Chapter 7

BO

The boat rocked a bit more than it had for the rest of the time I'd been on it, probably because of what Neptune said about us crossing over from Poseidon's domain into his. Though I was still a little surprised that it was an actual thing.

Despite that, I found myself making my way out to the stern of the boat, wanting to watch the waves behind us, and hopefully see dolphins that didn't turn out to be sea gods.

A lone figure sat at the very edge of the boat, and it only took a moment for me to realise that it was Neptune. I should have realised he'd be here, he did say he'd be doing what he could to make sure that the crossing of boundaries went well.

Without thinking about it, I put a hand on the top of his back.

He startled.

"Sorry, just me." Even as I said it, I realised how weird it was that I was responding to him that way, as if he was someone he knew well enough to interact like that. It had been less than a week, but something about the whole situation made it feel much deeper than that.

It was probably the boat. Even though we'd been docking in places for excursions and events, there was a sense of being closed off from the rest of the world while we were on it.

Neptune smiled, his nose crinkling. "I didn't expect to see you until later."

"Same," I responded. "I came to see if there were any dolphins."

"Just one," he joked.

"That's a shame. Unless you're about to tell me that the rest are sea gods too." I sat down beside him without even waiting to be asked. There was something about Neptune that was making me feel much more comfortable and at ease than I should. But it was summer, and even if I was here to work, there was no real escaping the atmosphere on the boat.

"If they are, they've been hiding it from me," he said. "What would you do if you found out they were sea gods?"

"Never look at another dolphin ever again." It might be safer not to anyway.

"I can think of one sea god who might be disappointed by that."

My breath caught in my throat. "Even if I stare?"

"I never said I didn't enjoy it," he pointed out. "Just that you were doing it."

I frowned. "I suppose that's true."

"Anyway, you're safe. As far as I know, I'm the only dolphin shifter amongst the sea gods."

"What are the others?" I asked, curiosity getting the better of me.

"Oh, all kinds of things. Anansa who runs the cruise is a type of mermaid. But the one that I know will make you laugh is Poseidon."

"Why will Poseidon make me laugh?" A chill wind came off the sea and I shivered slightly.

"Here." He held out a jumper to me.

"Are you sure?"

He shrugged. "I'm not using it."

"Thanks." I took it from him and pulled it over my head. It was far too big on my small frame, but it was warm and smelled like salt and the sea. Just like I imagined Neptune would. "So why would Poseidon make me laugh?" I asked.

"He's a seahorse shifter," Neptune responded. "He tells everyone that he's actually a hippocampus, you know the horses with fish tails?"

"Merhorses?" I checked.

He snorted. "More or less. Anyway, he tells people he's a hippocampus, but really he's a seahorse. When he shifts, he's about this big." He held his hands out to a span smaller than a pen would be.

"We're talking about the same Poseidon, right?" I checked, barely able to contain my amusement.

"Oh yes. I always figured that was the reason for his whole personality. He wants people to forget that he could get swallowed whole by a medium fish if he were in his shifted form."

"A dolphin is much cooler," I said. "And it suits you."

"Thanks. I guess I've never really thought about it much. I was born a dolphin shifter, so that's what I am. I've never questioned whether it fit me or not. And I've been a dolphin shifter for a very long time. I don't imagine many of the gods who have reached my age question what their magic type is."

"Except Poseidon."

He chuckled. "I'll make you a follower of the Roman pantheon yet."

"I'm not sure that would be possible. It would be hard to worship gods I knew were just people. Except..." I frowned.

"Except?"

"I suppose I've known that the gods were just people for years, but I still offer up prayers when the time feels right."

Neptune looked out at the sea, and I followed his gaze to see if it was something in particular he was looking at, but it didn't seem to be.

"It makes sense that you still do that," he said. "Being a god is...complicated. I think because we're created by the people who believe in us."

"I don't really understand how it works," I admitted. "No one talks about how to become a god."

Neptune chuckled. "That's because it's a bit of a mystery."

"How so?"

He sighed and looked back at the sea. "All gods can make immortals. I'm not sure how that came about in the first place, no one remembers that far back, but that's how new immortals come into being."

"What's the difference between an immortal and a god?"

"Magic and influence, more or less. I could make you into an immortal right now and nothing would change for you except that you wouldn't age very much, and you wouldn't die. But you said you had a lifespan of centuries, right? So that means you wouldn't even notice for another couple of hundred years."

"That sounds...intense. And not very nice. Surely people would want to know sooner than that?"

"Most people know they're being turned into an immortal," he assured me. "The god bit is more complicated. So if you were immortal now, you could stay immortal forever, and you probably would. To become a god, you have to have a certain amount of followers, or a specific kind of followers. I honestly don't know because no one really does."

"If no one knows how an immortal becomes a god, then how do you know you became one?"

"I felt different. It's a hard thing to describe, especially because it's been so long since it happened. But it is definitely different. And I wasn't able to do this before I became a god." He held out his hand and a small shoot of water sprang from it.

My eyes widened. "That's a perk."

He chuckled. "It has its uses."

"Do you like being a god?" I wasn't sure what made me ask, curiosity mostly, but he was being open about the entire thing and I liked that. It made me feel strangely close to him.

"It's a bit like being a dolphin shifter to me. It's been so long that it's just part of who I am. Though I'm not just a sea god, I'm also a horse god, but I don't have any powers related to that one beyond making horses like me."

I laughed. "That's a good one though, I've encountered some really bad-tempered horses before. You could become a horse whisperer."

He chuckled. "I did use it to my advantage. At the height of the Roman Empire, I might have engaged in a spot of chariot racing."

"That's cheating."

"No one ever said a god couldn't compete."

"They probably didn't know they needed to bar you," I pointed out. "If you already knew you couldn't die, then you could be twice as reckless as everyone else. And you could calm horses easily."

"I assume I could die from a bad crash," he countered. "Or at least, I've always thought that would be possible. As for cheating by calming the horses, I suppose that's true enough, but cheating was just part of the sport. Everyone cheated. All the time."

"Sportsmanship wasn't a thing in Ancient Rome, then?"

"Oh, it was. Cheating was punished if you were caught. You just had to make sure you weren't."

"It must be nice," I mused. "To live so freely and have the world open to you."

"It could be that way to you too," he said.

I sighed and stared at the waves. They were hypnotising, and already starting to calm down. "That's not an option for me. I have more freedom than a lot of my family do, but it still comes with its boundaries. I have things that are expected of me. And I'm already breaking free of them."

"Like?"

"Well, if it was up to my parents, I'd have settled down with a nice boy from my village already. I'd be at home making his meals and singing songs to his children." I didn't know where the admission had come from. "Sorry, you don't want to hear this."

He reached out and took my hand in his. It was a comforting gesture, and a somewhat unexpected one. "I asked, Bo. I want to hear."

I nodded and thought through what else I wanted to say. It was good to get this off my chest, even if it was to a literal god. Though I supposed his status as a god didn't change the fact I probably wouldn't ever see him again. Even with Mei starting to perform for the gods now, it was a large world and there were a lot of them in it.

Maybe that meant it was safe to tell him things that I normally kept to myself. "I just come from a very traditional family," I said. "They're not big fans of the fact I'm following an idol around the world while she does shows. And now I'm away on a cruise run by a dating agency. I don't think they really care about that, just the fact that I'm far away from them and it means I'm not at home."

"Ah."

"It's not that I don't want to be there either." I toyed with the sleeve of the jumper, enjoying how nice it felt to have around me. "It's just that I want to have my own life too. Do you know what I mean?"

"More than you realise," he responded. "When I was a young and dumb teenager, I wandered too far from home and was found by Saturn and Ops."

"Aren't they supposed to be your parents?" I asked.

He raised an eyebrow. "So you didn't realise who I was, but you know which gods I'm linked to?"

I looked down at my knees. "I downloaded a book on Roman mythology after Chiguo told me who you were. I was trying to find out the proper way to address you."

To my surprise, he laughed. "That's adorable."

"I wasn't trying to be adorable, I was trying to be polite."

"Well, I'm just fine with how you address me," he promised.

"Will you tell me the rest of the story?" I asked, realising I wanted to know his version more than anything I'd read in a book.

"Saturn took me under his wing, talking about the might of the Greek gods and how he wanted something to challenge that. I was young and foolish at the time, so of course I thought I had what it took to be like Poseidon. I loved the sea and I thought that was all that I needed."

"What happened?" I asked, shuffling closer to him.

"Saturn made me immortal. I went home to tell my parents, and my mother cried for days, telling me that I'd ruined my life. My father wasn't happy either. He'd wanted to leave the family business to me, and he saw me as betraying my legacy by choosing to become immortal. Now I'm older, I do kind of see their point, but at the time, I saw it as a way to get to see more of the world, and spend my time doing what I wanted when it came to being one with the sea. Father swore he'd never forgive me."

"Did he?"

The smile that spread over Neptune's face was both happy and sad at the same time. "He did. My sister married a man with a head for business and eyes only for her. The two of them took over my father's business and took it to even further heights than I ever would. Father forgave me because he saw what was obvious. I was never the right choice to be his heir, I was just the choice because I was a boy."

"You miss them." It wasn't a question, I could hear the truth of it.

"I miss everyone I've loved and lost. Each of them has changed me in some way, and helped me grow into the person I am now. For the most part, they're gone now. The world kept turning and I learned to live without them."

"Including your wife?" I asked quietly.

He chuckled. "You really have been reading up on me."

"There wasn't actually much to find."

"That makes sense, the Romans never warmed to me the way the Greeks did to Poseidon. Not as many naval victories, I'd think. Salacia and I were together for a long time, and shared a great love. But as time went on, we grew apart. I haven't seen her in several hundred years. But you don't have to worry about a vengeful ex coming after you because I shared my secrets, we parted on good terms."

"I wasn't worried," I murmured.

"Of course not," he responded. "By the end, we realised our marriage was mostly about appearances, and neither of us wanted that."

"It doesn't really fit with your love of freedom," I agreed.

"No."

"So, after you ended things with your wife, you went on living a bachelor life?" I shuffled closer without thinking about it.

"Hardly. I've fallen in love dozens of times in the past few thousand years."

"What happened to them?" I asked. I wasn't sure why I was so desperate to know the answers, maybe it was because I'd never had a chance to actually talk to a god about this. And none of the other xian talked about it either.

"Some of them ended in disaster, several in the natural passage of time, and one in a vengeful murder plot."

I let out a laugh, then covered my mouth, realising I shouldn't have reacted that way. "Sorry."

"You don't need to be," he assured me.

"Whose vengeful murder plot was it?"

"Hers. It turned out she was never over her ex and she decided to act on that in the least reasonable way. I was hurt at the time, but now I see that I made a lucky escape."

"Even if you can't die?"

"A stab to the chest might do it, just like a bad crash probably would."

"That's a dangerous thing to tell me."

"Why? Are you planning on stabbing me?" he teased.

"Well, no. But if the information got out, it could cause problems."

"I trust you."

The words warmed me and I realised I liked the way he seemed to be thinking about me. It was nice, reassuring even.

My phone blared and I groaned in frustration.

"Everything all right?" Neptune asked.

"I have to go and oversee Mei's fitting for her performance. The tailor got on at the last spot and last time the costumes for her set were a disaster."

"Duty calls," he said.

"Mmm. As does yours." I gestured to the sea.

"It seems to be doing well."

I got to my feet, pausing for a moment. "If the offer is still there for me to use your cabin later, I'd appreciate it." I hadn't even realised I was going to take him up on the offer until the words were out of my mouth, but I knew it was the right thing to do. The tailor always took a lot out of me, and the thought of then going back to the suite with Mei and Chiguo filled me with dread.

"Of course." He flashed me a smile. "Come meet me here when you're done, and I'll take you there."

"It won't matter that you're not at your post?" I asked.

"Not enough to cause a problem," he assured me.

"Thank you, Neptune."

"You're welcome."

I waved, not really knowing how else I was supposed to be saying goodbye to him, and headed to where the fitting was supposed to be taking place, dreading every moment of it, but looking forward to getting a chance to talk to Neptune again later.