Chapter 41
Medea
The next morning, I found Atalanta waiting for me in the library. She was leaning over a scroll, mouthing the words as she
read. Looking at her there, the sunlight gilding her skin, I felt as though I had come upon a sacred deer grazing in a glen.
A perfect moment, suspended in time.
Then she noticed me and smiled. And the lesson began.
Today, I made her inscribe her own approximations of the words in a beeswax tablet, carefully shaping the swoop of the alpha
and the bounteous curves of the beta.
Atalanta frowned. “They look like the footprints of a drunken chicken,” she said, eyeing her handiwork.
I stifled a giggle. “You’re still learning, it’s only to be expected. Soon you will have those chickens marching in orderly
lines.” It was true—Atalanta had the shaky, awkward handwriting of a child, but she was making quick progress.
“You’re very kind,” Atalanta said, tilting her head as she looked at me. “Everyone thinks you are a terrifying witch, but
really you have a gentle heart.”
“It’s the least I can do after you showed such patience while I threw that spear around,” I replied.
The spear lessons, which had been followed so quickly by the revelation of Procris’s death. The room darkened as a cloud crossed
the sun, and I regretted my words bitterly.
Atalanta put down the stylus, not taking her eyes off the marks in the beeswax.
“You asked me before,” she began, looking at the shaky letters as if it hurt too much to look at me, “who Procris was. And I told you that she was everything, but that is not the whole of it. Procris was the first human being I ever knew besides the hunters who raised me. She was the reason I knew of your goddess Hekate—her mother was a priestess. Procris was my hunting partner and my companion and . . . my lover.”
I felt as if I had been plunged into water that was both hot and freezing all at once. “Oh” was all I managed.
“We roamed the forests together and did the things that Artemis’s nymphs do during the nights of the new moon. I loved her.
But Procris had a husband, and one day she left me to go back to him. That was the man you saw in your vision, the one who
killed her.
“So I am glad that you have taught me how to read and write. If anyone leaves me again, at least I will know what they wanted
to say.”
My mind was a whirl of emotion. I wanted to comfort Atalanta, to take her in my arms, but I did not dare to touch her. “Now
I understand why you don’t see any need for a husband,” I joked, trying to offer some levity.
Atalanta’s gray eyes flicked toward me, their depths intensified by the band of sunlight in which we sat. “Is it really so
very strange? Your own aunt propositioned me.”
“Don’t remind me,” I replied, shuddering.
“Circe is a goddess and can do what she likes. It’s different for the rest of us.
I always expected to be married off to some prince and have his children.
But there was a priestess I knew once named Melanippe, she was very beautiful and—oh, why am I telling you all this!
?” I threw up my hands in frustration. “There’s no point in thinking about it.
And how would it work, anyway, with two women?
How would they have children? How would they have sex? ”
I immediately wished that I could eat my words, but a grin cracked Atalanta’s face.
“How do two women have sex?” she echoed in a voice like honey, the twang of her Arcadian accent giving her words a languid
air. “Any way they like,” she finished.
The sunlight congealed. The world seemed to contract and expand, weighted with possibility. I smoothed my skirts awkwardly,
remembering my sudden urge the day before to kiss Atalanta.
A green shoot of curiosity unfurled inside me. I want to know, I thought. Good girls waited until their wedding night for sex. But Atalanta hadn’t, and perhaps I didn’t need to either.
The air of the library shifted, crackling with invisible lightning. Atalanta’s stool creaked as she leaned toward me.
I cannot say what might have happened if Jason had not appeared at that very moment, skidding to a halt in front of the library
door.
“We’ve done it!” he called. “The Harpies are gone!”