“Live a long life, Turbote. Make Delarte as miserable as you’ve made me.”
He laughs again as if that was a joke, but then he’s on his way and I’m grateful to see his back. I look down the pier to where the fisherman sits with his head tipped back. Hardlyan auspicious beginning to a marriage—one forced by the hands of guards and man, the other forced by the threat of the gods.
I make my way down the dock, watching him as the distance grows shorter. I have not had a good look at him yet. I do not know if I am wedding a youth tomorrow or a man as old as Turbote.
Even as I draw close, it’s hard to tell. He’s hunched over himself as if in pain, one arm wrapped around his middle, his head bowed. He has a wild beard that hangs in hunks like rushes and spreads out to the sides like the tail of a thrush. It is not an attractive thing, but to be frank I’ve never met a man good at judging what’s attractive in a beard. Mayhap the fisherman thinks he looks very well indeed with a face like a thrush’s tail.
“I don’t think we need guards,” I say mildly when I reach him. He has not bothered to stand at my arrival—or even look up. The guards don’t move, so I fix them with my steady gaze. “Leave me one lantern.”
They look at each other. I don’t know their names, though I know the names of all my own palace guards, so these are part of the regulars. They’re worn and tired, uniforms salt-stained and rumpled.
I’m surprised by how offended is the part inside me that can feel their hesitance. But no one forced to marry a piece of flotsam after a storm can brag that she’s too good to be ignored by the guards. I’m still laughing at myself when I put a hand out to be given a lantern.
“There’s food at the palace, they tell me.”
I’ve hit the right note. They exchange another glance, offer a pair of reticent salutes, and give me one of the lanterns. Their footsteps echo down the pier. Voices drift in muffled tones and the sounds of people preparing for night echo over the water. The waves batter the sides of the various craft tied up along the pier, and the shushing lull of them calms me enough to sink down to the decking and place the lantern between myself and this mysterious heap of beard and cloth.
“Do you believe in fate, lady?” he asks me, and I’m so startled by his voice that I nearly tip over the lantern.
“No,” I say a little sadly.
I wish I could lay all this at the feet of some unknown divine storyteller, cruel and immovable. It would be a comfort.
“Do you believe, then, that your choices shape the course your life sails? That you are arbiter in the place of fate?”
He mocks me. And he does it with such a voice. His appearance may be shabby, but the gods have given him a voice that seems to have the power of the great swells of the sea behind it. I think if he were dressed well, giving orders, there’d be no hesitation in those he commanded.Hewouldn’t have to tempt the guards away with food. I smile slightly at the comparison.
“Who should I blame but myself?” I put to him.
He makes a sound that at first I take to be a fit of some kind and I look around helplessly. I am not practiced in healing arts. I make to rise, but his hand snaps out and grabs my wrist, and I freeze.
There’s a lot of power there. Too much to make me feel safe. Not an old man, then. The hairs on his arm are dark. His forearm is well shaped and darkened by the sun. He holds my wrist in a firm grasp, but not so tightly that it hurts. I am surprised at the gentleness of his touch. It takes a breath before I realize that the sound I hear is him laughing.
“You don’t blame the gods, then? For this fate of yours? To marry me, a poor fisherman?” His expression is hidden by the long hair that falls around his face.
“Is that what you are?” I ask curiously. But his words strike a chord in me. I do blame the gods. Not for the marriage. I care not about that. I blame them for the death of my Lieve. For the deaths of the rest. For being able to stop it but toying with me first instead.
The fisherman’s hold on my wrist tightens, and for one terrible moment I have a strange feeling that he is not what he seems at all, but rather some monster of the deep come up to claim my soul.
“A fisherman?” he says, seeming pleased with the title. His words break my reverie and he loosens his hold on me. “Among many things, I am certainly that.”
“And will you take me willingly to wife tomorrow?”
“Isn’t that what they’ve kept me here for?”
I open my mouth and then shut it with a click when he looks up at me for the first time. His eyes are bright and sharp. Those are not the eyes of a fool. They are dangerous eyes.
And they are also beautiful, like the sea just before a storm. They draw me into an intimacy I do not want.
I swallow hard. I know nothing of this man but his dress and conveyance. He could be anyone. Not a ghazul or a kraken, obviously, but perhaps a criminal. Perhaps a man who enjoys the torture of the innocent. Perhaps a pirate or reprobate or drunk.
And I will be his wife.
It will not be like my marriage to Lieve, where I was queen as well as wife, equal—superior, even—by birth and blood. Nor will it be the sweet partnership between us where trust was so strong.
I am about to learn a very different kind of marriage now—the binding of disparate souls, the tying of divergent fates.
“You know that you’ve been held here to marry me,” I say coolly, refusing to break our shared gaze. I will not bend first. “They would have told you.”
