Twenty-Eight

“Waxing and waning, rising and falling—this was my life for thousands of years in my kingdom in the sky. It might have continued that way and I would have never known love had not a firefly appeared one night. I knew these insects from seeing them far below at dusk when I readied my carriage for the night’s ride across the sky. But this one flew high, up through the veil of clouds, and circled around me, blinking and pulsing. I sensed it wished me to follow, so I did, tying up my horses to a moonbeam. A few mortals must have wondered why the moon didn’t show that night, though I should have been full. But most of them did not notice since looking up is something they seldom do, concerning themselves only with the affairs at their feet.

“I followed the firefly south toward Africa and the middle regions of the earth. And there, swaddled in a cloud, I found a baby, sleeping peacefully. A note was pinned to her misty swaddle that read, ‘Her name is Medusa.’ The firefly dove back down to earth and left me there, staring into the baby’s face, which I found brighter and more luminous than even my own. Love hit me then, and I gathered up this girl and clutched her to my chest. She was mine, and though I kept the name whoever left her had given, I raised her as my own.

“Every night, Medusa rode with me in my carriage. I taught her my magic and sang to her. I loved her so much that my light was brighter for those centuries, though the mortals didn’t notice, for their life spans are too short to comprehend heavenly change and moods. Apollo made a few comments, though—telling Zeus I should tone myself down a bit, so the mortals didn’t confuse day and night—and I tried because I did not want to get on Zeus’s bad side. I never trusted the Olympians. But love is hard to hide.

“My Medusa grew up slow and fast at the same time, as all children do—both mortal and immortal. It seemed a thousand years before she gained a conscious mind and babbled and pointed, seeking words and taking steps. But in the blink of an eye, she was already a girl, wandering away from me to peer down from the clouds at the mortals below.

“From the beginning, she was fascinated by them and asked many questions that I could not answer. This worried me, and I forbade her from ever descending to earth. I was wary of the trouble she would find there—also of the Olympians taking notice of her. They paid little attention to my kingdom; the sky at night, when we journeyed through it, felt safe enough. But I never trusted Zeus and his brothers and sensed that whoever had left Medusa to me had been trying to hide her from them. As you can see, I was a protective mother—moon mothers are by nature—and hovered over her. But having never been a mother before, I did not understand that holding tight to a daughter can have the opposite effect, a lesson I would soon learn in tragic fashion.

“One night, when Medusa had been with me for a thousand years but looked not much older than you, she took my carriage down to Earth. It was the one night of the month I slept (mortals call this the ‘new moon’), and since my horses returned to their stable at dawn on their own, I did not realize what she had done until the following night when I spotted her below. I wanted to swoop down and carry her back to the realm of the night sky, where I could protect her. But she seemed so happy on earth, overjoyed by the beauty of the world, by the people and animals. The sky is just clouds, stars and sunlight, dreams, air—I knew it couldn’t satisfy her forever. And so I watched her from a distance, half-frightened and half-proud of my fearless girl.

“Perhaps because she did not grow up on Olympus, where mortals are considered insignificant and playthings, Medusa felt an instinctive love for the mortals she met. She was drawn to women and girls most of all. Though their lives were short and hard compared to the gods’, she was touched by the efforts they made to create beauty and find love. She used her powers to help them because she saw they were often oppressed and mistreated—not only by the gods but by mortal men who copied the gods’ behavior. She turned women invisible when they were in danger; she strengthened their voices when they were afraid; she gave them knowledge of what plants could heal them and their children. A cult grew up around her. At first it was small, just a few villages, a few communities of women. But bit by bit, the cult of Medusa spread through Greece.”

Screeching, rage-filled, loathsome, without reason—Ava remembered what Athena had said about Medusa and how awful it had made her feel. But this wasn’t the Medusa Hecate had known. She’d been beloved. This was an ancestor to be proud of, one who’d helped women and girls, not turned men into stone.

“Why haven’t I heard this before?” Ava asked.

Fia shook her fist at where the sky would have been if they weren’t in the deepest reaches of Tartarus.

“The Olympians,” Ava translated.

“Your friend is right,” Hecate’s mother voice said with an echoing sigh. “I worried for my daughter, especially after news of her popularity reached Olympus. The Olympians are always jealous, and the mortals’ love for this new immortal, who had appeared from nowhere and who had no known lineage, enraged them. But Zeus is sneaky too—he did not strike her with a lightning bolt or throw her into Tartarus as he did me. He wanted the mortals to like him. Instead, he seeded the minds of men—the poets, especially—with stories: that Medusa had snakes for hair, that she turned men into stone, that she was one of three monstrous Gorgon sisters, that she was the enemy of his beloved daughter Athena. Because of these lies and the fear they caused, the popularity of Medusa’s cult dwindled.”

“But she really does have snakes for hair now and can turn men into stone,” Layla said. “So what happened?”

Hecate shook her heads sadly. “Although I did not approve of Zeus ruining my Medusa’s name, I hoped she would now leave the mortal world and return to me where she’d be safe. But instead, she did something no god had ever dared. She—”

But before Hecate could continue, a young woman appeared on the stairs. Her skin was so pale that Ava could see the blue veins beneath it. Her straw-colored hair was adorned with a crown of dead flowers. “Hades is coming,” she said. “They need to get back to the living world—now!”

Hecate’s six hands grabbed Ava’s arm. “Find Hestia, goddess of the hearth. She was witness to what happened next.”