vision broke to pieces. For a moment I could do nothing but breathe and press my cheek to Telegonus’ head. His faint wisps of hair were worn away at the back with endless fidgeting in his cot.
I put my trembling hand to the water again. “Who is it?”
The water showed only the sky overhead. “Please,” I begged. But no answer came, and I felt the panic climbing my throat. I had assumed it was some nymph or river-god who threatened us. Tricks of insects and fire and animals were just at the limits of a lesser divinity’s natural power. I had even wondered if it was my mother, in a fit of jealousy that I might bear new children when she could not. But this god had the strength to escape my vision. There were only a handful of such deities in all the world. My father. My grandfather, perhaps. Zeus and a few of the greater Olympians.
I clutched Telegonus against me. Moly could ward off a spell, but not a trident, not a lightning bolt. I would fall to those powers like a stalk of wheat.
I closed my eyes and fought back the strangling fear. I must be clear and clever. I must remember all the tricks that lesser gods have used against greater since the beginning of time. Had not Odysseus once told me a story about Achilles’ sea-nymph mother, who had found a way to bargain with Zeus? But he had not said what that way was. And in the end, her son had died.
My breath felt like sawblades in my chest. I must learn who it is, I told myself. That is first. I cannot guard against shadows. Give me something to face and fight.
Back at the house, I made a small fire in the hearth, though we did not need it. The night was warm, summer waxing to autumn, but I wanted the smell of cedar in the air, and the tang of my herbs which I had sprinkled over the flames. I was aware of a tingling on my skin. Any other time I would have taken it for a change in the weather, but now it seemed curdled with malice. My neck bristled. I paced the stone floor, cradling Telegonus against me until at last, exhausted from his wailing, he slept. It was what I had waited for. I laid him in his crib, then drew it close to the fire and set my lions and wolves around it. They could not stop a god, but most divinities are cowards. Claws and teeth might buy me a little time.
I stood before the hearth, my staff in my hand. The air was thick with a listening silence.
“You who would try to kill my child, come forth. Come forth, and speak to my face. Or do you only do your murdering from the shadows?”
The room was utterly still. I heard nothing but Telegonus’ breaths and the blood in my veins.
“I need no shadows.” The voice sliced the air. “And it is not for such as you to question my purposes.”
She struck the room, tall and straight and sudden-white, a talon of lightning in the midnight sky. Her horse-hair helmet brushed the ceiling. Her mirror armor threw off sparks. The spear in her hand was long and thin, its keen edge limned in firelight. She was burning certainty, and before her all the shuffling and stained dross of the world must shrink away. Zeus’ bright and favorite child, Athena.
“What I desire will come to pass. There is no mitigation.” That voice again, like shearing metal. I had stood in the presence of great gods before: my father and grandfather, Hermes, Apollo. Yet her gaze pierced me as theirs had not. Odysseus had said once she was like a blade honed to a hair’s fineness, so delicate you would not even know you had been cut, while beat by beat your blood was emptying on the floor.
She extended one immaculate hand. “Give me the child.”
All the warmth in the room had fled. Even the fire popping beside me seemed only a painting on the wall.
“No.”
Her eyes were braided silver and stone gray. “You would stand against me?”
The air had thickened. I felt as though I gasped for breath. On her chest shone her famous aigis, leather armor fringed with golden threads. It was said to be made from the skin of a Titan that she had flayed and tanned herself. Her flashing eyes promised: just so will