Mestra #5
He had always been good at getting people to give him things.
It was how he’d made his fortune in the first place, piece by piece, one more by one more.
He had not needed all the goddess’s trees for his feasting hall, but he’d chopped them down anyway.
I remembered his face, triumphant, when he came home.
It was the same look he wore now, but without the soft flesh that used to cover it.
All the times I had starved for him, all the times I had scavenged and stolen and fretted, all the times I let myself be sold and pawed.
Yet here he was, his mouth still open. Before the curse we’d been happy, that’s what I’d always told myself.
He’d let me ride with him in his gilded chariot.
He used to wink at me across the room, while his advisors twittered.
I thought of him smiling at me, after I’d won his bets for him.
Such scraps had kept me chewing for years.
But I was no child to him, only the closest piece of meat.
I wanted to laugh, suddenly, at how foolish it all was.
This wreck of a palace. His skinny shins, and jutting skull, gobbling and gobbling.
How he’d tried to scare me with those threadbare myths, the fates of Proteus and Thetis and Metis, who had been deposed and ravished and swallowed.
As if those things had not already happened to me.
And I was the biggest fool of all. I had a gift that gods would envy, and yet I still stood here, wondering if I should let him keep trying to cut it out of me.
I did laugh then, out loud.
“What’s wrong with you?” His hand snapped shut on my wrist. “Hold still.” He lifted the knife, and the fisherman came. My father let go as if I had scorched him.
“Turn back at once. Change.”
“Why? Does he make it harder for you?”
“Mestra! Change!”
So I changed. Oak’s great hoof kicked out and the table flew and broke against the wall. I bucked, trampling the chair. He fled behind the brazier and I stamped at him, grinding my yellow teeth. Then I galloped down the hall and into the darkness.
I almost did not recognize my cousin. Arete was two years taller and her whole shape was different, though her nose was still snub. I felt an odd shock move through me when she stood. I had expected to see the girl I’d been so often. But of course she had grown since then.
She threw her arms around me, heavy and warm. She touched a finger to the place above my elbow where it was shiny pink and sunken. The flesh had come back on me everywhere but there.
“You heard about your father,” she said.
I’d heard. I’d been walking the coast roads, hiring on the boats.
I knew nothing about nets or tides, but I looked as if I did.
A man had called out the news: Erysichthon, King of Thessaly, was dead.
The city lords had found him in his feasting hall, the flesh of both his arms chewed off to the shoulder, and parts of his legs as well.
The man telling the tale made big eyes. “They thought it was an animal, but they found some of his own fingers in his mouth. Can you believe it? He ate himself to death.”
“Wasn’t there a daughter?” I’d said.
“If there was, she’s gone.”
Another sailor had spoken up. “I heard she fled and is marrying a son of Hermes.”
No, said a third. “She was pregnant by Poseidon, and her son will be king.”
“Well,” said a fourth, “some merchant from Kos has been screaming he bought her, and she turned out to be a man.” We’d all had a good laugh at that.
Arete fed me cakes while I told her the rest.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “For what I did to you.”
She shrugged. “It wasn’t me. I was here.”
I hadn’t realized how afraid I’d been that she would hate me for it, all those times my father sold her, all the times I’d hidden in her skin.
But no. She’d been here. Now that she was in front of me, I saw that I hadn’t even made a very good likeness of her.
I’d forgotten the freckles on her wrist, her long narrow toes.
So my father had been right. I could have changed them if I’d wanted.
“You kept him alive a long time,” she said.
Too long, I knew it. I still caught myself sometimes, looking for berry bushes to strip, or unguarded baskets of bread, or men who wanted to buy. I wiped my cheeks with my hand.
“I still don’t really understand why he intervened,” I said.
“You mean the god.”
I nodded.
She was frowning a little. It was an expression I had always loved on her, her mind sifting her thoughts. “Has he appeared to you since? Sent any signs?”
“No,” I said.
“Maybe it wasn’t him. It could have come from someplace else.”
I remembered the first day I’d galloped as Oak. I’d thought: this is not a feeling that can be given. It can only be found.
We were quiet. Outside, in the courtyard, a black poplar shook its leaves in the wind.
“I owe the farmers a cow,” I said. “A real one.”
Arete smiled. “Then you’ll find a way to get one.”
I would, I thought. I was Mestra. Mestra the horse, and Mestra the fisherman, and Mestra the cook and the falcon and the lucky cow, and now Mestra the girl with the scar.
I became a sparrow like Honey, but my belly was plumper, and my wings brighter. I flew to my cousin’s hand.