The thing is man to the waist and then his muscled torso ripples into the eight undulating tentacles of an octopus. Or rather, I should say the six tentacles, as two end in terrible mangled stumps as if something has chewed through them. His face is beautiful in a bold way and his skin terribly pale. It’s pinkish in the face and neck, but slowly turns to a bluish white across the chest and belly until it becomes mottled over the skirt of his tentacles. He wears a silver torque and nothing else—and now surely this must be a dream, because I recognize him.
This is Vesuvius from the book—the one it claimed was God of the Sea.
I nearly swallow my own tongue at the sight of him. What does it mean that I can see a god?
“Is this your doing?” I ask him boldly, for I do not know how he has come to be here.
He stares at me blankly for a moment before curling a lip. “Surely not. I was always a more creative torturer than this.”
He moves toward me and I raise two fingers in a warding sign. From the creature’s body to the pearl in my hand runs a fine tracery of white mist. I have the most terrible suspicion that the monster is tied to this pearl. I have conjured him up, then. Somehow. Or conjured up his spirit, for the book named him dead.
“Stay back.” I am proud that my voice barely shakes, but Turbote does not seem to notice the figure. He tugs again at my sleeve.
“Come, Coralys.”
He’s right. I have no weapon but my belt knife. I cannot fight this monster or any other. I take a wavering step backward.
“We could make a bargain, ragged woman,” the monster suggests with a lifted eyebrow. “Whoever has killed your friend can be killed in turn. I was ever an excellent assassin.”
“Did you come here from this pearl?” I ask him, opening my palm to reveal it. That ghostly tendril remains.
He smirks. “Where else?”
I want nothing to do with him, though—beyond his unnerving appearance, I cannot explain why. That he will kill me when I refuse him is almost certain, but still I prepare myself for a fight, clenching my belt knife in one hand and slipping the pearl back into my belt pouch to free my other hand.
The vision vanishes with that action, leaving only mydead cousin hanging from the anchor—the symbol of the destruction of the people of the Crocus Isles lashed to the symbol of all our strength. I swallow, waiting for the nightmare to return.
I wait for one, two, three breaths and then—with a sense of overwhelming relief—I turn my back on my cousin and whatever is left of the god-monster’s spirit, and I run.
Turbote clutches at my arm, steadying his old feet as we scramble through the gardens and down the wide stone steps toward where a small boat launch is carved into the shore. The Crocus Isles have always been a kingdom of peace. There was never any reason not to bring boats right to the edge of my palace. I wonder if they arrived this way first. If they spilled from ships now hidden elsewhere, pouring over the land like darkness during a storm.
A small fishing vessel waits for Turbote, hidden in the high rocks of the launch. People huddle on the deck as if to make themselves small. I can’t see them clearly enough in my haste to recognize anyone. Unless that is Maevelys near the prow?
Beside me, Turbote stumbles. We’re still on shore and we’ll need to wade out past our waists in the water. I catch him and for a moment our eyes meet—sorrow and loss acknowledging pain and misery—and then someone calls from the boat, a sailor, I think. He’s pointing behind us. I spin to look.
We have been discovered.
Our enemies—for that is who these men must be—race down from the gardens after us. They’re armed andsoot-streaked, and I’ve never seen that look in an eye before. It’s a look that has long abandoned mercy. What I am in the eyes of those men, I do not know, but I am not a woman, a queen, a wife. I am athingthey have a will to alter.
I push Turbote ahead of me as fear claws up my throat and run as I have never run before. Our feet hit the surf just as the first of them clears the garden and reaches the steps.
“Hurry, hurry,” Turbote chants as we crash through the waves to our waists. There’s a better way to the boat if we stayed on land. But we don’t have time for that way.
We’re nearly there when one of the men draws level with me, his sword lifted as if to strike Turbote, who is a pace ahead of me. I don’t think. There is not time for it.
I launch myself at the man, driving all my weight into his side, shoulder first. It hurts when I connect. He’s wearing a hauberk under that surcoat. But I must have hit just right, because we go down together in the crashing waves.
I catch a glimpse of Turbote being caught by hands reaching from the boat, and then I’m in the surf, a tangle of limbs and steel and salt water. I can see nothing in the churned-up sand-filled waves. I catch a half a breath of water by mistake and everything burns—my nose, my mouth, my chest.
Gods have mercy. I will die here.
The sea catches me in its powerful embrace, dragging me under, demanding I surrender my life. I have never surrendered. I will not do it now. I will die fighting.
I try to twist my hand in a bowl shape, but it’s caught in a tangle of fabric.
And then the figurative arms of the sea morph and become the very real arms of a man, and I am wrenched up from the waves and thrown behind his naked back. I stumble and shove handfuls of hair out of my face so that I might see. Water pours off my rescuer in rivulets as he soundlessly raises a hand.
The man I knocked over surges up from the waves with a roar, sword held expertly in a neat lunge. He is not alone. The others have caught up and they throw themselves forward in a wave of man and steel and sharpened blades. Their battle cries slice through the sound of their feet churning up the water and I’m frozen in helpless fear, watching violence come alive and set itself against me.
