Across the beam of his wide shoulders is slung a blue marlin—the finest example of the species I’ve ever seen, its black back and blue belly slashed through with a long splash of aqua across its broad side. The spear of its nose matches the spear slung across my husband’s back, and for a moment, as he stands up to his waist in frothing water with that king fish across his shoulders, the sight of him is almost overwhelming. Perhaps someone ought to have made a statue ofhimon this island. How can someone so treacherous be so infinitely beautiful?
I flinch from his sudden glory. He looks more the God of the Sea than Vesuvius does, for all that the dead god has an octopus lower half. Okeanos fits the sea as well as the marlin does, as if the two of them and the water itself are all one tangled-up whole and that whole sears my vision, tricking my mind into thinking I’m seeing something too wonderful or worthy for me. How did I not know immediately that he was the God of the Sea?
I draw in a strangled breath, and then the sensation is gone, leaving only a powerful man and a great fish, and the ever-changing, ever-powerful swell of the endless sea.
“Wife,” Oke says, and he looks away suddenly as if he is reluctant to meet my eye. He flings the marlin to the shore and stalks through the water toward me, his gait twisted and slowed by his wound. “I would speak with you.”
He is only wearing one pearl necklace—a fat one that sits over his naked shoulders like a collar—but it is made of three strands, and one strand is black pearls, which remind me a little too much of Vesuvius. I shift uncomfortably when I see them. My bargain with the soul of the dead god does not sit easily with me.
“What more is there to say?” I shift in the water as it licks around my waist. All my hard-won equanimity has dissolved with his words.
I wish things were simpler. I wish that in my plans for the future I was not ending the life of a husband, of a man, no matter how tenuous our actual bond might be. I think I could have liked this man well enough were I not burdened with a great fury, a greater shame, and an enduring loyalty to a people who once looked to me for help. And I think he could have made me a decent husband were he not a treacherous god.
I speak calmly. “Did you save our people? Did you cast down their enemies?”
He doesn’t answer. And I feel the resolve in myself tighten.
“You filled my thimble.” The words gust out of his mouth so quickly that it’s hard for me to catch them.
He must have been to the house, then. Why did he not leave the fish there? I feel my cheeks flush. My act of anger feels like a fit of tantrum now. I mean to kill him. And that is earnest business. To leave petty tokens first seems beneath me.
“I gave you all I have left,” I say, and the words are more resigned than bitter.
He nods, looking sharply away, his eyes slightly glassy. “That is well, Queen Coralys.”
Behind him the waves are growing larger, choppier, more ungovernable. I start toward the shore.
“I am no longer allowed that title,” I say. I am thrown off by his emotion and gratitude when I expected resistance and reprisals. “And I don’t forgive you. It changes nothing that I now know you are a god.”
He sighs as if he has swum the whole breadth of the sea, only to find he must swim it again. His fingers tangle through his brown hair and he drags loose strands of it back from his face.
“You are more than vengeance and wrath, Coralys.”
He’s dismissed my whole purpose in one sentence, making it sound ridiculous instead of the high calling of my life now. And worse yet, the arguments he threw at me when last we spoke are ringing accusingly in my ears.
“You betrayed me,” I whisper. I hate that I feel my cheeks heat at his words. They betray me, too.
“Do you know how you turn tragedy into hell, Coralys?”
His voice is sad and his broad shoulders slump a little.Somehow that slump and the way he looks so wistfully out across the sea make him appear younger and they pull at something in my belly. Something a little akin to sympathy. Something a little too close to understanding.
He has been standing waist-deep in the water. Now he strides forward, the water running from his form in rivulets until he stands on the beach with me. I swallow roughly, overwhelmed by a strange combination of hatred and fondness. Of distrust and longing. I am a wreck being pounded by the swell against the rocks in one direction and by furious rains in another, and I do not know which will sink me first.
His gaze is intent. It sends a little shiver down the backs of my thighs. “You turn tragedy into hell by turning to resentment to succor you. I want better for you than hell.”
“How comforting.” My words are dry and so is my mouth.
The wind around us picks up, rippling our hair and snapping our clothing like sailcloth. It brings with it dark clouds and turns the sea behind Oke the same green as his eyes.
I’m surprised when he snags my hand in his and kneels in front of me. He holds my hand as a courtier might, but then he turns it so the palm faces him and rests against his forehead. My stomach flips. I don’t ask to be touched like this. Not by a man. Not by a god. And yet another part of me craves it. It wants to thread my fingers in that hair. It wants to give him what he’s asking for.
“Forgive me,” he says. His fingers are still tangled with mine as he presses my palm against his brow, and at first I think he’s apologizing for the touch, but then I realize hemeans this act to be some kind of almost religious blessing or absolving. “Forgive me, Queen Coralys, for being slow to answer the cries of your people and failing to drive their enemies away. Forgive me for their spilled blood.” He seems to choke a moment on the words, and his other hand rises up and tightens on the strings of pearls he wears. “Forgive me for my failures.”
I clear my throat and draw my palm away, untangling our fingers. Losing the touch fills me with an almost giddy relief and a terrible yawning loss all at once. I am suddenly unmoored. I expected a fight. I did not expect a plea. I am unprepared.
“Who are you to apologize for the deaths of my people? Who are you to ask my forgiveness when you’ve been spending lives like coin from a fool’s purse?”
He looks away into the gathering storm, and when the flickering emotions on his face grow stronger, I begin to believe I might get some answers. He abandons kneeling to me and instead strides up the rock shore as the first raindrops fall, but as he moves he speaks in halting words.
