The Reign of Olympus (Shadows of Olympus #3)

Chapter Nineteen

The day is bright up on the ridge, and hot. Our horses step smoothly in formation: Ares and his stallion first, then Nemese on her white mare, and Eros and me on Ajax, bringing up the rear. I glance down again toward the army marching below. Men in their hundreds, their indistinguishable forms. But now I know that among them walks Yiannis, and young Timon. I want to tell Eros about my meeting, but I don’t know what he’ll think. Yiannis was my betrothed, after all. But I have a favor to ask.

“I saw someone, in Nafplion,” I say at last. “One of the soldiers—he was from Sikyon. I knew him in my old life.”

After all, what point is there in mentioning this was the man I was supposed to marry? That past is long gone now, some faraway place, impossibly distant.

“He is a mercenary in the Spartan army now,” I continue. “He is a foot-soldier, but he would be well suited to the cavalry. He would excel there, I am sure.” I hesitate. “There are spare horses since yesterday, and he is very skilled.”

I feel Eros nod behind me. He seems distracted.

“You want him promoted. What’s his name?”

“Yiannis. Yiannis Demou.” I say the name with trepidation, but Eros does not seem to remember it.

“I’ll speak to my father. The priest will hear of it today, and give the command to the generals. No one will question it. It is the right of the gods to bestow favor.”

I feel a surge of relief, but it irks me, this reminder of how easy it is for the gods to arrange our human lives. Ares will give a command, and the men will move to obey it, like pieces on a petteia board. But that is not Eros’s fault, I remind myself. I push away the flicker of resentment, and the guilt, too, at the full truth of who Yiannis is. The things I have not told Eros of late are beginning to multiply. The vision in Hera’s garden. The strange dream I had last night. What would he make of them? I suppose I know why I’m reluctant to share the dream from last night: I’m afraid he’ll tell me it’s just a dream, and not to put too much stock in it. But I want to believe it. I want to know my sister and her son are alive.

A hare darts across our path, almost between Ajax’s hoofs, and Ajax stops hard, snorting, as Eros and I are jostled together. He braces one arm around me, steadying me, and I feel safer, and for a moment, a little lighter. When we’re on the move again, a little ways behind the others, I voice the other thing I’ve been wondering about.

“I heard you in the temple. Nemese was saying something about six doors . What did she mean by that?”

He’s quiet then, and I think he means to keep the answers from me. But then I feel the warm breath of his sigh against my neck.

“The gulf of Saron is known for many things. But among them, it is rumored to hold six entrances to the Underworld, each one on a different island.”

I frown. “And is one of them on Hydra?”

“So it is said.” He pauses. “I have been wondering if that is the reason for Deimos’s presence there. If perhaps, somehow, he means to find the entrance and journey down.”

I half-turn, the better to see his face.

“But what would Deimos want with the Underworld?”

Eros sighs again. “His twin is there, Psyche.”

I stare.

“You mean…Deimos could go and get him? Bring him back to life?”

“I do not think so,” Eros says. “Hades cannot tamper with the Fates, even for a god.” But I hear the note of uncertainty in his voice. He’s silent for a while.

“Phobos,” he says then. “The way he was when you met him—he wasn’t always like that, you know.”

I frown. It’s hard to imagine the vicious creature I knew ever being any less of a monster. But he was around for many aeons. Once upon a time, he must have been more innocent.

“My mother’s fury, her resentment, her hatred—those are among my earliest memories,” Eros says. “She hated my father for what their love affair had done to her. The gods punished her severely for it. She was disgraced, and it took her a long time to get over it.”

“Did the gods punish only her?” I ask. “Not Ares?”

I feel Eros nod behind me. So even among the gods, it is the woman who suffers.

“When they divided us,” he goes on, “I became my mother’s child, and the twins went with my father. But the more they grew like him, the less my mother wanted to do with them. She spent all her favor on me instead. And our father, meanwhile…my brothers’ anger was useful to him, I suppose. He could harvest it, and use it to his advantage.”

I think of the gold band Eros wears on his arm, and I glance up ahead of us to where Ares sits atop his chestnut stallion.

“He taught my brothers one side of war,” Eros goes on. “How to stoke terror, how to wield fury. But they did not learn much else.”

I turn back, face to the wind. Sometimes I wonder if Eros looks at me and sees what he has lost. A mother, two brothers: they would not be lost to him if not for me. And as for me? My father, who stepped into an arrow’s path; my sister, disappeared. I do not say Eros was to blame for it, nor I for his losses—but how can I not be aware of what our love has cost him; what it has cost me?

*

When the men break for lunch we stop with them, and Eros goes to speak to his father about Yiannis’s promotion. I’m grateful, though I don’t much like being left alone with Nemese. She’s more restless today, pacing slowly on the green edge overlooking the mountain pass. I assume she’s lost in thought about Nafplion, about Deimos and the blade, but after a while she turns her glance on me.

“I heard a rumor from Olympus,” she says: “That you went into the garden of the Hesperides, and ate an apple from one of its trees.”

That gets my attention.

“Athena is not best pleased with you, you know. It was unwise.”

I nod. Unwise would probably cover most of what I’ve done in the past week. But I’m more concerned about what Nemese plans to do with this information. Tell Ares? Tell Eros?

“What did you see in your vision?” She looks at me.

“What do you mean?” I stall.

“Your vision—you must have had one,” she says, refusing to buy my attempt at ignorance. “Everyone does.”

I hesitate.

“I don’t remember. Why? What do people usually see?”

She gives me a disbelieving look.

“It depends. Sometimes it’s something from the future, sometimes from the past. You cannot choose. The vision chooses you.” She pauses. “Zeus has come to the garden often since his blade was stolen. He thinks perhaps the apples will give him a vision of how to get it back. But they don’t work like that.

“And of course, sometimes”—I could swear Nemese gives me a knowing look when she says this—“the apples tell us things we don’t want to know. Things we’d much rather avoid.”

I turn away, letting my gaze slide over to the valley below, and the distant phalanxes gathered in its shadow. A dusty wind flicks against my skin, and I wet my dry lips.

“And these visions…are they always accurate?”

“Certainly.”

“But how do you know?”

Her laugh is light, faintly scornful.

“My mother is goddess of the night. My brothers are the gods of sleep and dreaming. It was my family that gifted the first apple tree to Hera—a wedding gift for her marriage to Zeus. From that one apple tree, the Garden was born.”

“So,” she continues, “is it true, what Athena suspects? It sounds as if you are of mixed blood, by her telling. And if you were able to eat the apple unharmed, I think she must be right. There is something more than mortal in you after all.”

I clench my jaw. Over to my left, Eros and his father are still talking, the sunlight glinting off their plated armor. Nemese follows my gaze.

“Does he not know?” she frowns.

“Eros knows. Not about the apple, but about the rest. That there is something…different about me. I think he suspected even before I did.” I glance at her. “But Ares does not know. And I do not wish him to.”

She considers me. Clearly, she’s not inclined to promise anything.

“What do you know of your parentage?” she asks.

My voice tightens. “Very little. My mother was mortal, and if she knew who my father was, she had no chance to tell me. She died in childbirth.”

Nemese nods. “Common enough, with children of the gods. The bodies of mortals are not built to birth them.”

I’ve heard this before, but still it cuts hard. Not only the idea that I was what caused my mother’s death, but that I am something against the natural order. Something that doesn’t belong among my species.

“Better for you if whoever sired you is a god of no consequence,” Nemese says. “You will be safer that way. It is not a forgiving time, on Olympus.”

I think of my young nephew, and if my dream told the truth, the power that must run in his veins. What would Olympus make of him, if they were to track him down?

*

By evening, Yiannis rides with the strategoi. Now, when I look over the edge to this long line of men, I know his place in it. It does not mean I can protect him, but I feel better all the same.

I am preoccupied, thinking of my conversation with Nemese. If rumors are spreading about me, then Eros will hear them, too, before long. And so will Ares. I clear my throat.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

But he doesn’t answer, just gives a faint hiss, as though he’s in pain, and moves a hand away. I swivel in my seat, turning to see his face.

“Eros?”

He has one hand to his temple. At first I think it’s another of the headaches, these debilitating ones he’s been having as his god-strength fades—the ones Nemese has apparently been helping him with. But then I feel the wind stirring in the trees, the way the air whispers around us.

“Athena.” He winces. “Greetings.”

A voice answers.

“Eros. Any word of your brother?”

For me the voice is quiet, muffled—but from the way Eros is gripping his temple, it seems as though Athena’s voice must sound like a struck gong inside his skull.

“Little that is helpful,” he grimaces. “He has moved on from Nafplion—to where, we do not yet know. The priests there said he sailed from the isle of Hydra.”

Faintly, the voice answers.

“Hydra? That is news.” She pauses. “My scouts, the sea-hawks, tell me of a great fleet that sails toward Athens as we speak.”

“A hostile fleet?” Eros frowns deeper.

“So I would assume,” Athena’s cool voice comes. “But who leads them, I do not know.”

The wind, the strange whispers, seem to wink out then. She is gone. Eros’s grimace relaxes, but his frown remains. He meets my eyes.

“Do you think it’s him?” I remember that apparition in the temple—Deimos sneered at the mention of Athena then, complaining she was Zeus’s favorite. Clearly he has no love for her. But would he be so bold as to move on her city like this?

Eros quickens our pace, hurrying to convey the news to Ares and Nemese. When Ares hears it, his brow darkens savagely.

“And what does she mean by that? She has no proof it’s Deimos.”

“But if it is…” Nemese says.

“If it is, then it is not just Athens that’s in danger. It is Athena herself,” Eros finishes.

“Nonsense,” Ares snaps.

“Would you leave her there to face Deimos alone, when he carries the knife?” Eros turns. “You know he has little love for her.”

“It is a false alarm,” Ares says, dismissive. “He has not the strength yet to take Athens and he knows it. No, we must continue to Hydra, as we planned.”

I watch Nemese and Eros exchange looks.

“We could split up,” Eros says. “You could go to Hydra, Father. I can make for Athens.”

Ares scowls. “You are soft, son. This is what comes of Zeus spoiling Athena as he does. She thinks the other gods are here to do her bidding; that we must come at her command.”

Eros shakes his head.

“She did not ask for help. She was alerting us—and she may be right. This fleet approaches Athens even now. If Deimos sails with them, it may be our best chance to secure the blade.”

Ares exhales sharply.

“Fine,” he snaps. “You ride to Athens with the men. At least the road is well-worn; it will be the quicker journey for them. And I will continue to Hydra.” He looks at Eros, his eyes narrow. “You’re stubborn, like your brothers,” he says under his breath.

Eros tightens his jaw.

“Very well, Father.”

Ares turns, addressing Nemese. “Mind he does not turn soft on my men. I need them strong. Now come, Arinnys,” he says to the horse. The next moment they are galloping away from us, nothing but dust rising in their wake.