Iolaus shrugged. “Depends whose story you hear. They say that when Lady Althea saw that her son had killed his uncles, she ran back to her room and—”
“The log.” I hardly spoke above a whisper, remembering what Pirithous had told me, but Iolaus had good hearing.
“That’s right, the one from the tale about the Fates coming to his mother when he was a baby.” He stood up again and sighed. “They say she was so blinded by grief for her brothers’ deaths that she threw that log back into the flames. It burned to ashes and Meleager died.”
“But it’s not true,” Castor protested. “Althea is our mother’s sister. We know that none of their brothers is still alive!”
“The truth steps aside for a good story,” Iolaus said dryly.
“Let people entertain themselves some other way,” Castor snarled. “To say that the queen killed her own son! If I catch any man spreading that slime about Lady Althea, I’ll—”
“Save your anger,” Iolaus said, resting one hand on my brother’s shoulder. And as kindly as he could, he told us my mother’s sister was dead too.
The best lies hold a small, withered seed of truth. The queen had rushed back to her room after the slaughter in the feasting hall, but not to throw some nonexistent piece of wood into the fire. As soon as she saw her son’s dead body, her heart broke, her mind shattered. She hanged herself with her own sash from one of the beams in her room before any of her maidservants could reach her.
My brothers and I remained in Calydon for ten days after that cursed feast. We attended too many funeral pyres—for my cousin, my aunt, the victims of the boar, and the victims of stupidity. Castor and Polydeuces won enough prizes at the funeral games afterward to confirm their budding reputation as heroes. I sat on the sidelines like an ordinary girl, feeling the sting of the hidden, slowly healing scrapes and scratches I’d gotten during the hunt. I didn’t see Atalanta anywhere.
The palace of Calydon was a house of mourning. Meleager’s father moved through the corridors like an avenging wraith. The slaves and servants walked softly, afraid of the king’s sudden, senseless outbursts of rage. Once I saw him beat a boy black-and-blue with his own fists for whispering the queen’s name to one of his fellow slaves. When I tried to stop him, he gave me a crazed, red-eyed look that reminded me of the maddened boar. I fled, terrified and ashamed.
Many times during those ten endless days, I wished that my brothers and I could have left Calydon as soon as the other boar hunters did. Once the funeral games were over, my uncle’s former guests couldn’t wait to put plenty of distance between themselves and Lord Oeneus. Castor and Polydeuces and I were among the last to go. Our family ties forced us to linger. Meleager was my cousin, and the lady Althea was my aunt. I dreaded having to tell Mother that both of them were dead.
As I watched my uncle perform the daily sacrifice for his dead wife and son, I wondered whether anyone but my brothers and I would ever tell the truth about what happened that night. As Iolaus said, The truth steps aside for a good story.
At least Iolaus had the kindness to remain in Calydon a little longer. Men like Theseus and Pirithous might have sneered at him behind his back, calling him a poor substitute for his uncle Herakles, but they were the cowards who ran away as soon as possible. Iolaus stayed. I saw how he took pains to approach Lord Oeneus at meals, even when the king was sunk deep in despair, and spoke words of comfort to him. It wasn’t his fault that my uncle’s grief had left him too numb to respond. I loved Iolaus for trying. I wanted to tell him so, but the thought of saying something like that to a man was more daunting than facing the boar all over again. By the time I found the courage to do so, he’d traveled on.
At last it was our turn to leave. My brothers agreed that we’d done our family duty to our uncle and to the spirits of our dead kin. Polydeuces came bearing the good news to me as I sat alone in the room where my aunt’s loom stood untouched and abandoned. None of the palace women had found the backbone to return to that place just yet; Lady Althea’s last weaving still waited unfinished in the tall wooden frame.
“We’ll leave tomorrow,” Polydeuces said, sitting beside me on the bench before the loom. “Can you be ready?”
“Of course.” I spoke listlessly, even though he’d brought me the news I’d been hoping to hear for days.
He got up to go, then looked back at me. “You don’t sound like yourself. What’s troubling you, little sister? Are you still mourning Lady Althea and Meleager?”
“Yes,” I whispered, because it was easier than telling him the truth. But then I set aside the easy answer and told him, “No. No, that’s not it. I’m sad because…because…Oh, Polydeuces, do you know what happened to her, to Atalanta? I haven’t seen her since that night when—”
“No one has,” he replied, his face stern. “Vanishing like that, avoiding the funeral games for the man who died because of her, running away—”
“She didn’t want him to die!” I shouted, springing to my feet. “You were there! You know she didn’t ask for the boar’s hide! And you know she’d never run away.”
“Then where is she, little sister?” he asked softly.
I shook my head. “I don’t know.” I sank back onto the bench, tears rolling down my cheeks. “I don’t know.”
He sat beside me and hugged me. “I’m sorry, Helen,” he said. “You’re right. She’s gone, but she didn’t run away like a coward. I can’t blame her for leaving, not with Lord Oeneus out of his mind over what happened. If he’d seen her at the funeral games, the gods know what he’d have done to her. May the gods protect her, wherever she is. It was an honor to be her companion in the hunt.”