The Reign of Olympus (Shadows of Olympus #3)

Chapter Twenty-One

I stand close against the tree, my breath so light that I can’t hear it, can barely feel my chest move. And then the orange spark comes closer still. A figure enters the clearing, and a face comes into view. A face I know.

I step out from the trees, and now he’s the one who looks startled.

“Psyche!” Yiannis’s eyes grow wide, the whites catching the moonlight. “I didn’t…What are you doing here?”

I almost smile to see the look on his face. “I might ask you the same. My horse scented water. I could not sleep, and followed him here.”

Yiannis nods, his gaze moving from Ajax to me. He’s still recovering from the shock, and he seems…bashful, somehow. He was not that way before. Perhaps it is the darkness, the moonlight—it makes our meeting feel more private, as though somehow we had orchestrated it. Surely he can’t imagine I did orchestrate it? In the darkness, I find myself blushing.

He puts down the torch, driving it into the ground to keep it upright. I see that he’s carrying something else: a wineskin, it looks like.

“I came here to make an offering,” he says. “One of the men mentioned this place. He said it has been a shrine to the gods since olden times.” Yiannis shows me the pouch. “The cavalrymen get wine with their dinner. I saved mine—for the gods.” He glances at me again. “But it seems I will have a chance to thank you in person. I know what you did for me,” he says. “You and your…your companions.”

“My part in it was little.” If my cheeks are still flushed, I suppose he can’t see it in the dark. “But I was glad to help. I am sure the promotion was well deserved.” I step away from the pond, giving him room to make his offering.

“I am sure your gift will be appreciated. It never hurts to please the gods.”

He gives me a glance. And you’d know all about that , it seems to say. I look away. He approaches, and pours out the wine-skin. The liquid swirls like a dark mist on the surface of the pond. If I looked closer, I wonder, what shapes would I see there now? I pull my gaze away, back to Yiannis’s face. He’s watching me again, and I can’t help thinking of that sideways look, and how he called the gods my companions .

“It must seem very strange to you,” I say. “My story.”

He shrugs.

“I’ve got used to strange stories. But”—he glances at me—“are you happy? With…him?”

The water ripples gently, mirroring the canopy of trees overhead, black and silver. I nod, but keep my eyes averted. Happy is not how I’d describe myself tonight. But this is no place for such an admission.

“You seem different,” Yiannis says. “I don’t know what it is. You’ve changed. Or perhaps I just never saw you properly before.”

I know what he means. Back in Sikyon we were not taught to see each other, truly see each other. Instead, we were taught to see what the other stood for: a good marriage; a respectable future. Each of us, in our way, a prize to be won.

“We have more in common now,” I say, and he nods. There’s bitterness in it, and I understand that. What we have in common is what we have lost. We understand pain better.

“I thought we were the lucky ones, you know.” He looks at me. “In Sikyon, everyone said so. I believed in the gods’ favor back then. It was easy to believe in, when I thought it was ours forever.”

I drop my eyes. I suppose there was a time when I thought the same.

We are quiet for a while. How strange it is to be standing in a midnight glade, talking of gods and fate with this boy I used to know.

“And you?” I say at last, breaking the silence. “Are you married?”

He takes a seat on one of the rocks encircling the edge of the pond. I hesitate, then go to sit beside him, near but not too near.

“Perhaps I will be, one of these days,” he says. “Foreigners without prospects are not much in demand.” He shrugs. “But the women seem to like me well enough.”

I catch the glint of humor in his eye. He has not changed entirely, then. There are traces of that boy in him still—laughing, good-natured, a little cocky but none the worse for it.

“Besides,” he says, and his voice grows more serious. “I still have Timon to look after.”

A memory pops up of a skinny little boy with a shock of yellow hair. They called him Finch, like the little birds that arrived in spring to forage in our orchards, rustlings of gold amid the thistles and new leaves. He and Yiannis hardly looked like brothers: Yiannis always in perfect proportion, perfectly composed; Timon awkward and slight and half-grown. I suppose he is different now.

Yiannis clears his throat.

“What you did for me today…is there any chance of your doing the same for him? I can keep an eye on him from where I ride now. But it feels wrong to have a position of greater safety when he is not by my side.”

My cheeks warm again. I should have thought of that.

“I’m sorry. Of course you would want to protect him, too. I will see what I can do.”

I see a weight lift from Yiannis’s shoulders. I remember that smile, quick-moving and bright. He seems to relax for the first time.

“Thank you.”

We sit for a moment in silence, watching the trees, the water. After a while, he glances up at me. “Tell me, do you still practice with your bow and arrow? You were quite the avid archer, once.”

Now it’s my turn to smile. He wasn’t supposed to know about that—nobody was. Father said it lacked propriety for girls to be seen engaging in such sports. But he taught me, all the same, and let me practice in the cow-shed, where no one could see.

“Sometimes,” I say. I do not tell him that I have shot arrows from Eros’s own quiver; that some time ago, I even used one to kill a monster on Mount Olympus. His eyes would grow round at that; he would not know what to say to me. For right now, I’d prefer him to see me the way I was: a girl in a cow-shed, practicing for a life she never thought she’d have.

He nods. “A bow is my weapon of choice, too. For a foot-soldier, they prefer us to excel at close combat, spears and swords and so on. I can do that, but I am better with a bow.”

“And you carry one even now,” I remark—he has one slung over his right shoulder, and a quiver of arrows across his back. I suppose it’s wise, walking these dark hillsides at night.

“Habit.” He shrugs. “I learned some time ago not to go wandering and leave my belongings behind me. Though Spartan soldiers don’t thieve like we refugees did, I’m sure. And besides, I’m not sure these are worth stealing.”

“May I?” I hold out my hand, and he shrugs off the quiver and passes it to me. I take out one of the arrows to have a look. He’s right: the arrows are poorly made army fodder, the wood warped, the fletching cheap. I’ll wager the balance is not what it should be, either. He should have something better than this. What good will his promotion be if his weapons cannot keep him safe?

“Tell me,” he says. “They say we march on Athens, not to attack it, but to come to its aid. Is it true?”

I don’t wonder at his confusion. Athens and Sparta are old rivals. If the men of Sparta have marched this road to Athens before, it would only have been as a hostile force.

I look out at the pool, and watch a small leaf blowing in the night wind, coasting across its surface like a tiny boat. “I believe so,” I say.

“So the armies of Sparta and Athens are to unite.” He frowns, his troubled gaze drifting over the water too. The wine is long gone now, sunk to the bottom, but I can still see the spot where he poured it.

“Whatever enemy approaches, they must be very great.”

I say nothing to that, though I feel his eyes on me. I am not sure what to say. Athena’s scouts had only scant information. Whether the fleet is really Deimos’s, whether it is really so large and terrible, we do not know. But Sparta’s army and Athens’s are spoken of throughout the lands. Surely even with his blood-flowers, Deimos will not have been able to amass anything to rival theirs so quickly. But what do I know?

Yiannis watches my face.

“A true war, then. I wonder how many will come back alive.”

“ You will.” The words drop from my lips before I have time to consider them. “You must.”

He glances at me. I’ve overstepped.

“I mean…there are so few of us left. Sikyon is dust now. There is no one to remember what we once were.”

His eyes linger on mine a moment longer, and he nods.

“Well, I do not intend to die on this outing, Psyche. You may be sure of that. Though I suppose we both have those who will be glad to see us in the Underworld.”

Sadness tugs at me. The list of those we have lost is longer than it should be. He must be thinking the same. He looks pensive then, as though trying to remember something of the distant past.

“Your mother…she was a foreigner, was she not?”

I nod. “From Atlantis.”

“Yes.” His frown deepens. “I do not think they treated her well in Sikyon.” He looks at me. “I didn’t understand then what it means to be an outsider. To have to start over, somewhere new. I suppose nobody did.”

He’s right. They did not approve of her. I used to wonder sometimes, if they had loved her a little better, whether the midwives would have been quicker to arrive that night; whether they might have tried harder to save her. Sometimes I wonder still.

“I am sorry for what happened to you and Timon,” I say. Living as an outsider is a lesson Yiannis has learned the hard way, but that’s not all of it. As mercenaries, war will be his life for a long time.

He shrugs. “The army life isn’t so bad—at least, if you’re a mercenary and not a slave. The Messenians,” he clarifies, seeing my confusion. “You know.”

But I don’t know. Slaves do not serve in the military—at least, I have never heard of it. I have heard of the Messenians, though. They’re the rebels who attacked the temple that night.

“Who are these Messenians?” I say. “I don’t remember hearing of any Messenian war.” If there are slaves, there must have been one. That is how slaves are made.

Yiannis looks surprised at my ignorance. I suppose there is much I do not know of our mortal world. After leaving Sikyon, he has spent his time in a great city. I, on the other hand, have had little contact with others of my kind except on Atlantis, and that was cut off from the rest of the world. I suppose I have not learned as much about my own people as I might have.

“There was no war,” Yiannis says. “The Messenian people are not war spoils.”

I frown. “What are they, then? And how came they to be slaves?”

He shrugs. “They’re farmers, by tradition. Slavery is all they have ever known. Generations upon generations of them.”

I don’t understand. A land of slaves? I have never heard of such a thing.

Yiannis looks away.

“How do you think Sparta feeds its people, when all its men must spend their prime years in the army? The Messenians are field-laborers and slaves, and their land is enslaved too. Their masters are not men, but the Spartan state itself. They cannot be bought, or sold, or freed. They will be born and die on that land, and their children will be slaves, and so will their children’s children.”

The night was dark before, but suddenly it seems even darker. A bleakness settles inside of me. I do not doubt that Yiannis’s account is correct, but it is such a terrible thing. And I had never heard of it till now. It makes me wonder what else I don’t know, what other evils are taking place in the world of men that I have not yet heard of.

“But those people...” I look at Yiannis. “They have done nothing to deserve it.”

He grimaces.

“And those war-captives the army brings home as spoils—you think those men have done something to earn their fate?”

I look away. I hardly know what to answer. He is right, there is unfairness in either case. And yet…is there not something more chilling, some colder brutality, in what he has just described? When Ares or Nemese or even Eros spoke of the Messenians, they spoke of them as rebels, insurgents. And I accepted it. I did not question what they were rebelling against .

“It’s wrong,” I say, and Yiannis looks at me. He does not disagree, but I sense he is impatient with me, too.

“You know our world: it is one built by force, where what is yours is yours only so long as you can defend it. The gods were the first to teach us that lesson.” He glances out over the pool. “What good is it to talk of justice and injustice? We have little power over them anyway. Such things, we’re told, must be in the hands of the gods.” He glances at me. “Though I suppose you would know better than I.”

I look away. I don’t want him to include me in their company. Not after what I’ve just heard.

“It’s late; I must not keep you from your rest.” He stands from the rock and offers me his hand. I hesitate, then take it: it’s cool and calloused, nothing like Eros’s. In the night, he seems to be standing very close. He runs a hand through my hair, pushing it behind my ear, and I feel my breath pinch.

“Perhaps there is another world, somewhere,” Yiannis murmurs, “where the gods willed things differently. And in that world we are still in Sikyon, you and I. And you came to me on our wedding day in your crown of myrtle leaves, and now in the night you lie warm beside me.”

I feel a flush travel over my skin. He conjures the vision well: I can see it too, and it is a strange sensation. I swallow, and take a step back.

“I must go.”

“Goodnight, Psyche.” He bows, his eyes still on mine. I turn and walk away, and this time, he does not ask if we will see each other again. Perhaps because this time, he already senses the answer.