“I think you’ve said enough now, cousin,” my husband says. “And even if you have not, you have utterly bored me. Fly off somewhere else.”
And without another word, he sweeps an arm around me, turns, and sets an unrelenting pace up the jetty toward the heart of the island. I look back once and see our visitor standing there. He raises his hand like he’s holding a bowl, and as my eyes are still widening, he twists his hand and disappears. An icy chill slices down into my belly. I have seen magic. And I have seen it done twice—I’m certain of that now.
Chapter Seven
Not only do you live alone and bring no one here, you also refuse visitors. Even relatives,” I say as I walk with Oke. My mind is racing, grief set aside with this puzzle spread before me. Oke is a god-chosen hero. So, the question is, which god chose him? It feels obvious. But I do not want to race to conclusions.
He’s given up his pretense of good health. He pauses as the dirt path widens to a boardwalk and he leans against the railing, teeth gritted and head bent down. The muscles of his wide shoulders flex and flex again, bunching tightly under his skin as if he is fighting an inner battle.
I wait, cautious. I was given a jungle cat once as a present from an ambassador of the Andalappo Isles. He was hurt in transit, though no one knew it, and when I opened the door of his cage to examine him, he shot out, claws first, andtore a great chunk from the head steward’s leg. Oke’s heaving back reminds me of the cat just after that attack.
Even here bleak statues line the path, their massive faces watching us, their graven eyes bearing witness to Oke’s pain. I half expect one to come alive and step into our path. Perhaps this island is his solitary haunt now, but the statues speak to a long history of men in this place.
“Do not invite anyone to our island, I beg of you,” Oke says after a moment, holding up his two fingers again in what might be a blessing or a spell of some kind. “You do not know what power you possess here.”
“The power of hostess?” I say wryly. “Yes, it is a mighty load to bear. I know not how I’ll manage it.”
“Precisely,” he agrees, huffing out his breath, running a hand through long hanks of hair, and then leading the way again. He’s dripping blood all down the path. His meeting with his strange cousin has unsettled him.
“If I am to live here as your wife, I should know how closely my husband dances with death. If your wound is never-healing, will you die of it?”
“It is my fervent hope that I do not.”
Men. They always think they can ignore anything they wish to avoid—right up to the moment it causes disaster. I make an annoyed sound in the back of my throat.
He turns to me and lifts a brow. “Do you want me dead, then, Coralys? Would you be a widow twice in as many days?”
“If you die tonight, or even tomorrow, what is to stop thegods from claiming I have broken faith with them?” I allow myself to soften enough to let a little wry teasing creep into my voice. “Surely if it is my curse to marry, then it is also my curse to stay married.”
He snorts a soft almost-laugh and for a fleeting moment we share a dark smile of shared gallows humor before he elaborates.
“The wound is carved by the hand of a god and linked to their power; it can only be dispelled by their will or by breaking the power of their curse.”
I feel a little ill at the thought of that. He may be right that there’s no cure for it, then. But he is no simple man to have offended a god so well as to earn this punishment. And while it might be easy to guess which god has sponsored a man who styles himself as the Fisher King, it is not so easy to guess which god has cursed him. Again, my mind starts to spin out a list. Is it Treseano, God of Death, who holds his wound? Or perhaps he offended the very god who gave him power—Okeanos, God of the Sea, who demanded this marriage.
“Which god wounded you?” I ask him boldly. “And what do you mean by a curse?”
We’ve been climbing. The boardwalk ascends a set of thirty stairs. At the top of them, I take his arm and wrap it over my shoulders. He smells of sweat and salt, but he leans on my shoulder with greedy relief. I have to bite back a wave of sadness. The last man to have his strong arm slung over my shoulders was Lieve.
We stand still a moment, him catching his breath, me taking in this view of the island and the statues at varying heights all over it as I await his answer. Being here is like finding oneself in a city of the dead. Despite the ghoulish atmosphere, the foliage is verdant and lush and that bay is enticing. If the fishing is as good, a family could live here very well.
I try to see beyond the island, staring out into the wavering blue horizon. There’s no sign of the Crocus Isles, though I’m certainly looking in the right direction. Not a tiny lump of land or even a wavering in the line of the sea. Out there somewhere, my people are picking up their lives again. And out there somewhere the gods who stripped them bare and stole their loved ones are living free and easy. I will not forget.
“The very wound is a curse,” Oke says when he gets his breath back. “Power isn’t free. You know this. Think of being queen. Your power is bought with a price. You command the people, yes, but also you are commanded by them. Not by them as individuals, mayhap, but by their needs, by their traditions, by their will. The monarch who bucks all three finds herself fish food in hours.”
I nod. He’s talking sense—though I notice he has not named the god who hurt him. My eyes narrow in suspicion.
“All power works this way. Think of the power of the talented blacksmith. For each piece he crafts, he exchanges a portion of his heart, of his imagination, of the breath of his life, of the strength and energy of his body. A smaller example, perhaps, but it is a thread that runs through all human endeavor.
“So it is with the power of the gods. Each action requires sacrifice. Each binding binds the binder. If one wanted to create a boat from the carcass of a whale, well and good, but perhaps one must live as a whale for as long as one has use of the boat—a sacrifice for a crafting. A pain for a boon. And each one is tuned to the god who wills it—the crafting of verdant things is stronger in the hands of Glorian, for instance, than it would be in the hands of Okeanos.”
“Theoretically, obviously,” I say when his words trail off, “for you are no god. But how do you know these things? Did your god teach you? Did your cousin?”
I am edging very close to announcing my suspicion outright. For who has not heard of humans favored by the gods as their champion heroes? Who has not heard of their works, both wondrous and terrifying? Though they are rare, the stories are not. I’d be a fool not to see that’s what he is.
He grimaces. “My cousin? He’s taught me a thing or two. And I’ll not soon forget.”
I feel a chill. “He’s not complicit in your wounding, is he? Did he lead an angry god to you?”
