THE TRIDENT AND THE PEARL

     ​I was born into the embrace of the sea on a moonless night in the month of the Ragged Tides. My mother did not bleed out her life into the sea with my arrival, nor was my father visited by a terrible curse.

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    In fact, neither one of my parents passed away until the summer of the Year of the Peacock brought yellow fever to our fair shores. By then, I was a woman grown, and when I took up the Pearl Crown and settled the mantle of woven seed pearls over my shoulders, I did not need to have either cinched to accommodate me.

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     I was not forced into an arranged marriage to a man the age of my father, nor obliged to dance attendance on an emperor who might make demands on my kingdom if he couldn’t make demands on my person. Instead, I married my childhood friend Lieve, a man of smiles and teasing jokes who filled our short marriage with laughter.

 

     One might think I wasn’t to be at the heart of a fairy tale at all. One would be wrong, as I was. And the discovery of how very wrong I was nearly became the end of me.

 

    But I am getting ahead of myself.

 

    This tale starts with the sea and with a storm.

 

    If you’ve spent any time at the sea, you know its smell, but if you’ve spent time traveling many seas, then you know that the smell of the sea is different in every port. Here on the five Crocus Isles, the sea smells of brine and spices and a little of the honey-sweet crocuses that grow on all five islands.

 

    “Coralys.” Lieve’s voice is rough, but it has to be to pierce through the howl of the winds.

 

    My eyes snap to him. He sets the back of his knuckles against my cheek in a moment of public intimacy he’d never normally allow. He is always tightly controlled, my Lieve. Always a ship smartly rigged.

 

    His brown eyes soften for a half a breath, he almost smiles, and then he brushes a kiss across my lips.

 

    “I will be back shortly,” he says, and I think this time that some of the roughness is emotion.

 

    I tangle my fingers in his, unable to find words. If I beg him to be careful, it will only instill the idea that I doubt him. If I make him promise to come back to me, it will put weight on his shoulders that does not need to be there. If I tell him what an honor it has been to be his wife, it will feel like I am already reading his eulogy.

 

    Or mine.

 

    He has no choice but to go. Or rather, he has a choice, but he’s Lieve and he’d never take it. We thought we saw a capsized boat on our way here. It was too far away to divert to when we were racing for the island of Talasa, but there were people clinging to the hull and Lieve must go back for them.

 

    So, I muster a smile—seas and skies, where do I even find it?—and it seems to be enough.

Our fingers tighten.

    “I will be here,” I say—my normal response when he leaves me, but today it feels like some kind of declaration. Some kind of challenge to the wind and seas that lash our islands with increasing furor.

 

    I will be here, I tell them. I will not be moved. Keep trying all you want, you will not budge me.

 

    “Your Serene Majesty.” Turbote shifts from foot to foot just one step above me. His white beard is so wet it looks like the foam collecting in tufts on the edge of the sea. “Please. We must hurry. You dare not wait!”

 

    Our fingers untangle and Lieve’s strength slips away from me. He tosses a last warm look over his shoulder and then hurries down the steps. I’m memorizing him without meaning to, tracing his muscular shoulders and tight, lean frame. He’s purpose come to life, leaning forward as he jogs back to the boat.

 

    I wrench myself up another stair and away from him.

 

    I try not to look back, but I do. Twice.

 

    We sent away the last of the ships yesterday after the harbor master brought me a fish with a coin in its mouth—a terrible omen of devastation for my people—and we sent away the last of the seaworthy boats this morning. They’ll have raced to find shelter outside this storm, fleeing to our neighbors in hopes they were hit lighter than we and still have fresh water supplies or piers left to tie a boat. Talasa is our tallest island and even here we’d docked against the temple steps halfway up the holy hill. The pier is deep below the waves.

 

    Now, all we have left are boats so unseaworthy that they cannot be trusted to set out into the surf with our precious people for anything other than the shortest of journeys. They’re all that’s left to take Lieve out to search for those we saw stranded.

 

    One more glance over my shoulder. I’ve lost sight of Lieve in a wall of blowing water. I try to tell myself I’ll see him again, but my inner voice is a liar.

 

    The storm has not relented in three days—not only that, it grows more angry as the hours pass, swelling up over our islands, battering every bit of our lives until they crumble and fail or sink beneath the furious waves. The line of dockside fish markets is nothing but matchsticks. The pottery market lost the roofs off every shop. My own palace is knee-deep in brackish water, the imported rugs ruined, the riches buried in the green brine of the sea.

 

    We are already climbing the hundred stone steps faster than I imagined was possible. Turbote’s wet robes slap his legs in an arrhythmic beat. He’s panicked. He’s been panicked since we left the main island on Lieve’s wreck of a boat and came here to the island of Okeanos’s Temple. The boat doesn’t carry many people. A mercy, perhaps. Instead of my entire council of bickering advisors, I am accompanied only by Turbote, my most annoying counselor and the priest of Okeanos.

 

    Our ancestors carved the temple from stone, following the natural ebb and flow of the white rock bones of our islands. The steps swirl up like waves tousled by a benevolent breeze to where the temple rises—enormous in scale in a way that bids the worshipper to wonder if the gods had actually met man here once, and if this place had been carved to suit their size rather than ours.

 

    At the center of the temple is a single statue of Okeanos, carved of white marble. If the god truly lives and if he looks like this, then I am impressed. The image is two men tall and boasts intricately carved tangles of long hair fanned out to one side as if he was caught by the sculptor in the middle of twisting, trident in one hand, a set of five chains in the other. His blank marble eyes house a fury impossible to portray in marble, and yet it is there.

 

    I, who once told Turbote to his face that the gods were nothing but a beautiful dream, am here to plead with him. I, who refused on the first day of this cataclysm to so much as offer a single prayer, have come now on my knees. I know this for what it is. Futile. Desperate. The last thrashing of a dying whale trapped on the shore.

 

    But I can no more stop thrashing than the whale can.

 

    “We’ll plead with any god who will listen when we get to the top,” Turbote gasps. “Let me do the talking—pray by all means, but any bargain should be made by me. I am the priest.”

 

    We spill out into the temple—two tiny figures at the highest point of the Crocus Isles standing under the last sign of our strength and will. Above us stone waves crash. Below us real ones swell ever higher, lashed by rain.

 

    We told the council that I would go and pray, but Turbote and I both know what that means. Nothing comes from nothing. If any of the gods deigns to bargain with me, then I’m going to be asked for something. Yet my riches are already lost to the sea, my people scattered to the winds, my power evaporated with them. So, it’s my life they’ll have or nothing.

 

    Turbote is praying loudly to any god who will hear, but mostly to Okeanos. He presses my head down hard so that my chin hits the white rock and I taste blood in my mouth, half expecting to feel the knife of his blade cut my throat. He’s dousing me with holy ocean water. In his enthusiasm I’m half drowned.

 

   “Pray,” he begs from above me. “Add your words to mine! Please, Serene Majesty.”

 

    “Gods of the sea and storm,” I shout out over the blast of the wind, and as if in answer the wind blows twice as hard, whipping my long black hair behind me until it snaps like a banner. “Show yourselves!”

 

    And for a long moment there is no response.

 

    Not that I thought there would be.

 

    Everything is still. Everything waits with me. Water trickles down my neck, down my spine, making me shiver, and there is no god who comes to claim my life. And no god who comes to save us. I draw in a deep breath, about to let out my resignation with a sigh, when I freeze.

 

    A whirl of wind kicks up, spinning so hard around the temple that I hear a crack, and then one of the decorative waves behind me falls and shatters. Turbote screams and falls back, but I do not. Because worse—so much worse than the destruction of the temple or the wrath of the gods—I’ve lost sight of the little dot bobbing on the waves.

 

    I swallow, stand, and take a step forward as if I could fly out like a pelican and swallow up my beloved from the waters and carry him to safety.

 

    But of course, I can’t. I’m mortal still.

 

    WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE OF ME, MORTAL QUEEN?

 

    They aren’t spoken words. They’re the crash of the sea and the beating of the waves. They’re the howl of souls caught up in the shaking power of the storm. And yet they make my heart race. I fight against a chattering jaw—my body’s natural flinching from so great a glory washing against my mind. My will must be greater.

 

    “Spare my people,” I beg succinctly. “Still this storm.”

 

    WHAT BARGAIN WOULD YOU MAKE FOR THIS BOON?

 

    I had thought I was not one to plead. How naive of me.

 

    “What would you take, Lord?” I ask, choked. I dare not withhold anything.

 

    YOUR FUTURE.

 

    I swallow, looking again at the empty patch of ocean where my husband has disappeared. The howling grief swelling in my throat tells me he asks for too little, for already my future is lost to me. But if I am bargaining for lives, then I am bargaining for Lieve’s life, too, if he is not yet lost. If there’s even a chance he could survive this, then I must fight for it.

 

    “Yes,” I say so quickly that the word blurs into the storm. “All of it.”

 

    I think I hear a laugh, but I am not certain for the wind shakes us again, ripping at us so hard that a piece of my dress tears away and is a tenth league out over the sea before I notice it has broken free.

 

    I can barely breathe, my air is snatched before I can draw it in, and then suddenly the wind stops. The waves still. I hear water pouring, and it takes a heartbeat for me to realize that it’s running from the stone down the slope of the hill in rivulets.

 

   Out over the still sea—unnaturally bright and peaceful to my eye—my green islands rise up out of the water like a half-drowned child rescued and hauled into a boat. They are torn and ragged, but they gleam like lost gems recovered. My islands.

    Restored to me. My heart leaps.

 

    Can it…would the gods truly bless me so? It feels like grasping at air. Impossible to hold. I can no longer deny that they exist. I must not deny their blessing, too.

 

    AND NOW THE PRICE.

 

    The storm has passed, and yet the voice in my mind is as howling as a turbulent wind.

 

    “The price,” I agree, but my eyes ache from looking, searching. I don’t dare blink. I’m scanning every bit of water I can see.

 

    He only disappeared for a moment. He might be out there in that calm water. He must be.

 

    YOU WILL MARRY THE FIRST PERSON TO SET HIS FOOT UPON THE PIER. YOU WILL BE HIS BRIDE. HIS STATION WILL BE YOUR STATION. HIS CROWN YOUR CROWN. HIS PEOPLE YOUR PEOPLE.

 

    I blink, confused. “I am already married, Lord.”

 

    ARE YOU CERTAIN?

 

    I am certain now. And it guts me like a fish brought to market.

 

    I howl my pain and fury into a still, blue, perfect sky.