In the Veins of the Drowning(79)

“No, I am wrung dry. Utterly spent. Delightfully sore.” I smiled at him over my shoulder. “I’m just too anxious to sleep. It’s like there are bees in my skull.” I pulled open the door. Close to a dozen small books, bound in old, cracked leather, were piled into a basket on the floor, a folded piece of paper laid on top. I dragged them over the threshold and scooped up the topmost book with the folded note that lay upon it.

Theodore watched me with dreamy, tired eyes, the barest smirk on his lips. “Beautiful.”

I gave him a coy smile. “As are you.” I unfolded the paper and crawled back into bed to read it.

Hermitess Vasili,

I have taken a wife. As a gift, I humbly request use of any and all of the Great God Jesop’s books that pertain to magic, the Mage Seers, and the like. As you say, the books belong to the realm of Leucosia. Please know that they will be used to aid, protect, and keep it.

Your King,

Theodore Ariti

Praise be to the memory of the Great Gods that you have found a wife worthy enough to kneel before. You were growing too old.

Here. Return in two days. Just as they are.

I snorted at the curt reply. Theodore chuckled as he looked over the note.

“She lives in the palace,” I said. “You should have said you’re ‘soon to take a wife.’ She’ll realize the wedding hasn’t happened yet and come after you with her stick.”

“The woman hasn’t left the basement in forty years.” He kissed my arm. “Besides, I meant you.”

“Oh.” My cheeks warmed. “What’s this mean?” I asked, my voice soft with overwhelm. “‘A wife worthy enough to kneel before’？”

“In Leucosia, a king or queen will kneel to their betrothed, and only their betrothed, as part of the binding ceremony.” His eyes were closed. He shrugged. “My father never did it. The hermitess must have remembered that, and stickler that she is, she’s likely trying to guilt me into honoring tradition.”

I remembered Nemea’s mountain the night I’d escaped. The howling wind, how terribly I shook, and Theodore dropping to his knees before me when I swore my oath of fealty to him. I set the book on the mattress, turned on my side, and swiped a lock of hair from his forehead. “You knelt for me.” The words were timid, laden with a question.

That dimple of his appeared and disappeared with a quick curve of his mouth. “And I’ll do it again later.”

I pushed weakly at his shoulder. “When we escaped Nemea’s.”

He opened his sleepy eyes, looked into mine, then closed them once more. “I’ve been besotted from the moment I saw you on that overlook in that ridiculous dress. It was easy to kneel.”

“You lie,” I said, breathless.

He shook his head, eyes still closed. He whispered through a crooked smile. “Besotted.” Theodore wrapped an arm around my waist, pulled me close. He gave me a long, slow kiss. Despite his heat, a chill crackled through me. He fell off to sleep, but I remained awake, my eyes on the bed’s canopy. Rohana’s decrepit voice ran through my head in a taunt.

You are a Goddess-queen.

Take what you want.

Sleep never came. I lay at the edge of the bed, propped on the pillow so I could read by the faint light of a single taper. With drooping eyes, I scanned over Jesop’s exacting scrawl. It was page after monotonous page of lineages, and tales of the Great Gods from when they were new. Marriages, and deaths, and births, and I found myself cursing Jesop’s power of long memory and wishing it had been a gift for fine prose instead.

The sun was sneaking up slowly, brightening the sky beyond the window in a wash of steely gray. I wanted time to stop. I wanted to pore through these books in a blink and find precisely what I needed, but with each useless page turned, my hope dwindled. Even if I learned where Eusia was, even if the exact spell I needed was written out in stark black and white, it would not give me what I truly desired.

I closed the book and looked at Theodore. He slept on his back—full lips parted, brow smooth. The entire world was stacked against us, but my body, my heart, did not seem to care. I had spent the whole of my life wondering what it might feel like to truly belong somewhere, and now I was starting to know.

I picked up the next book. A little blue leather tome with browned paper and a crumbling spine. With renewed urgency, I flipped through the brittle pages, one after the next, until my eye caught on a section title:

THE FIRST MAGE.

The blanket slipped from my body as I sat up straighter. Knees pulled toward my chest, I gripped the book’s case tightly and read on with wide eyes.

Spell magic was born of malice and jealousy, but I cannot say that it does not have its uses. Its merits are many. It can heal, can divine, can locate the blood through the sea or land or air. In some cases, it can do what Gods’ power cannot. There are recorded events of ships surfacing from the deep with the aid of spell magic. Of bodies rising up from their graves. But my warning must be stated clearly:

For all that spell magic can give its user, it will take from them more than double.

The temperature in the room seemed to dip. The grotesque memory of the loose, marled skin hanging from beneath Rohana’s milky-white eyes lit my mind. I thought of her bluish teeth and useless body. It was magic that had remade her from maiden into monster.

When the First Mage began her spell work, it was rumored that she wished to overshadow her sister, the Great Goddess Ligea, who was given immeasurable Gods’ power at her birth. The Mage was given very little. Her mind, however, was shrewd. By spilling her own Siren blood, mixing concoctions, making sacrifices, and reciting well-worded prayer, she was able to make a new kind of power. One that her sister, the Great Goddess, did not master.