“A bargain with the gods.” His eyes flash in the lantern light. Against my will, my breath catches. “As if a mortal can bargain with the immortal for anything and come out the winner.”
“And yet, I did,” I tell him. And I’m not sure if my voice is cold because he is toying with me, or because the idea that the gods were playing with me last night is taking root and growing in my heart. “Tell me, fisherman, why else but because you are to wed me tomorrow are you kept here on my pier unmolested?”
“Your pier?”He finds that amusing.
“Until I marry you,” I say firmly. “Until I marry you and abandon this life of mine, I am Coralys, Her Serene Majesty, queen of the Crocus Isles, seventh of her line. My ancestors built this pier—and the others of the five islands. They carved our palaces and courthouses, shiphouses and temples from this rock. They set in pools and springs, fountains and terraced gardens. We are a haven of bounty and spices and peace between men.”
He smiles as if he is charmed by a tale. “Is this so, Coralys? You are so very favored as all that?”
“Yes.” I am annoyed now.
His voice softens. “Is it true that your husband died in the storm? Or is that one more exaggeration I should lay at this man Turbote’s feet?”
I feel the blood drain from my face, annoyance shattered with the strict reminder that grief is my companion this night.
“It is true.”
I cannot decipher the emotions rippling across his face, but he is very grave when he speaks.
“Your people lived—mostly—but your kingdom is drowned. Where will the terraced gardens be today? Washed away. Your beloved fountains filled with debris and brackish water. Your silks ruined, your rugs trashed, your riches washed out into the greedy mouth of the howling sea. I name you Queen of the Drowned, for that is what you are.”
“What is that to you?” I ask softly.
His answer is so faint that I barely catch it. “What indeed?”
He drops his hand suddenly, as if stung, and I feel cold.
Carefully, I retreat to put a post at my back and close my eyes.
“Are you going to run?” I ask him.
“There’s nowhere to flee.” His words sound bleak and one corner of his mouth hitches in a way that makes me wince in sympathy.
“Is marriage to me so grim as that?”
But he does not answer and I do not care if he runs. It will only mean that I am bound to follow, and I think that maybe chasing him would be preferable to him chasing me, so I close my eyes and I lean back against the pier.
This journey is too important to abandon now. Because I have made a choice as I spoke to him. I have decided I will climb up out of the mortal mirk and find the gods, and I will have my revenge on them for withholding their mercy like it was a game and plucking my husband’s life like fruit from a tree. And the thought of this new purpose swells in my breast in a way that sits very nicely alongside my grief and drives all doubt from my mind.
The fisherman is whistling something tuneless that sounds like the wind in the rocks of the shore more than the song of a man. It suits my mood perfectly. Neither one thing nor the other, just like me tonight. I drift in and out of cold, comfortless sleep, and I clench my fists and wish I could pray for revenge, but with the gods as my enemies I refuse to pray at all. Instead, I simply hope and I cling to the haunting sound of that whistle until dawn.
Chapter Four
Any island kingdom will have great reverence for the sea. It is from the sea that we gather food and riches and by the whims of the sea that we live. We are blessed or cursed by the waves, and the tide steals or gifts as it wills.
And so, on the Crocus Isles, anything we do of significance, we do in the sea.
We start our lives born into its salt, no matter what the cost is to arrange it. I’ve seen pregnant women in the middle of a gale laboring against a standing rock, bidding their child come before the winds sweep them away, friends and neighbors encircling them, wet and wind-whipped, holding thick ropes so that they will not be washed away, and once the infant arrives it may find refuge in a floating tar-painted basket. My own birth was to calm seas, and yet even I taste my name in the brine, for each mother speaks the child’sname as the babe is dipped beneath the waters so that the ocean may know them and understand we belong to it. We are the people of the sea.
And when we die, we are released to the sea once more, our names released with us, in thanks for the gift of our lives upon the waves, just as I gave Lieve to the sea yesterday.
When the time came for me to ascend to the crown, I was raised to the throne within the waters, the Pearl Crown set on my head as it had been set on each head before mine. The crowd gathered there with me, their clothing wet and heavy, the swell of the tide rocking them back and forth and knocking all the small, clustered boats against one another with hollow wooden thunks. Our wind that day was strong, and flower petals—torn from their stems by snatching winds—drifted down around me and my subjects. The Crocus Throne is what we call the natural bench that rises just up out of the surf, great towering rocks soaring upward on either side. It’s formed in such a way that you can sit on it, and when you sit, the waves will crash hard all around you in a swell of white foam and violent power. And so, I was baptized a second time when I sat as monarch.
The people of the Crocus Isles also marry in the sea, both parties going down into what started as a natural tide pool but was carved by our ancestors into a perpetual greenish-blue pool with a mosaic floor. It represents the birth of both parties into a new life and it tells the sea we are now one.
I walked into the pool with Lieve on our wedding day. I remember yet his abashed joy as we entered it together,hands clasped tightly. Weddings, just like those other events, are conducted naked. Naked we are born into the sea, naked we return to it, and naked we marry to embrace our new lives together without secrets.
That seems ironic today. I know nothing about the man I am marrying and naked flesh will not change that. It will only be a stark reminder of what I have lost and what I am losing.
