Page 120 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“I have no goddess!” Bodil spat.

“No, I shouldn’t think you would like that term after the Great Huntress took your sire and husband both in one day,” Faerie agreed, and I stopped breathing. “Oh, you didn’t know?” she asked, seeing whatever was on my face.

Pritkin got between me and Bodil, like that was going to matter. “She didn’t like your mother,” I thought numbly. Way to understate it!

Yet she’d saved me more than once.

“Why help me?” I whispered, meeting Bodil’s fiery red eyes. “You saved me in the pool, and then again after we came here—”

“My champion turned out to be disappointing,” she said, shooting Æsubrand a purely vicious look. “And Feltin was compromised. You might try to drag us into war, but at least it would be on the right side. If I couldn’t win, better you and your puppet than—”

“He’s not my puppet—”

“We’re all puppets!” she roared, passing Pritkin before either of us could react and getting in my face. “It’s all the gods know, all they understand! My father was a minor river god, Aliacmon—have you ever even heard of him?”

“No.”

“No.” Her face twisted bitterly. “Neither have most people. He was nothing, a nobody in the vaulted pantheon, barely acknowledged as a god. One of the ones who couldn’t feed as effectively as the mighty and would never have their power.

“Yet she killed him. And when my husband tried to intervene, she killed him, too. My father was a resource to great Artemis, someone with a power she needed. He could travel anywhere, even into the hells, where gods far greater than he struggled to go. And she killed him for it.

“Do you understand? Not because he hurt her—as if he could! Or offended her. He was a tool and nothing more. Just as we all are, the only difference is that I know it!

“But I didn’t want my family to.” She looked at her granddaughter and her face crumpled, with the light suddenly dying in her eyes. “Your mother?” she whispered.

“The Lady Ærindís is dead,” Faerie replied, but with a slight frown as if some of Bodil’s anguish had gotten through.

“Then they’re all gone. Everyone.”

She sat down suddenly on the floor and did not look like she planned to get up again.

Faerie’s frown grew.

“They are dead in this time,” she said slowly. “But not in the other. You can go back. Put all this right—”

“Can we?” Bodil asked, her face expressionless. It didn’t help that she was looking at me and that I . . . didn’t have good news for her.

I licked dry lips. “I . . . don’t understand what happened to us or how Tony did . . . whatever he did,” I said. “But . . .”

“But?” Pritkin spoke that time, looking intense. As if he already sensed the truth.

“But Pythias don’t deal with the future, as it doesn’t yet exist for us. Navigating to it would be like . . . like trying to vacation in a town that hasn’t been built yet or moving into a house that isn’t finished or even started.”

I was struggling to explain as I didn’t have the words prepared. This wasn’t something Gertie had taught me, as there was nothing to teach. The future was as closed and locked for us as for anyone else.

It was the province of its own Pythia, only here . . . there was none. We would absolutely have met her already if so, as this kind of incursion would have rung every alarm bell she had. And the fact that we were in Faerie wouldn’t change that, as there was no division anymore.

It was all the realm of the gods now.

“Cassie?” Pritkin prodded, but I only shook my head. This was why I hadn’t been asking questions; this train of thought led to madness. What had I done?

I had abandoned my post; that’s what I’d done, and the fact that I hadn’t meant to do it or wanted to go didn’t matter. I had left, and a timeline cannot be without a Pythia. So, when my power returned, understood that I was missing and wasn’t coming back, what did it do?

Where did it go?

Who had been here, trying to hold everything together, when the gods returned?

“Cassie?” Pritkin prodded more forcefully, and I was glad for it. I couldn’t think, couldn’t face it, didn’t want to know.

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