From my vantage point on the stairs I can see down to the docks and also a great deal of the island. It remains quiet. Few people have returned to it since they abandoned this holy place.
There is no sign of Aurelius below, and why would there be? I know where the God of the Air will be—where healways is, at the center of things. He’ll want drama and pageantry.
I mount the steps with trepidation.
I have said before that the temple raised to Okeanos is a beauteous thing, a marvel of white stone carved to delicate peaks and valleys that mimic the caress of the water against the land. It is up the uneven but gloriously wrought steps of the temple that I race, my heart in my throat.
It is nearly the setting of the sun and the white steps are tinted carnation and cantaloupe. The birds are silent, and in the distance, the clouds hang in eerie asymmetry—some are tall and towering, while others are scattered and torn, streaming side to side like a bride’s veil in the wind. The sea is just as frenetic, stirring up in troubled waves first one way and then the other. It is an unsettling sight, as if the elements themselves have turned upon us all.
It reminds me—starkly—of a time only months ago when I stood here with my beloved and he pressed his face to mine and smiled into my eyes before he was wrenched away by the very thing I am become—the sea.
I race up the steps, my mouth dry, my mind too full of conjurings that I hope will not prove to be true.
I see no priests. Their braziers are not lit. Their bowls of seawater have not been filled, but in the center of the temple, just as he promised, is Aurelius.
He stands before the statue of Okeanos—the fine, strong marble Okeanos in all his glory. The statue is posed in such a way that every muscle ripples on display and the spear inhis hand almost looks as if it is in motion. He is vitality and strength and power made alive. I have seen this statue a thousand times before and still I did not recognize the god it inspired when I met him, but now that I have, I can’t stop seeing his likeness in the marble flesh.
Aurelius stands before it with his head slightly bowed, facing me.
He looks up suddenly, and a smile dawns on his face like the sun.
“You gave me your flesh after all,” he says, and he looks very pleased. “I thought you would eventually.”
“Your argument was compelling,” I murmur, but I am not listening to him—I can’t listen to him because there at the feet of the statue lies the corpse of my dead husband and my heart is hammering so hard in my chest that I can hardly think.
He is draped across the dais as one might drape a cloth or lay a laurel wreath, or spread out a fish to be gutted. The wound in his thigh remains and I clench my jaw at that. We were wrong about Treseano, then. He must not have been the one holding Okeanos’s wound price. And yet my dead husband is free of his iron shackles, so perhaps we were correct about that part. Half right and yet half wrong, and if I have not healed the Crown of the Sea, then I haven’t completed five tasks, have I?
Panic claws up my throat and I try to press it down. I should have checked the clock before I went looking for Oke.
He still bears the wound in his chest and the fresh woundsin both wrists from where he was pinned to the anchor. I can see all his broken, mangled body. His beard has grown back to a shadow but someone has sawed the glorious tangled hair from his head, leaving it ragged, and he has been badly beaten. Though he was dead before, it had not truly felt real. Now that he lies here limp and grey and powerless, golden flowers spilled out all around him, I feel the truth of it.
Okeanos’s eyes are open, and when he sees me, his lips move thickly as if he is trying to speak. His chest rises very shallowly. He barely breathes at all. And I know without having to be told that he is clinging to the last of his life by the barest thread.
I stumble forward, my hand reaching for him and his name on my lips. “Oke.”
But Aurelius shifts two fingers in the slightest of movements and the air in front of me forms a wall that pushes me back a step.
“I don’t think so, Wife of Okeanos,” he murmurs. “I do not like the pair of you too close together.”
“I have come for my husband,” I say, but already I can feel that the sands of my life are slipping away with those of Okeanos. “I do not know why you have taken him, but surely he is of no use to you.”
Behind Aurelius, Oke wets his lips with a flick of his tongue and one of his fingers twitches. I can hear his gasping words: “Cora. My betrayer.” And I think what is left of my heart breaks.
Aurelius flicks a hand indolently. “Let us have thisconversation, then. It has been long coming and I must admit that I have been anticipating it with a certain hunger.”
“Hunger?” I ask him, careful not to give too much ground at only the opening of our negotiation.
He saunters across the mosaic floor toward Oke’s prone form, and though I twitch with my desire to go to my fallen husband, I still cannot move.
I drag my eyes from Oke to study Aurelius and I notice again the slight hitch to his step, the barely discernible intake of breath as he sits on the edge of the dais beside Oke’s vulnerable form. The tiniest tremble in his leg. And I know.
I know that beneath his perfectly stitched chlamys and chiton is a secret, and my breath catches in my throat. His sharp gaze follows mine and then his eyes widen slightly.
“Here is a surprise. Coralys, you astonish me. You are the first to divine for yourself my little secret.”
His chiton covers his leg and it is wine colored. How very clever of him. And I think back and see that he has been dressed in the color of wine or blood every time I’ve seen him. Of course he has, for his garments have been working very hard to hide from others what I have just realized—that this is the man who has given Okeanos his godwound, and he has paid the price in his own flesh by bearing an identical wound all this time. Though it cannot be entirely identical since it has not slowed him as Okeanos’s has. Perhaps he pays by bearing a smaller wound. Still agonizing, but less inhibiting.
And this means that he has been working against Okeanos since long before Treseano declared war on the King ofHeaven. He is not the lesser member of an alliance who was sent as a messenger to Okeanos on Treseano’s behalf at all. He has been the regent uncle, ruling the kingdom behind another’s face. I should have realized this when first I saw him walk into the Resurgence with a slight limp.
