think Halcyon is in trouble?” Maia whispered as she stood beside Evadne, their elbows bumping.
Evadne avoided Maia’s gaze. “I do not know.”
She left her cousin to wash, moving as fast as she could up the stairs to her bedchamber.
Halcyon’s blankets were wrinkled from when she had briefly lain down on her bed. Evadne rushed to refold and straighten them. And then she noticed the floor. Sunlight poured in through the open window, illuminating Halcyon’s footprints on the tiles.
Evadne stripped off her chiton and dipped it into her pot of water, falling to her knees to scrub the prints away, angry and heartsick. This was not how this day was to unfold.
Once the floor was clean, Evadne opened her oaken chest and found her best chiton, the one she had been saving for tonight. It was white, its hem patterned with a green vine. The most adorned of all her garments. She donned it, cinching it with her leather belt before reaching for the two brass brooches her mother had bought her as a gift. They were fashioned as olive wreaths, and Evadne fastened her chiton at the shoulders with the pins, her hands trembling.
Do not be afraid, Little Sister.
She looked out the window. In the distance, the Dacia Mountains rose like the knuckles of a god’s hand. Evadne wondered if Halcyon had fled to those mountains to hide, but then she thought how foolish that would be, because of Mount Euthymius.
Mount Euthymius was the tallest summit in the kingdom, and even though Evadne could not see it from her window in Isaura, she knew the Dacia ridge answered to it. No one wanted to live in the shadow of Euthymius, where fears manifested and had the power to roam the land as phantoms, where the door to the Underworld could be found in the mountain’s vast heart.
As a girl, Evadne had been terrified of the summit, as all the children of Corisande were taught to be. Euthymius, god of earth and beasts, had laid claim to it centuries ago, during the era when the nine divines dwelled among mortals. Euthymius’s brother, Pyrrhus, god of fire, had foolishly taken stones from the mountains and breathed his fire into them, leaving the “ember stones” as relics throughout the kingdom, much to the adoration of common people, who could now spark fire effortlessly. Soon, more people worshipped Pyrrhus than they did Euthymius, and Euthymius grew jealous and irate that his brother had used pieces of the earth for his magical fire. He began to devise a way to make Pyrrhus pay.
It did not take long.
Pyrrhus wanted a passage forged below the earth, so he could create his dream of an Underworld. Euthymius and his sister Loris, goddess of water, made an agreement with Pyrrhus, that they would carve into the mountain’s heart and create a door for him. But in order for Pyrrhus to reach the door, he had to pass through layers of earth and water, and it swallowed all his fire. He was the only god still earthbound, trapped behind his own door in the mountain ironically named after his brother. As such, his rage could still be felt from time to time, in the trembling of the earth. And all the temples throughout the kingdom—even those where Euthymius was worshipped—never let their fire burn out like Pyrrhus had.
Evadne closed her shutters. She shivered, as she always did when she thought of Mount Euthymius and the god of fire trapped beneath the ground.
No, Halcyon would not run to the mountains. Even she had been afraid of Mount Euthymius, Evadne thought as she returned to the main floor of the villa.
She could feel Straton’s presence like a shadow had fallen over them. Evadne began to walk the corridor to the kitchen until she heard her father speaking.
“I must ask, Lord Straton. Why have you come here for Halcyon? Has my daughter done something to merit this visit?”
The men were in the common room. The doors were ajar; Evadne paused in the shadow of the threshold, listening.
“I think we should wait and let Halcyon answer that herself, when she arrives,” the commander said.
He had no doubt his warriors would find her, would drag her home in shame.
Evadne gritted her teeth, hating him in that moment.
She went to the kitchen where her mother, Aunt Lydia, and Maia were already at work bringing out bowls of fruit and warming flatbread on the cooking brazier.
No one spoke.
Evadne opened the cellar door to bring up two jugs