Chapter Five
It’s nearing dusk—the day has passed in preparations—and the silvery light glints off Eros’s new plate of armor. I hate it: I hate the greaves, the helmet, the sword, the spear. I hate every shimmer and gleam of it.
“Try to understand,” he says.
“What?” I demand. “What should I understand? That your desire to please your father, to please Zeus, to please every demand from these gods who will never be satisfied—that all of it is more important than us ? Than me ?”
“We cannot all act as units of one,” Eros says. “If everyone acted only according to his desires, his priorities, there would be chaos. Humans may not yet have learned how to act as the ants do, as the bees do—but do not dismiss me for acting for something bigger than myself.”
“You don’t get to do this!” I seethe. “You don’t get to call me selfish! Not when you’re abandoning someone you claim to love, and doing it out of an addiction to praise and glory.”
His eyes spark with an emotion I can’t name. It’s not anger. Disappointment, perhaps. Pain. His eyes grow darker; the stars in them seem to wink out.
“Psyche, I have not forgotten Atlantis. I have not forgotten where ambition almost got me. But that is not what I seek now. Look at me.” He takes my chin in his hand. “As long as my brother has that blade, our whole world is in danger. Not just the world of the gods: our world. He will desecrate Olympus, and let no peace bloom in your mortal lands. And he will seek out his vengeance on us, Psyche, on you and me, till end of days.”
My heart beats faster. He’s wrong. At least, I need to believe he’s wrong.
“You are no war god,” I protest.
We are in a quiet corner of the garden; the other two have left us alone for the little time that’s left. Beside me, under an olive tree, Ajax whinnies, stamps his foot.
Eros moves a warm palm against my face. I don’t want to look at him; I don’t want to let his gaze inside of me. He has a way of making me believe things—and tonight, I’m not sure I can afford to believe them.
“I am half war god,” he corrects me. “But I am a better one than my brothers, and here is why: because I understand love, too.” He fixes his eyes on me. “I mean to be clever about this, Psyche. I do not mean to put myself in harm’s way.”
“Then don’t,” I sigh.
He takes my chin in his hand.
“I won’t. I have you to come back to.”
They are seductive words, but they are only words. I look away, out toward the center of the Olympus acropolis—the glistening towers that catch the last of the soft evening light. A wave of pain goes through me.
“Why did they raise you like this?” I say. “Why did they raise you and your brothers to hate each other?”
Eros breaks our gaze. He knows what I mean. His parents, Ares and Aphrodite, have a lot to answer for. Deimos and Phobos may be monsters, but who made them that way?
“I don’t think they meant to raise us as rivals,” Eros says at last. “But they divided us from each other early on. The twins went to my father, and I…” He shrugs; I know that story well enough. How his mother coached him in her image. How she demanded his loyalty in all things. How she has never forgiven him for his disloyalty, and now, after the death of her firstborn, never will.
It should not be like this. How is it that the gods have all the time in the world, and yet they cannot seem to mend the harm they have caused each other?
And not just to each other , I remind myself. The gods may blame me for their losses, but I blame them for mine. The catalog of ruin is never far from my mind: Sikyon; Atlantis; all the places I have called home. All the people I have loved.
All except the one who stands before me now, and he is waiting to leave me.
He touches his hand to my temple, as though he’s about to speak some spell, something to hush my thoughts. But I don’t want them hushed. I want to feel every second of this pain, and he knows it. He rests his hand there a moment longer, brushes back the hair from my face, and lets it fall.
I’m going to make the world safe for you . The words are unspoken, but I hear them anyway. I only wish I could believe in them.
“I’ll see you soon,” he says instead.
I watch him turn and walk away from me, and feel a light die out in my chest.
*
“Are you hungry?” Athena says, but I shake my head. The gods eat only for pleasure, not because they need to, and their food is too rich, too exquisite, for an untrained mortal palate. It’s a long time since I ate such food. Besides, I am not hungry tonight. The image of Eros walking away from me, the olive branches closing around him, finally blocking him from view, takes up all the room in my body.
Athena shrugs, and her eyes settle on me with unabashed frankness.
“So…the mortal girl who caught the eye of the God of Love. Many have been curious about you.”
I frown. That doesn’t sound like a good thing.
“Were you curious about me?” I say, and she smiles, but not with her eyes.
“Curiosity is a distraction,” she says.
This god’s blood runs cold, I realize—cool as her silvery torchlight, as the stone tile underneath my feet. Perhaps that’s just as well. It’s the passionate gods who have the cruelest whims, who rain down fury without a second thought, irate over some perceived insult or jealous fancy. But even so…
She’s studying me. That cool smile once again.
“You do not like us much, do you?”
I blink at the directness of her words. But so be it. If she is challenging me, I will not be cowed.
“What cause,” I say, “have any of you given me to like you?” I am almost surprised at my own audacity. But apparently, Athena is not.
“Well, you are no fool, at least.” She looks me over once more. “I just hope you do not make one of my cousin.”
She shows me through the long halls, to a room she says is to be mine. The rooms are stately, towering in height, with the cool smell of stone. I have been in a god’s palace before—I spent many weeks in the palace Eros made himself, though that one was not on Olympus, but rather in a half-realm between the mortal world and this one. Those rooms were opulent and luxurious, full of marble and gold, the softest of silks, the most dazzling of tapestries. It’s different here: the ceilings tower just as high but the walls are bare stone, with only the shimmer of quartz veins running through them. There are no tapestries, no paintings, almost no ornamentation at all, and instead of richly dyed silk, there is pale linen. The sconces in the stone walls are simple and uncarved, and the torches nested there throw out a clear, cool light, silvery as water. The stone floors are cold under my feet.
In Eros’s palace, I was never cold.
*
I wake in the middle of the night. High ceilings, pale linen, white moonlight. Silence.
I can’t sleep.
My surroundings, and this sense of foreboding, of being trapped: it’s taking me back to those early days in Eros’s palace. Days when I did not trust him, when I did not trust myself. I was far from home then too. I have come a long way since those days—except that tonight, it feels like I have not come very far at all. As if, instead of more answers, I have only gained more questions on the way.
More questions, and more losses .
Where is Eros right now? Athena said that Ares had decamped to the mortal city of Sparta, where he rules as patron god. I suppose if he is there still, Eros will have found him by now.
God of war. What good has ever come from war? But then, Aphrodite is the god of love, and I have little praise for her, either. And yet somehow between them, they managed to produce that being who holds my heart above all others.
And now Ares wants him at his side. For aeons, Ares was accompanied by his other sons, Phobos and Deimos, the twins that were bred for blood and battle…but now one is dead, and the other disowned. I suppose that’s why Ares shows such an interest in his youngest son now. Why suddenly, after never having taken his part before, he wants Eros at his side.
They are fickle, these gods.
Outside, Athena’s orchards are dark. I leave my bed, and lean out the window. Only the moonlight and the tremor of wind prompts a flash of silver here and there, and the rustle of leaves from the olive trees. I strain to hear any voices in the night—the owls and foxes, the lizards and insects, anything that makes the dark its home—but if they are speaking, I cannot hear it.
Sometimes, in the woods outside our little cabin, I’d catch the thought of a bird flitting in the trees, or of a fox or a field mouse surprised in the woods: not just sounds, as others hear, but words , thoughts, feelings. But even then, the voices didn’t seem as clear as they had been before: less in focus, somehow, more like a song I knew once but had started to forget. Eros has seen my gift at work when it was stronger than it is now. It is not a thing an ordinary mortal should be able to do, he says, and despite myself, I know it’s true.
The night before Atlantis was destroyed, my mother came to me in a dream and told me the truth about my father—part of the truth, at least. That the man who raised me, who took care of me all my life; who treated me, much to my sister’s fury, as his favorite: that he was not the one who sired me. That there is something in my blood that is, after all, not quite mortal.
Can such a thing die, I wonder? Can it wither from disuse, just as some part of Eros has been withering?
I picture Deimos, angry and armed, somewhere out there in the dark. Marking time for the revenge he wants. Can they really expect me to wait here patiently while Eros confronts him alone? And yet, what are my choices? I am powerless against the likes of Deimos, especially now, without my knife.
The knife was my mother’s, an heirloom, but we knew nothing of its powers. Only when I was on Olympus last time did it emerge what the blade could truly do. I do not know who forged it, or how. Eros speaks of three famous blades, forged by three brothers. The Cyclops brothers were cousins to the gods, and lived on Atlantis, where they kept their adamantine ore hidden deep beneath the earth, under a great volcano. They forged the blades for three other brothers, many aeons ago—Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, who wielded the blades in the great rebellion, the war against the Titans. It’s said that Hades’s and Poseidon’s blades have both been lost to time, disappearing either in the great battle itself or in the long years that followed. Zeus’s blade, the First-Forged—the one Deimos now wields—is the only one whose whereabouts is still known.
But I wonder if there were not others made in secret, by the Cyclopes or by other smiths. Perhaps, for all we know, there are many scattered about these lands, like the one my mother came to own. But if so, it seems they lie undiscovered…and for now, Deimos has the most powerful one of them all.
I turn my back on the window and the white moon outside, but its light still dances on the stone tiles, shimmering a path out my bedroom door, into the rooms beyond. Sleep will not be coming for me, not tonight. I follow the moonlight out into the maze of rooms this goddess calls home.