I pale. “But at the docks you made a great show of not being able to enter Okeanos’s island.”
His smile is as cruel as a drawn bow aimed toward me. “A simple ruse. I had already planted my tiny trap for you by then. Did you ever tell your god-husband about your eight-legged friend?”
“Six-legged,” Vesuvius says, and his following laugh is dark with hatred.
The ice in my spine is spreading to my lungs and making it hard to breathe. I never did tell Oke about Vesuvius. Not even after I killed him.
“Why are you telling me all this?” I ask tightly as Vesuvius swarms past me on his six living tentacles.
My gaze catches on the two severed tentacle stumps he bears. I am starting to get a twisting feeling in my stomach regarding those and it gets worse as he slides to stand beside Aurelius, peering down as if he is a gravedigger estimating the correct size for my dead husband’s vulnerable form.
Oke’s eyes are shut, but his throat bobs again—slower, weaker than before, and his lips part as if he wishes he could speak. That tiny motion is enough to wrench me. I want to throw them both off and stand between him and them. I do not like how Aurelius’s hand lingers on Oke’s knee or how Vesuvius allows his gaze to sweep over his fallen enemy as if choosing where else he might stick a blade. They violate his person and I want to bite and snap and roar.
The sun is sinking lower, the colors that paint the white marble shifting from subtle to garish as if a gauche handslashed geranium-red brushstrokes all across the world, and under them shadows spread out like spilled blood.
“I think, Coralys,” Aurelius says, “that you wish to negotiate for possession of your husband.”
“And you guaranteed it would be so by holding my people hostage,” I say dryly.
I do not know if I’ll be able to pay whatever price they set and I don’t want to think about what that will mean.
Aurelius smirks knowingly. “I think that when you’ve bought him back from us, you plan to no longer build his unattainable sanctuary but to use what he has gathered to return him to the land of the living.”
I bite my lip. Of course I’d wanted that. Before I realized the fifth task had not been fulfilled.
He goes on, not knowing my thoughts. “And what a shame that would be after all the work I’ve done to bring him to his knees. The sea is ever too powerful, too prevalent. It covers three-quarters of the earth and swallows men whole. If I am to gain from the King of Heaven his throne and place, I need the sea on my side. And Okeanos would never agree to that. He’s a loyalist through and through. But my old friend Vesuvius.” Here they exchange another glance I can’t quite read. There’s admiration there, but there’s wariness in Aurelius’s eyes, and I wonder if he’s still thinking about how Treseano was dead without him knowing of it. “He will work with me. He will give me the sea if I give it back to him first.”
“I don’t see how you’ll do that,” I say frostily. But I amchilled right through. If he means to give Vesuvius the sea, then he means to kill us both.
“Don’t you?” His large eyes widen with innocence. Even now he is all boyish beauty. “Did you speak in lies to me, Vesuvius, when you told me of how you poured falsehoods in her ears and tainted her view of her husband until she drove his very own spear through his heart?”
Oke’s eyes flutter open again at that, and my heart freezes as they look directly into mine. He knows. He sees. There’s no hiding my full treachery from him—that I not only killed him but unknowingly colluded with his enemies to do it.
His lips form a single word: “Betrayer.”
It seems fitting that he would spend his last energy to accuse me. And the stricken look in his eyes hurts even more for how very near it is to the look of hunger they held when we kissed.
“I lied about nothing,” Vesuvius rumbles, one of his tentacles sliding up to run through his hair as one might run one’s fingers.
I shudder, but I channel what strength of spirit I yet maintain into my voice.
“How are you still here, Vesuvius? Shouldn’t you be trapped inside that pearl?”
He shrugs just one shoulder, twice, until I realize he is not shrugging to tell me he doesn’t know but rather highlighting the barb there.
“It is not fitting that you wield a weapon you are so poorly equipped to possess, Drowned Queen. But what you handlepoorly, I was master of, and as a result, I know its capabilities. You, for instance, did not know the danger of letting your chained bull stab me with my own trident. For it carries within it the power to pin a thing into a certain time and place and you pinned me in the land of the living once more. And that allows me to put the question to you.”
Aurelius coughs and Vesuvius changes his tune. “It allowsusto put the question to you.” He pauses, and then with a smirk he asks me, “Do you want your husband back?”
I brace myself for a price I cannot possibly pay. “If this is a negotiation for his release, then state your terms.”
This is a lot of effort to spend on the wife of a dead god. Even if she is a god herself. Especially when all of us know that each of them could overpower me all by himself and take from me any shred of life I might possess. What price will they ask of me knowing that? They don’t think I would betray my people, I hope. I bite my lip so hard that it bleeds.
“This is absolutely a negotiation,” Aurelius says smoothly. And his smile grows a little deeper. “With the highest of stakes… for you.”
I shoot a glance at my husband and see his green eyes blazing through the slits of his eyelids and how his lips curve to form the name “Cora,” and fear twists bitter in my heart. Perhaps what we have is not love, but it is a path that twists very near.
My chest squeezes slightly, and I feel the blood rush to my cheeks as I see his chest flutter and then still. This is taking too long. Every word we speak counts down time thatOkeanos clearly does not have. I must bring this to a head somehow and gather my husband up and bear him away to a refuge where we might restore his strength.
