the door between us. He screamed and screamed, and there came a pounding like his head against the wall. I finished my cleaning and tried to work, but my own head was beating at itself by then. I kept thinking that if I let him rage long enough, he must at last wear himself out and sleep. But he only went on, wilder and wilder as the shadows lengthened. The day was passing and the spell not done. It would be easy to say that my hands moved on their own, but that is not how it was. I was angry, burning hot.
I had always sworn to myself that I would not use magic on him. It seemed like something Aeëtes would do, setting my will over his. But in that moment I seized the poppy, sleep-drugs, all the rest, brewed them till they sizzled. I went to the room. He was kicking the pieces of shutter that he had torn from the windows. Come, I said. Drink this.
He drank and went back to his tearing. I did not mind now. It was almost a pleasure to watch. He would learn his lesson. He would understand who his mother was. I spoke the word.
He fell like a toppled stone. His head hit the floor so loudly I gasped. I ran to him. I had thought it would be like sleep, his eyes gently closed. But his whole body was rigid, frozen mid-movement, his fingers curled into claws, his mouth open. His skin was cold beneath my fingers. Medea had said she did not know if those slaves in her father’s halls could perceive what happened to them. I knew. Behind his blank eyes, I could feel his confusion and terror.
I cried out in horror, and the spell broke. His body sagged, then he scrambled away, staring wildly back at me like a cornered beast. I wept. My shame was hot as blood. I’m sorry, I told him, again and again. He let me come to him, take him in my arms. Gently, I touched the lump that had risen where he had struck his head. I spoke a word to ease it.
The room was dark by then. Outside, the sun was gone. I held him in my lap as long as I dared, murmuring to him, singing. Then I carried him to the kitchen and gave him dinner. He ate it, clinging to me, and revived. He slid down and began to run again, slamming doors, pulling everything from the shelves that he could reach. I felt a weariness in me so great I thought I would sink into the earth. And every moment that passed, the spell against Athena went undone.
He kept looking at me over his shoulder. As if he were daring me to come at him, to witch him, to hit him, I did not know. Instead I reached up to the highest shelf for the great clay honey jar he was always yearning for. Here, I said. Take it.
He ran to it, rolling it in circles until it broke to pieces. Then he wallowed in the sticky puddles, and raced off, trailing threads for the wolves to lick. And so I finished the spells. It took a long time to bathe him and carry him to bed, but at last he lay beneath the quilts. He held my hand, his small warm fingers curled around mine. Guilt and shame sawed at me. He should hate me, I thought. He should flee. But I was all he had. His breath began to drag, and his limbs slackened. “Why can you not be more peaceful?” I whispered. “Why must it be so hard?”
As if in answer, a vision of my father’s halls drifted up: the sterile earth floor, the black gleam of obsidian. The sound of the game pieces moving on their board, and my father’s golden legs beside me. I had lain quiet and still, but I remembered the ravening hunger that was in me always: to climb into my father’s lap, to rise and run and shout, snatch the draughts from the board and batter them against the walls. To stare at the logs until they burst into flame, to shake him for every secret, as fruits are shaken from a tree. But if I had done even one of those things there would have been no mercy. He would have burnt me down to ash.
The moon lay on my son’s forehead. I saw the smudges