Chapter Twenty-Eight
On the path above the vigil house I get a clear view of the sea once more, turbulent and streaked with white. Every now and then I see the flash of a hull—a capsized ship. They’re still distant, but it seems to me the fleets are closer than they were: Poseidon’s forces have pushed closer to our shores.
I call Dimitra’s name softly as I pass by the dark spread of trees, but of course, there’s no answer. I could almost believe I invented her visit from last night. Almost.
Is she safe; can she trust Poseidon as she thinks she can?
Can any of us trust anyone the way we think we can?
I round the last bend and see the spread of temples and the wide, bare summit with the silk pavilions of our encampment. A fire blazes once again, and two figures are silhouetted against the flames. Eros and Nemese. They’re facing each other, sitting close together. She has a vial in her hand, and she dabs something from the vial on her fingers and touches it to his temples, rubbing it in. I’m not sure from here, but it seems to me his eyes are closed. He looks so peaceful, soothed by her touch.
I stand fixed to the spot. My heart seems to have stopped beating, and yet my chest is burning. They look beautiful together: right, like they belong.
“They loved each other well, once.”
I stifle a sound of surprise, and turn to find Ares standing beside me. He’s watching me—watching me watching them. I try to mask all the things I’m feeling, but I’m not sure I have that kind of self-control. He glances back toward the two figures by the fire.
“Do you know how long their union lasted?”
I don’t answer. It was a long time ago , Eros said. But what does that mean, to a god?
“Many mortal lifetimes,” Ares says. His tone is offhand, but there’s nothing offhand about the way my chest closes in. Lifetimes . What can Eros and I have, compared to that? Even if he loves me until my dying day, it will pale in comparison. She will always have had him for longer.
“See how she heals him,” Ares says. His voice is warm and approving, drawing my gaze back toward the two figures by the fire, almost against my will. I watch her hands move to Eros’s temples again, another dab from the vial. This must be the elixir he spoke of. I thought he simply drank it.
Ares’s mouth twists. “Perhaps you did not realize what your little mortal life was doing to him? How fast he was fading, how badly he was sickening?”
I knew , I don’t say. I only pretended not to.
“If I take him as my true heir,” Ares goes on, “all my temples will bear his name. They will carry his likeness next to mine. In time, he will be fully restored. He will be all that he ever was. Stronger, even.”
I swallow. Eros, a war god? A permanent arrangement? The thought appalls me. But then…what is his alternative? Without some path back to mortal worship, it seems he must grow ill and live in pain.
Perhaps, if he becomes a war god, he can bring change. Perhaps war can become something better, less savage, if he shares its command. I try to convince myself, even as my heart sinks.
Ares keeps his hard gaze on me.
“But,” he continues, “I will not enthrone a son with a mortal consort.” He looks at me, checking to make sure I’ve understood. Of course I’ve understood. I stare at him.
“You have said he sickens without Olympus. That he is fading. And yet you would deny him what he needs to recover—all because of me?” My skin stings with the rawness of the words. I’m flushed, but I don’t know if it’s from anger or humiliation. “Gods have taken mortal consorts before. What is it to you, if this is your son’s choice?”
Ares raises his eyebrows.
“What is it to me? It is my bloodline. My eldest son is dead. My second must rot in Tartarus, if I do my job well. I must look to my youngest son for heirs. I will not have him waste his seed on mortals.”
My cheeks burn.
Waste .
That is what I am to this creature. That is what my children would be. A waste .
“Understand,” Ares says slowly, “it is not about you. Like belongs with like, that’s all. In the end, the differences between you and my son…they can only bring pain.”
“Mortality brings pain,” I retort. “Not our differences.” But his words have struck home and he knows it. How can I pretend he’s wrong? Mortality is the difference between us.
“I will make you an offer,” Ares says, his voice calm. “Return to your world and leave my son be. I will ensure you the most comfortable of lives—a life of glory, even.”
The insult of his words wakes me up, letting my own words flow at last.
“You cannot bribe me,” I seethe. “I know you have never taken a wife, so perhaps you do not understand, but the vow I took was sacred. Neither bribes nor threats can sever it.”
His eyes grow colder.
“I have not threatened you yet, girl. When I do, you will know it.”
His words hang darkly in the air, but a sound from the fire makes me turn. It’s Eros, walking toward us. He frowns as he draws closer.
“Psyche—you were gone a long time. You know it is not safe to wander far.”
As I look into his golden eyes, I hardly know what to think. They are so grave; I see concern there. But then I think of what I just witnessed by the fireside.
“You did not seem particularly distressed by my absence,” I say. My voice is raw as I turn away from him and from his father. Away from the war out at sea, from all of this. But I have only gone a few paces when there are footsteps at my back.
“Psyche.” Eros grips my arm, draws me toward the doorway of our tent. “Don’t run from me.”
The air inside the tent is warmer, and yet I still feel cold. The breeze makes the walls shiver and ripple, and a dark gap flickers where the fabric meets the grass—but it is not the wind that’s making me feel this chill.
“You’ll always belong to Olympus,” I say. It comes out of me, a burst of words I had not meant to utter. He stares at me, not understanding.
“You need it,” I say, my voice quieter now, but no less raw. “You belong there, you belong to them. But I don’t belong there. I can’t, and I never will.”
He is silent a while before he looks up.
“You belong with me, Psyche. You cannot doubt that.”
“I cannot heal you,” I say. “I cannot help you. She can. But I cannot.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he says softly. A wave of frustration wells inside me.
“Of course it matters! I can’t live in your world—and you can’t live in mine.”
We both know I am the one who has divided him from his mother and his clan, and from the mortal worship he once had. I have deprived him of his strength. If he doesn’t resent me yet for it, one day he will.
And me? The mortal children he refuses to let me bear? Maybe I, too, will grow to resent him.
He looks at me, and his eyes draw me in, two pools of infinity. Time is the enemy, I think to myself. Time is what divides us, and makes us see the world differently. And time will trick us, too, in other ways. I look away, feeling miserable.
“You’ll grow tired of me,” I say. He shakes his head.
“You’ll say you won’t, but you will,” I insist. “I’ll change. The pretty girl you saw will age.”
He puts out a hand, grips my arm, making me look him in the eyes. He speaks slowly, carefully, as if he needs me to hear every word.
“I cannot slow time, Psyche,” he says. “But I have my own version of it. Do you understand? I am not imprisoned in the present moment, as mortals are.” He runs a hand against my cheek, letting his touch flood me.
“When you are old, I will look at you and still see the girl on the rock that day. You need not grow old in my eyes, even if you grow old to the mortal world.”
I look away. I want to believe him. I do. But what if Ares is right? A mortal and an immortal…There can be no peaceful ending for us. Time will pass, and I’ll belong with him even less than I do now. Less and less each year.
“Come here,” he says, and pulls me to him, pressing his warm lips to mine. And then to my cheekbone, and the softest parts of my throat. As if he can banish every doubt, every darkness, every shadow. And at least for a little while longer, I’d like to believe he can. So I turn my throat to him, letting his warmth flood me. Letting his hunger become my own. Letting his hands burn their track over my skin as my chiton slips free.
*
In my dream I’m standing on a great shoreline. It seems to stretch infinitely in every direction, as though the world itself can’t tell where the sea ends and the sky begins. The sand beneath my feet is damp, though I see no waves. Air clings to my skin like mist.
Ahead of me, three figures are waiting: Three women, sitting side by side. The one on the left, the young one, glances at me. The others pay me no heed, busy with their work. The young woman has a spindle between her fingers, so white it seems to be made of bone. The thread it casts is fine as a spider-web. She is beautiful; her thick hair flows behind her as she turns to look at me, heavy as strands of seaweed caught in the tide.
The woman in the middle wears a red veil like a bride, and it ripples in the wind. I cannot see her face, only her hands that hold the silvery thread. She feels along its length as a blind person might feel, testing it, measuring it.
And on her other side is the third woman, with a face older than time. She holds a blade in her right hand, glinting darkly. It looks like a blade I know. When she looks at me her eyes are endless, reflecting nothing back.
“You’re late,” she says.
A whisper of dread courses through me. These are the Fates, weavers of the thread of life. And what they weave, they also sever.
“You’ve brought them,” says the young girl, nodding past me. I turn and see others on the shore—my mother, standing silent, her dress heavy with damp at the hem, and a few paces from her my sister, her hair tangled as though woken from a storm. The air is damp but my mouth feels dry. You should not be here , I want to call to them, but the words don’t come. Then I remember that my mother is dead. Although perhaps in this place, she is not yet dead.
I want to keep them at bay, tell them not to come closer. Perhaps somehow they hear it: they just stand there on the shore, hair and dresses billowing. Watching me.
“What do you want from us?” I demand, turning back to the three sisters.
The youngest glances up at me and tugs at her thread, looping it tighter around the spindle. “It’s not what we want,” she said. “It’s what each of you chooses to give.”
And then the sea is rising as if from nowhere, creeping upward, covering my ankles, then my knees, and then everything, even the sky, until there is only a single vast, gray expanse, a world swallowed whole.