Page 2 of The Ruin of Eros

“It is very simple—see?” Yiannis holds the reins for me to watch. “Like this to go left. Like this to go right. And to slow them: so.”

I glance at him, taking in his profile: strong nose, pale lashes, freckled cheekbones. He’s handsome, the girls of Sikyon agree, and I like him well enough. He’s better-behaved than some of the other boys in the town, the way they ogle and leer, the things they call out—Father says it’s flattery, but I confess I do not feel flattered. Yiannis stares at my breasts like the rest of them but at least he pretends not to. Not like his friend Vasilis, who looks openly, lips wet, eyes like slits, small and unsatisfied. I admit, I question Yiannis’s taste in friends, but I see no real badness in him.

But although I am ready to be married, I worry, still, what I will be made to let go of. In my father’s house I have freedom for the most part. I love to work on the loom, but in the Demous’ house only servants do such work. And at home, I still go out to the barn some days to practice with my bow and arrow, which I certainly won’t have space for at the Demous’. It’s just an indulgence, but I find it focuses the mind. Some days, days like this one, I wake up full of foreboding, as though some evil I’ve dreamed in the night might yet come to pass. It’s been happening more of late. And then I go out to the barn, notch anarrow, inhale, release…it brings me peace, somehow, to see it fly true and hit its mark.

Thatis something I won’t get to do under Kiria Demou’s watchful eye. My future mother-in-law likes to have everything under her command.

There’s a rustling and fluttering in the chariots ahead of us, people picking up reins, making last adjustments, waving to the family members that have come to see them off. It’s time for us to begin.

“Ready, Hector? Don’t fall over.” I glance over at my father’s proud face, and then to my left, where Yiannis is already joking with Vasilis and his other friends. Vasilis’s eyes fall on me and I turn away with a shudder.

The carriage ahead of us takes off with a jerk.

“Go!” I say, and the whip cracks in my hand.

Here goes nothing.

Chapter Two

Our town must be one of the handsomest in all the Peloponnese, or at least that’s what I believe. I have never gone further than Corinth and that was only once, with Father, but I think it is hard to imagine a landscape I would like better. From up here, in the mountains, sometimes it feels like you can see the whole world. The winters are harsh enough, but the summers are gentle, and in spring anemones grow everywhere in the fields. Most people with some status live in the center of the town but Father likes it further out, where we are. There, the red-gold roofs of barns and farmyards shine in the sun, and the sound of pigs and cattle and now and then a rooster pierces the air. In the early mornings all you hear are birds. At night the sky is so deep a navy it looks black, and the constellations burn.

And far down below, at what looks like the very bottom of the world, you can see the sea. Father says it is the same color as my eyes.

The streets that lead to the Agora get wider as we approach, and soon a handful of onlookers becomes dozens. The streets look different from my perch on top of this high carriage, looking down.

“Slow, you stupid beasts,slow,” I mutter anxiously, tugging on the reins the way Yiannis showed me. Hector and I are the last carriage in the parade. Ahead of us, the others represent the sea and the heavens, thepolisof Sikyon, and the nymphs that attend Aphrodite as handmaidens. But since we are last, I must work the hardest to keep our horses from charging forward—otherwise we will all tumble into each other like a handful of marbles.

I think how Dimitra would laugh at that.

It is only the three of us: father, Dimitra, and me. My mother died when I was born, and it was the birthing of me that killed her. She gave me my name before she died. They say it was the last word she uttered. Psycheandra:soul warrior. Dimitra scoffs at it. You see, my mother was not Dimitra’s mother: my father has lost two wives now. The first, Dimitra’s mother, was a local girl, born and bred in Sikyon as Father was. It was no great love-match, I think. He was a military man, frequently away from Sikyon on some campaign or other, and the business of finding a wife had been long postponed. When he reached the age of thirty, however, he came under pressure from his family, and Dimitra’s mother was found. But then, only a year after Dimitra’s birth, he returned from his latest military campaign to learn that a great sickness had come to Sikyon while he was away. Dimitra’s mother was one of many to perish.

He left Dimitra with his sister, our aunt, and went back to the front to fight again. This time the war he went to was the great Atlantean war. It was supposed to be over in months but lasted two whole winters. When he returned from Atlantis, he was a decorated soldier and a married man: he’d brought an Atlantean bride home with him.

You might think that both having lost our mothers so early in life, Dimitra and I would understand each other better. You might think we’d be closer. But that’s not exactly true. Wewereclose, once, but no longer.

My sister was an angelic-looking child, highly praised for her prettiness since infancy. She never had an awkward stage, even in those years of puberty which afflict so many young women. Meanwhile, as a child, I was not considered noteworthy: my neck was too long, my hands and feet too big, my arms tooskinny, my eyes a little too large in my childish face. But a strange thing happened the summer of my fourteenth year: I began to be beautiful. I say this not to boast—on the contrary, it worries me. They say my mother was beautiful, and because of it none of the women in the village liked her. Even the midwife was late to attend her labor. I try not to wonder whether it would have made any difference, had she been on time.

Dimitra has stayed as pretty as she ever was, but the gossip in town began to change after I became beautiful. They say I have now surpassed my sister, that I began to outshine her years ago. Dimitra knows it, and hates me for it. Meanwhile I fear the townspeople have lost the run of themselves—Sikyonians love to exaggerate—and when they have finished comparing me to Dimitra they start to compare me to others. Fairer than Persephone, goddess of spring, they say. Fairer then the goddess of dawn, Eos. Father reports the things he’s heard with pride, and I worry he has become indiscreet. I worry that he’s let it go to his head and boasts of it.

Gods are jealous creatures—look at what happened to Medusa. People think she was born with a head full of snakes, but that’s not true. Most monsters aren’t born, they’re made. You’d be surprised how many of them used to be human once. Beautiful humans, most of them. But it doesn’t do to be too beautiful.

The houses get grander as we make our way down the main street, toward the Agora, which is the assembly-place for the whole town. Twice a month there is a great market there, and every day it’s where the men congregate to talk, drink wine, and agree on the great things they have done for the city. This long building we’re passing now is where the Council sits, and behind it, raised up on a mound and decorated in blue and red and gold, is the king’s palace. But that’s not where we’re going today.

As we move into the Agora, the murmur of the crowds becomes a roar. I don’t envy the job of the first chariot in the parade, having to carve a path through them. Sikyonians get like this on festival days: transported, euphoric, over-excited. It’s a combination of alcohol and hemp-flower, heat and crowds. Fights will break out before nightfall, I’m sure of it. But right now, they’re roaring with delight. Roaring for us.

“Wave, Hector,” I encourage him. It’s Hector, as Eros, who should be drawing the bigger cheers today. But I can see quite clearly, it’s me they’re looking at. Hector doesn’t seem disappointed: he’s a sweet boy, and looks mesmerized by the crowds. Some of them throw roses, and he reaches out to catch them.

“Careful!” I say under my breath as I wave and smile and try to keep all this pearly fabric from billowing out of the carriage and under its wheels. “Thorns, Hector.”

But he’s already found out his mistake, and drops the stem from his grip with a cry of disgust.

That’s roses for you.No wonder they’re Aphrodite’s flower.

Beauty always has a sting in the tail.

“Do you hear?” Hector says, and I look down to see his eyes wide in admiration, staring at me.

“Hear what?”

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