Page 55 of The Court of the Dead
“Would you be willing to tell me what happened?” he asked gently. “With your parents?”
Savannah shivered. “Have you heard of the Daemones Ceramici?”
It took Nico a moment to translate the Latin. “Pottery demons? I think I heard a story at Camp Half-Blood once.” He gestured to Savannah’s gray-streaked hands. “You’re a potter, I take it.”
She nodded glumly. “Every morning. First thing.”
Nico understood how much dedication that would take.First thingat Camp Jupiter meant Savannah would have to get up every morning around three or four.
“I’m a legacy demigod,” she continued. “My grandmother was a child of Minerva, patron of ceramic arts. She was so talented.”
She gazed at nothing, clearly lost in memories. “We always kept a little statue of Minerva on the kiln in the workshop. It’s an old custom with potters. When you fire your pots, it’s supposed to protect them from the ceramic demons that want to break your pieces or destroy them in the flames.”
Nico’s stomach felt heavy. He thought he knew where this story was going. It was similar to other demigod tragedies…including his own.
“My mom and dad made all kinds of art together,” Savannah continued. “But my mom’s speciality was magic containers. Things that could entrap bad spirits.”
“Like empousai,” Nico guessed.
“Yeah…the empousai didn’t like that. I don’t know how they found us. One day they broke into the workshop while the kiln was firing a new batch of vases. My mom and dad and I were working, and…the demons broke the kiln god. They unleashed the Daemones Ceramici.”
Her green eyes shone with rage. “Do you have any idea how hot a kiln fire gets? The empousai weren’t bothered by the flames. They pushed me outside, saying, ‘Learn a lesson from this, girl.’ I couldn’t fight them. I—I wasn’t strong enough. They barricaded my parents inside, and…”
She didn’t need to finish.
“I’m sorry,” Nico said. “My mother died in a fire, too.”
He told her the story. Even after so many years, his voice broke when he talked about the wrath of Zeus; the way a single thunderbolt had left Bianca and him orphaned.
“I guess if I could whack Zeus with a practice sword,” Nico said, “I probably would.”
Savannah wiped away a tear. “That wouldn’t go well.”
“No,” Nico agreed.
They sat listening to Centurion Maurice barking out commands:“Pila tollite! Ad pila portate!”
“What can I do?” Savannah asked.
Nico studied her face. She seemed serious about wanting to help.
“You could start by telling people what you told me,” he suggested. “That you know Arielle wasn’t responsible for your parents’ death. That you were upset, understandably, but you were wrong to attack her.”
Savannah grimaced. “I guess that’s fair. I’ll send an Iris-message around.” She tapped the blue pendant on her bracelet.
“What is that, anyway?” Nico asked.
Savannah slipped off the bracelet and handed it to Nico for a closer look. “A tessera—a tile from a mosaic.”
Nico turned the pendant between his fingers. It wasn’t stone, he realized, but layers of colored glass fused into a single square that glimmered and flashed in the sunrise.
He remembered asking Hazel about those high-definition Iris-messages. She’d said something about tesserae. “How does it work?” he asked. “No water, or rainbow, or golden drachma offering?”
Savannah smiled. She seemed relieved to talk about something she actually enjoyed. “Each piece has an underlayer of Imperial gold. I fired them in a kiln and then constructed all of them into a mosaic of the goddess Iris, right? Once the mosaic was consecrated at her temple, I broke down the pieces and handed them out to people in the legion, starting with the praetors and centurions, obviously. You just tap the tessera and speak the name of the person you want to talk to. Iris does the rest. You can even talk to multiple people at once, like a group chat.”
Nico tried to digest that information, and how much easier it would make demigod communication. “Youinventedthis?”
Savannah shrugged. “You don’t have to sound so surprised. I’m a legacy of Minerva. I don’t have enough tesserae for everyone in the legion, but yeah…they’re pretty helpful.”
