“Odysseus calls you ‘Cally.’”
She smiled. “He does.” She gestured over Cassandra’s shoulder at the bare branches of the broad tree. “That tree will never bear leaves again. The buds will fall dead to the ground this spring. I wonder if it knew.”
The tree looked fine. No signs of rot or disease.
“How can you tell?” Cassandra asked.
“I can’t tell,” Calypso replied. “But I know. Aidan won’t allow the shade. The same way he won’t allow snow on this stone.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t like to think of him…” Cassandra paused. “As being under the ground. As being there.”
“He isn’t there. He is somewhere else. I didn’t mean that he was in that box. Only that some things are strong enough to leave pieces behind.”
“Pieces.” Cassandra frowned. “You’re not good at saying comforting things.”
Calypso’s laugh dragged a smile out of Cassandra from somewhere down deep.
“I know,” she said. “I haven’t lived with humans as long as Athena and Hermes have. I think it’s made me strange. If I wasn’t strange to begin with.”
“I don’t think you’re strange,” Cassandra said. “I start training today. Hand-to-hand stuff. I’d like you to be the one to do it, if you’re willing.”
“I think Odysseus wants to train you.”
“You or him, then,” said Cassandra. “Or Hermes.”
“So, just not Athena.”
“Not Athena, and not—”
“Achilles!” The way she said it, Cassandra knew Calypso wasn’t just finishing a sentence. His shoes squelched as he walked the last yards to where they stood.
“What are you doing here?” Cassandra asked.
“I wanted to see him,” he said. “The god beneath the ground.” He stared at the headstone as if it were a museum exhibit, and it made Cassandra want to tear her skin off. Her palms began to tingle and itch, but the tingle couldn’t do anything to Achilles besides make him nice and toasty warm.
“It doesn’t seem right,” he said. “This small marker when he used to have temples.”
“We should have brought wine,” Calypso agreed. “To pour out a proper libation.”
Achilles gestured to the bottle in Cassandra’s hands. “Maybe he accepts libations of vitamin water now.”
Libations. Godly talk from a godly hero and a nymph. They didn’t really know whose grave they stood at. They didn’t know Aidan at all.
“Stop it,” Cassandra said. “He’s not a god. He doesn’t accept offerings of anything anymore.”
Achilles stuffed his hands into his pockets.
“You should have come another time,” Calypso whispered to him.
“I wasn’t sure what the right thing was,” he said. “What seemed more respectful. To come when she was here, to show I cared—”
“You don’t care,” Cassandra said. “Everyone else is fooled by you, but not me. Even though they know I’m the prophet, no one listens. My curse is still at work all these years later. You’d think I’d be used to it.”
“I don’t blame you,” Achilles said. “My face is the face you remember killing your brother. Just like Henry’s is the one I remember killing Patroclus.”
“You didn’t—” she said, and shut her mouth. She’d been about to say, You didn’t actually see that, but she stopped herself. That was an assy thing to say, even to Achilles.
“We only do what the Fates ask of us, princess,” he said. “You and me both.”
“Don’t put us in the same sent—” she said, and Calypso screamed.
Cassandra barely had time to whirl before the black wolf sprang and took Calypso down to the ground. Then Achilles had Cassandra around the waist, half-dragging and half-carrying her through the cemetery.