I need a weapon before anything else.
I would pray for one, but the irony of asking the gods for a weapon to destroy them is too much for even me.
I did not believe in gods before, but I made a bargain with them all the same and I heard their voices in the wind. They are out there and they are responsible for all my calamity. And I will feed them their own sorrows and return back to them tenfold the destruction they have wrought on me and mine.
In the end, I pick up that strange thimble as if it might be a clue and turn it round and round between my fingers as grief for my beloved takes a moment to wash over me. I let sorrow unmoor me for a few minutes before I stuff it back down and carry on. Like the tide, I expect it will rise often, and like the tide it will have to recede. I refuse to accept anything else.
Grimly, I wash the other tunics and the dishes, eat my fish, and finally go to the bookshelves.
These books have been shelved in no discernible order. A book on the campaigns of the Orange Fleet is shelved beside a book of epic poetry and that is beside a book of maps of the Crocus Isles. I want to pull that out, but I need to focus. There’s no clear theme between the selections that might offer a clue, and there’s nothing on theology, which would have been the most helpful in destroying the gods, but there are two books of myths that I pull out in hopes that one of them is based at least in part on truth.
As I draw out the second book, something small falls off the shelf, hits the ground, and then rolls under the bed.
I chase after it. It is another pearl. A black one with no setting. If Oke had only mentioned he had an enormous wealth in pearls, we could have properly outfitted his boat before we left my home.
I bring the pearl to the table with me along with the books of myths. I should put it back. Even if my husband has so many that he loses track of them and they fall out of the bookcase, still, stealing is stealing.
But revenge can be expensive, too.
“What is mine belongs to you,” I murmur, quoting Oke’s words from last night.
I set the pearl in the thimble. There. He has his first chunk of “riches.” I stare at it, thinking of another black pearl. One that Lieve wanted to buy for me set in silver.
“It’s too extravagant,” I’d told him. “I don’t need to wear wealth. Better to use it for the good of the isles.”
On a whim, I get up, dig into the chest, and come outwith a weatherworn belt of green leather that has a small pouch affixed. I saw it there before, but I had nothing of value to keep safe. Now I do. I jam the thimble and pearl into the pouch and look around, because I am loath to have a pouch on my belt that is only for the trivial, and when I see a chipped belt knife and a flint I add them in as well. Everyone should have a knife for practical tasks like cutting lines or lighting fires.
I snug the belt around my hips and go back to work. Opening the first book at random, I read it with furious intensity.
It tells the story of Kilinippa, a princess—it’s always a princess—who had to do five impossible tasks to free her husband from the halls of the underworld and release him from the wrath of the gods. She must have loved the man very much. If suffering can win you a boon, she’d earned a lot more than one soul by the time she was done with these tasks.
Poor thing. She would have been better off born a merchant’s daughter or married to a fishmonger. People of simple backgrounds are never dragged into these terrible stories. Their stories are hard enough—full of empty bellies, sick children, and death in childbirth, but at least no one makes them mix with gods and madness.
But these are the kinds of stories I need. Though this one tells nothing about how tofindthe underworld or any other god-inhabited place, it does indicate that one exists.
Someone has slipped a little piece of parchment between the last pages of the story. I pull it out and run my eyes idlyover a penned list upon the scrap. It reads like a task list a madman might make. Or like a selection of notes for a new myth.
Win a god’s oath.
Wed the drowned queen.
Collect the dead to serve.
Fill a thimble with riches.
Heal the crown of the sea.
Turn the betrayer’s heart.
Mend time with golden stitches.
Drink the ocean dry.
Spin moonlight into silver.
Split the seven seas in twain.
This list is eerily similar to something I’ve read before. Five of these tasks I recognize as Princess Kilinippa’s. She spun moonlight into silver on a drop spindle she stole from the goddess Glorian. She used gold to buy back the home of her husband’s ancestors lost to them by treachery, thereby “mending time with golden stitches.” She made the one who betrayed her beg forgiveness before the king. For returning the spindle, Glorian agreed to give her children peace. And… yes, there it was… she drank a tavern called “the Ocean” dry by means of marching an entire town through it in one evening. Not all that impossible, it seemed, though I have the feeling that if by doing this she earned some kind of magic for herself, then it must not have been very potentsince she was clearly relying on creative misinterpretation to fulfill some of these tasks.
