21
Once August kisses his palm for good luck and blows it away, he and I put a palm to the portal. It repels his and swallows mine. I meet his blue eyes. “Guess that means it’s my turn.”
“We can win,” he rasps, squeezing my hand in time with each word.
I swallow my fear. “We can win.”
A thousand more words and wishes pass between us, our mouths never moving as he grabs my free hand and doesn’t let go until he’s forced to.
The room I enter is tranquil and opulent. Pale marble veined with gold. Enormous columns support an ornately painted ceiling. Luxurious potted plants grow all around the space. A small pond with fragrant water lilies and orange-scaled fish is seated in the floor to my left.
In the center of the room, a woman sits on a tall, three-legged stool. A small crevice stretches across the raw stone beneath her. Steam rises from the break.
Beside the fissure is the conical omphalos stone to mark this place, the navel of the Greek world.
She wears a simple blue chiton. A sheer purple veil covers her head, concealing everything but her mouth. The veil is held in place by a wreath of fresh laurel.
She’s the Pythia, Apollo’s blessed oracle and high priestess. The women who have served in this role through the centuries have offered ambiguous advice that’s led many a hero astray. Which is probably why Ares sent me to her. I look for a way out.
“The gods sent you here for a prophecy.” Her voice is rusty.
“I don’t want one.”
She draws her legs up and folds them beneath her. “You’ll need this divine advice. But you have a choice to make. The Celtic seers can’t guide you,” she rasps. “You can consult me, or you can choose a seer from your other bloodline.”
That bloodline has no seers.
Two acolytes in ice blue robes appear. The first sets a tall table beside the oracle. The second places a golden chalice on it. With curved, subservient spines and eyes that never look upward despite the lofty god they serve, they scurry away.
I can’t help but wonder if one of them was my mother.
She serves somewhere in a temple like this.
I’m not sure which deity she left us for.
Abuela never told us. She may not know. But I imagine that her back has the same curve.
That she is bent and broken like them. Like she wanted to be.
I hope it was everything she imagined and that she found leaving us to be worth it.
The Pythia takes the cup and sips. She smiles, revealing teeth that gleam with fresh blood. “You’re lucky, you know, to have been raised by a wise woman. Some of the others with the old blood have forgotten or forsaken it. But not her.”
I’m already sick of this seer. And I swear to the gods if she mentions Abuela again in that slimy tone, I’ll knock her off that stool. “What do you have to do with our third trial? This,” I motion around the room, “seems a little too simple, given the other two we just survived.”
She takes another drink. “Your trial hasn’t yet begun. I told you, my wisdom is a gift to you.”
I narrow my eyes at her. “And I told you, I don’t want your prophecy. How do I enter the trial?”
“If you won’t hear my warning, perhaps you’ll listen to hers.” She points to a tall wooden door built into the marble wall on my right. The door didn’t exist a moment ago when I looked for an exit.
This feels like a trap.
The hair on my nape prickles. “Hers?”
The oracle lifts her face to the ceiling where a small hole focuses a single shaft of sunlight onto her shrouded head. The Pythia offers another bloody smile. “Carina sends her regards.”
My heart squeezes. And because she invokes my sister’s name, I remember to count to three.
One…
This is part of our trial. It must be. Which means something terrible is waiting on the other side of that door.
Two…
She’s lying. How can Apollo’s elect hear my sister? Carina doesn’t belong to Hades. Morrigan promised me that her soul rests with Lugh, and I believe Morrigan above all the divine.
“The two of you remind Ares of the twins, you know. When she went to the world with her clever words, he envisioned Carina as Castor.” The woman shifts forward.
The mosaic on my oikos wall flashes violently into my mind.
I abandon counting and snap, “I’m no Pollux. Do I look like an immortal to you?”
The veil may hide her eyes, but I feel her cold stare. “If you were, would you trade your divinity to bring your sister back?”
I ball my fists. Take a threatening step forward. “Even the gods can’t bring back a mortal who is dead.”
“If it was offered, would you want to become a goddess? There is a prize to be had in these games.”
I bark a laugh and shake my head in disbelief. The divine would never make a mortal their equal. Not if we win their trials. Not if we conquer our peers to win their games. This is one of their tricks. Rage overwhelms me.
“Liar!” I hiss, hoping the word echoes into the heavens straight to Apollo himself.
I cross over to the door she pointed at, refusing to spend another second in the Pythia’s sticky web. Her venomous words hit their mark, though. They worm their way through my mind, spreading rot.
Worst of all, for these past wasted moments, I forgot about Koda.
The legs of her stool scoot on the rock as she rises from it. There’s a loud crash, then a metallic clang as the table and goblet spill onto the floor.
Blood soaks the stone. The Pythia walks into the crimson puddle, leaving bloody footprints as she rushes toward me with her arms extended. “Wait! I need to share a message with you. It’s from Car—”
I wheel on her. “Finish her name, and I’ll drown you in your pretty fucking pool.”
Her dark lashes flutter and she clutches her chest, snarling like she’s never been spoken to with anything but reverence.
“Do you think he’ll come down and save you as you thrash?” I raise my brows.
Her angry gaze darts to the ceiling, then back. She swallows thickly.
She’s as mortal as I am and the last time I checked, mortals die if their heads are held under water.
The copper scent of the spilled blood mixes with the lilies’ sickly sweetness, swirling around me as I open the door and step into darkness, slamming it closed behind me.
It takes two seconds to regret it, and one more to wonder what I’ve done. Ragged breaths tear from my chest. My eyes struggle to adjust to sudden darkness. It’s hot and humid in here, like it was in the labyrinth…
In a panic, I reach out to feel the walls, only calming when I realize they’re roughly hewn.
This is more like a cave than a cell or a maze.
Somewhere ahead, warm light flickers.
Maybe I should have found another exit from the oracle’s temple. Or perhaps I shouldn’t have threatened to kill her. I turn, considering whether to go back, only to find that the door I just passed through is gone.
Hand on my forehead, I take a deep breath. With only one way forward, I walk toward the light.
The scent of burning copal seizes my heart. Abuela burnt it three times this year instead of two. Once to remember her late husband’s birthday. He died before my siblings and I were born. A second time, to honor our mother’s. And a third, marking the date Carina first entered the world.
My eyes well at the smell and a knot tightens in the back of my throat. I rub a hand over my chest to ease the deep ache that blossoms.
A large room yawns open, the walls smooth and painted bright red.
Firelight dances from lamps hanging around the space.
There’s a modest wooden table set with two chairs.
Copal burns in the middles of three abalone shells laid out in a row across its width.
The smoke wafting from the bubbling resin is thick, white, and fragrant.
A woman crouches in the corner, rifling through woven baskets. She brushes long, dark hair over her shoulder when she hears my footsteps, then continues her search. Her blouse and skirt are the color of quetzal feathers, and the sash at her waist matches the crimson walls.
The lingering smoke shrouds her features as she draws a yellow shawl up over her head before rising and walking to the table. She lays something down, sits, and gestures to the empty chair.
I move to the table and take the seat.
“You saw the Pythia and she let you leave?” she rasps, head ticking back like she’s surprised.
I purse my lips. “In a manner of speaking.”
I hear her answering smile.
Hands thick with scars push through the smoke, holding a mirror out for me to take. It’s oval, rimmed in a simple, hammered-gold band, the obsidian a still, dark lake. Fighting my screaming, thrashing heart, I take it from her.
“What do you see?”
She wants me to look in the mirror. “I thought you’re supposed to tell me what you see.”
All the bravado I mustered this morning in my oikos is gone. I can’t bring myself to hold the obsidian up and peer inside it.
“Your friend needs your help. You should hurry. Look,” she challenges, gesturing again to the mirror.
My fingers tighten on the gold band. “Is this part of the trial?”
“It’s not part of their game, and it’s no trick. I’m trying to help you.” Her voice thickens. “And I am here because one from our blood must sacrifice to stay in contact with our gods.”
Sacrifice. The word isn’t as innocuous as it might seem on the surface, nor is its meaning. To Abuela’s gods, sacrifice is real. Lives are taken and given. Blood is required.
She takes an obsidian blade from her side and draws it across her open palm.
Both of her palms are thick with layers upon layers of scars. The healed patterns repeat up her forearms.
How many times has this woman had to cut her own flesh? And why didn’t she ask me to bleed instead of bleeding for me?
She fists her hand and drips blood into each shell, into the bubbling copal. Her blood mingles with the resin and the ivory plumes turn red. Then she pushes the shells across the table to me. “Drown the mirror in the smoke and look into it.”
I tilt my head… That’s an interesting choice of words, considering what I just threatened to do to the Pythia.