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His face is dark, and so are the words: they should not warm me, I think, and yet they do. When I look at his face it’s as though my lungs have been tied shut, and I have to force myself to inhale. I can see he’s deliberately avoiding my glance, his eyes on the tunnel mouth ahead, the circle of sunlight. Why won’t he look at me?
“What your brother said, before…” I hesitate. “You believe me, about the dagger? You know I would never mean you harm?”
“I believe you.”
My head swims; letting my eyes close, I lean back into him. The smell of the woods at night. Of incense swinging in the temple.
What will happen to us?I want to ask, but I don’t know if I want to hear the answer.
At the entrance to the tunnel he puts me down—and there, like a vision against the sky, is a black stallion. As though he had been waiting here for a thousand years and could wait a thousand more. At the sound of his master’s feet, he whinnies.
“Ajax,” I murmur, and his tail swishes, ever so gently. He waits quietly until we reach his side, then kneels—kneels! I have never seen such a proud creature do such a thing—to let us mount. Eros sits me onto the broad back first. Then l feel hiswarm weight behind me and he gathers the reins. Ajax rises, and without Eros seeming to command him, breaks into a gallop. As he hurtles down the mountain it seems to me we move faster—much faster—than before. There is magic in his stride now. I suppose it is because he rides with a god on his back.
The mountain, too, is changed. It feels silent, watchful—as though its creatures have retreated to eye us from their lairs.
“News will travel fast,” Eros murmurs in my ear, one warm arm around me, clasping the reins. The small of my back presses against his chest. “We must put as much distance between ourselves and the mountain as we can by nightfall.”
I look at the silent wilderness around us. The enormity of what has happened is starting to sink in. I know—I have always known—what happens to mortals who get involved with the gods.
“They will kill us,” I say quietly. “They will find us, and they will kill us.”
“They will not harm you, Psyche.” His warm voice buzzes at my ear, his chest against my back. “I will not let it happen.”
“And who will protect you?” I whisper. “Your powers are weakened. If they come after us…”
“They will not find us,” he says, and there is a finality in his voice.
We hurtle out of the winter storms, past the falling snow, past the ice and white-coated forests.
“We will make for the crossroads of Elassona,” Eros says. I know the name of Elassona. It is a great meeting-place: the roads there go in all directions, bringing travelers north to Illyria and Macedonia, south to Corinth and Sparta, and even across the seas to east and west, as far as Persia or Italos.
“And from there,” he says, “we will travel south: to the Gulf of Patras, where the crossing is shortest; then from Achaea to Elis, and find passage west, to the isle of Atlantis.”
Atlantis?
“Why Atlantis?” I say; my head is spinning again.
“It is where my father fights.”
Ares. The god of war.
The war at Atlantis has been on and off for many years—its resources are too plentiful for mankind to leave it alone. But recently, I hear the battles have renewed with new fury.
Of course the god of war camps there.
Atlantis.
My mother’s home.
We hurtle through the dank autumn leaves, the brown mulch, and then the amber, still-crisp ones.
“You think your father will help us?” I say, and when he doesn’t answer, I wonder if my question got lost in the wind. I’m about to repeat it when he speaks.
“I cannot say.” His voice is flat. If he feels hope, he refuses to let it show. “But he is fearless as to the opinions of his fellow gods. He may side with us for principle, or if not that, for sport.”
I think of the oracle’s words to me:a chance, she said. And now I thinka chancemay be enough.
Eros tells me of his brothers, how, once Aphrodite declared that Eros had betrayed her, the twins were quick to seek their mother’s favor. How they would do anything she asked of them.
