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CHAPTER ELEVEN
KINGCRONOSWOKEin the evening, and Zeus was there. The nurses made him comfortable, fluffing his pillows until he frowned and waved them away. Then they left father and son alone in the King’s traditional bedchamber.
Zeus had always hated this room. Everything was too martial, too imposing. All about history and tradition. He preferred sunlight and space to all this heaviness.
But he had never thought to askwhichhistory his father was mired in. He had always assumed it was all Theosian history and had never cared for the yoke of it himself. But now he wondered if these stout furnishings reminded the old man of something else. Something personal.
Someone.
He didn’t ask now. He stood against the nearest wall and gazed down at what age had done to the man he recalled as far mightier than the sun. The true god in this palace dedicated to them.
Back when he had been so small and useless.
Nina’s voice sounded in his head.He’s just a person.
Zeus could admit that he had never thought so.
“I did not think I would see you again,” Cronos rasped. And did not look as if he was best pleased to see Zeus now.
Because even at a moment like this, he knew how to provoke his son. Zeus reminded himself that he had not become who he was out of nothing.
“I’ve been waiting for this moment,” he drawled, lounging against the wall in the indolent way that he knew had enraged his father since he was little more than a sulky youth. “Surely you know that. A most indecorous deathwatch, I think all your acolytes would agree.”
Cronos only laughed, though it sent him into that rattling cough that had slowly taken him over this last year. “Such is the weight of the crown, my boy. You must wait for the moment of my death to rise. And you cannot mourn for even a moment. You must rule.”
Zeus wanted to launch into one of his diatribes. He’d been practicing them for years. He had looked forward to this moment with all that he was. Before Nina, he had planned to vow, here on the old man’s deathbed, that he would never have a child. That he would make sure the throne passed out of this family forever, so that all the old man’s machinations had been for nothing.
With Nina, he’d thought he’d have an even better knife to stick in, deep.
Because he could still remember sitting with his mother as she slowly faded away, that little smile on her face. So pleased that she had, in her death, done one thing to please herself completely. He could remember every moment of her last days.
He had been holding them close ever since. Hoarding them so he could build his fury about what had happened, year by year.
But now he was in another room in this palace, at another bedside, and yet his head was still back on that beach.I will love you anyway, no matter how little you love yourself, she had said.
And Zeus found he could not bring himself to say the things he should.
“Do you believe I will mourn you, old man?” he asked, almost idly.
And for a moment, he saw again the canny, shrewd King who had ruled his country long and well, through wars and plagues and famines alike.
“It is all mourning, in the end.” That gaze of his still packed the same punch. “Remember that, Zeus. If you have any stake in this life at all, sooner or later, you mourn.”
And maybe that was the word for what tore Zeus apart. Maybe it was all mourning, after all. For what he’d lost. For what he’d found but had intended to betray in this way. Maybe that made sense of the heaviness in him and the heart he’d only just discovered, broken into pieces.
And all of that wrapped up in an eleven-year-old’s rage and grief for the mother who might not have left him if anyone beside him had loved her.
He cleared his throat. “I planned to send you off into the afterlife with the knowledge that I have not only impregnated Princess Isabeau’s scandalous orphan, but I will also be marrying her in short order. Forever tarnishing your throne, your reputation, and therefore all you hold dear.”
Cronos stared for a moment, and Zeus expected him to start in with the usual outrage. But he didn’t feel even remotely as entertained as he’d always thought he would. He felt no rush of glee. No cleansing rush of spiteful triumph.
And it had never crossed his mind that he might find his revenge...underwhelming.
His father began to laugh again, though it made him hack and sputter. It took him a long time to catch his breath again. For a moment, he looked as if he might slip back into sleep. Instead, he roused himself, and when he looked at Zeus again, it was with an expression Zeus had never seen before.
As if his father was almost...bittersweet.
It had his throat tightening up.
