“Let it begin.” My voice doesn’t even shake. I am doing very well.
“Are you truly certain—?” one of the counselors begins to say, but I cut off any other objections.
“We will be wed this day. I will fulfill my bargain with the gods.”
And then they will get a lot more than they bargained for.
There are no more hollow objections.
We make our way down the steps and into the water together. I see now why the fisherman looked drunk. His legs barely support him. I’m not sure he’ll live the week out. I may be a widow twice in a seven-day stretch. He doesn’t lean on me, though.
He flinches when the salt water meets his injury, and I wince in sympathy. His blood clouds the pool around us, swirling in garish patterns of red and coral against the pale bluish green. Little flashes of my first wedding rise to my mind unbidden. The warmth in Lieve’s brown eyes as we entered the waves contrasts in my mind’s eye to these piercing green ones that look as stormy as the sea has been these past few days.
The water slips up past our waists and I recall the beauty of Lieve’s vitality contrasted to this battered wreckage of a man who is claiming me. He takes my other hand in his and I feel a pang. These hands are warm in an unfamiliar way and laced with mysteries I do not know.
We stand together, clasping both hands, and I know it is an effort for him to do this much because his body sways as he hunches over his wound. He has locked his gaze steadfastly to mine.
“From the sea we are given, to the sea we return,” Maevelys intones. “And in marriage we die to our old lives and live now anew in a life together. You are dead now to the old Coralys and the old…” She pauses awkwardly, suddenly realizing that we’ve been using this poor man as a playing piece in this game without knowing so much as his name. “My apologies, good sir, but what is your name?”
“Oke,” he says, and it comes out half a grunt of pain.
“And the old Oke,” Maevelys says with a frown. It is a common name, one of the most common on our shores, and I’m certain it makes my marriage to him all the moredebasing. “And you will rise from this pool bound as one in the eyes of the gods and the fates—your two ropes entwined into one line with room for none other. Do you agree to this?”
“Aye,” Oke says over my “Yes.”
“Then speak your oaths,” Turbote says unhappily as the wind picks up and swirls around us.
I speak first. I know the words. I’ve presided over weddings myself, and yet these vows feel too intimate right now, said to a stranger with no one watching me but him.
“I come to you as Coralys of the Crocus Isles, my titles and family in my past. I give myself freely to you to be your wife.” I almost choke over that part. It feels like a betrayal of Lieve to say these words to another. “I give my oath that I will deny you nothing—not my wealth nor my name, not my affections nor my comforts, not my body nor my fate, nor the children of our union. In all things I tie myself to you no matter the storms that come or pass. I vow faithfulness and honor to you all the days of our lives.”
His eyes flicker not a mite. And then he speaks.
“Water to water, life to life, I give myself to you. Bound by the water of life in your veins to the water of life in mine, tangled up as a man tangles with a woman, heart of my heart, as two waters meet and mingle, we will be one. Where your future flows, there will mine flow with it. As you ebb and recede, so I retreat. As you flow and rise, surely I go with you. Wherever your soul lingers, there will mine be, and if it slips into the Nightwaters, even there will I join you. Neverwill I leave you. Never will I forsake you. And if I fail in my vow, then may the waters be leached from me, and my mouth be salted, and may I be buried in the sand far from the rush of the sea.”
And then he kisses a knuckle, lifts it reverently above us, and bows his head, breaking our eye contact for the first time, and just as I’m breathing a sigh of relief, he takes a tentative step forward and presses a very bold kiss to my brow, leaving me with a face full of beard and the sense that I am somehow honored in a way I do not understand.
Then the fisherman pulls me under the water with him, dropping so that we are both dunked fully beneath the surface of the pool, and for a moment we are staring at each other wide-eyed in water that laps in and out of the ocean into this pool, green bubbles floating up all around us. He says something I cannot make out and then he finds his feet just as I do and pulls me up with him out of the water.
Trickles of water run off me in rivulets. My hair is plastered to my body, and I’m gasping like a fresh-caught fish. That wasn’t part of the ceremony.
“Before the authorities of the Crocus Isles and before the eyes of the gods you are wed,” Turbote announces. “Hear, O sea, our queen is wed. Hear, O ocean, these two are now one, bound by vow and water, made one in the justice of the waves. May the gods take note that our former queen has fulfilled her vow that we all might be spared.”
“What was that vow he spoke?” someone is whispering to Maevelys. “Is that one of the ancient ones?”
“I think so,” she whispers back, and then hurriedly speaks the next words of the ceremony.
“As the husband shelters his beloved, so the wife is sheltered by him, and as a sign of this she will leave this place wearing nothing but what he gives to her.”
It’s only as she’s speaking that I recall what that means. The fisherman has come wearing nothing but the most basic, bloodstained clothes. Now I know why they are stained. I climb the steps with him, and I realize with a blow that feels like a hammer to my chest that I am no longer queen. I knew, of course, and yet I did not feel it until now. I’m so stunned that I only realize I’ve been standing there dripping naked with my lips parted in surprise when the fisherman—Oke—holds his tunic out to me.
“It’s long enough to almost be a chiton,” he says with a rueful smile, and then when I’m still too stunned to speak, he straightens with a tight, strangled sound and tries to put the tunic over my head. His whole torso flexes, and it is easy to see every muscle tighten as he has not a shred of extra fat on his frame and possesses a body very neatly put together. But despite what looks like a strong effort, he winces as he tries to bring his arms high enough for the task. He must be stiff from hunching over his wound all night in the cold on a hard dock. I stop staring and recover my senses enough to take the tunic from him.
“Thank you,” I say woodenly as I put it on. He is right. While the garment hung loose around his hips, it reaches nearly to my knees, though there is no belt and I must knotit as best as I can. Only the lowest classes wear trousers or tunics on the Crocus Isles. Our audience is all properly clad in ankle-length chitons. Despite my new husband’s words, I will look exactly as I am in this outfit—bereft.
He kicks his sandals to me and I thank him again. Once his trousers are tied back on, I speak: “It is done.”
And by my words, my council realizes we’re dressed and they remove the ceremonial blindfolds. But it’s not to my side that they move to congratulate or say goodbye. They do not even meet my eye as they crowd around Delarte and speak in hushed tones with him about the crown and belt he holds. I am born anew by means of my wedding, the old queen dead and gone.
