I pry the drawer open the rest of the way and within I find three rolls of parchment. I unroll the first right there on the floor and immediately wish I had not.
It is so delicate that the edges flake, leaving little fibers along the mosaic floor. Drawn on the parchment in intricate detail is a lighthouse.
It is depicted from the side and then the top, and then a separate sketch is drawn of every floor of the ten it is meant to have. I have never seen the like. It looks almost like a living thing, gripping the rock with its tentacles, flaring fins soaring above the eyelike light. And yet it is terribly beautiful, delicately worked, gorgeously rendered. Flowering tracery windows of epic proportion fill the walls. When occupied, the whole house would be lit like a crystal spire gleaming out into the night. It snatches my breath clean away.
And it hits me like a fist to the chest. This is the place of safety he’s been trying to build for his people. This is the refuge he was trying to convince me to construct with him. I should have known this would be his last request. I frown at it, annoyed, for it cost him his life and his godhood, and inthat moment I had thought was so intimate, as he lay there dying, it was this for which he yearned.
I cannot make out the labeling. It is in a language and script I’ve never read. But I recognize it from one of the books I’d seen in the library above. And there are notes below in a sharp, masculine hand that bear the wordsCurse of the Great Lighthouseand a repeat of the list I found before. The list of ten terrible tasks.
Win a god’s oath.
Wed the drowned queen.
Collect the dead to serve.
Fill a thimble with riches.
Heal the crown of the sea.
Turn the betrayer’s heart.
Mend time with golden stitches.
Drink the ocean dry.
Spin moonlight into silver.
Split the seven seas in twain.
Oke has completed four of those, just as he said. Which means the rest are mine to tackle if I mean to honor his mad request.
I shake my head and return to the upper level of the cottage, carrying with me the only weapon I found below—a strange bronze trident—verdant green all over from corrosion. It’s not much of a weapon, but it’s the best I can do. I lean it against the wall beside my bed and go to the bookshelf, andin a matter of minutes I find the book,Curse of the Great Lighthouse, which I had believed to be a fictional tale.
It details that a great lighthouse was lost beneath the sea when the gods together cursed a race of sailors and their greatest achievement—a lighthouse of such grandeur it blocked the paths of magic and bargain, offering a sanctuary to all who would avoid the strength of both blessing and cursing. It speaks of the jealousy of the gods and their determination to be turned away from no door—not even the door of a single human sanctuary. They sank the lighthouse and buried it beneath the waves forever, exacting terrible punishments upon the sailors who had built it.
There is a section toward the end that strikes a chord. I read it twice over.
“It is said that the Great Lighthouse will never return to us again except by an act of wondrous and terrible magic that might draw it up from the depths of the sea. But who could achieve such a wonder? For to do such a thing would require the power of a god. And no god would bless a place where they are not welcome.”
I applaud Oke’s reasoning, but there is no way to give him what he wants. These tasks are labeled impossible for a reason. And I have a people to rule over and help to prosper and save. I do not have time—nor his ambition—for something so whimsical as raising a lighthouse. If he had hoped I would take up his mantle, he must think again.
I need something useful to occupy me, something to take my mind off death and great works of magic and dead souls, so I fix the pearl cuirass, threading the beads one by one back onto their string. But it does nothing to solve the roiling storm in my heart or the doubt creeping in. When I reach Vesuvius’s pearl, I pause, hold it up, and sigh. It does not go on the strings with the others. It remains in my belt pouch. I cannot explain why, only that it must be so.
It’s long past noon when I curl up in the bed again. I just need a moment to rest, just a moment to escape being myself.
I curl around the pearl cuirass the way that Oke curled around the weapon that killed him and I choke on a silent sob of shame before I shake myself out of it.
Tomorrow, I will go and see my people. I will catalog their troubles and needs, and I will set about righting them. That, alone, will make up for murder. For what could be a greater end than the salvation of my people? I must not lose sight of all I have gained.
But though I try to comfort myself with that, I do not sleep. The crushing weight of guilt presses on me as if someone has carved my god statue already and has laid it over me.
I am stained and ruined, my heart in tatters, my conscience shredded. WhenIdie, there will be no pearl. How could there be when I’ve ruined any soul I might have had?
But I am not ready to bend. Not to sorrow and not to shame.
Tomorrow, I must rise and find a way to be a better godthan Okeanos ever was, and if I do not know how, then I will simply learn. After all, I did not know how tokilla god and I achieved that. Certainly I can learn how tobeone.
I tell myself this over and over and over until eventually I fall into a fitful sleep.
