Behind me, I hear another call. The voices are getting closer. Someone gasps a curse.
But I am quicker.
I reach the edge and I fling myself into the water below as one might fling a line of rope, only to remember that I don’t know how to get back. I hit the water with a slapping belly flop and then rise, fumbling with my belt pouch as I hear a second person scrambling up the rocks.
“What’s happened, Markanos? Is he there?” The words are harsh and male, but I don’t know whose they are.
I pull Vesuvius’s pearl from my pouch and it takes no effort to wake him. Not when my tears are flowing so freely. I almost drop the pearl twice I am shaking so hard as I bob in the waves.
“What is—?”
I silence him with a quick gesture. He looks past me and his eyes widen with sudden delight.
“Tell me how to get out of here,” I demand in a harsh whisper even as the voices behind me rise.
Above me someone curses even more loudly and he’s joined by the second voice. They’ve found Okeanos.
Vesuvius laughs soundlessly and the contortions of his face and body repel me even as I gesture again for silence. With a shrug and a triumphant grin he shows me a new hand movement, and the moment I see it, I copy it, praying I’ll escape to anywhere but here.
Footsteps slap on the rock above me as the world spins in its almost-familiar way and shifts me between planes.
I rock with nausea as I grip the deadly black pearl in one hand and what’s left of my sanity in the other, and I hope, hope, hope they cannot catch me.
I’ve left a husband dead. Sprawled on his own bed. Murdered by my hand.
And there is nothing before me but bleak emptiness and the heavy guilt I’ll carry forever.
His death was supposed to heal the world of ill. It was supposed to fix all the mistakes that came before—maybe it still will—but right now it feels like it’s not just me or my islands drowning, but all the world, and I am queen of the flood, queen of the drowned, queen of damnation itself.
Chapter Twenty
The sea opens to me the moment I shift in it, and I am momentarily too stunned to move another inch.
As I merge back to Okeanos’s home plane awareness sweeps over me, dragging me down and drowning me under the pull of it. I am the sea and the sea is me. It is in my bones and heart.
I feel every line of the shore where the waters lap against the rock, every fish slicing through the waves, every ripping, tearing attack of one creature upon another, every youngling spawned, every slide of fish against fish, every tumble of rock and murmur of the great movements beneath the floor of the sea. I feel it as one feels one’s own flesh.
I am freezing cold and laced with sharp ice. I am warm and balmy and tranquil. I am the hard grey of the north and the sultry azure of the south.
It is utterly overwhelming.
I am the sea.
I am sliced by the hulls of ships, the calls of fishermen echo over my surface, and with it comes their joys and worries as they catch or fail to catch. I am told the names of children as they are born into the waves, feel their startled first breaths and cries. I know the creak of the rigging and hear the worried curses of captains carving paths through froth and bubbles. And I feel the despair of the drowning, the misery of the hungry holding empty nets, the pounding of wave after wave over the exhausted who can barely stay afloat.
I am the sea.
The sea is me.
And this is not a thing for mortals, I tell myself as I shudder under the pale grey dawn of a rainy day.
This is not a thing forme, I tell myself in a panic.
I am gasping when I blink back to consciousness, overwhelmed by sensation and emotion. I am on all fours in the water, the tide lapping up to my chin. Drenched and clammy, my fingers pale and wrinkled, I feel as if I have spent an entire day within the brine.
My hair is crisp with salt. My breath comes fast and painful as if this is the first breath I’ve drawn all night. It is a little terrifying to realize you have inadvertently become a body of water.
I shudder and look at my hands. They are not covered in blood. They are pale and dimpled from the sand and yet they look worse than if they showed the evidence of murder.
