It was a greater honor to be her friend, I thought as I clung to my brother.
The morning of our departure was glorious, with fat white clouds gliding across a brilliant sky. Our soldiers were gathering by twos and threes, chatting with one another or just standing around patiently until they were given the word to go. Some of them were awkwardly saying good-bye to teary maidservants, while their comrades looked on and laughed.
I was standing beside the oxcart, waiting for my brothers to finish the official ceremony of farewell inside the palace, when someone called my name. It was the same slave boy who’d earned my uncle’s mindless wrath for whispering my aunt’s name. He clung to the shadow of the palace’s outermost defensive wall, gazing at me through a thatch of dirty brown hair with owl eyes, huge and golden. He looked about my age and even skinnier than I was, if that was possible. Even at that distance I could see the fading marks of my uncle’s fists on his scrawny arms and chest, the purple and red bruises dappling his pinched cheeks. He clutched a cloth-wrapped bundle under one arm and beckoned me.
As soon as I came near, he bowed his head and held the bundle out for me to take. “She left this for you,” he said.
I didn’t need to ask who she was. I opened the bundle and found the bronze head of Atalanta’s broken spear. It was still flecked with the boar’s blood.
“I wanted to clean it, lady,” the boy said. “She said no. She said that even if the blood ate up the blade, you’d earned it all, blood and bronze together.”
“When was this?” I asked, my eyes never moving from the trophy in my hands. “When did she give this to you?”
“The day she left,” the boy replied. “The day before I—the day before I angered the king.” He lowered his eyes.
So she hadn’t disappeared right away. She’d stayed to honor the dead, even if from a distance. A hunter knows how to hide.
I held the spearhead to my heart. “What’s your name?” I asked the boy.
“Milo.”
“Milo,” I repeated. “How did she come to choose you to bring me this?”
His smile was hesitant. “The cook sent me out to gather mushrooms in the hills. I found her there, camped high up on a slope that had a view of the citadel. She asked me if I was going to tell Lord Oeneus where she was. She wasn’t afraid I’d tell; she just wanted to know. I said no. I was the one who fetched fresh water to the hunters’ rooms. She always thanked me, and sometimes she’d even give me extra food. While she was still up there”—he gestured out the open gate, toward the mountains—“I did the same for her, when I could.”
“But she’s gone now?” I asked. “You’re sure?”
“When I could go back to her camp again—when it didn’t hurt to walk—it was deserted.” He bowed his head. “I’m sorry.”
I took his hand. “Come with me, Milo.”
He cringed. “Have I done something wrong, lady? Have I displeased you? Please don’t tell the king that I saw her! He’ll have me killed!”
“We’re not going to see the king, Milo,” I told him, pulling him firmly after me as if he were a small child. “You’ll never have to see the king again.”
In the palace, I questioned one servant after another until I found the person I sought, my uncle’s chief steward. That big-bellied, easygoing man was in one of the storerooms, checking the supply of olive oil, but as soon as he recognized me, he left his work and raised both hands in deferential greeting.
“Lady Helen, what a joy to see you still here!” His voice dripped honey. “I thought that you and your noble brothers were leaving us?”
“We are,” I told him. “But there’s something I want before we can go.”
“What might that be, Lady Helen?” He pressed his palms together. “If one as humble as myself can be of any help to you at all, you only need to ask.”
“The gods will bless you for your kindness,” I said, smiling as I reached up and removed my gold earrings. They glittered even in the dim, dusty light. “There’s something I wish to take away with me when I leave Calydon. I don’t want to trouble my royal uncle with the details.”
The steward’s bright eyes darted from me to Milo and back again. He gave me a questioning look. I nodded and placed the earrings in his plump, soft palm. His fingers closed around them and he beamed.
“Great Lady Helen, you’re as wise as you’re beautiful.” False flattery came easily to him. “There will be no need to burden Lord Oeneus with such a trivial matter at all.”
Later that morning, when we were finally free to leave the citadel, my brothers asked the obvious questions about Milo’s presence beside me in the oxcart.
“I bought him and freed him,” I said casually, as if it were something I did every day. “You know I promised to make a sacrifice of thanksgiving to Artemis if you did well in the boar hunt. I’ve chosen to sacrifice this boy’s former life as a slave. Artemis should approve. A huntress values freedom.” I patted Milo’s shoulder and added, “He’s going to stay with us, though, at least until he finds a way to feed himself.”
Polydeuces reached out and grabbed Milo’s chin, turning his head from side to side. He frowned as he surveyed the boy’s battered face, then glanced down at the bruises on his body. “A fitting sacrifice, then,” was all he said.
We rode away from Calydon, down the citadel road, past the little pine grove, into the hills where I’d learned how to ride a horse—a little—and where Milo said Atalanta had made her now-abandoned camp.
Is she really gone? I wondered. We couldn’t say good-bye, but wouldn’t she wait somewhere out there in the forests of Calydon to watch me leave?
As I stared with longing into the trees, trying to read their secrets, I thought I heard the sound of a horse whinnying. Aristos…Atalanta… I raised my hand in a gesture of farewell.
“Lady, what do you see?” Milo asked.
“Nothing,” I said, lowering my hand. “Nothing at all.”
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