“Cassandra, you should get behind me now,” she said, too late. Cassandra turned a knob and pushed through.
Athena burst in behind her and put her arm out across Cassandra’s chest. Athena’s eyes swiveled to take in everything, and came up short. Hera was there. The braziers burned and skittered orange against her stone cheek, all but healed. She smiled, and she could almost use her whole mouth to do it. But Hera wasn’t the most important thing in the room.
“What are you?” Cassandra asked.
“Who are you talking to?” Athena blinked. Something blurred her eyes and made her head swim. The room was lit only by firelight and the setting sun, but it was too bright. The air was too thick to breathe even though the far wall was open air, cut rock and columns, looking out over the sea. Her eyes watered. She barely made out the dark shape of Ares, standing on the opposite side of the room.
(WE SEE YOU, GODDESS OF BATTLE. NOW SEE US)
Athena’s grogginess disappeared, wiped clean like a hand swept across a fogged mirror.
There they stood. Or sat. With the tricolor silk laid over them she couldn’t tell. Three disfigured women, raised up on a platform of marble. Three crumbling, withered monoliths of women, twisted together. Athena’s eyes traveled from their red, black, and silver hair, to their arms, grown into each other’s stomachs.
“The Moirae,” she whispered.
Atropos, the black-haired one in the center, and the only one still beautiful, took her eyes off Cassandra. Her gaze made Athena want to crawl into a hole.
(KNEEL)
Athena didn’t think. She knelt with reverence and haste. Anyone watching would have thought she wanted to. That doing it was her decision.
She couldn’t look at Hera. Couldn’t stand to see her smug expression of triumph.
The Moirae were here, and they stood with her enemies. Fate had never been with her at all. It was too late to warn the others.
Too late to tell them that she’d been wrong.
*
Cassandra stood still in the center, between Athena and the Moirae. They ordered the goddess onto her knees, and Athena’s kneecaps struck marble as she obeyed.
They made Athena obey. It almost made Cassandra like them.
“I’ve heard of you,” Cassandra said. “The Moirae. The Fates. They Who Must Not Be Named. Is it true? Are you the gods of the gods?”
She didn’t really need to ask. Invisible leashes wound around the necks of every god in the room, from Hera to Ares, tethering them to the sisters. And the dark one in the middle had thrown a rope around Athena easy as roping a lame calf. It could be good. Leashed gods were easy targets.
(COME CLOSER, CHILD)
The words pulled her, but their voices were softer in her head. Whispering instead of ringing like cathedral bells.
(COME, AND BE GRATEFUL FOR THE GIFT WE GAVE YOU)
“What gift?”
(PROPHECY)
“That wasn’t your gift. It was Aidan’s, and it was a curse.”
(COME KNEEL)
“No.” The leash wouldn’t go around her, she realized. And now that she had her eyes on them, they could bombard her brain all they wanted. It would be no different than if they screamed in her face.
(NO?)
“That’s what I said. I don’t take orders from a Frankenstein monster in patchwork silk.” She looked back at Athena as the burning in her hands spread up her arms and into her shoulders. Soon, she’d be able to taste the fire in her throat. “I don’t take orders from anyone.”
(YOU ARE OURS)
“It would seem not,” she said, her eyes on Aphrodite’s deliciously terrified face, hiding behind a pillar. Time would stop while she watched it melt. So many gods, ripe for the picking.
“Athena, stand up,” she said, and willed Athena’s legs to move. Athena trembled and started to sweat.
(YOU WILL NOT)
“I will,” said Cassandra.
A door she hadn’t noticed flew open on the other side of the room, to the rear of Ares and Aphrodite. Achilles and the others spilled through.