Chapter Thirty-Nine
I didn’t know whether it was a good thing or a bad one that the sphinx knew who I was. My instincts urged me to flee from this giant predator, who in addition to her tail, also had fangs like a snake.
Something Io had failed to mention.
Was I supposed to answer?
Breath rasped out of my chest, rendering me unable to speak.
The sphinx didn’t seem to notice. “I have five riddles for the five acolytes of the earth goddess. Each must be answered correctly. If you give the wrong answer, my sister, The Devourer, will awaken.”
I looked at the statue on the left. Its eyes were closed, but I assumed that was who the sphinx was talking about.
Anything called The Devourer had to be horrifyingly bad.
Which the sphinx confirmed by saying, “She has a fondness for human flesh and hasn’t fed in many millennia.”
I had to swallow down the knot of fear that had formed in my larynx.
“You will be given one minute to answer each riddle. If you have no answer by then, it will be considered wrong and you will perish,” the sphinx said.
Couldn’t anything about this place be easy?
“My first riddle is this: What is it that you ought to keep after you have given it to someone else?”
My mind had gone completely blank. All I could think about was that a giant rock-monster statue was going to eat us if we couldn’t answer riddles.
“Love?” Ahyana whispered, and I shook my head. That didn’t seem right.
Zalira kept her voice low, too. “What about money?”
“It’s your word,” Io said, making eye contact with me. “You ought to keep your word after you have given it to someone else.”
She was answering the question, but she also meant it as a rebuke to me. I sensed that it was the correct response.
“Dea’s savior, you will speak for your adelphia,” the sphinx instructed.
“Your word,” I said, my heart beating wildly. What if it was wrong?
“Correct.” Was it my imagination or did the sphinx seem disappointed? “In the form of a fork or a sheet, I hit the ground. And if you wait a heartbeat, you can hear my roaring sound. What am I?”
“Lightning,” Zalira immediately told me. “It can be in a fork or a sheet, hits the ground, and the thunder after is the roaring sound.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Absolutely. I feel it.”
Trusting my sister, I gave the sphinx “lightning” as the answer.
“Correct. Found by the wise, lost by the weak, broken, not damaged, carried, never touched, sweet, not tasted, unique, but universal. What am I?”
Could I ask her to repeat what she’d just said? There had been so much. The riddles seemed to be getting harder.
“I have no idea,” Io said, looking panicked.
Ahyana’s hands went to her sword hilt. “Neither do I.”
I was fairly certain we would not be able to fight our way out of this if The Devourer elected to eat us.
That didn’t mean I wouldn’t try.
Suri tapped on my arm. She put her hand against her throat and then raised it up. She opened her mouth and made her fingers wiggle, as if something were coming out of it.
“Your voice?” I asked.
Yes.
“What if that’s not right?” Zalira asked.
“You will give me your answer,” the sphinx instructed.
We had nothing else but Suri’s guess. “A voice,” I said as I moved my feet into a fighting stance.
The sphinx paused. “Correct.”
“Thank the goddess,” Io said with a sigh, and it was a sentiment that we all shared.
“For our ambrosia we were blessed by Dea with a sting of death, though our might, to some, is jest, we have quelled the dragon’s breath. What are we?”
“What could quell a dragon’s breath?” I asked.
Everyone went silent.
“Maybe it doesn’t mean an actual dragon. There is a flower called dragon’s breath,” Io offered.
“And ‘ambrosia’ is another word for nectar or honey. Sting of death? Flowers? The sphinx is talking about bees.” Ahyana’s eyes shone with excitement.
“What is your answer?” the sphinx asked.
“Bees,” I said.
Another long pause that made me feel like my heart would give out. “Correct.”
Four questions down. I thought of the fact that each one had seemed to be specific in some way to one of my sisters. Suri, who didn’t speak; Io, who was upset about my word not being kept; Zalira and Ahyana with their aspects.
That meant the next question was for me.
What if I didn’t know the answer?
“I shine brightest in the dark. Though I’m there I can’t be seen. To possess me costs you nothing, and without me you’ll lose everything. What am I?”
“Air?” Zalira offered.
“That doesn’t shine in the dark,” Ahyana said.
“If it’s cold, you can see your breath. Air doesn’t cost anything and you’d lose everything without it,” her sister countered.
Io began to fidget. “Maybe it’s light. It shines bright in the dark.”
“Or fire,” Ahyana added.
I looked to Suri and she shrugged at me, the worry evident on her face.
This was about something that had to do with me.
Goddess help me, I silently prayed.
Xander’s face filled my mind. And the memory was from last night, when we had been talking in the tent.
When he realized that I didn’t love someone else, that I had adored the present he had given me, when I had cuddled up next to him on the floor even though I hated sleeping there, what I had seen in his eyes before we had been interrupted.
“You’re almost out of time,” the sphinx said, and the edges of her mouth curled up into a feral grin, her fangs showing.
We heard a rumbling, rock-groaning sound from her sister, as if The Devourer intended to wake. Golden light started to appear from the slits in her eyelids.
“Lia! What do we do?” Io shrieked.
“Hope,” I told the sphinx, my heart beating as loudly as thunder in my chest. “The answer is hope.”
The sounds of rocks moving immediately stopped, and the golden light went out of The Devourer’s eyes.
I nearly fell to my knees in relief. We had done it.
Io hugged me fiercely and the others joined in.
“That is correct. You may pass,” the sphinx told us.
I walked out in front of the sphinx first and stood there, waiting for my sisters to go by. When they were safely at the other end of the room, I would join them. I needed to stay here to make sure that nothing happened. For all I knew the sphinx might be a liar. I wasn’t going to take that chance.
The door appeared on the far wall, indicating that we could leave. I had started to head toward my sisters when the sphinx spoke again. “Dea’s savior.”
I came to a stop.
“You have many,” she said.
“I have many what?”
“I do not answer questions; I only ask them.” She closed her eyes and went back to sleep.
Hurrying across the room, I joined my adelphia, and we went through the door.
We went into the hallway and I thought about my riddle. There had been a message there for me. Because in a way, I had given up hope. I expected to die. I was planning for it, figuring out contingencies for how to help the people I loved after I was gone.
I needed to have hope again. To think that I could survive and find a way to make things work out.
As the sphinx had said, I would lose everything without it.
“What do you think the sphinx meant?” Zalira asked me. “When she said you have ‘many.’”
“The first thing I thought of was that I had many people that I love who love me, but that can’t be it. I already know that. She was saying it as if it were something I wasn’t aware of.”
“Perception,” Io called out from the other end of the hallway, reading the sign.
“I want to say it can’t be as bad as the others, but I feel like that would be tempting fate,” I said as we joined her.
Io opened the door and we all went inside. There was a long table filled with different types of treasure. We walked over to the table and saw another sign.
Choose the goddess’s greatest treasure and place it on the altar.
I turned to see that there was a stone altar near the far wall.
Ahyana sighed. “I want to ask what will happen if we pick the wrong one, but I think we already know. Certain death.”
“Which one do we choose?” Zalira asked as she started to walk the length of the table. “How do we perceive what’s right?”
“Suri? Are you sensing anything?” I asked.
She shook her head. I had hoped her magic might be the one that actually worked since we were in the earth right now, but I supposed that would have been too easy.
I started looking at what was laid out on the table. There were elaborately decorated swords that had jewels in their hilts and blades made of the purest and brightest steel. I saw Zalira grab one.
Ahyana reached for a golden bird automaton that tweeted and flapped its wings when she picked it up. I could hear the gears whirring and clicking.
“I think this is aether,” Io said, holding up a vial of silver sparkles. “This comes from her daughter. This must be the goddess’s greatest treasure.”
“Maybe.” I wasn’t sure, though. There were so many different kinds of valuables laid out—some that were entirely unfamiliar to me. Where had they come from?
Something glinted at the far end of the table from underneath a cloth and it caught my attention. I went down to see what it was, and when I lifted the cloth, I gasped.
It was the eye of the goddess.
Here.
“Look!” I called out.
“Is that the eye of the goddess?” Io asked.
“It can’t be,” Zalira said. “Artemisia had the only one left.”
“But what if there’s another eye? For all we know, the goddess made a thousand eyes. This might be one that she kept in this cave.” For me.
This might be the greatest weapon.
And it would help me restore Locris.
“It’s obvious that this is her greatest treasure,” I told the others and began to walk toward the altar.
Zalira grabbed me by the arm and made me stop. “Hold on, what if you aren’t right?”
“Why wouldn’t I be right?”
“Because despite what you think, you don’t know everything,” she snapped back at me. “Did you even see what I have in my hands? It’s a golden sword. What if this is Dea’s golden sword?”
“That’s not her sword,” I said. Zalira was behaving so foolishly right now.
“You don’t know that. What if it is? And what if we made the mistake of leaving it behind and got kicked out of this room and couldn’t go back and get it?”
“If you’d actually been paying attention, you would see that this is the fourth room and everything has been about fives. Of course there’s going to be a fifth room, and that’s where the actual greatest weapon will be!” I shouted back.
“The bird automaton is representative of the life the goddess created. This must be her most prized possession,” Ahyana said.
“That’s not what the sign says,” Io told her. “It’s her greatest treasure, not her most prized possession.”
“How do we know that? We’re just supposed to take your word for it?” Ahyana retorted.
“You wouldn’t have to if you knew how to read!” Io yelled.
“It’s the eye of the goddess and I’m putting it on the altar and taking it with us,” I told them.
Zalira again got in my way. “Why do you think you get to make all the decisions?”
“Because I’m your queen. Move aside!”
She pointed the golden sword at me. “Stop telling us what to do!”
The four of us started yelling at each other and reaching for our own weapons. None of them were going to order me around when I so clearly had the eye of the goddess and—
“Stop!”
We all turned to see Suri staring at us, her chest heaving.
“Stop,” she repeated.