He holds up a goblet with a single raised eyebrow, but I shake my head. One of my feet is still in the sea, poised to flee. I still do not trust that he will not catch my hand and tie me up beside my husband. I do not trust this god at all.
He shrugs and drains the goblet himself. He certainly loves to hear his own voice.
“Treseano has tied you up fairly, Okeanos, that is a certainty. I thought at first it was your woman who wove these magic knots, despite your protests to the contrary.” He flicks one of Okeanos’s chains and I flinch. “But if she’s paying a price to keep the creatures from eating you heels-to-heart every day, then it must not be her who has affixed you so, and if not her, then it must be him.”
“Did I not tell you so?” the sea god asks.
Markanos keeps talking as if he wasn’t interrupted. “He’ll bring you to heel to serve his rebellion one way or another. Has he sent his dog back begging yet?”
The waves calm slightly as if Oke’s emotions have calmed with them.
“If you mean Aurelius,” Oke says carefully, “I will not name him dog to any man, but he was here this morning demanding again my submission.”
Was he, now?
“Was it not Aurelius who found my corpse with you?” Oke continues. “I think he hoped to find my pearl within it.”
I will never take it in stride that he is dead but not dead, that I killed him and yet he discusses it as if it is merely misfortune as he eats and drinks from the hand of Markanos with a gouge from my spear still set into his flesh. He’s shockingly alive-looking for someone who is dead, though I do see that his skin is very pale, almost grey, and his eyes are glassy in a way they were not in life.
“Then we shall both be glad there was nothing to find.” Markanos grits his teeth and drags more driftwood over, throwingit on the fire, creating a swirling plume of sparks. They dance and extinguish just like all my plans and assumptions.
“You are friends, then?” I ask, looking from Okeanos to Markanos and back. It’s an odd kind of friendship if that’s what it is.
Oke nods. “Yes.”
“I would not trouble myself so much as this for an enemy and there’d be a knife in the gullet at the end of the night,” Markanos agrees.
“Yes, I believe that’s what you threatenedmewith,” I say acerbically. “Twice.”
“You did murder the greatest of my friends, girl.” He sits again, sprawling on a driftwood log he must have brought here himself, for it was not on the island when I arrived in the daylight.
“The only of your friends.” Oke quirks a smile. How does he smile right now—even tightly, painfully? He’s still chained. He’s still dead.
“Greatest,” Markanos corrects. “I did have Rothgar and Rethgar.” For a moment his expression is haunted and then he blinks it away and is back to good humor. “Did I not just list a portion of your exploits? You forget, girl, or you never knew and you ought to know, what a powerful god you married and murdered. He’s so humble he’ll not tell you himself. You met him at his worst.”
I look Okeanos up and down and raise a brow. Oke makes a face that suggests he wishes he could hide from my gaze but is trapped in place.
“You met him besieged by shadow enemies, outmaneuvered, unmanned…”
“I think that description suffices,” Oke tries to interject.
“Outclassed and outplayed,” Markanos charges onward, seemingly unaware of the tightness around Oke’s mouth. “Wounded in a way bound to bring any man shame. This is not him at his best. He was… he is yet, even now that he is dead… the greatest of us, and you did a dread deed when you drove your spear through his heart.”
I am still looking Oke steadily in the eye. He looks away sharply. Embarrassed. Shy. And it’s that shyness that makes me believe Markanos.
“There’s more to power than violent deeds, God of War,” Oke says grimly.
“Well, if that is a prompting to tell your bloodstained bride of how you saved her own reign in its early days, I’m happy to oblige,” Markanos says, and there is something challenging in his eyes when he looks at me. “Did you not find it odd, unworthy queen, that your nation found fish in plenty in the Blasted Year? That half the world strained under the heat of the sun that year, and they fainted and died of heat and starvation, and yet there your isles sat, in blowsy plenty, barely acknowledging the miracle of what your god did for you.”
“That was you?” I ask Oke, a little breathlessly, for I remember that year well. I know how I smiled and smiled in public and fretted behind closed doors, certain the famine would take us, too, if our nets began to fail even once.
He does not look at me and that is all the answer I need.
I take a single step toward him then, and he exhales. How long was he holding his breath?
“If you are his friend, then why is he still a prisoner here?” I ask Markanos. “Are you not a god? Can you not set your will into the world and free him?”
The God of War laughs and draws a whale-bone pipe from a little leather satchel he has with him. He makes a show of packing it, tamping it, lighting it, and offering a puff to Oke before answering me.
