“Ten impossible tasks,” I challenge before turning my eyes back to the moving jellyfish.
I want to dive in with them and drift just like that until my legs and arms cease to be full of bones and edges. Until I am nothing but a ripple in the current of this life, here and then gone again. It has nothing to do with this conversation. It is an ever-present thing, never-healing like my new husband’s wound.
I throw all caution to the wind. What does it matter?
“I saw your list, Oke, and I read the books. The tasks of Plector. The tasks of Kilinippa. You put them into one list. Ten is the number of the gods. The number of the holy. The number of the impossible.”
“Impossible is not a thing that exists,” Oke says fervently, edging toward me. He’s let the tiller go and the boat float where it will. We have no sail up and there is not much current.
“That’s what I’ve always said,” I murmur.
His voice has a note of appeal in it when he says, “Nothingcan be truly impossible when pitted against an unyielding will.”
“And do you have such a will?” I ask him in a way meant to provoke. I am annoyed because making wild claims about strength of will is usually somethingIdo while others look on wide-eyed. I mislike having my tactics turned on me.
He doesn’t answer straightaway and I can tell he’s startled by my tone, but then surprise fades to something warm in his eyes that I read as attraction. His lips part, and I realize I don’t want to hear what he will say. I slip past him and take the boat’s tiller in hand.
He watches me, amused, but he does not comment, simply settles into tying the loose end of a knot as if we two always work together. Eventually he says, “I have the will to do whatever I must. What is it to you, Drowned Queen?”
His easy manner only makes me more agitated. “And will you do those things you listed? Those wild tasks? Moonlight to silver? Gods’ oaths?”
His brow furrows and his expression flickers from mood to mood as if he is trying to make a decision about something. We stand side by side under an azure sky above a writhing mass of one of nature’s wonders. It would be almost a tranquil scene if we did not each have secrets hanging over us like storm clouds waiting to drop rain upon the water. Instead, our conversation feels portentous.
“What would you say if I admitted that out there, I have people I care about, too? A people tormented and hounded. A people who need someone to protect them,” he says.
“I might be relieved,” I say. I want him to tell me more. I want him to tell me everything.
“Relieved?”
“Who are we if we love nothing at all? I was a queen. I was a beloved wife. I was honored and powerful only yesterday and now I stand here barefoot in a threadbare borrowed tunic. My only comfort is that I saved my people. I may have lost all else, but they are safe.”
“Exactly. That is exactly it, Coralys,” he says. “You, of all people, understand what it is to give your comfort, your safety, your entire heart for the good of someone else. So, if I tell you I have… goals. Plans. That I am undertaking a great act of wonder, can you not agree there might be some purpose or even necessity to that?”
He seems to be holding his breath, but I will not answer him. Of course his motivations sound noble. That is not what I’m questioning.
“This is beyond the realm of good reason,” I tell him frankly. “Surely there are other ways to help your people than to try to perform an act of power.”
He makes a frustrated sound in the back of his throat, rubbing his shaven jaw as if he is annoyed there is no beard to pull. I get the distinct impression he is hiding something from me and struggling to answer without revealing it.
“Trust me when I say to you this is what is needful. What must be accomplished. And only I can achieve it.”
“And where do I fit in these star-spanning dreams of yours?”
“You, Coralys,” he says, reaching forward and slipping a stray strand of hair behind my ear, “are precisely in their center.”
As if that is not wildly troubling. I lean back so that his hand must fall away.
“And do you have the backing of a god?” I ask with a bitter snap to my words because even now he is hiding the most important part. That he serves a god—and likely the one who ruined me. “Tell me, Oke, do the gods condone your unattainable mission? Do they applaud you for trying to achieve what the scholars call impossible?”
He shakes his head and I look up into his impossibly deep eyes. “There is no one striving to achieve this but me, Drowned Queen.”
“Not even the god you serve?” I say, daring him to tell me the truth.
“And who would that be?” His refusal feels defiant.
And the way his jaw hardens and his lower lip divots with displeasure makes my breath catch. Anger suits him. I hope I look as well-dressed in it.
“You tell me,” I say with the quiet of true anger.
