Chapter 20
“He said he would wait outside,” I say at once.
“Of course.” Hephaestus’ disbelief cuts me to the quick as he shakes his head and reaches for the door handle.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
Now he looks at me. “Going out there,” he says. “Before my brother tears apart a volcano in search of me.”
“He’s not going to do that,” I protest. “This isn’t his battle.”
A muscle jumps in Hephaestus’ jaw. “To Ares, every battle is his.” He yanks the door open before I can stop him. His fist is clenched tightly around his silver staff, his shoulders thrown back and his head high, color flaring in his cheeks as he steps into the quiet forge.
I hurry behind him through the doorway, darting to his side as I take in the scene.
Ares stands in the entrance, his broad shoulders and wide shield blocking the light behind. It streams around the edges of his silhouette, limning him in flashing bronze where it glints off his armor.
Four Cyclopes stand, wary and tense at their stations, their eyes sliding to Hephaestus for instruction on how to deal with the intruder.
“You said you weren’t coming in.” My voice rings off the cavernous walls that tower above us.
“You said he’d agree to your request.” Ares’ voice is silky smooth, deceptively calm.
I fold my arms across my chest. “How do you know if he has or hasn’t?”
Ares walks toward us, his strides long and measured, and stops a few paces away. “He hasn’t,” he says.
My breath hisses between my teeth.
“I told you, Aphrodite,” he says. “I knew it wouldn’t work.”
“So what are you going to do?” I ask. “Try to beat him into submission? That’s stupid. It’s not the solution.”
He’s not even looking at me. His glare is fastened on Hephaestus, his eyes cold and black, fathomless depths of yawning hunger I’ve never seen before. He could be a stranger—ancient and powerful, beautiful and terrifying, intent and unstoppable.
“Ares,” I say, “stop.”
“It looks like he won’t listen to you either,” says Hephaestus. His voice is level, but next to me his body is locked and rigid.
“I won’t make you marry me, Aphrodite,” Ares says, advancing again, step by slow step. “When I’m finished with him, and he’s let her go, I’m the only god who won’t collect that oath.” Now he looks at me, a flicker of the man I know in his face. “I’d never force you to do anything you don’t want.”
“I don’t want this,” I say. There’s no point reminding him that what he’s suggesting is just as bad: if I don’t marry the winner, I break a Stygian oath. He’d be condemning me to exile.
“He doesn’t care,” Hephaestus says, and Ares casts him a murderous look. I swallow a scream of frustration, before trying to appeal to Ares again. “You can bring this whole volcano down on his head and you still won’t change his mind.”
“Good idea,” he breathes. Menace ripples from him; barely held wrath on the verge of breaking free.
He takes another step, and another, and Hephaestus can’t help but step backward.
For a second, I think that’s it, that he won’t break the habit ingrained into him over thousands of years.
Hera was right. He can’t stand up to his brother. Ares has called his bluff.
But he catches himself. He doesn’t retreat any further. Instead, he plants his feet solidly on the ground and lifts his chin, looking Ares directly in the eye.
“You’ll free our mother,” Ares says. “You’ve always been spineless when it comes to her. You know as well as I do that you can’t keep this up; it’s already destroying you inside.”
Hephaestus doesn’t flinch, but I do. The contempt that drips from Ares, his arrogance and superiority, isn’t as lacerating as the undeniable core of truth wrapped within it.
It must be agony for Hephaestus, even in his victory.
It goes against everything he’s ever been.
And the irony that at last he’s doing what Ares once blithely told me he should do—standing up to Zeus and Hera, refusing to give way—makes it all the more unbearable that it’s Ares who is taking him apart, piece by piece, for doing it.
“Why would you think it’s destroying me?” Hephaestus says. “Don’t you think I enjoy seeing them floundering? Wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t care enough about them for it to give me any satisfaction,” says Ares.
Hephaestus snorts. “You care enough to come here. Nothing else would have brought you to my home.”
“I’m not here for them.”
“Oh, you’re here for Aphrodite. But she’s told you to go. She told you not to come at all.” Hephaestus shrugs.
There’s a burning in Ares’ eyes; a wild longing about him with an edge so keen I can feel it humming in the air.
“How many times,” he says, “did I hold back the worst of my impulses?” There’s a hypnotic rhythm to his words, the slither of a snake’s underbelly on the ground, a deceptive softness before the strike.
“How many times did I rein myself in, walking out of Olympus so that I didn’t bring the house of the gods tumbling down to earth? ”
Ares stormed from our palace so often it became legend.
Evidence among the gods of his uncontrollable rage, his volatility and the danger he posed to us all.
The way he describes it now makes each occasion sound like an act of preternatural self-control, a restraint that went against every one of his instincts.
“You were never with me then,” Ares goes on. “You cowered in your forge, making trinkets to please them.”
In the furnace on the back wall of the cave, the molten rock rears up, hissing. The reflection of the burning river glimmers in Hephaestus’ eyes.
“I challenged Zeus and Hera alone,” Ares is saying, “and everyone hated me for it. But I put only myself in harm’s way, not anyone else.
I was never so foolish—never so selfish and blind—as this.
” The contempt in his voice is devastating, but Hephaestus doesn’t bow his head, doesn’t stumble back or try to appease.
Ares gets louder, the reverberations bouncing from the rock.
“But now you finally decide to stand against them, and this is how you do it? With a drunken jest, a child’s trick, an act of idiocy that gives Zeus exactly what he wants? ”
“It doesn’t matter to me if he gets what he wants,” Hephaestus says. “This is what I want. For the first time, I’ve done what I wanted.”
“And you’ll undo it!” Ares seizes him with a swiftness neither one of us saw coming.
His spear drops, unheeded, to the floor and he’s gripping Hephaestus by the neck of his chiton.
The Cyclopes stir, the four of them in a line, their hulking shoulders and clenched fists an intimidating sight, but Hephaestus manages a jerk of his head that tells them no.
The lava boils, the Cyclopes stand watchful and ready, but Ares is intent on Hephaestus alone.
Hephaestus stares back at him. Then very clearly and deliberately, he speaks. “I won’t.”
Ares flings him backward, and he crashes into the rock face with a sickening thud. A thin crack splits its surface, tracing up from the impact of his body, and his staff drops from his hand, clattering to the ground.
“That’s enough,” I say, but neither seems to hear me.
Ares is striding toward his brother, suffused with deadly purpose, and Hephaestus shoves at him.
His broad chest and the vast muscles of his upper arms give him strength, even against the hard bronze of Ares’ breastplate, and he knocks him off course.
But while Hephaestus is powerful from centuries of toil, Ares possesses unstoppable momentum as the God of War.
The river of molten fire is rising in waves, bubbles swelling and bursting in seething jets of smoke and sparks, but Ares is relentless, yanking Hephaestus and slamming him against the wall until the whole mountain shudders with the impact.
Stones tumble from above, pebbles shaken loose and scattering, and a rumbling growl reverberates from deep in the ground.
Hephaestus’ face is contorted with rage, ablaze with a fury he’s never expressed before—but Ares is incandescent.
Terrible and awe-inspiring, vivid with divine wrath, alight with the dynamism of the battlefield in this cave that cannot contain it.
I’ve heard his war-cry stream across the plains, a dreadful shout that holds within it a multitude of horrors, and, when he flings back his head here and lets it free, it leaps from wall to wall in a grotesque crescendo.
I see the Cyclopes falter and pale, pressing their gigantic hands to their heads, buckling at the onslaught of sound that shrieks and rattles my brain inside my skull without mercy or respite.
Hephaestus, for all his bulk and determination, is crumbling under his brother’s blows.
He shrinks against the wall, his arm across his face, smears of golden blood trickling down his skin.
Then he rallies, swinging his fist around to connect with Ares’ face, his knuckles smashing into the side of his helmet, crumpling the bronze as though it’s nothing. Ares doesn’t seem even to notice.
I look from side to side, searching for something to hurl between them, for any way I can stop them long enough that they might hear me.
The forge bristles with weapons—gleaming swords, heavy hammers, vicious-pointed arrows and double-headed axes—but closest to me is the spear Ares abandoned.
I duck down and seize it. The ash wood is smooth in my grip; it’s weighty but balanced with a deadly blade.
I lift it, aiming to the side of the grappling brothers and hoping I don’t hit either one of them.
I fling it and it flies past Ares, skimming his shoulder. He turns in surprise, shocked into stopping at last, before it crashes into the rock and jerks back, landing beside Hephaestus’ staff.
Hephaestus lifts his head, his eyes dull.
I’m sure that Ares is only momentarily deterred, but it’s enough of an opportunity for me. I draw myself up, letting power crackle through my body. I remind myself: I was born from the destruction of a god. The Sky itself shattered for me.
My power isn’t diluted by the generations of Titans and gods that came before Ares and Hephaestus; the ichor in my veins flows directly from Ouranos, who was shaped by Gaia herself at the very dawn of the world.
The gods who came after me might have cruder weapons, more brutal violence and a willingness to break the world apart in pursuit of their desires, but I was here first and I’ll be here until the end.
It will be me, every time, who pieces it back together.
Me, always, who is the reason for life to keep going in the face of disaster and ruin.
Me, who walked out whole from underneath the collapsing skies and brought happiness in my wake—brought love, ever-replenishing and never defeated.
“You’ll leave Hephaestus now,” I tell Ares, in the breath of silence that follows the fallen spear. “He won’t do as you say, no matter what you do to him. You’ll stop. Now.”
The air pulses with violence. I can taste it like the iron and salt under the Thracian moon, vivid in the blood-drenched twilight where they sacrificed the bull in Ares’ name.
The longing is powerful, a reckless desperation to throw it all to the wind, to give in to the desire to crush and conquer a foe. It’s palpable, almost irresistible, and for a moment, when I look at the wildness in his eyes, I think he’s going to ignore me.
Instead, he wrenches himself away with an effort that makes me wince.
Without another glance at his broken brother, he stalks toward the exit and is gone.
Hephaestus stares after him, his gaze clouded and stunned. “Did he leave?” he croaks.
I swallow. “Yes.”
His eyes shift to me in an effort that seems as monumental as the one that Ares mustered to walk away from the fight. “He listened to you.”
“He did.”
“He gave up.” Hephaestus heaves himself to sit up against the wall, his hand groping for his staff.
His breath wheezes from his chest as he speaks, but there’s a wondering light gathering in his face, a kind of dazed epiphany.
“He gave up, and Hera still isn’t free.” His drifting gaze fixes on my face. “She isn’t free. And neither are you.”
His words settle like stones in my chest. “No,” I say, “I’m not.”
“I’m sorry,” he says.
I glance toward the door.
“You aren’t going to him, are you?” He pauses, then chokes out a gurgling little laugh. “Even after this?” He shakes his head, painfully. “What would it take for you to see what he’s like?”
“I’m not going to Ares,” I snap. “Though if I were, I wouldn’t have to explain it to you.” A flush creeps into my face. It feels so oppressive in here, the stifling burn of the furnace and the stinging scald of his judgment. “Are you going to give me what I asked? Will you tell me how to free her?”
“No.”
I want to ask him how he dares to expect my friendship, then, but I bite my tongue.
Ares has shown me that force isn’t the way, that Hephaestus won’t be broken by threats.
As desperate as I am to claim back my freedom, I’ll give him time and he’ll have to see that I’m right about this.
“I won’t stay,” I say. “Just think about what I said.”
And I leave him again.