I say nothing.
“You know I am your god and your husband, and yet you plot against me. You will not take my word that I am bent on your good and the good of those you love.”
To my utter surprise he leans close and draws me to him with a hand at the small of my back. He is warm and firm with muscle. I’m so taken aback that I gape at him like a fresh-caught fish. I see in his eyes the unexpected. Longing. Desire.
“Hostility is the last thing I wish to see grow between your heart and mine. Leave it, wife.”
“And what will I be, then?” I ask, a little breathlessly. “Faithless? Fickle? I am neither of those things.”
I shiver against his touch, regretting that I must reject it and him in the most violent way possible.
“You’ll be my wife.”
“What would you have me do? What?” I press, frustration acid on my tongue. “Forget my dead husband and my suffering people, and live a happy life with you here in the sun and by the sea?”
His hand at the small of my back tightens in what I think might be matching turmoil, and the movement hitches me a little closer as he shakes his head. His brow so close to mine that I can feel his hair brush my cheek. He is very alive. Almost inhumanly alive, and I feel myself pulse in time with the rhythm of his heart. His words are forced, tight, frustrated.
“I would have you stand by my side and be my wife in more than name.”
I’m surprised that he would bare himself so knowing Imust shatter any hope of such a thing. That he would draw so near to she who waits like a snake in the grass. Surely he realizes. Surely this is why he has hovered so near and waited so long. Did he truly believe he could seduce me into trusting him? Now? When my heart is set?
I slip from his arms, putting distance between us, and the look I give him is firm and set.
“Had I not so great a cause, I might very well have given you that. But it is too late.”
He nods. “I must attend to my duties, then. As you must attend to yours.”
And I feel every place that he no longer touches like the shock of cold spray on the skin. His pleas have changed nothing except for how much it will hurt us both when I take his life and all his dreams from him.
He gathers his things quickly and I watch from the cottage as he leaves on his boat. The wind is rough today, and it shakes the little craft in sprays of silver as it drags it off to the deeper sea.
And then—at long last—he is gone and I’m free.
I make my way back down to the water—not the beach and not the rocky steps where I bathed in the sea. Both those places are too full of Oke, and to betray him there feels doubly wrong. Instead, I slip out in a different direction past the statue where I called up Vesuvius, down the toothlike jagged rocks that make me feel as if I am crawling into some great creature’s mouth, and down to where an unhappy sea foams against the shore.
All along this half bay, the waters have washed up spew from lands beyond: battered timbers, tumbled bits of glass, a handmade buoy with the sign of Okeanos carved painstakingly into the surface and then worn away by the waves. Little tokens of lands far away that I’ll never see now that I’ve chosen this course.
I step into the surf and let it tickle my shins. Now that the moment is here, I find I’m not quite ready. But I do not have the time nor the patience to wait for my heart to be ready. I screw up my mouth, fix my courage, and take the black pearl from my pouch and stare at it a moment. I’m not sure I want that horrible dead god with me for this after all. I leave it clenched in one fist, close if I need it, but unopened.
My hand is shaking as I raise it in the cupped shape Vesuvius showed me. I know I am afraid. But is anything truly worth doing not a little terrifying?
Before I can think my way out of it, I twist my hand the way I was shown. The world around me shimmers and reels, and I blink hard to recover myself, expecting to be in the home of the gods.
I am not.
Instead, before I can gasp in a breath or see my surroundings, water rises in a forceful swell, sweeping my feet out from under me, curling upward and then crashing down again like the mouth of a monster bent on destroying me. I am swept up and rolled under the powerful wave. Panic clutches me, but I fight it back and scramble for footing. There was ground beneath my feet a moment ago.
I find it suddenly as the water recedes and pull myself upright between sharp rocks that rise through the water like the spine of some great dead creature.
I gasp for air and claw against one of the rocks, choking and heaving on the salt water I swallowed. I must be in the wrong place. I must have done it wrong. As my anxiety rises, the water rises, too, and then I’m smashed again under an angry wave.
I lose my grip on the rock and tumble, knocked hard on the head so that I nearly lose my grip on the pearl. For the second time in a fortnight I think I may very well drown. By luck alone, my grasping fingers find the rock again and I claw myself free of the drag of the dark waters and suck in a breath, forcing myself to remain calm until the wave recedes and my heartbeat becomes manageable.
I must find higher ground.
I drag myself up the spinelike rock, only to have the waters chase me upward yet again, until I’ve climbed twice my height and I’m still ankle-deep in water.
I wobble there on the top of one of the rocky ridges and look outward at a string of white islands connected to this spiny ridge as if they are the ribs of a massive dead creature. I think I see structures carved from the white stone on some of them, and in the distance there is a rock that rises high above the rest, but I am drenched and bedraggled and to reach it I must swim from rock to rock along this jutting spine.
