Deidameia stepped backwards, her eyes wide, her lips gone white. Her hands were trembling. She lifted one to her stomach and clutched the fabric of her dress there, as if to steady herself. Outside the palace, beyond the cliffs, we could hear huge waves breaking on the rocks, dashing the shoreline to pieces.
“I am pregnant,” the princess whispered.
I was watching Achilles when she said it, and I saw the horror on his face. Lycomedes made a noise of pain.
My chest felt hollowed, and egg-shell thin. Enough. Perhaps I said it, perhaps I only thought it. I let go of Achilles’ hand and strode to the door. Thetis must have moved aside for me; I would have run into her if she had not. Alone, I stepped into the darkness.
“WAIT!” ACHILLES SHOUTED. It took him longer to reach me than it should have, I noted with detachment. The dress must be tangling his legs. He caught up to me, seized my arm.
“Let go,” I said.
“Please, wait. Please, let me explain. I did not want to do it. My mother—” He was breathless, almost panting. I had never seen him so upset.
“She led the girl to my room. She made me. I did not want to. My mother said—she said—” He was stumbling over his words. “She said that if I did as she said, she would tell you where I was.”
What had Deidameia thought would happen, I wondered, when she had her women dance for me? Had she really thought I would not know him? I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.
“Patroclus.” He cupped my cheek with his hand. “Do you hear me? Please, say something.”
I could not stop imagining her skin beside his, her swelling breasts and curving hips. I remembered the long days I grieved for him, my hands empty and idle, plucking the air like birds peck at dry earth.
“Patroclus?”
“You did it for nothing.”
He flinched at the emptiness of my voice. But how else was I to sound?
“What do you mean?”
“Your mother did not tell me where you were. It was Peleus.”
His face had gone pale, bled dry. “She did not tell you?”
“No. Did you truly expect she would?” My voice cut harder than I meant it to.
“Yes,” he whispered.
There were a thousand things I might have said, to reproach him for his na?veté. He had always trusted too easily; he had had so little in his life to fear or suspect. In the days before our friendship, I had almost hated him for this, and some old spark of that flared in me, trying to relight. Anyone else would have known that Thetis acted for her own purposes only. How could he be so foolish? The angry words pricked in my mouth.
But when I tried to speak them, I found I could not. His cheeks were flushed with shame, and the skin beneath his eyes was weary. His trust was a part of him, as much as his hands or his miraculous feet. And despite my hurt, I would not wish to see it gone, to see him as uneasy and fearful as the rest of us, for any price.
He was watching me closely, reading my face over and over, like a priest searching the auguries for an answer. I could see the slight line in his forehead that meant utmost concentration.
Something shifted in me then, like the frozen surface of the Apidanos in spring. I had seen the way he looked at Deidameia; or rather the way he did not. It was the same way he had looked at the boys in Phthia, blank and unseeing. He had never, not once, looked at me that way.
“Forgive me,” he said again. “I did not want it. It was not you. I did not—I did not like it.”
Hearing it soothed the last of the jagged grief that had begun when Deidameia shouted his name. My throat was thick with the beginning of tears. “There is nothing to forgive,” I said.
LATER THAT EVENING we returned to the palace. The great hall was dark, its fire burned to embers. Achilles had repaired his dress as best he could, but it still gaped to the waist; he held it closed in case we met a lingering guard.
The voice came from the shadows, startling us.
“You have returned.” The moonlight did not quite reach the thrones, but we saw the outline of a man there, thick with furs. His voice seemed deeper than it had before, heavier.
“We have,” Achilles said. I could hear the slight hesitation before he answered. He had not expected to face the king again so soon.
“Your mother is gone, I do not know where.” The king paused, as if awaiting a response.
Achilles said nothing.
“My daughter, your wife, is in her room crying. She hopes you will come to her.”
I felt the flinch of Achilles’ guilt. His words came out stiffly; it was not a feeling he was used to.
“It is unfortunate that she hopes for this.”
“It is indeed,” Lycomedes said.
We stood in silence a moment. Then Lycomedes drew a weary breath. “I suppose that you want a room for your friend?”
“If you do not mind,” Achilles said, carefully.
Lycomedes let out a soft laugh. “No, Prince Achilles, I do not mind.” There was another silence. I heard the king lift a goblet, drink, replace it on the table.
“The child must have your name. You understand this?” This is what he had waited in the dark to say, beneath his furs, by the dying fire.
“I understand it,” Achilles said quietly.
“And you swear it?”
There was a hairsbreadth of a pause. I pitied the old king. I was glad when Achilles said, “I swear it.”
The old man made a sound like a sigh. But his words, when they came, were formal; he was a king again.
“Good night to you both.”
We bowed and left him.
In the bowels of the palace, Achilles found a guard to show us to the guest quarters. The voice he used was high and fluting, his girl’s voice. I saw the guard’s eyes flicker over him, lingering on the torn edges of the dress, his disheveled hair. He grinned at me with all his teeth.
“Right away, mistress,” he said.
IN THE STORIES, the gods have the power to delay the moon’s course if they wish, to spin a single night the length of many. Such was this night, a bounty of hours that never ran dry. We drank deeply, thirsty for all that we had missed in the weeks we were separated. It was not until the sky began to blanch at last to gray that I remembered what he had said to Lycomedes in the hall. It had been forgotten amidst Deidameia’s pregnancy, his marriage, our reunion.
“Your mother was trying to hide you from the war?”
He nodded. “She does not want me to go to Troy.”
“Why?” I had always thought she wanted him to fight.
“I don’t know. She says I’m too young. Not yet, she says.”
“And it was her idea—?” I gestured at the remnants of the dress.
“Of course. I wouldn’t have done it myself.” He made a face and yanked at his hair, hanging still in its womanly curls. An irritant, but not a crippling shame, as it would have been to another boy. He did not fear ridicule; he had never known it. “Anyway, it is only until the army leaves.”
My mind struggled with this.
“So, truly, it was not because of me? That she took you?”
“Deidameia was because of you, I think.” He stared at his hands a moment. “But the rest was the war.”
Chapter Thirteen
THE NEXT DAYS PASSED QUIETLY. WE TOOK MEALS IN our room and spent long hours away from the palace, exploring the island, seeking what shade there was beneath the scruffy trees. We had to be careful; Achilles could not be seen moving too quickly, climbing too skillfully, holding a spear. But we were not followed, and there were many places where he could safely let his disguise drop.
On the far side of the island there was a deserted stretch of beach, rock-filled but twice the size of our running tracks. Achilles made a sound of delight when he saw it, and tore off his dress. I watched him race across it, as swiftly as if the beach had been flat. “Count for me,” he shouted, over his shoulder. I did, tapping against the sand to keep the time.
“How many?” he called, from the beach’s end.
“Thirteen,” I called back.