In the Veins of the Drowning(95)

When Nemea heard his crew speak the familiar words of Eusia’s spell—the one he’d taught me so long ago—a slow smile curled his mouth.

I jumped to the deck. Pain shot up my shins when I landed. My attention narrowed on the poor knots the sailors had tied around Nemea. The ropes were slung loose across his barrel chest. It would take little effort for him to remove them. Yet he didn’t struggle. He sat at ease, gaze on me.

His stillness—his peace—sent a spear of anxiety shooting through me.

His sword lay on the deck a few paces away, gleaming gold in the early evening light. It gave a metallic scrape as I retrieved it. Cannon fire still quaked through the warm air, but the volley from the ship I’d been on had ceased. They were sailing away, up the line to support the others, leaving me and Nemea on his flagship—alone.

With a forceful current and a steady wind, I guided the ship away from the tight cluster of firing vessels. I let us drift out farther from Varya’s shore, yawing and pitching with the chaos of the sea. The sun limned Nemea’s silvering hair and shadowed his narrow face. I stared, forcing my adrenaline-sodden body to still, and looked for something of myself in him.

I’d inherited so much from my mother. Her features, the shape of her body too, were nearly identical to mine. But I feared I’d inherited my father’s heart.

All the deaths I’d caused did not pierce me like they should. I still stood on my own feet, I still pulled breaths into my lungs without collapsing under the weight of self-detestation. I wished to feel the sting of these terrible, punishing things, to feel absolution, as Theodore had said, but I was numb.

I must have gotten that from Nemea.

The sails flapped overhead, unmanned and now loose in the breeze. I’d never looked at Nemea with such clear eyes before. I could picture what he would have looked like with the years peeled away, back when the empress had known him. The dark hair and light olive skin, the narrow slant of his gray eyes. How they pierced like pointed steel. I walked nearer to him, toward where his crown lay on the deck. My heart knocked into my ribs as he watched me. I bent to pick it up, weighing the heavy, sun-warmed gold in my palm.

“Hello, Imogen,” he finally said, over the snapping sails. “Have I surprised you?”

That voice. Low, nasal. It sent a host of rotting emotions spreading through me. “You have.”

“You left,” he said simply, head leaning back against the mast. “I had no choice but to retrieve you.” His gaze slid to my wings. “I’ll admit, you’ve surprised me too.”

My fist tightened around his crown, its edges denting my palm. “Don’t pretend you didn’t know what I was,” I spat. “And I am not yours to retrieve.”

He gave a chuckle. It was unamused, rough, empty. “But you are. In so many ways, you are.”

“What is your strongest claim to me, Nemea?” I asked, adjusting my fist around the sword’s hilt. “That you are my king? My warden? That you fed my blood to a monster since I was a baby?”

Slowly, I rested his crown upon my own head.

He scowled. Then the expression on his face slackened as he realized I knew precisely what his strongest claim to me was.

“Take that off.” The words were clipped, frigid.

“It’s where it soon belongs, isn’t it?” I hated the feel of it, the way it pressed down and cut in. “Am I not your heir?” The vitriolic look on his face moved through me like a slow poison. “I disgust you, don’t I?”

“Disgust.” Nemea was so still. “The Sirens disgust me, yes.” He shook his head. “But you never have. She never did either.”

She. My mother.

He must have seen the questions springing through my mind, the longing that shadowed my face, because he said, “Would you like me to tell you of her?”

Nerves tingled beneath my skin. He pulled fear from me as easily as he had blood from my palm. He adjusted himself against the mast like his body ached, and the shoddily tied rope across his middle slipped lower. I saw the glint of something silver at his hip. A dagger. I set my teeth and moved my other hand to the sword’s grip. But Nemea only sat there, uneasily still, waiting for my answer.

As much as I was tempted, the story of Nemea and my mother was not one I needed. I needed to know of Eusia. Of the empress, and the princess, and the tangled web that I was stuck in the middle of. But I drew in a shaky breath and nodded.

He made a thoughtful sound and focused on something in the middle distance, seemingly slipping into the past. “You remember the stories of the years that I was missing at sea?” His voice was strange. It went soft and lank, rolling between us like an eerie morning haze. “I was with Ligea for most of them. The stories boast that I set out to conquer, but I was never fool enough to think that I, the lone mortal king of Leucosia, would ever amount to much in a realm where Gods exist. If I wanted power, I had to make it.” His haunted gaze locked quickly with mine. “Isn’t that right, Imogen? Isn’t that what I always told you?”

I didn’t answer him.

He pursed his lips at my silence before he continued. “I took a small fleet to seek out the Mage Seers. They had succeeded in making their own power, after all, so why couldn’t I? I’d thought magic could give me what I lacked. I was foolish in my youth, though. I had no knowledge of its cost. When I saw the Mage Seers, what the magic did to them…” He shook his head, lip curling. “That was not a price I was willing to pay.