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“If you don’t mind my saying, Mr Valancy, you appear far more hale and hearty than you were the day you came to consult the oracle. The past several months seem to have agreed with you.”

“Yes, I’ve been doing the things I always wanted to do. I took up blacksmithing. And I got married.” Sterling’s morose tone did not match the words coming out of his mouth.

The votary placed an encouraging hand on his shoulder. “You’re a lucky man, then. Go home to your wife, and tell her the good news.”

His wife.

Sterling buried his face in his hands.

***

Bernadette had yet to come home by the time Sterling returned. Salt Sea and all the gods of death, what must she be thinking? That he had swindled her? Trapped her?

He was surprised by how badly he wanted to explain the horrible misunderstanding to her in person.

He would have expected himself to be more cowardly than that.

But since he had no idea when she would return, and since he could not rightfully call this precious rundown cottage his home any longer, he would have to leave her a letter instead.

A pathetic, inadequate letter.

He took his linen handkerchief from his coat pocket and dabbed his eyes. Tears would not serve him now. What he needed was a pen and paper.

Finding either proved depressingly daunting.

Sterling used an old pencil to jot down the market list each week on the small notepad in the cupboard drawer.

Both the pencil and the notepad seemed woefully insufficient for the task at hand, but, short of searching Bernadette’s study – a room he was forbidden to enter as a part of their marriage agreement – he could not locate a proper pen nor a sheet of paper anywhere in the cottage, much less a pot of ink.

He gazed down at the dull pencil sitting atop the newspaper.

Bernadette had used it to draw a preposterous mustache and a pair of horns on an image of the Larkspur, the anonymous hero who risked life and limb to help demigods escape the bloody revolution in the country of Gol.

Unsatisfied with rejecting only the Old Gods, the Golois had decided to reject the New Gods and demigods, as well.

They were imprisoning and executing the hapless offspring of immortals left and right…

unless the Larkspur managed to sneak in and steal the demigods from underneath their noses.

“Spare me,” Bernadette would moan whenever Sterling attempted to read aloud excerpts from the newspaper, recounting the Larkspur’s outlandish exploits.

She would roll her beautiful blue eyes at him before snatching the paper out of his hands, straddling him in his armchair, and kissing him until he could barely remember his own name, much less the derring-do of the Larkspur.

As he thought of Bernadette in his arms, a sharp pang of loss and regret rattled through his ribcage.

He looked to the door of her study, which was closed as always.

Sterling had long suspected his wife of being a smuggler rather than a peddler, but he had never questioned her stipulation that he stay out of her business affairs and, therefore, out of her study.

He’d even joked about it, calling the mysterious room her ‘Den of Iniquity’.

But now he needed to write her a letter, and with nothing better than a pencil and a small, wrinkled notepad at hand, he would have to enter the forbidden study in search of proper writing supplies.

I have already broken faith with Bernadette by living, even if I had not meant to , he thought. What is one more transgression?

Either Bernadette trusted him more than he deserved, or she had been in such a rush to get away from him that morning she’d forgotten to lock the door. In either case, Sterling entered the Den of Iniquity with ease.

The room was small but remarkably tidy. There was a businesslike oak desk with a neat stack of papers and a well-made wooden chair atop a worn wool rug.

When Sterling drew aside the curtain covering the single window to let in sunlight, the glass was clean, the sashes dusted.

It was very unlike Bernadette to be so neat.

Throughout the rest of the cramped house, she was an invasive vine, leaving tendrils of herself wherever Sterling looked – teacups on the mantel, earrings on a cupboard shelf, her drawers wherever it was they had last made love.

He did his best to ferret out what he needed without looking too closely at the rest of the room.

He found a pen and a sheaf of rather fine paper, and a bottle of ink in one of the desk drawers.

The words did not come easily, however. He had three false starts full of apologies and groveling before he gave up and opted for the plain truth.

Dear Bernadette,

I went to the Bride’s Oracle today. Ten months ago, she mistakenly sent to me a letter intended for a Mr Sherwood Valancey…with an ‘e’. I do not have bad luck after all!

Please believe me when I tell you that it was never my intention to trap you in a marriage you did not want. I will, of course, grant you a divorce without argument. Your fortune is yours. Your life is yours. I would not dream of remaining in your way any longer.

Thank you for your generosity, for sharing your home and your kindness with me all these months. I will always look back on this time as the luckiest of my life.

Yours,

Sterling

He would not write to her of his love, much as he wanted to, because that would be unfair of him, manipulative even. She owed him nothing, and he did not want her to feel guilty for letting him go.

The heavy task completed, Sterling leaned against the back of the chair, making it creak ominously. He could almost hear Bernadette’s laughter when he had told her that his mother called him ‘Lambie.’

Lambie! she had cackled. You are more like a bear!

But in his mind’s eye, Sterling had never stopped thinking of himself as a lamb. He could probably lift Bernadette over his head – and she was not insubstantial herself – but he knew that between the two of them, his wife was the strong one really.

As he mulled over the empty, Bernadette-less future stretching out before him, his eyes drifted to the large, framed maps upon the wall in front of the desk.

One was a detailed, topographical map of Gol, the country across the Middlemark Sea from Stenland, the roiling land where the Golois were hunting down demigods and killing them for the crime of being born half-divine.

The other was a naval chart of the Middlemark Sea and all the ports of call along the Golois and Stennish coastlines.

Sterling had always assumed that Bernadette brought her illegal wares back and forth between Stenland and the landlocked countries to her north and east. Few were brave enough to land on Golois shores these days for fear of being accused of having divine origins.

Many had lost their lives to such baseless accusations.

Bernadette was fearless, to be sure – it was one of the many reasons why Sterling loved her – but she was not so foolhardy as to put herself in mortal danger.

Was she?

Suddenly anxious, Sterling got to his feet and began to pace.

What if Bernadette’s delay in returning home had nothing to do with his lack of bad luck?

What if something – or someone – had waylaid her?

What if she was trapped in some fetid Golois prison cell, unable to call for help, at this very moment?

What if it was already too late?

This last thought brought him up short as his blood froze in his veins.

But no, he was being ridiculous. She could not have made it to the coast and sailed the Middlemark Sea in a day, so she most certainly was not rotting in a Golois dungeon.

And Bernadette had too much sense to get herself caught up in something truly dangerous.

As his panic subsided, he found himself staring at a small altar to the left of the study door.

Most homes kept the family altar beside the front door, not hidden away in a back room.

Sterling had always assumed that Bernadette’s lack of a family altar indicated a lack of family, period.

He’d once asked her about her parents, but her eyes had gone uncharacteristically sad and distant.

“It’s complicated, Bear,” she had told him, stroking his bearded cheek with an equally uncharacteristic tenderness.

He hadn’t pressed her on it at the time, not when she’d touched his cheek so affectionately and called him Bear.

But now that Sterling stood before Bernadette’s family altar, he could not see what was so complicated about it.

Only one ancestral birth key winked at him from the shelf.

Beside it sat an old-fashioned portrait-in-miniature of a man, presumably Bernadette’s father.

The resemblance was obvious. He had the same thick, dark hair, the same arched eyebrows, the same long nose.

His eyes were different, however – large like hers, but brown, so unlike the startling blue of Bernadette’s.

He appeared to have her more adventurous taste in fashion, too, as evidenced by the height of his stiff collar, the busy pattern of his waistcoat, the many folds of his cravat, and the vibrancy of his delphinium boutonniere.

The only other objects on the altar were a dish of salt water – a symbol of the death god known as the Salt Sea – and a yellowed, postcard-sized painting of the Bride of Fortune.

The god’s iconography made her easily identifiable – her hands held out as if they formed the two sides of a scale, good fortune balancing out the bad; the vineyard vines tumbling at her feet, representing prosperity; and the key she wore around her neck as was the custom of all brides and grooms on their wedding day, the symbol of two people uniting their fortunes.

Only, in the god’s case, she united her fortune with all humanity.