Chapter Twenty-One
Iwake to a throat clearing.
I sit up so quickly that the pearl cuirass rattles and I must push long tendrils of hair from my face so I can see.
I laid no defenses last night, not knowing I would need them. Even the trident is not close to hand. It slipped to the floor in the night. And now here is an enemy in my very room, lounging on one of the chests as if this is how he spends every morning.
“Awake?” Markanos asks. He does not smile. He only runs a finger down the flat of the sword he has laid upon the table. It whines like the rim of a water glass. “Did you dream red dreams of murder and the shedding of blood?”
“So many,” I agree, a little breathlessly. If he’s come to intimidate me, he’s welcome to leave straight off. I offer him a cold smile. “And you? Did you dream of slaughter?”
“Iamthe God of War,” he says, resting his palm over the flat of his sword. He makes a sudden twisting move and the sword dances across his forearm like I’ve seen men dance daggers over their knuckles. It’s an almost charming thing to do. Almost playful.
But not quite.
“Charmed as I am by your presence,” I say tightly, “I am not receiving visitors.”
“Murderesses rarely do,” he agrees with a companionable smile as if we share a secret.
I say nothing. I will not deny I killed Okeanos. Any fool will know that. I went to bed with him on an island and only I left. I sit here now in Okeanos’s bed and Okeanos does not. This mystery is hardly a party riddle with a surprise solution.
“And you a murderess twice over,” he says, watching me as a cat watches koi in a pond.
“I did not kill El’Dorian, if that is what you suggest. Was she your sister that you love her so?”
“No.” He’s watching me as if waiting for me to say more.
“A lover?” I quirk a brow.
“It is not for her that I have come today.”
Ah.
“If you’ve come to avenge the death of Okeanos,” I say as coolly as I can, though I choke a little on my late husband’s name, “then have done with it. You’re the one here with the sword and the armor and the muscles. I think we both know how this ends.”
It seems I won’t need to learn to be a god after all.
My heart is beating so hard that it is all I can hear.
He spins the sword again.
I hold my breath. Is there a place in the Nightwaters for people like me? And if there is, is it as terrible as they say? One priest told me that when a murderer dies and finds the afterlife, the terrors of the Nightwaters kill him in the way he killed his victims, only over and over and over again forever. How will I feel when I’m skewered to a bed for the thousandth time?
Markanos slams his hand on the flat of his blade, it stops twirling abruptly, and he smiles at my involuntary flinch.
“If Okeanos is gone from the land of the living,” he says very slowly, “then that is a revelation to me.”
I wait. I know there is more, though I cannot fathom what mad game this god is playing at. Surely he knows my husband is dead. I most certainly do.
He leans back with his legs spread out the way fighting men like to sit. Some say it’s very masculine. I have long believed it is because their backs pain them. Every action wears a path on the body and the way of the sword is no less harsh than the way of the washerwoman or the way of the midwife.
His voice is a quiet rumble. “I saw him in the flesh not an hour ago.”
I do not gasp. I do not flinch. I do nothing to give away my surprise except for hold my tongue.
If Okeanos lives, then perhaps I am not a god at all. I am only playing at one. Perhaps it is only my imaginationthat paints blood on my hands and guilt on my heart. But I doubt it is so.
More likely, this is Markanos’s cruel joke. More likely, they are all laughing even now from that terrible plane where I left them, casting lots to see which of them will swoop down and devour me. Perhaps Markanos won the toss.
