Page 72 of The Ruin of Eros

“We lost him.” She speaks quietly. “Hector. We lost him in the rubble.” She swallows. “My daughter survived. So did my husband and I. But Hector…we lost him.”

The pain curls in my throat.Hector. I think of the crown of flowers on his head; his boyish, sweaty palms. The faint fuzz on his upper lip. Just a child.

Gone.

I raise my head and force myself to look at her.

“Tis lypes mou,” I manage, but my voice is shaking. Is this really all I have to offer her—my sorrows? She will never see her only son again.

She stares back at me, and in her gaze I see Hector: all that he would have been, all that he will now never be. I understand what she meant, when she said her eyes play tricks on her now. She sees him still. She will always see him, perhaps.

“I don’t blame you, Psycheandra,” she says at last. “I don’t know why those boulders fell, or what it is that stirs the finger of the Fates. The tempers of the gods are beyond my ken. But you went to the cliff to save Sikyon; you deserve no blame for what came next.”

I wish that felt as true in my heart as it sounds on her lips. I cannot help but think now, what if Eros had never intervened? Hector would not be dead then.

But I remember what Eros said when I voiced that thought before.A life is not a coin that can be traded for another.For better or worse, no such bargain exists. I was saved, and now I have my life and must use it. My grief won’t bring back Hector, nor will guilt or regret. Instead I vow to one day do something great in his name.

“We will keep the memory of him burning,” I say quietly.

“Tha thymithoúme,” she responds.We will remember.

We look at each other in silence for a while, and then she gestures, indicating over my shoulder.

“They are moving,” she says. “You are being summoned.”

*

She sits on a three-legged stool, before a deep opening in the rock. Across the divide there is a small bench, where petitioners are to sit, I suppose. When I see her round, young face, I can’t help blinking in surprise. I had expected an old woman—wizened, ancient, a crone. The Pythia has served at Delphi for hundreds of years, after all, not that anyone truly believes it’s been the same person all that time. Despite the girl’s young face, her lush, thickly braided hair is bone-white. She regards me with large, pale eyes.

“Sit, daughter of Sikyon,” she gestures.

I take my seat.Daughter of Sikyon. Is it her gift that speaks, or was I asked for that information earlier? I can’t remember.

“What do you wish to know?” she says. Her voice is light, like a child’s. Somehow, after these days of riding, and these many hours of waiting, I’m tongue-tied. I have questions buried inside me that I haven’t yet figured out how to ask. But there is one above all that drove me here.

“My father, my sister. I was told they escaped the devastation of Sikyon. Is it true?”

“It is true,” she says. A lump forms in my throat when she speaks the words and I cannot look at her. The relief, the gratitude, is too overwhelming.I did not hope in vain.

“Then I must find them,” I say. “Where are they?”

She does not speak for a while, and I grow restless. Has she not heard me? Does she refuse my second question?

“Nowhere, yet,” she says at last.

Her words do not make sense—they must besomewhere—but she speaks them so definitively.

“You will not find them if you search now,” she carries on. “It is not your path.”

I stare.

“Mypath?”

“Your path is through the gods, daughter of Sikyon.” She keeps her cool eyes on me. “The god who is your husband. Aid him, and he will aid you.”

A cold, prickling feeling spreads over my skin.Husband.She knows everything about me already. And she speaks as if this god and I were still bound together; as if those reckless promises still endure. But he told me to run. To forget.

“Aidhim?” I repeat. She must see how absurd the notion is. “What need has a god for mortal aid!”

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