“Prisoners don’t usually dictate their own conditions.”
My face stung, but I knew better than to show it. “Tell my father I will do something awful to them if they do not leave. I will turn them into rats.”
“I can’t imagine Zeus would like that. Weren’t you already exiled for acts against your kin? You should beware further punishment.”
“You could speak on my behalf. Try to persuade him.”
His black eyes glittered. “I’m afraid I’m only a messenger.”
“Please,” I said. “I do not want them here, truly. I am not being funny.”
“No,” he said, “you are not. You are being very dull. Use your imagination, they must be good for something. Take them to your bed.”
“That is absurd,” I said. “They would run screaming.”
“Nymphs always do,” he said. “But I’ll tell you a secret: they are terrible at getting away.”
At a feast on Olympus such a jest would have been followed by a roar of laughter. Hermes waited now, grinning like a goat. But all I felt was a white, cold rage.
“I am finished with you,” I said. “I have been finished a long time. Let me not see you again.”
If anything, his grin deepened. He vanished and did not return. It was no obedience. He was finished with me too, for I had committed the unpardonable sin of being dull. I could imagine the stories he was telling of me, humorless, prickly, and smelling of pigs. From time to time, I could sense him just out of sight, finding my nymphs in the hills, sending them back flushed and laughing, giddy from the great Olympian who had shown them favor. He seemed to think I would go mad with jealousy and loneliness, and turn them into rats indeed. A hundred years he had been coming to my island, and in all that time he had never cared for more than his own entertainment.
The nymphs remained. When they finished their terms of service, others arrived to take their place. Sometimes there were four, sometimes six or seven. They trembled when I passed, ducking and calling me mistress, but it meant nothing. I had been put in my place. At a word and a whim from my father all my vaunted power blew away. Not even my father: any river-god had the right to fill my island, and I could not stop him.
The nymphs wafted around me. Their smothered laughter drifted down the halls. At least, I told myself, it was not their brothers, who would have bragged and fought and hunted down my wolves. But of course that was never a real danger. Sons were not punished.
I sat at my hearth watching the stars turn through the window. Cold, I felt. Cold as a garden in winter, gone deep to ground. I did my spells. I sang and worked at my loom and husbanded my animals, but it all felt shrunk to the size of ants. The island had never needed my hand. It prospered on no matter what I did. The sheep multiplied and wandered freely. They ambled over the grass, nudging aside the wolf pups with their blunt faces. My lioness stayed inside by the fire. White fur stained her mouth. Her grandchildren had their own grandchildren, and her haunches trembled when she walked. A hundred years at least she must have lived with me, pacing at my side, her life extended by the close pulse of my divinity. A decade that time had seemed to me. I assumed there would be many more, but one morning I woke to find her cold beside me on the bed. I stared at her unmoving sides, my brain stupid with disbelief. When I shook her a fly buzzed off. I pried open her stiff jaws and forced herbs down her throat, chanting one spell, then another. Still she lay there, all her golden strength turned dun. Perhaps Aeëtes could have brought her back, or Medea. I could not.
I built the pyre with my own hands. Cedar it was, and yew, and mountain ash that I chopped myself, its white pith spraying where the axe blade struck. I could not lift her, so I made a sledge out of the purple cloth I had used to wind around her neck. I dragged her through my hall, past the stones worn smooth by the pads of her great paws. I pulled her up to the pyre’s top and lit the flames. There was no wind that day, and