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And what else was she going to do? She didn’t want to fight, either. Not if this was all there was. Two lives and two deaths on an island slowly breaking down, with people foolish enough to worship them.
She took his hand.
He led her to a grove.
The trees here looked so much healthier than any of the others on the island, growing straight and tall with no signs of suppurating rot. Nyxara could tell they weren’t exactly natural. Too uniform, the colors too vivid. Not like the old growth and wildness that had been here before they drank from the Fount, but an imitation of it, as if made by someone who hadn’t really seen a forest before.
But she loved it anyway.
She pressed a hand to the bark, looked up into the lattice of green. The branches grew close, like a wall, like a sanctuary. Somewhere she could hide from what she’d become. Beyond, the blue of the sky, gleaming and endless.
“Braxtos grew it,” Apollius said. “I told him to.”
Another reminder of the patterns they’d all fallen into, taking orders from Apollius, letting him default into their leader. Nyxara pressed her hand harder against the rough bark. Braxtos had taken to directing his new power better than the rest of them. Though the island was still slowly dying, he managed some flowers in spring, some new trees in summer, colorful leaves in fall. Of the six of them, he was the only one who could still measure time.
“No one but us can come here,” Apollius reassured her. “Just the gods. No people. This is sacred to us.”
And it did feel a little bit sacred, having somewhere private. Somewhere no one would look at her and see a terrifying goddess.
She knew they looked different. Years had bled the surprise of differences out of them, for the most part, made the figures they saw now seem as familiar as who they’d been before. But she saw the way the penitents looked at them, mingled awe and horror. Her fingers sharpened to dark claws. Iridescent scales wreathed Caeliar’s arms, and the whites of Hestraon’s eyes glowed ember-orange. Apollius’s skin shone as if sunlight ran in his veins, nearly as golden as the Fount itself.
“Braxtos helped make this, too.” Apollius held out the hand that had been twisting nervously at his side. “He pulled the stone from the earth. Hestraon forged it. I didn’t tell him what it was for, but I don’t think I needed to. He knew.”
Nyxara looked at his hand.
A ring.
She laughed. That was her first instinct. A ring, such a human and pedestrian thing, when they’d passed all that at his insistence?
A stormy look crossed his face, and when he spoke, it was with the tone of an order. “Marry me.”
No. There was no court to marry them here, not like there was back home, no King’s official to set them before their friends and kin and declare them bonded—but she didn’t want it, not now, even if it was only symbolic. Before the Fount, she would have married him in a heartbeat, but now she was something different. Something stronger.
Something fighting against the way they’d all fallen in line for him.
But Nyxara didn’t say all that. Instead, she said, “Give me time.”
And surprisingly, he did.
She spent most of that time in the grove. The others would come sometimes, too, but it was her space, and they knew it. Lereal would pass through on their way to the cliffs, where they said they could hear the wind speak. They’d tell Nyxara about their experiments with Caeliar—how she would go to sleep, and Lereal would follow the patterns of her breath into her dreams, watch them, sometimes manipulate them with Caeliar’s consent. “It’s interesting,” they said, twisting their nearly translucent hands together, “but it also scares me, a little. What if someone else could learn? What might they do?”
“You don’t have to worry about that,” Nyxara would reassure them, lying on her back and staring up at the cloudless sky. “No one else has power like you.”
“It isn’t my power that makes it work, I don’t think.” Lereal absently braided their hair, their eyes far away. The slender ivory of their bones shone through the glasslike skin of their hands, fading back to white sun-touched flesh right before the elbow. “It works with any power. They all come from the same source, so anyone who holds any magic from the Fount can walk through the dreams of someone else who also does.” They dropped their braid. “I’ll have to experiment more. Take notes.”
Nyxara envied those of her friends who could find some sort of purpose in their godhood, who wanted to understand the power they held. She mostly wanted to forget it.
Braxtos came by sometimes to check on the trees, to see how his handiwork held up. The trees greened when he was near, unfurling toward him. The tiny leaves blooming from his nailbeds and the corners of his eyes did the same, reaching farther, curling from him like lace. “Maybe I can do this for the whole island,” he’d say, but even when he tried, the changes didn’t stay. Rot ate away at the greenery, wet and stinking, every day a little worse.
Caeliar hardly ever came to the grove. When she did, she argued with Nyxara, told her that she was being ridiculous by not taking Apollius’s offer. She thought that if Nyxara gave him what he wanted, his love might make him work harder to find an escape from the island.
She didn’t understand that Apollius didn’t really love, not anymore. He just owned.
So Caeliar mostly stayed down by the sea on the northern shore, prodding at the waves, convinced she could find a way off the island. Every time she walked into the tide, her whole body seized, pain contorting her muscles and her heart beating so fast it was nearly visible. She’d fall back on the sand, defeated. The same thing happened to all of them, when they tried to leave, but she was the only one who kept trying over and over. The penitents had learned to steer clear of Caeliar, to avoid the northern shore entirely. They collected driftwood from the southern beach only, building their houses, their tall buildings carved with their six names.
When Hestraon came to the grove, he didn’t say anything, not usually. He just sat with Nyxara, quiet.
He was with her the day Braxtos ran up to the grove, grass rippling over the ground and then dying instantly where his feet landed. “She got into the tide this time,” he said, wide-eyed, not out of breath despite running all the way here from the shore. “Come see.”
