Your people? Glorian of Growing Things has taken great bites out of your entire eastern coast. I hear half of it belongs now to her and not to you at all. And Alexandros the Toolmaker arrives to take his own piece of the northern one. You are squeezed and soon will be broken, ready to pop with a little more pressure.The creature laughs.You will have no people, Drowned Queen. Even I have heard that.
I am so stunned that I hardly know what to say, but I’m not as stunned as the sea serpent believes I am. She is so pleased she has surprised me that she does not notice how close my boat has drawn to her shining scales, or how I am bracing my trident to strike. She lifts her head from the water and brackish fluid pours through the tendrils of her beard and foams around her curving jaw. She opens her mouth to scoop me up, but I kick the tiller hard, and as my little boat surges to the side, I plunge Vesuvius’s trident through her skin and into her throat. And just like I killed a god, I kill a sea serpent, though not nearly as neatly.
She drags me through the water as I twist the trident, plunging me under, wrapping her tail around my side and squeezing, squeezing, squeezing until I think I might burst. The fight is a blur of desperation and intent, but to my credit, I remember I am the sea. When she squeezes me, I squeeze back, my waters gripping and throttling her as she throttles me until I manage to twist my trident into place and drive it through her eye.
When her grip on me falls lax, it’s all I can do to rip my trident free and drag myself back into the little fishing boat. I cannot breathe properly. My ribs slowly find their places and pop back into them and around me are the cries of the living as they rush to rescue the dead and the horrible smell of bursting bubbles filled with a rotting seaweed scent that are the only reminder that these waters churned with a living, breathing monster just moments ago.
This is madness. All of it.
I drag myself back to my island somehow and pull my broken body up onto shore and lie upon the rocks until finally I can breathe and my limbs—to my surprise—function properly again. I could have sworn I had a broken shoulder and clavicle, and at least a half dozen ribs, but they are all functional by midnight and painless by morning.
I hope the people made it to safety once the sea serpent was dragged from their hull. A good god would have stayed and been sure. A good god wouldn’t have been too damaged to help. A good god would have never let it happen in the first place.
But me? I make a terrible god. Worse, I am realizing, than Okeanos. Worse than Glorian. Worse than Aurelius. Possibly even worse than Vesuvius, and that is a very great claim indeed.
I am the very worst of gods.
My only comfort is that the sea seems to love me.
When all has gone wrong, I lay drifting in the water. I won’t lie and pretend this part is not excellent. It is the balm to my aching soul, the sweet in all the bitterness. I close my eyes and feel the movement of the humpback whales in their pods, feel the dart and dash of the dolphins, and the great joy of the anemones on the reefs. And for a moment, I am blissful. I dance with the bubbles that roil up where the seals dive and moan. I laugh with the hoot of the sea lion. I fall into sonorous rhythm with the penguin in his march. I snap at nothing with the shark. I am the sea.
I feel the great inky quaking of the monsters of the depthsand I bid them go back to sleep. I feel them only when they murmur, but I sense them always—great creatures who sleep deep in the beneath, underpinning all the ocean with their power. I am their sea, too.
Sometimes I feel something more out there far off in the ocean—that same murky sense of dread and pain I felt the first time and from which I shy away. I do not want to know what gives off such terrible misery. I am afraid that if I find out, it will become my responsibility to fix it, and that whatever the solution is will most certainly mean my taking on that vast well of pain. I have had enough pain. I am ready to live without it for quite some time. I can try it again later, when things are less fraught with trouble.
And once—only once—I think I might sense the Lighthouse just under the skim of sand in the deep Pleitas Trench. It, too, is far away and it feels like a wind chime sounds, haunting me all day and well into the night—enough that I draw out Oke’s notes again and read of his Lighthouse project and wonder if he was a dreamer, or a madman, or merely a visionary slain before his work was done. It has become clear to me that he was, in fact, trying to build a paradise-like refuge for his people. And that he was not lying to me about any of the claims he made. And maybe, just maybe, I might give him his wish after all and find a way to draw this Lighthouse back up from beneath the waves.
For just a moment, I think of Oke’s distant gaze and I think we could have shared this—that I would not have had to bear the burden of it alone—had I not been so certain thathe was lying to me and that his death was vital to changing the course of things. The thought guts me and I must thrust it away as I do every time the conclusion creeps closer—the knowledge I’ll not be able to avoid forever, the understanding that I already see even if I’m struggling to accept.
I was wrong.
I killed for no good reason.
For the god I hoped to supplant was only replaced with a worse god… and that one is me.
It is two moons into my reign as goddess that I go looking for the rebel Gheric Rodehands. I have given up on Turbote. Given up on the prince of the Andalappos, who is now king of the Crocus Isles. I have learned both of them serve only themselves. They make up what the God of the Sea has “told them” out of whole cloth and then demand obedience from the people despite my orders to the contrary. I have asked for none of what they claim I have required. I have asked them for nothing at all. Everything they tell the people is a lie, and I fear that if I see Turbote again, I may kill him. I have found no evidence of someone else giving him orders—no “Okeanos” pulling his strings. I do not know if he has gone mad from the terrible horrors he lived through or if he is the villain he seems, intent on the deaths of others to shore up his own power.
I cannot quite seem to calm my fury where he is concerned, and I am beginning to fear that one day I will sharpen this trident and go looking for him. He has not stopped his terrifying demand of drowning virgins. And thelast five I’ve drawn from the depths at the very last minute cursed the God of the Sea—and Okeanos specifically—with the first breath they drew back into their salt-soaked lungs. It was not easy to find them safe places to hide, and to my despair, I could not convince them that the tragedy they had lived through was not ordered by the dead god they blame.
Because of all this, Gheric Rodehands is my people’s last hope of a mortal who might be made into a king. He certainly can do no worse than those who have already claimed the title. I have been watching him from afar, and now, it would seem, is the time to speak.
He’s young. Twenty-five, perhaps. Not good-looking, not particularly powerful of body, but his people hang on his every word. I wait until he is in the sea cleaning fish—he’s not too good to work with his hands—and I meet him there.
He freezes when he sees me, but after a breath he returns to what he’s doing. I’m frequently curious to see how mortals will react to me. I have looked into my shell of rainwater and my face is no different than it was when I was queen, but sometimes in the right light I do think that perhaps it glows a little. It does not seem enough of a change to explain the reactions of mortals. Some—like Turbote, who still does not recognize me—act as though I am as distant from them as the heavens are from the earth. Others, like the innocent child of the priest of Okeanos or this leader of the people, simply shrug and carry on with their work. I have not yet figured out if it is something I am doing, or some attitude they have, or merely a quirk of vision from one to the next.
“The Lighthouse,” Gheric says confidently when I explain who I am, and this time it’s my turn to freeze. “Casavar the priest told me about it.” His eyes blaze as he speaks on about the man—the one I met in Okeanos’s Temple who gave me my peplos. “If such a thing were possible, I would lead our people to it. All who remain. And we would be free of these looming god wars that threaten to ravage the land. We’d be free, too, of the moods and whims of those who were meant to protect us but seem only set on ruining us.” His smile is grim and sad. “But of course, it’s only a tale.”
He tells me of other things as well, and tries to sway me to his cause. Were I mortal still, I might join it. Were I queen, I’d make him a captain or advisor despite his clear disdain for the monarchy. He’s very persuasive. But I am neither mortal nor queen and even the memory of me has left the lips of the people. They do not speak of Coralys except in cursing the gods for taking me and leaving them to their current fates. There is a small group of people who believe I was the first of Turbote’s virgin sacrifices—foolish, since I was not a virgin and since Turbote had nothing to do with my choice to abdicate. To everyone who meets me now, I am only Okeanos’s wife. They will not call me Coralys no matter how often I remind them.
I go home from my meeting with Gheric deep in thought.
“Can I bring up the Lighthouse from the depths?” I ask the helpful woman from the pearl that night, drawing her out from her prison, but she only laughs at me.
I ask them one by one—each resident of each pearl—andeach one laughs or shakes his head or tells me I’m a fool. Even those who look at me with wistful eyes as if they wish it could be so say the same thing.
“It’s too late,” they say. “There was a chance, but that is gone now.”
At last, I even ask Vesuvius.
