It was not a fight the Old Gods could win.
But there are pitfalls to being a self-made god. As ever, Ursla’s ambition required sacrifice. Being not naturally of the sea, the more she acclimated to life in the water, the less time she could spend outside it. Soon there were no more forest strolls, no meetings in the mountains, no pipe tobacco, no cooked food. No human joys. And quickly did the men turned Urslings require societies and structures, purpose, of their own.
She’d never been fond of the responsibility of power, and so began to groom her Ursling Peris, a promising young man from a scholarly family who’d been sold into slavery to pay his father’s debt and chosen the deep over whatever that future held. She surrounded him with drowned nobility, Urslings whose pasts contained some knowledge of governance or bureaucracy. Peris, she knew, would make a fine leader of the creatures she’d created. She looked forward to their new art and culture.
For now, though, she’d grown bored. Curious. She’d discovered that it wasn’t necessary for her to hunt her prey. The same magic that allowed her to occupy the bodies of her followers, which she mostly used to once again experience the joys of living on land, could also be used to bring prey to her. Faith in Ursla, the seeking of the favor of the God of Death, meant it was a blessing to have her visit your body. Peris knew this. He’d seen her most devout walking into the sea at her whim, certain that they were meant for their new life and not merely to sate her craving.
Merrine, the Old God of the Sea, was the pettiest of them all. The Kept chronicled as much. She was the last to flounce off into the ether after her brethren quit their realms.
There was a regality to whatever form she took. She would have outlasted the others whether or not the witch had interloped. Perhaps it was this supremacy that had made her Ursla’s target. The witch had, after all, set up shop in Merrine’s own territory—a direct challenge that required a direct response.
Merrine alone had the keenest understanding of Chaos and had first sought the sea because it was the seat of the world. Where went water went all life. And she would not allow Ursla to have both that and death.
The truth splits here, into the church and the faithful: the Kept and the Obéid.
It is the Kept’s position that Ursla was of the pantheon of Old Gods, not their usurper, and that the divine spats were familial in nature. The Obéid are Ursla’s devout and maintain that Ursla’s superiority made her a target, that Merrine had gone to Chaos and demanded the Obé’s abominations be adopted into the natural order.
“I will create a kingdom of the sea to relieve you of the burden of ruling them. Only the blood of my blood will sit the throne, and they will be bound to honor you as I do,” she offered.
“You possess no heirs,” Chaos allegedly replied. “Ursla, the last of you remaining gods, in this moment has more claim to a throne than does the fruit you’ve yet to bear.”
Merrine claimed to know the Ursling Peris, who knew the Obé better than anyone and would do anything to protect the world from her hunger. With him, Merrine would produce an heir, but not without purpose. The bloodline this sea god and Ursling bastard would produce was Mer beings created of life, not from death.
Not from the witch.
And the Obéid’s truth was the real one. If only they’d been better armed.
2Exile
10
• YEMI •
The tunnel did not so much “let out on the coast” as run interminably along it, forever narrow and stifling. They trudged onward well into the daylight hours as evidenced by the bright and glittering ocean visible through a line of small holes they encountered crossing the underside of a land bridge. They lingered here awhile, desperate for the fresh air and the illusion of coolness in the breeze whistling through the holes. Cutter announced that the sun’s positioning put them at midmorning. It’d been the first thing anyone said for miles. And then they kept moving.
Yemi couldn’t remember a time in her life when she’d been this thirsty. Her throat was still sore from the bizarrely strong choking Dahlia had given her. Despite herself, she kept thinking back to the sinking blackness of her eyes in that moment, certain she hadn’t imagined it. The anxiety and adrenaline had long worn off, and the heat of the tunnel compounded her fatigue. She wasn’t so much walking now as dragging herself after Nova.
After what had to be another few hours, the tunnel grew loud and Cutter’s feet shuffled to a stop. He handed Nova the torch and bentbeneath an overhang that halved the height of the tunnel. There was grunting and banging on what sounded like wood, as if he was trying to move something.
Nova plucked a dusty old box out of a cubby similar to the one they’d found with the matchsticks in the beginning. Only inside this one was a sizable satchel of gold coin.
“You need help?” Nova asked, her voice hoarse as she jingled the bag.
Cutter’s reply was a torrent of muttered obscenity as he adjusted his footing into a squat position and pressed on the ceiling with his back until something moved and Yemi saw sunlight.
“Ha!” he barked and climbed up. Nova followed, and they both pulled Yemi up after. They were standing on a narrow cliff face overlooking a sheer drop-off and the rocky shore a hundred feet below. To their left, a waterfall streamed from a source another hundred feet overhead, and to their right, rocky stairs led to what looked like the last vestiges of a collapsed lighthouse.
“Watch your footing,” Cutter called over the roar of the water and started up the stairs with a bit more pep in his step. Nova handed him the bag of coins and followed behind Yemi. Her skin prickled, awash in sea spray as they climbed. Her legs burned, and Nova was audibly cursing by the time they reached the surface, where miles of lavender and wheat fields extended into the sun-drenched distance, separated by the odd dirt road lined with telephone poles lacing wire through the countryside and ending at the occasional tiny house. A fast-flowing river poured over the edge of the cliffs. They followed Cutter to some point along it where he promptly stuck his head right into it while the others drank from their hands.
“Where are we?” Yemi asked, the alkaline taste of her own dried blood in her mouth rekindled by the new moisture.
“Miles west of Chairre,” he said. “Walking’s not going to get us to Muris. Neither is starving. We’ll rest here for now. See what we can come up with when we’ve had a second to catch our breaths.”
Thirst sated, they spread out in the long grass under the sun, grateful for the cool wind rising off the sea. Cutter stayed beside the river, counting coin and tinkering with the salvage of his spear, while Nova walked off wordlessly toward the cliffs and the lighthouse ruins and disappeared when she sat among the long grass. Yemi followed her, wanting to talk about the night, about next steps, about Dahlia’s eyes and the prescient visit from the sea witch.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” Nova replied. Her face was scrunched into a frown, eyes bracing against the brightness of the sky after so long in the dark. Her tall boots collapsed in the grass beside her, and she peeled off her shirt to rinse it in the river, revealing bruises and blood-crusted lacerations wherever her subarmor didn’t cover her. The shirt itself was stained and peppered with singed bullet holes over the torso. Yemi forgot why she’d come over as she stared at it.
