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He narrows his eyes, and sits back from me.
“Your leg—when Ajax trod on it, it healed overnight when it should have been broken. Your hair grew back in one night, when it should have stayed shorn. You did not go mad when you saw my face, as a mortal is supposed to. It is not about powers, Psyche, but your life force. It is stronger than an ordinary mortal’s. Your body—it resists injury. It is not easily broken.”
I stare at him.
I have been used to explaining things away. But the truth is, there have been occurrences before this one, just as strange, if not so miraculous. There are the ones he mentions: my hair, my quick-healing leg. The winter night on Mount Olympus: the harpies swore I would die of the cold, that they’d pluck my bodyfrom the icy ground, yet I lived through it. But there were other things too.
Every childhood scrape and scratch that disappeared overnight; every ailment the other children had, or that Father and Dimitra contracted but I escaped.
They said I was healthy. They said I was lucky. They said I had my mother’s strong constitution.
But others in Sikyon said my mother was a witch.
That my mother brewed potions and cast spells.
That she was something for mortals to fear.
What if they were right?
She owned a blade of adamantine.
I screw my eyes tight, trying to make sense of it all.
“My mother died giving birth to me,” I say. “My father saw it. The midwife saw it. She was mortal.”
My father put the coins upon her eyes himself; he adorned her with her funeral wreath and led her procession to the tomb.
Didn’t he?
Could he have lied?
I shake my head. Old Lydia was the woman who tended to my mother in her birthing-bed; Lydia was there the day my mother died. She was the one who chased Dimitra from the doorway; who comforted my sister at the sight of my mother’s corpse. My motherdied.
I cannot figure it out.
Eros’s words go round in my mind.Something more than mortal.
“I don’t understand. It doesn’t make sense.” I look at him. “I’m alive, Eros. Isn’t that enough?”
He moves toward me, and takes my head in his hands.
“It is everything,” he says.
But how long can such a reprieve last? I stare into his eyes, still wide and dazed, as though part of him even now still sees medying.
“How did she find us?” I say. It’s cold, now, in the treehouse. The white moonflowers have closed up, as though they have already seen too much. The golden glow of the place has dimmed. I pull at the Shroud around my neck. “I thought this was supposed to hide me.”
Eros shakes his head.
“My mother has many spies in this realm to do her bidding, animal and human. Think, Psyche. Who did you see at the market today? Might there have been someone there who knew you?”
I shake my head, then stop.
No one at the market recognizedme, but the stallholder recognized Ajax. I don’t think he knew the full truth, but he knew enough, I suspect now, to see that I rode a horse of the gods.
And asked for a fugitive’s cape.
I close my eyes again. Even if we are careful, terribly careful…can we really hope to make it to Atlantis? And if we do, what then?
