“And who will save Hector and Andromache, when you’re dead?” Demeter went on. “You have to do it now. While you have the strength.”
“You want me to lead a fight against the Moirae, when Athena couldn’t?”
It was more than ridiculous. It was impossible.
“You must want me to end up with a pair of shears in each eye.”
“Athena didn’t know what she fought,” Demeter said. “You will.”
“I’m not a leader. I’m the god of thieves.”
“Hermes. There’s no one else. There’s no one left.”
Just him. Only him, until Athena made it back. If she ever made it back.
“Hold on,” Henry said. “Why don’t we just wait for Athena? And my sister, if they’re coming back?”
Demeter regarded the boy warily.
“This is how a warrior speaks?”
“Yes,” Henry said, eyes dark. “If he wants to win. If waiting is smarter, then we wait. And if running is smarter, we do that, too.”
“Stop.” Hermes closed his eyes. The flat plane of the desert seemed to tilt. They’d come for solutions and instead found another fight. Another set of odds. And bad ones at that.
This isn’t real. The Moirae are a puddle of twisted bodies. I haven’t dreamed about them, and even if I had, they can’t come through my dreams and shear me in my sleep.
“You’re trying to push me into something,” he said. “Something where there’s no winning.”
Demeter chuckled, and her eye scrunched up. Somewhere in the distance, what remained of her mouth was smiling.
“I can’t fight the Moirae,” Hermes said. “Nobody can. Not Athena. Not anybody. Definitely not me.”
“Why not?” Demeter asked.
“Because you just don’t. Because you can’t.”
“Because my brother Zeus said you couldn’t?”
Hermes pursed his lips. Zeus deferred to the Moirae. They all deferred to the Moirae. It was how a god learned to bow his head. Their only hard limit.
The very idea of fighting them seemed mad.
“I can’t win,” he said quietly.
Demeter lifted, and flopped back into the dirt: the rug’s equivalent of a shrug.
“You might not,” she said. “But sometimes you don’t fight to win. Sometimes you fight to fight.”
6
OUT OF THE BLACK
Athena knelt beside Odysseus, watching his chest rise and fall around the blade that still protruded from his chest and back. In the strange red-orange light of the underworld, the blood around the wound was visible, and still wet. He’d bled no more once they’d landed in Hades. It was the same blood in the same pattern, the same rhythm to his breath. Nothing changed, and he never spoke. She couldn’t remember why she’d thought he would.
Sometimes she whispered to him, mostly nonsense and foolish promises, apologies for slights and mistakes she made thousands of years ago. But the words died inches from her lips. The air ate the sound so quickly she wasn’t sure if it ever reached his ears.
Athena brushed his dark hair gently away from his eyes and paused at the sight of her fingers. Three of her nails were cracked. The one on her index finger had split down the middle, a casualty of an unlucky grab. It had slid against some water-bound creature’s scales. Slid, and then scraped and then split.
“But no feathers.” She fluttered the wounds before Odysseus’ closed lids. The feathers were fewer, if there were any at all. Being in the bounds of the underworld seemed to slow them.
“We should have come here from the start,” she said. “We should’ve come here, all of us, and left you alone.” But they hadn’t, and Achilles had put a sword through Odysseus’ chest.
That was my decision. My choice to bring Achilles back with us. My plan to force Hera into a fight. And now my choice to hide from everything that happened.