Page 10 of The Ruin of Eros

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Back home, Father bolts the front door and tells the servants to stand guard. My heart has not beat normally, I think, for hours. If I let myself think about what just happened, my mouth dries up so that I can barely swallow.

Offering.

Aphrodite’s Pillow is a place further down the mountain,almost halfway to the sea. It is a rock formation, a sort of tabletop jutting out over the water below. They say in the olden times sacrifices were offered there, back when these lands worshipped the Titans; back when they did not only slaughter bulls and sheep for the gods, but humans, too.

I close my eyes. I have retreated upstairs, leaving Father and Dimitra to argue below. How can it all have come to this, and so fast? They say the gods are merciless, and yet I never thought to suffer like this—to suffer for something I haven’t done, something that was not my fault.

How quickly Sikyon went from singing my praises to calling me a witch. But I suppose I should not be surprised. Dimitra says they called my mother a witch, too, even though she married and produced a child, did the things a woman was supposed to. Even though she wore her cloak of respectability well. She dallied with herbs and potions, I am told, and did not mix with the neighbors. Her biggest sin, though, was to marry my father when other women of Sikyon wanted him for themselves. No one objected to a soldier bedding a foreign girl when he was off at the front, but to bring her home,marryher? Witchcraft, they said.

And now they say it of me.

“Gather your jewels, Psyche.” Father appears in the doorway to my room, his face seeming to have aged years in a couple of hours. “I have told Dimitra to do the same. I will see to our other valuables. We must take as little as possible. Only what we can easily carry.”

“What are you talking about?” My voice shakes.

“Father says we are to sneak away from here in the night.” Dimitra appears behind him, her voice hard as glass. “To becomeostrakaof our own making.”

“To save your sister.” Father turns to her. “Would you have it any other way?”

Dimitra turns away, but I know what’s running through her mind.Ostrakaare unlucky. By many, they are considered untouchable. She will lose everything. The money from our small packs of valuables will not last long. We will become vagrants.

I don’t want this future for her. I don’t want it for my father.

I nod.

“I will pack.” But once Dimitra’s withdrawn to her room and my father’s gone back to his study, I go to find him. He’s hovering over a tray of valuables: a small icon made of gold; a signet ring of his father’s; a knife with a jewel-encrusted handle that belonged to my mother. A strange heirloom, but the only one she had, Father says. He used to take it out and show it to me sometimes, if I begged hard enough. But he never let me touch it.Too sharp for little fingers,he would say. I wonder if he thinks we need weapons, now.

“What if Kirios Demou is right?” I say. “Aphrodite has issued her demand. Aren’t we just trying to fool the gods by running away?”

Running away doesn’t work when it’s the gods who are after you. I know that much from the old stories, and Father should too. He’s the one who told us the stories.

He doesn’t meet my eyes, just stares down at the tray in front of him before finally shoveling everything into a satchel.

My father is wealthy because he is powerful; he is powerful because everyone here knows him. How would he manage, how would he ever support us, if we had to start from scratch somewhere new? Dimitra and I have never been taught a trade, we would be useless to him.

“Iwill run,” I say. “I’ll leave. Tonight. But you and Dimitra can stay here, and be safe.”

“Do not ask me to give you up,” he says, and his voice has a tremor in it.

“Even for my sister’s sake?” I say. It is a cruel question, but I must make him see. He must protect her too. “Think of the life you will subject her to, if you force this on her.”

He shakes his head fast, like a swimmer ridding his ear of water. He does not want to hear me. He does not want to see.

“We will leave together,” he says. “All will be well.”

I pause.

“Father…”

No one has asked me for the truth about my hair, and what happened today at the temple. Father and Dimitra both saw it for themselves. They know there was no trick to it.

“You saw what happened at the temple,” I say. “It was not right.”

He smiles nervously, his eyes still not meeting mine.

“It’s not the time for that now. We will seek answers later.”

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