Chapter Nineteen
“What?” Io’s expression had turned wary. It was very unlike her. She was usually the first person to volunteer to help.
Then I realized why she had reacted that way. She thought I was going to ask her for a favor about her brother.
Like asking her to retract her request that I stay away from him.
“If something happens to me, I need you to promise to do what you can to get the eye of the goddess and then use it to restore Locris. You don’t have to stay, just save it.”
Her face softened. “Of course I would do that for you.”
“I don’t know the right words or what aspect to use but I know you would be able to figure it out.” If anyone had the right kind of magic to fix Locris, it was Io.
“I promise that I will,” she said.
That was a relief. I thanked her. I hoped it would be possible for either her or me to save Locris, but there were so many obstacles in our way. “What if Artemisia destroys the eye?”
“I don’t think that she would,” Io said.
“She’ll be looking for a way to use it. She knows it has power, and she will utilize every weapon at her disposal to annihilate us.
I’m sure Lysimache never told her that it could restore your nation.
Why would she? She wanted Artemisia to wield it against us. ”
The only reason that Artemisia would move against Locris was because of Lysimache. Locris didn’t have enough believers to power the goddess, so she would attack solely because of Lysimache’s personal need for vengeance.
The rest of my adelphia entered the room. Suri closed the door so that we could sit and talk. Io handed me a bowl of dates and nuts and I snacked on them as everyone took their spots.
Io told them what we had figured out about Arion and how his followers were most likely planning to attack his mother’s believers to weaken her.
“Could we invoke him?” Ahyana asked. “Call on him since we have his name? Use him somehow?”
“I can’t imagine that would work,” Io said. “We are followers of his mother. He has no power over us or to give us. For all we know, his abilities might counteract our own because they’re enemies.”
“There’s so much we believed that is turning out not to be what we thought,” Zalira said. “It’s scary how one person could trick so many people. It still baffles me that Lysimache made up the tribute race and convinced everyone that it was the goddess’s will.”
It was something I couldn’t think about too much—all those lives needlessly lost, all those grieving Locrian families.
“It also wrecks my theory that the red-dirt pirates came after Quynh and me in order to offend the goddess. She wouldn’t have been upset if the Locrian maidens had been taken from the race. ”
Zalira shook her head. “The pirates wouldn’t have known that. Your entire nation thought you were doing the goddess’s will—why would it be different anywhere else? No one knew about Lysimache’s lies. So that might still be why they tried to abduct you.”
That was true.
“Speaking of things that Lysimache made up,” Ahyana said, “I was hoping you could tell us a bit more about what happened at the end of your interrogation. Not the part where she died, but what exactly she said. Zalira could only remember the gist.”
I didn’t think I’d ever forget—it was like every word of that conversation had been permanently seared into my soul as some kind of curse.
“At first she told me that she’d kept some rituals, reinstituted old ones that had been done away with, and created new ones.”
“But we don’t know which thing we follow is which,” Ahyana said in frustration.
It was easy to guess which particular rule she was concerned about.
“I asked her what laws and rules she had changed, but she was resisting answering and didn’t say anything coherent.
I specifically asked about priestesses marrying in the past, which she confirmed and seemed to indicate that the rules around it had been changed by different high priestesses, including her.
When I asked her why, she fought not to answer, and what came out was, ‘Because couldn’t risk them,’ and then she slit her own throat so she wouldn’t have to answer. ”
Ahyana frowned. “So Lysimache was willing to tell you every other part of her evil plan, but when it came to priestesses getting married, she killed herself rather than discuss it? That seems significant to me.”
She was right. It did mean something.
“Which way did it get changed?” Io asked. “Is marriage allowed and Lysimache undid it, or was it not allowed and she instituted it and then took it away again?”
Lysimache had mentioned the high priestess who had forbidden them from using magic. We didn’t know who had made changes over the centuries or for what purpose. What was true and what had been tampered with.
“Maybe she changed her mind about it every few hundred years to hurt people,” Zalira offered.
“I can see Lysimache doing that—telling women they could marry when it went against the goddess’s law just to condemn them in the next life,” I said.
“If it was allowed,” Ahyana said, “and Lysimache stopped it, then that means the celibacy vow is fake and shouldn’t be followed.”
There wasn’t anyone in this room who wanted that to be true more than I did. “Lysimache specifically talked to me about my relationship with Xander. She said that if I broke my vow, I couldn’t use the goddess’s power.”
“Did she know at that point that you’d given her a truth serum?” Io asked.
“Yes.”
Io looked troubled. “What exactly did she say?”
“She said, ‘And break your vow? I know you think you can save Locris. Do you really think you can access the goddess’s power if you do not do what you promised her?’”
“I was afraid of that,” Io said with a sigh.
“What?” Ahyana demanded.
“Not that I want to encourage anyone here, but it is possible with the serum to say something that isn’t a lie and sounds like the truth without it actually being true. Lysimache asked questions. She didn’t give answers or definitive statements. She let Lia’s imagination do the work.”
I dropped the date I’d been holding. By the goddess, how had I not realized that before? What did that mean?
Io added, “Someone like Lysimache, who told you that she’d used truth serums many times before, would know how to circumvent it.”
Ahyana instantly stood and after a moment sat back down.
“What was that?” her sister asked.
“I was going to go find Rokh, but I just remembered that he’s on a mission for Xander,” she replied.
My first thought was, What mission? My second was that if Rokh had been in the palace, Ahyana would have found him and broken her vow.
It seemed she had decided the celibacy vow wasn’t real, but I couldn’t take that risk by leaping to the same conclusion.
I didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t.
I’d made that promise to the goddess, and I had to hold to it if I expected her help.
“What did the high priestesses risk by priestesses being married?” Zalira asked, and no one responded.
“There’s no way to even guess,” Io said. “It could be a million different things.”
And now we would never know because Lysimache was gone.
“I wish I had a second aspect,” Ahyana said. “One that could bring the goddess down here so that we could ask her our questions.”
That reminded me of something I hadn’t told my sisters yet. “Xander mentioned something strange to me last night. He said that my eyes turn green in our shared dreams. That it looks the same as when I do magic.”
More silence from the group.
“Do Xander’s eyes turn green in your dreams?” Io asked.
“No.” He always looked like himself. I was the one with changing hair lengths and different-colored eyes.
“Then that means that you’re using the goddess’s power. I would think that if it were due to the goddess creating the dreams, you’d both be affected, and so both of your eyes would turn green. The fact that it only happens to you . . . you’re behind the dreams.”
That couldn’t have been true. “That would mean I have two aspects. That’s not possible.” It was something Maia had emphasized to us repeatedly—that we could connect with only one aspect of the goddess. Fury and controlling dreams? Those were two different aspects.
The only person I could ask about it, Lysimache, had eliminated herself as a possible resource.
“And I’ve never used the words,” I said. “I’ve never called on the goddess before dreaming.”
“Maybe because you’re the savior, it happens naturally. You don’t need to call on her,” Io replied.
“Are you saying there’s two kinds of magic?”
“There might be thousands,” Io said. “We don’t know.”
I thought of Rokh and his shape-shifting. How the women in his family could control the sex of their babies. I hadn’t heard of anything similar in Ilion. There were obviously other types of magic in the world—I just hadn’t realized that we’d be dealing with that personally.
“When did the dreams start?” Zalira asked.
I thought back. “On the Nikos. That was the first time.” I had dreamed of Xander. Or Jason, the name I called him back then.
Was he tied into this somehow? Was he responsible for me gaining this ability? I’d always felt a connection to him. Was this part of it?
“You should try it tonight,” Io said. “Use the aspect and see if you can control what happens.”
To a degree, I already had. There had been the night when I had started to dream of when Haemon left Locris.
Xander had already seen some of my most vulnerable moments, and I hadn’t wanted him to witness that one as well.
I had verbally complained that my dreams were always about my life and not about Xander’s.
And then the dream had shifted and changed and I saw him as a little boy, when he’d found his mother’s body after she killed herself.
Did this mean I was also responsible for the nightmares that had been plaguing me for the last few weeks? Had I somehow sent the message to Xander that he needed to hold me so that I wouldn’t have them? As if my subconscious were manifesting my desire to be close to him?
If that was true . . . I would owe him another apology.
“What is the dream aspect again?” I asked, not sure if I remembered it correctly.
“Nyctipolus. Night walking,” Zalira said.
I had interpreted that aspect literally.
When the goddess had searched for her missing daughter, the sun god had removed himself so that she wouldn’t have any light.
She had carried a torch and walked through the endless night looking for her.
It had never occurred to me that it might be speaking about dreaming.
But that was true—in a sense, I had been night walking.
And night talking and night fighting and night kissing.
“I’ll try it,” I said. It still seemed unbelievable to me.
“You had better hope we can have more than one aspect,” Io said. “Because if we don’t, you won’t have a way to save Locris.”
She was right. I had been operating under the belief that the magic of the eye of the goddess would work without an aspect.
That its power was independent of all this.
But Lysimache had said she’d used her aspect to destroy, which meant that I’d need an aspect to create.
My fury aspect wouldn’t restore anything. It wasn’t meant to.
“I can worry about that later,” I said. Although fixing Locris was my priority, too many other things had to happen first.
Namely, getting the eye back from Artemisia. “If Artemisia is carrying a god-weapon, how are we supposed to stand up against that?” I asked.
“It seems to me that the only way would be to have a god-weapon of our own,” Ahyana observed.
“The savior is supposed to wield the greatest weapon,” Io mused. “It can’t be the eye because Artemisia has it. And I can’t imagine how you’d get it back from her if she has Arion’s hammer.”
Zalira leaned back against the wall. “The goddess had a god-weapon. Her golden sword.”
Maia had spoken about that particular sword on multiple occasions, including during my induction ceremony at the temple. She had said that the goddess had used it, cutting her hand and letting her blood spill upon the earth to create all life.
“Maybe it’s in the temple vault,” I said.
Suri shook her head.
No.
We’d never specifically looked for that item, but considering what it was, I couldn’t blame her for being certain. I guessed something like that would wield a great deal of magic and power. She wouldn’t have been able to miss it. It would have stood out.
“And not in the palace vault either, I’m assuming,” I said.
No.
“The palace vault!” Io jumped up and ran over to her bookshelf. “I completely forgot about this.”
She pulled out a scroll. It was the one Suri had found for me in the palace treasury. It had been labeled “the greatest weapon,” but the scroll was blank. Io had tried various methods to get it to reveal its secrets, but nothing had ever worked.
That was also before we had magic.
She took it over to the table and used full cups of water to weigh down the edges, rolling it out smooth. “It’s a puzzle,” she said. “We just have to solve it.”
I noticed her hands were trembling. Had she been eating and drinking? “Are you all right?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” she said, waving me off. “I think if we all work together on this, we’ll get it. Maybe we could all take a fortification potion tonight and stay up? I’m sure we’ll solve it quickly. Or Suri could use her power to find the secret of how it works!”
Suri shot Io an apologetic look, indicating that her aspect wouldn’t work in this situation.
I wondered why. Perhaps because the information the scroll had wasn’t lost. Or what if it was protected by some kind of enchantment?
“Maybe we should call it a night,” Zalira said, sounding as worried as I felt. “Get some rest.”
“You should all stop worrying,” Io said. “I told you I’m fine. Perhaps we need to do more research. Go down to my mother’s library and have Suri search to see if there’s an answer about the key to unlocking this scroll. We can just—”
She had been reaching for a book on the far end of her table but accidentally knocked over one of the glasses of water holding the papyrus in place.
It soaked the scroll.
“Oh no!” Io said, her hands going to her cheeks. “I didn’t mean to do that! That was so . . .”
Her voice trailed off as we all witnessed the same thing.
The papyrus soaked the water up and lines began to form on the scroll in front of us.