“How desperately romantic you are, Okeanos, telling a woman she must be spent like a coin in your purse.” Okeanos’s visitor is Markanos. He lounges on the rocks like he plans to stay here a long time. “Is this why you’ve never taken a lover? Do you repel them thus with such vinegar words? I could teach you better. My reputation in romance is only exceeded by my reputation in battle—as you would know if you sought any company but my own.”
I am frozen, staring at him. If he tries to kill me again, I suppose I could dive beneath the waves, a crustacean indistinguishable from the others. I don’t think I’m fast enough to retrieve the trident before he might stab me. My breath comes quickly. Awareness of my limitations is a clamp around my throat and yet…
“What are you doing to my husband?” I ask quietly, but I put a threat in my voice.
Markanos laughs. “Feeding him wine, naked queen. And some kind of pastry with salmon in it.”
He holds up both for me to see before turning to dribble a little wine in Okeanos’s mouth.
The sea god offers me a wry look, swallowing the wine with calm acceptance.
“Someone must see to his needs,” Markanos taunts. “Not all of us choose to be crabs.”
A wave rises up over the shore and slaps hard when it comes down, splashing on Markanos and sizzling across part of the fire with a puff of steam that clouds the air.
I take that cue to scoop up my tunic, belt, and cuirass from where they fell when I transformed and I quickly dress. To their credit, neither man watches me.
“Are you insulting my wife?” Okeanos asks in a restrained voice. Does he still have some control over the waves? I try to sense it within myself, for if I am the sea, then I should feel any hold he has on me, but I cannot. Either that was coincidence—unlikely—or his grip remains on the reins of the ocean and I cannot sense it, for we are too intermingled.
The thought gives me pause, but I must drag my gaze back to Oke’s almost instantly, for his words are thick with some emotion I can’t read when he says, “Wife, I must confess, not once in the centuries that I have been a god has another offered her safety for mine or her comfort to ease my pain. Or seen me as a man in need of succor or kindness. The last to do such for me was my mortal mother. I am… humbled by your gift.”
His words are sweet, as is the look in his eyes when he offers them. I stop dead at what I was doing—fumbling with the buckle of my belt. I’m taken aback. If generous gifts are new to him, sweetness is not new to me. My Lieve was agood friend—strong, kind, tender. I cannot compare him with another. It is not fair to do so, and yet what I see in Okeanos’s eyes is the same as what I knew from Lieve. He shows me a facet of vulnerability so endearing it hurts, aches, cuts something deep inside me. I wince because I can feel how it affects me. It makes me want to open myself up in kind, to accept what is being offered and return it.
Our gazes meet and mingle for a long moment, and I feel as though I am breathing in time with him, as though I am thinking in time with him. Unbidden, the memory of his kiss returns and my lips are suddenly dry.
I love my husband, I remind myself. I love Lieve.
My breathing is heavy and uneven.
“Leave off,” Markanos mutters, shaking his soaked arm with a grimace. The water sloshes from his sleeve as from a jug. “Tortured you may be. Dead in all but spirit, certainly. But I’ll not have the legendary Okeanos debase himself to a mere mortal queen.” He turns to me and I force my attention to him. Anything to recover my self-control. “Do you not know him whom you have married? I think you do not, for all you try to buy him with petty gifts.” He stuffs one of his salmon pastries into Okeanos’s mouth to silence the start of a protest. As if that’s not petty. He’s one to talk. “Let me enlighten you, Drowned Queen. Okeanos, God of the Sea, is the greatest god of the pantheon. I have watched him single-handedly turn back a fleet of eighty ships launched to invade his islands. He settled them with one careless flick of a wrist and the storm that arose swamped them, sank them, and swallowed up the survivors.”
I inhale sharply through my nose and out of the corner of my eye I see Oke stiffen. He knows how I feel about careless violence.
“Is this so?” I ask. I feel as if I balance on a taut rope.
Markanos is undeterred. “Did not Aurelius try to take his holdings not fifty years ago? And did Okeanos not hammer those temples of the air to dust beneath the pounding of his breakers? He led the vanguard himself, a dozen mad sea priests charged from behind his banner, all of them mounted on giant squid. They rippled up the shore, unstoppable, terrifying, trailing a wake of salt water and blood as they ripped Aurelius’s temple apart.”
“I would have heard of that,” I say dryly.
My tone may be the only dry thing on the island. Waves whip up around us, pounding the shore, and it is notmyemotions that whip them up. I slide a side look toward Okeanos, and his glowering brows knit tight together.
“Youhaveheard of that,” Markanos says with a rumbling laugh. “They blamed it on a storm. A very precise storm that destroyed the temple entirely.”
Fine. I did hear of it, but he is wrong. It was not so precise. It leveled half the city.
“And the innocents swept up in the chaos?” I ask, but he’s not listening to me.
“I’ll not bother listing the Battle of the Shoal Reef, or the matter of the dispute between Heskatan and the Scarlet Ram. I’ll not list for you the kings he set up and tore down, the counselors tricked or judged, their bodies washedoverboard to bloat upon the waters when they ignored his words. I will not list the nations saved and ruined, the shores pounded to nothing, the islands swallowed up, or fellow gods bowed under the power he brings to bear. I may be God of War, but my friend is God of the Sea and well does he hold his spear and trim his sail, for he reigns with strength and justice, and in the end nothing in all the world compares to the power of the deeps.”
In the silence after this declaration, Oke’s quiet voice sounds loud.
“The innocents haunt me still, Coralys.”
Oke has eyes only for me and I shift uncomfortably at the emotion in them. I believe he is sorrowful over the loss of these people. But what good is that beside their suffering?
Markanos scoffs. “The pair of you have your sails trimmed the same, I see. Forget the past. Let us speak instead of more dire things. Treseano and his rebellion, for instance. It’s clear now that he is the one who murdered El’Dorian, knowing as well as any of us that she would side with you, Okeanos. I always thought her sweet on you, Goddess of Virginity or not. Wine, Drowned Queen?”
How does everyone know that name for me?
