1. The Satyr’s Advice #2
The woman I’d heard earlier stood near the bow, her arms tightly crossed.
She was silver-haired and pale, and her skin carried a glow that reminded me of the asphodels.
The moment she saw me, something in her expression shifted.
A flicker of surprise crossed her face, as if she’d been expecting something different. Perhaps… worse?
Next to her stood a massive, hooded figure. Ancient coins drifted in slow orbits around him, and his eyes glowed with blue fire. He held a pole the length of a ship’s mast in one hand. When he turned toward me, the coins moved with him.
“You are death-touched,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“So I’ve been told.” I stopped at the water’s edge. “And you are… Charon.”
“Indeed.” He tilted his hooded head. “I am the ferryman of the dead. And you have walked a long way to ask a question you already know the answer to.”
“I like to be sure.” My legs remained steady beneath me, which still felt like a small miracle after months of barely being able to stand. “A satyr in my village told me the city on the other side takes women like me.”
“Takes is perhaps… a poor word.” The woman smiled at me, a small twist of lips that somehow made her look more alive. “We’re welcomed on the other side of the lake. We have a chance.”
It was almost too good to be true. My skepticism must have shown, because the woman kept speaking.
“Perhaps you feel afraid or alone now. But you should know… my name is Medea, and my touch used to kill everything it came in contact with. Flowers, animals, people. Anything living that brushed against my skin withered and died.”
I stared at her hands. They were steady and uncovered. They looked completely harmless. Just hands. “What changed?” I asked. “What did you find there?”
“A home.” Her hand drifted to her chest, the kind of gesture that came from habit. “People who look at me and don’t see a weapon. Someone who touches me and doesn’t—”
She stopped herself, and the softness that crossed her face finished the thought better than any words could have.
I thought about what Silenus had told me, about the pale girl who’d run away from the Argonauts. This was her, the woman who’d guided the Blight toward Colchis. But it didn’t matter, not really.
“Medea, I’m sure she’s heard enough.” Charon’s pole scraped against the deck with a low grinding that cut through the quiet. “We are not here to trade histories.”
“I know.” Medea didn’t look away from me. “But she needs to know it’s worth it before you tell her the price of the Bride Market.”
My breath caught, and I stared at them in disbelief. “A Bride Market? But how?” My village had been too small for monsters to pay it much heed, and the few woodland clans that neighbored it had never shown interest in our people. And yet, the Blighted Ones had a bride market.
Charon and Medea didn’t answer, and that was when I knew. Whatever I needed to pay wouldn’t be gold. “What’s the price of entry?”
“A memory,” Charon replied, as relentless as the Thorn-Sickness. “A happy one.”
A happy memory. The words sat in my chest like a jagged stone. I had expected him to ask for pain, because I had that in abundance. Happy memories were a different currency entirely. I had been running dangerously short of them long before the Sickness took root.
“I don’t have many of those left,” I admitted. “I don’t think I ever did.”
“One is enough,” Medea assured me. She said it softly, but there was a weight behind the gentleness. “It was enough for the others who came before you.”
The others who’d come before me. If there had been others, and if they’d found a home just like Medea had said, surely I could also do it. “Do I choose which one? Which memory?”
Charon shook his head. “No. The lake decides. It makes its own choices and follows its own currents.”
The water lapped against the shore. I stared at the dark surface and tried to imagine what the lake would reach for if I let it. “And if what it takes is something I can’t afford to lose?”
“Then you’ll gain something else in its place,” Charon offered, unmoved by my hesitation. “Every woman who has knelt on this shore has asked me the same thing. Every one of them boarded my barge.”
“Is that supposed to be comforting?”
“I do not deal in comfort. I deal in passage.”
Medea touched my shoulder. Her bare hand rested against my skin, warm and comforting. She wasn’t the woman who’d presumably brought the Blight upon Colchis. Not anymore.
“He’s terrible at reassurance,” she said. “But he’s right. The price for what Asphodelia offers is high… but it is worth it.”
Worth it. I wasn’t sure what to think. I didn’t know what to believe, what to make of any of it. But what choice did I have, really?
True, I could stay here. I could sit down on the wet stone and let the Blight keep the Sickness at bay until my body decided it was done fighting. The asphodels would keep me company. Somewhere on the road, Fera would carry on without me, and that would be that.
But I’d decided when I left my cottage that something was still alive inside me. I’d decided when I gambled everything on the word of a one-eyed satyr that I still had a future.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll find a happy memory… somehow.”
That was the only thing I needed to say. Medea closed her hand around my wrist and pulled me aboard. Charon planted his pole against the deck. The barge shifted beneath us, barely a tremor on the still water, and began to move.
The shore fell away behind us. The mist closed over the asphodels and the rocky slope I’d walked down. At last, all of it disappeared into the fog as if it had never been there at all, and the lake swallowed us whole.