Chapter Text
The vibration in Hermes’s heels usually meant one of two things: either he had run too close to a thunderbolt’s discharge, or someone, somewhere, was making a massive mess of the natural order.
By the time he slid onto the marble terrace of Artemis’s grove, the gold wings of his sandals were still twitching with an anxious, frantic energy he couldn’t quite shake loose. He had tried the length of a mountain range to outpace it, which told him everything he needed to know about what kind of day this was going to be.
He found them right where they always were when the sun reached its midpoint. Apollo was draped across a cedar bench, his long fingers trailing aimlessly over the lyre strings without committing to any particular tune. Artemis stood at the edge of the shade, her thumb testing the sharpness of a bronze arrowhead with methodical focus.
“You’re breathing like an exhausted horse,” Artemis said, without looking up. “Did someone steal your cattle again, or did you simply forget how to pace yourself on the low roads?”
“I’ve just come from Boeotia.” Hermes leaned against one of the grove’s massive cypress trees and let his caduceus rest against his shoulder, more grateful for the bark against his back than he would ever admit. “Thebes, specifically.”
Apollo didn’t open his eyes. His fingers went still on the lyre strings. “Thebes is loud and dirty. You usually don’t stay there long enough to ruin your shoes.”
“It wasn’t loud today,” Hermes said. He shifted his weight and looked between his brother and sister. This was the part he had been running over in his head since he’d left the city, how to say it in a way that wouldn’t sound like he’d simply lost his senses between the coast and here. “It wasn’t anything today. I went to deliver a trade compact to a fat merchant near the market stalls. I was standing right in front of him. He was in the middle of a breath, his mouth open, about to tell me the price of grain from the northern fields-and then he just didn’t finish it.”
Artemis stopped her thumb against the bronze tip. Her silver eyes drifted toward him, sharp and level. “What do you mean he didn’t finish it?”
“I mean he stayed there.” Hermes heard his own voice go quieter as he spoke it, the way it did when you were describing something that your brain had not entirely decided to believe yet. “The whole street. A mule was halfway through a stumble on the stones, its hoof hanging an inch off the ground. A woman had spilled a bucket of goat’s milk, and the white stream was just suspended in the air, like a piece of pulled wool. The sun was still hot on my neck, the light didn’t change, but nothing was moving. Except for me.” He paused. “And her.”
Apollo sat up slowly, the casual ease leaving his shoulders in a single quiet motion. “Her.”
“The girl from the fountain,” Hermes said. “Our sister’s daughter and cousin. Percosia.”
He remembered her birth clearly enough; he’d been standing close to the mortal king when the salt water turned into something living. He remembered the way she had looked at the assembled gods and the city below. Not at all how a newly made goddess finding her bearings. It was not a look he’d ever seen on any newborn thing. He had not thought much of it again until now.
“She was in Thebes?” Artemis asked. Her voice had taken on that particular edge she got whenever young women were involved.
“In an alley behind the slave market.” Hermes nodded. “A group of traders had taken a dozen girls from the outer villages. They had the ropes already around their wrists, ready to load them into the carts. One of the girls must have prayed to her. Percosia didn’t descend in a chariot or drop from the sky in a column of light. She walked out of the shadow of a wall.”
“And she took the hour,” Apollo murmured.
His gaze had drifted toward the distant peaks where Athena’s temple sat over the city, and his voice had the quality it got sometimes when he was saying something he’d already known and was only now saying aloud for the first time.
“She touched their shoulders,” Hermes said. His hands moved as he spoke, reconstructing the scene in the air between them, which he did without thinking when something was still too vivid to put down. “One at a time, just a light tap, and the moment her fingers hit their skin each girl started breathing again. They looked around at the men holding them, frozen where they stood like limestone garden sculptures, and they started to scream. Percosia told them to be quiet. She told them there was a black-sailed ship waiting at the docks and they had until sundown to reach it.”
“Until sundown,” Artemis said. Something in her expression shifted, brief and faint. On anyone else he would have called it approval. “She gave them the whole day.”
“She stayed behind to hold it.” Hermes shook his head slightly, still working through it himself. “I tried to walk up to her. I got within ten paces, and the air went heavy, like trying to push through wet sand, like the seconds themselves were thickening. I tried asking her what she was doing but she didn’t look at me. She kept her eyes on the harbor until the ship cleared the point.”
No one said anything for a moment.
A bird moved through the high branches of the grove, and the sound of it was very loud.
“The King has already received a report,” Hermes added, letting the easier, more official tone settle back over his voice the way you put on a traveling cloak. “I had to file the movement log with the high stewards before I came here. You know how he gets about the old domains. He has spent his entire existence making sure his father’s tools stayed where he could account for them. Now his own brother’s child is twisting the seconds in Boeotia because a mortal girl asked nicely.”
“She isn’t wielding a scythe,” Apollo said. His voice was quiet and considered, the tone he used when he was being precise rather than poetic. He stood up from the bench, his chiton catching the bright Olympian light. “She is a daughter of the Mind. There is a structure to what she did. She didn’t shatter the hour; she made it wide enough for people to run through.”
Hermes looked at him. “You’ve been thinking about her.”
It wasn’t quite a question. Apollo had the particular quality of stillness that he always had when he was carrying something he hadn’t set down yet, and it had been there since the day of the fountain, which Hermes had noticed and not remarked on, because there were things you noticed about your siblings and chose not to mention until the moment required it.
Apollo didn’t answer him. He had moved to the edge of the terrace, where the stone dropped away to the blue air and the long slope of the mountain, and was looking out toward the horizon where the distant sea met the sky in a line so clean and certain it looked less like a view and more like a statement.
“Hera’s already moving,” Hermes said, when it was clear Apollo was going to stand there being contemplative and not helpful. “She had Ares backed against the armory wall before the third hour this morning. She’s talking about alliances. She thinks if she can get the girl inside her house, settled with her son and under her influence before the presentation, she can anchor that power to the throne. She’s terrified the loyalty will drift back to one of us bastards or to the sea.”
“She doesn’t understand her,” Apollo said.
“No,” Artemis agreed, setting the arrowhead down against her thigh. “She doesn’t.”
“From what I hear, Percosia is also Oaths,” Apollo said. He said it the way you said a thing that was obvious once you said it, but hadn’t quite arranged itself into words before. “If she swears her loyalty to the high throne she will hold it long after the stone has rotted. Father need not worry. But the queen doesn’t want an oath. She wants a lock for both her son and her new niece.”
Artemis made a short, dry sound that was not quite a laugh. “Let her try to put a collar on a girl who can make a slaver wait four hours for a punch to land. I would pay in good silver to watch that conversation.”
“The presentation is in three weeks,” Hermes reminded them. “It was supposed to be a welcome feast. Now every god on this mountain is going to be sitting there trying to see the grandfather’s scythe somewhere behind her eyes. Zeus will want to know whose side she’s on before he lets her leave the room. And after Thebes, there will be no pretending she doesn’t have something worth taking sides over.”
“And let’s not also forget that every male god and diety will try to take her to wife. Present company included. Poor mice.” Lamented Artemis.
Apollo was quiet. The wind off the mountain moved through the grove, carrying the smell of cedar and the far-off salt of the sea, and he stood there with his face turned toward the horizon with an expression that Hermes couldn’t entirely account for.
“It’s a strange thing,” Apollo said finally, his voice low and almost not for them at all. “The sun rises because it is a promise. The tide comes in because it is faithful to the moon. She’s the measure of it, Hermes. The steady beat beneath everything. I can feel it from here, the way you feel a drum when you can’t yet hear it.”
Hermes looked at him. He looked at Artemis, who was looking at Apollo with her head slightly tilted, the expression of a sister who had registered the problem and was not going to say so out loud until she absolutely had to.
He checked his sandals. The static had mostly settled, leaving behind only the faint, residual hum of a world that had recently been rearranged. “I just hope she doesn’t break the mainspring when she walks into the Council,” he muttered. “These things are hard to put back in order.”
“She won’t,” Apollo said, his eyes still on the distant line where sea met sky. “But the King is going to have to learn that some things cannot be ordered by thunder alone.”
Artemis picked the arrowhead back up and resumed her work. “He has never learned it before,” she said, conversationally.
“No,” Apollo agreed. “He hasn’t.”
Hermes pushed off the cypress tree, rolling his shoulders and feeling the last of the static drain down through his heels and out into the marble beneath him. Below, somewhere in the vast structure of Olympus, the wheels were already turning. He thought of her green gaze fixed on the harbor, unmoving, steady as a held breath. He thought of the way Percosia had not looked at him when he’d tried to speak to her.
“She’s going to be a great deal of trouble, she’s barely a fortnight old and is already creating more work for me!” he childishly complained.
Apollo smiled at the horizon. “Yes,” he said. “She is.”