be a hazard for ships and a landing place at low tide for passing birds. I can think of nowhere else nearby.
“There is little close in this direction,” I say warily.
His smile grows anxious. “It doesn’t have to be close. It is a small place—small and secret and all my own, and I never let anyone else within it. I only bring you there now because you are my wife. Do you understand?”
I nod, but I do not understand. What kind of life does he live that he receives no visitors?
He shifts uncomfortably. “I feel compelled to warn you, for I know how stories work. They’re powerful things. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do about how they sweep you away, and I am afraid we are both caught up in one. I do not want to see us dashed upon their fateful rocks.”
He’s speaking nonsense again. Perhaps Turbote was right.Perhaps we should have taken measures to ensure we picked who would step onto that dock.
