‘If you were to just drag me back, I could make myself a ghost, and never acknowledge one word or touch. I know you now, Miah. You would never be content with half-measures. Only my complete submission would satisfy you. Give me Jonah’s life with no more harm, and I will return to Equus.’
‘That’s a lot to offer. I’ll need to see evidence of your full measures first.’
She took a breath of courage and slid out of her coat, kicked off her boots, pulled off the wet priest’s leggings and discarded them. A thought crossed her mind how it might have gone better if she’d taken more notice of the burlesque dancers of Clay, who didn’t make disrobing seem so clumsy.
The buttons of the shirt were too much for her hands, so in the end she yanked the shirt over her head. It dripped water over the floor. She sensed upon her eyes other than Miah Anguis’, men made cold and wet from the weather, taken from warm beds and the embrace of saltwives to linger on this wet island. Their attention was not on the courtyard.
The ghostweed glowed red with Miah’s vicious inhale. A rage behind his eyes that she was unmooring him so. He would not advance on her, give her no place to claim the excuse of non-consent. He put the cigar aside and drank from the cup of mead by his side. Maybe she was just humiliating herself, bruised and bedraggled, and he would realize just how little she did have to offer him. A wild deepwater wench would respect him as leader and King. He would not be reduced to chasing wilful Lyonnians who didn’t appreciate his status, or his body.
Instead he shifted upon the bench. ‘Kiss me, then. Make me believe you can love me without condition.’
A terrible determination. Arden straddled the leather-clad thighs and kissed the hard lips though all her conscience screamed in opposition. He opened his mouth and the return kiss was full of indignant desire. His mouth tasted of char-smoke and grease-fat undercut with mania. His yearning was visible even through his leathers, and he gripped her forearms halfway between pulling her close and throwing her off.
Even then a small, still note of regret for this path. Each kiss only strengthened the bonds of his mandatum obsessions. Her mouth only stoked the fire in him. He raised her closer, mouth hungry on one breast, sent darts of sensation into her, and because her life and Jonah’s life and Stefan’s life depended on it, she surrendered to her own body’s reaction. Murmured encouragement. Miah exhaled a grunt of awed delight and pulled himself from his leathers, trembling and eager.
‘You see sense at last, wife.’
She would not allow him entry, only moved against him slowly, the resolution in her heart wrapped up in thorns and bitterness. Wished herself monstrous, venom in her flesh, a cartilage rasp of her skin and teeth in her vulva.
Because if she were angry, she would not feel so torn and undecided, as if she could surrender herself to him and lose herself completely.
But she was none of these things and he was close to overcoming the prohibitions of blessing, close to throwing her to the floor of the storeroom and taking his way among the wheat kernels and fig-sacks. If something was to break in him, it had to break soon. He clutched her close and ground his mutilations against her, believed her wetness was her desire for him. His face flushed hot as his excitement took hold. Tried to enter her and found himself stymied as she pulled away.
‘Don’t make me—’ he grunted. A flush of arousal mottled his chest and shoulders.
On the edge of an awful epiphany Arden slid off his knees to kneel before him, kiss wider the damp thighs as heavy as oak-masts, he said no at first, for he had to know he was being watched. His men would despise him for his weakness. But his secret desire was greater than what was forbidden, he let her slide her tongue upon his scar, her mouth along his hot, wounded length, then to catch the vinegar traces of his seed as he came almost as soon as she had begun. His hands tangled in her hair as he trembled in jerky spasms, strangled pronouncements of joy from his throat.
She knew Miah well enough to recall the physical paralysis that followed his orgasm, and slid upon his lap as he shivered with aftershocks to whisper in his ear. ‘I realized it back in the longhouse, but it took until now for it to make sense. The issue of a man is much the same as blood, really, in the scheme of things. Same blood as Mr Stone’s when I called the fire to the shore. And mandatum is instruction that can be given both ways. You will leave the island, and return to your people and not come back.’
He had the presence of mind to hiss, ‘Why would my men obey such a thing?’
‘Because Mr Lindsay, the Lion, is there with his words and his coins and his issuing of instructions,’ she said, with the copper taste of him still on her tongue. ‘And because you will be blind.’
‘What—’
She covered his eyes with her numb hands and then from the depths of her belly – though it hurt, oh how it hurt – willed fire.
And Miah screamed.
30
The storm
The storm drowned him out, and the men came running as soon as she’d yanked her wet coat back on and mutinously drunk the rest of the beer in his stein.
She did not try to run, Arden Beacon, who had not inflicted so much more than the remnant flame her whole family expressed, but that little spark of foxfire was all she needed to boil the fluid in his eyes.
With a strangled cry Miah rushed for her. The table’s edge caught him and tumbled him to his knees. He spat incomprehensible words in Old Fictish. A snake on the end of a noose would be no less enraged. He tipped over chairs and trestles, lunged at her imagined noise.
One crewman had forethought enough to shove Arden aside at the moment he ran in, thinking that perhaps she had caused some grievous injury with a blade and might still be armed.
‘Whore!’ Miah screamed, one hand clawing the blank space before him. ‘Lyonnian whore! Get her!’
His brother clansman lurched after Arden somewhat half-heartedly, for even in their wild deepwater ways such intimately violent scenes were usually caused by a man’s offence to the woman, and the tough saltwives would punish him accordingly.
They didn’t have long. The doors to the storehouse crashed open with the wind, and Jonah stood illuminated by dawn fire, bloodied but not broken, the chains still hanging from his wrists.
‘Enough,’ he thundered even as he gasped with exhaustion. ‘You have brought shame upon the house of the King.’
The men stilled, cowed both by Jonah’s presence, and the blade in his hand. Miah pulled back, baring chest and throat, laughing maniacally despite his vulnerability.
‘What becomes of me, cousin?’ he mocked the darkness. ‘Here I am, prey ripe for the killing. Finish the sin.’
‘I won’t kill a fallen man,’ Jonah growled.
‘Oh no. Not one fallen man. Only many. Be careful with that woman,’ he said, his voice gone hoarse and hysterical. ‘One day she will tire of you the same way, and you will join me in Purgatory. Blinded or castrated, who the fuck knows?’
‘Anguis,’ one of the deepwater men implored. ‘What do we do?’
Miah’s lips moved without making a sound. He was fighting himself, the mandatum necessity, the obsession, and Arden’s words whispered to him in his moment of weakness. Then with a breath of surrender said mockingly, ‘We will return home to Equus. There is a Lion, waiting for us.’
They paused, then two went to pick him off the floor. He fought them at first, the humiliation of assistance far too great for him, then deigned to take a shoulder. His head tipped up, sniffed the air, and he turned to Arden.
‘This is not over, Beacon. Don’t think it for one second!’
Mr Cleave was the last to arrive, with two others. He evaluated the situation, Arden’s defiance, Miah’s sightless, stumbling anger, and Jonah still holding the monster-hunter’s flensing blade. Knew at once that a drama had occurred and his political fortunes had reversed.
‘Well,’ Mr Cleave said. ‘This is an interesting reunion.’
‘Control your man,’ Jonah gruffed. ‘He has done e
nough damage.’ He tightened his fist on the blade handle.
‘Would that we had met again under better conditions, Jonah Riven,’ Mr Cleave replied, holding up his bare, unarmed hands. ‘I never had much of a chance to say it when you last came to our shores, but I knew you as a boy, and your stepfather Ishmael could call himself a relation of mine. We have good blood between us.’
Jonah nodded, put down the steel. ‘I remember. You were the one who stayed Jeremiah’s hand the first time.’
Mr Cleave nodded Miah’s way. ‘We will take him back, give him treatment. But please understand that the black boat Saudade must be the payment that squares us and all that you’ve done tonight. You’re taking a man’s sight, and his wife.’
A wince of pain in Jonah’s eyes, and then he nodded. ‘Go then. She is yours.’
In the dawning light they took Miah down to the pier. Arden watched with bitter relief as they boarded Saudade in preparation for leaving. The big ship bumped up against the pontoons fretfully. Miah cursed the entire way.
But for all the relief she felt at having disposed of Miah Anguis, Arden could not shake the cloud of misgivings that settled permanently about her. She had facilitated this exchange. Forced Jonah to pay the price of his boat, his one possession and connection with his family. All this for her.
She waited, chilled by the dawn fog as the black boat cast off. When Saudade had been completely swallowed by fog, she turned away, and walked back to the crypt.
Found Stefan on the floor, his body cold and grey, the cup spilled at his hand.
She cried out for Jonah, and he came to kneel beside him, covered his body with an altar cloth.
‘Oh Stefan,’ Arden murmured, speaking even as she wanted not to disturb the moment between Jonah and his friend. ‘If only he’d believed me! I was going to set us free.’
Jonah looked up. ‘His addiction enslaved him. He would not have lived out the year.’ Something in his face seemed incomprehensibly distant. A thousand seasons separated the man she had embraced on board Saudade and the one who now tended the body of her cousin. The man was gone, and the boat gone. A cousin Arden had hardly known had been Jonah’s lifelong friend, and he was gone too.
Strange, how she felt no real weight but her knees buckled.
He stood up and went to Arden’s side.
‘Arden, do you need to lie down?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m all right. It’s just …’ She gave a grim laugh. ‘The Deepwater King has exacted his coin.’
Jonah nodded. ‘They are his ransoms.’
Across the courtyard, the doors to the Deepwater chapel hung open slightly. Arden could not stay still, did not feel ready enough to talk to any living thing. So she went to them, pushed the doors aside and entered.
The votive candles of the antechamber had all been put out. The eternal flames of the worship hall had been spilled across the floor and smothered. The kraken and serpent still sported, but the King was gone, sawn off the wood.
31
Jonah Riven
Jonah Riven, pragmatic as ever, recovered his krakenskin coat from the storeroom, which apart from the arrow-bolt had suffered little damage for all its journey back to him. He rubbed his small shoulder scar thoughtfully, then shrugged back into the bronze leather.
‘We can’t let Stefan stay in the yard.’ Arden rubbed her numb hands with worry. ‘We can’t. We need to put him to rest.’
Jonah glanced at her hands. He was thinking, she knew, of her days’ remaining number. He must have seen the same act in Jorgen Beacon, back in Vigil, the illness in him. The death.
‘Is it customary for Lyonnians to prepare the body?’
She started to nod then blurted, ‘I can’t bear to look at him! My father, my uncles. I see them in Stefan’s face!’
‘Then don’t look. I’ll say when he’s ready. We will cast him into the sea with the Deepwater Rite.’
‘The Rite …?’ She had almost forgotten what had started her on this journey.
‘He is a priest of the old religion. It is how he will be returned to the King.’
Jonah had known Stefan best. They had been neighbours before Jonah’s captivity in Harbinger Bay. When Jonah had returned as a man to Vigil, Stefan Beacon – Pastor John Stefan by then – became his friend. Jonah’s only real friend, apart from Bellis Harrow. Three people united by hard sanguinities they could not control.
Arden wondered what Stefan’s sanguinity had been. He could not have been driven to help Jonah and Bellis through empathy alone.
Now she would never know.
In the gauzy afternoon light Jonah took Stefan’s body and prepared him for the funeral boat, murmuring the old songs. Arden stayed at the pagoda, gripped a column for both strength and protection. With his back turned he became a stranger wearing the ink of Miah Anguis. The chevron tattoos sank and rose into the indentations of his spine. His most recent trials welted pink and raised across his back. This death-song made her fearful, of what lay ahead, and of him. They had yet to speak fully of their reunion.
She had lashed herself to the fate of a man she did not truly know. There had been more days and words between her and Miah Anguis in their time together.
By evening, Jonah took long hollows of driftwood from the grey beach and fashioned a longboat as gnarled as a kraken’s tentacles. Arden found a spiced tea in a tin among the last of the stores. Real tea, not the bitter morphium of Stefan’s addiction. She hassled Jonah to drink it, even though the rite commanded he should spend the day refusing food.
‘Take a rest and drink,’ she said, giving her note of instruction. ‘You may not eat, but you can drink.’
They sat on the edge of the bluff, overlooking the Darkling Sea. A storm wall in the distance sparkled with lightning. The sun slipped low behind them. The brewed tea steamed in Arden’s hands.
‘Such a far distance you have come to witness this,’ Jonah said suddenly. For the entire day he’d been immune to small-talk.
‘Did you know I was in Equus?’ Arden asked.
He nodded. ‘My last day on Maris Island, Wren Libro – the girl in the saffron dress – she told me. But Mr Absalom was on his way. He meant to take you home. I was happy then, to know you safe.’
She examined the contents of her cup. The tea murked. A star-anise pod floated on the top. ‘Are you unhappy the way things have turned out?’
‘Of course not. I know survival, Arden.’
She nodded. ‘Either my god or your god or the devils of the ocean have brought us together again. I want to be certain my path is the right one. Tell me – have I done the right thing? A man is dead, another blinded … how do I make up for that?’
‘Ultimately, it’s your decision how you pay those debts,’ he said with a gruff casualness while tossing back the last of the tea.
‘Yes.’ Yes, it was her decision. She would not let evalescendi make it for her. It was her decision and she wanted Jonah to stay with her.
She leaned forward and kissed his rough lips and he responded with a generous fondness. She let the teacup fall and clung to him then, his raw, solid body as if he were the wood of the cathedral.
‘Stay with me.’
He held her tight, but as an adult might comfort a child. There was none of Miah’s yearning hunger in him. For a terrible instant she realized how he could have loved Bellis utterly but never consummated their marriage.
‘There’s something I must do first. Do something for me, Arden.’
‘Anything.’
‘The Librans will come back here soon. Tell them what happened here. Tell them my name, and have them bring you home.’
‘Home.’
‘Lyonne. Clay. You have done what you came for.’ He kissed the top of her head tenderly. ‘This journey of mine always ended with you. And it must end.’
If you asked me to follow, Jonah …
He did not ask. He hugged her close, but she could feel him fading from her, the way a ship will do in a midwinter fog.
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Then the night came, the time for the fires to be lit in the sand, to call for the god of his people.
Jonah wore a linen shirt over his tattoos, bound his wrists and palms with strips of sea-silk and oyster shells as if they were armoured gauntlets from a strange war. Walked the boundary between land and water while at all times murmuring a song to his cruel god who would soon claim him.
The only clothing Arden owned that was not scrap was the bridal dress, and an odd rebellion made her slide back into the translucent silk and wear it for the funeral.
A funeral for both Jonah Riven and Stefan Beacon, maybe.
The ache returned, and if she hadn’t exhausted her tears in the afternoon solitude, she’d have cried yet again.
Jonah gave her a brief, odd look when he saw her in the wedding gown, but said nothing. He returned to his prayers. Arden spun the wedding ring on her finger.
The wind whipped up, the waves rolled in and retreated. For a long time he walked the edge, a bullroarer of opaline serpent ivory circling above his head, one of the relics from the temple. It was filled with kraken oil and burned with a blue flame. Looked out to sea. Arden, higher up on the beach, experienced the same mounting tension as she had on the night the maris anguis had been brought to shore. Lightning on the clouds, behind the thunderheads.
She crouched down, watching. The yearn of her blood’s shadow moved thick and coarse in her veins. The merfolk of the grotto had taken to the ocean, and they were dark silhouettes against the phosphorescent breakers, crowding in.
Arden thought about shouting a warning to Jonah, before accepting that he had called them, for the Rite of the Deepwater required an army, the court of the King.
Jonah suddenly swung the fiery roarer into Stefan’s funeral barge.
Set him alight, pushed him burning out to sea.
And followed.
32
He went into the ocean
He went into the ocean.
The merrows avoided the burning funeral boat. They swallowed Jonah up instead. Bony webbed hands reaching out, tugging him under. Not even the splash of a fight. He didn’t even struggle.
Deepwater King Page 31