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Pirithous
“Come with me,” Thalia said.
Pirithous had been waiting for it to burst from her, whatever it was that had kept her lips pursed and caused her to glance sidelong at him as they rode home from the town. She had held back until after the evening meal, encouraging him to eat and drink, pouring him more wine whenever his cup fell empty.
He arched an eyebrow, waiting for her to elaborate. She had a disconcerting habit of launching into strange tales without any introduction or explanation and leaving him struggling to understand what on earth she could be going on about.
“To Virginia. In eleven days. I have an apartment all set up. I’m living by myself. You could stay with me and no one would know. You said yourself I’d be safe there, and so would you.” She toyed with the remains of her dinner, pushing it around her plate. “No centaurs. Lots of museums for you to check out and bring yourself up to speed with the world today. Come with me.”
He pressed his lips together. It was what he’d wanted from her, what he’d hoped for, and now she’d offered he couldn’t even accept it. “No, Thalia.”
“What do you mean, no?” She demanded. “Just yesterday you were cornering me in the bathroom offended that I was running off on you!”
“If I go with you, you won’t be any safer there than you are here. The centaurs will follow me, and the gods will not be far behind.”
“Your gods can’t hurt me, Pirithous.”
He shook his head, unconvinced, and pushed his own plate away. A cross seemed small protection against the power of Hades, if that god involved himself. And for the centaurs to have escaped, he almost certainly had already. Hades would not have wanted to free Pirithous, nor did he require the prayers of the living.
“The centaurs can and will. They will hunt us both, and if they catch you, they will make me watch while they break your bones, one by one, and skin the hair from your head.”
Her face paled. “Why?”
“Revenge.” He shrugged, his good hand closing into a fist around the stem of his wine glass. “The pleasure of making a demigod squirm and beg for mercy. They have always been troublesome beasts, wild and impulsive, lacking all self-control.”
“But why me?” she asked. “It can’t be what you said before, about Persephone. I’m helping you. I took you to the store, to the masonry company. I got you the stone bench for the altar. It wouldn’t do her any good to take my life.”
“No,” he agreed. “Cyllarus and his mate have their own reasons. Just as I must hunt them for mine.”
She frowned. “You know them?”
“I killed Cyllarus myself, three thousand years ago,” he said, and he had to clear his throat before he went on, his voice still thick with the memories of that day. “When he led his people into war against mine, against his own princess, my bride. To think I had thought him a friend, once. But he betrayed us both, in the end.”
Thalia sat back, her eyes wide and liquid with sympathy. “But if you killed him, how is he—?”
“Alive?” He twisted the wine glass in his hand, staring at the liquid inside. These were not things Thalia could understand, he supposed, when she did not have faith in what he knew as truth. Was this what Persephone wanted of him? To turn her mind to the gods he knew? “Hades, perhaps, angry that Persephone freed me, or Aphrodite, who takes great pleasure in leading me toward love only to tear it from my grasp. It does not matter. I won’t suffer them to live here, just as we did not suffer them in Thessaly after they turned against us and attacked my people.”
“And you’re going to stop them with a sword, when they’ve put an arrow through your shoulder already? What if they’d hit your heart, Pirithous!”
“By then you will be in Virginia, safe, and I will be no worse off than when I began.”
“Do you even hear yourself?” she asked. “How can you just give up this way? You’re alive! You’re back after three thousand years, and you’re just going to throw it all away and give yourself up to some ridiculous centaurs in the woods? You’re here for a reason, Pirithous!”
“To remind the world of a faith they abandoned, Thalia. That is the reason I was freed. For what purpose? For the glory of gods who would kill you if it served them? Maybe it is for the best that your people have forgotten them!” He rose from the table, turning from her. “You want me to come with you, to live on, but you cannot understand what that would mean for your future. I’ve already endangered you with the centaurs, but at least I can fight them. My sword will not serve to protect you if the gods strike at us directly.”
“I don’t need you to protect me, Pirithous. How many times do I have to say it? I don’t need protection. I don’t need a guardian. I don’t need a hero!” She caught his good arm, following him around the table. “What I do need is a man who isn’t afraid of my brother. You said you wanted to marry me before. That you wanted me and you weren’t afraid. Are you really going to roll over and give up before we’ve even started?”
He laughed, but it sounded bitter even to his own ears. “You seem to have no trouble finding other men.”
“Other men who quake the minute Alex shows up and glares!” She pulled him around. “You heard Tom. All those things he was saying? It’s the same thing over and over again. I meet someone half-decent and Alex finds a way to run him off again. Now I finally meet someone who isn’t afraid of my brother, and you’re rejecting me because what? Someday your gods might get cranky about it? I’m not theirs to take away, Pirithous. I have my own God, with a host of angels and saints to protect me. So what if they don’t like it? They can’t hurt me. They can’t touch me.”
His gaze dropped from her eyes, so fierce with determination, to the cross around her neck. The cross she clutched while he burned his offerings and said his own prayers. He traced its form with his fingertip, where it rested against her collarbone, in a sea of silken skin.
“Take me to your temple, Thalia,” he said at last. “And we will see what protection your god can offer.”
***
HE HAD NEVER SEEN A temple so tightly enclosed. Even in Athens, the buildings dedicated to the gods were open, to allow air and sun. Inside, though much larger than he had expected, it was not so different, but for the rows of benches on either side of a broad aisle. Alcoves had been built into the wall, and idols set inside, lit by flickering lamplight with true flames. Saints and angels, according to Thalia, for God Himself had no true likeness, though there were images of his son, Jesus, and the woman who bore him, clothed in blue.
Mary, the virgin mother. He frowned at the statue before them, the child-god in her arms. A shiver went down his spine, though he did not know exactly what it was that unnerved him. Something in the figure’s eyes, though Thalia had been offended when he had asked her if the statues served to allow the saints and angels to come to earth. Something about idol worship and false gods, until she’d realized what she was saying and her face had flushed red in her embarrassment.
That was when he’d understood that when she spoke of idols and false gods and pagans, she meant gods like his and his own people.
“You believe that we worshipped lies, pretending gods into existence?”
Thalia’s face burned brighter. “I—yes. Yes, for the most part, people believe it was all made up. Stories you told yourselves to explain things you couldn’t understand, like forces of nature and cultural disasters.”
“And you think you are above such foolishness?” he asked, struggling to keep his tone level. “You believe because your god is a god of everything at once, it makes you better than those of us who believed in many gods, each with their own sphere of influence?”
“You’re angry,” she said softly.
He closed his eyes to stop them from burning white with his fury. Of course he was angry. It was not enough that they had abandoned the gods he had known, but they had turned them into imaginings of ancient fools, as well.
“Is this what you think of me?” he asked. “That I am some bastard son telling himself his father is a made-up god?”
“At first.” She took his hand, gently working his fingers free of the fist they had made. “Before you showed me what you could do, and before I knew who you were. But I know better now.”
He let out a breath, staring at the statue of Mary so he would not glare at Thalia—it was not her fault she did not know his gods. But then he realized the statue was staring back, blue eyes mocking, lips curved. Pirithous stepped forward, pushing Thalia behind him as he did so, studying the statue. A dove lighted on the woman’s shoulder, and roses were painted at her feet. His throat closed. No wonder he had been uneasy.
“What’s the matter?” Thalia asked.
Pirithous backed away from the idol, releasing Thalia’s hand to touch his fist to his forehead in respect. It seemed Aphrodite had found a way into this new faith, taking up the mantle of the Virgin bride. He should have known. He should have realized she would not be cast aside so easily.
“The gods make fools of us all,” he said, then nodded to the altar. “What sacrifice does your god require? I wish to honor him.”
“No sacrifice, unless you mean prayer and obeying the commandments. God doesn’t ask for anything other than that. If you want to honor him, all you have to do is kneel and say thank you.”
Pirithous thought he heard laughter from the idol behind them, but Thalia didn’t seem to notice. Was that what Aphrodite lived off of, now? Prayers and obedience? He said nothing, following Thalia to a low bench. She knelt, folding her hands together and raising her eyes to a large cross. Pirithous took to his knees beside her, resting his hands on his thighs and leaning back on his heels. How much power could this God have, if he took Aphrodite to wife and received nothing from his people?
Thalia had told him her god was the same the Hebrews had worshipped, but even they made sacrifices and offerings. She closed her eyes, her lips moving in silent prayer to her nameless god.
Protect her, Pirithous prayed. Keep her safe from all those who might do her harm.
There was little more to say than that, but Thalia’s god offered no sign that he had heard, and when Pirithous asked her later, Thalia could not offer him any reassurance either.
Perhaps he should have made an offering of some kind after all.
***
THE TRIP TO THE TEMPLE—THALIA insisted it was called a church—had not taken much of the morning. He had hoped to meet with a priest, but none came forward, and Thalia was anxious to return home for the delivery of the altar and the rocks she had purchased for him from the stonemason the day before.
“You’re still not convinced,” she said as they drove. “Is it because there weren’t any booming voices from the sky? Because that isn’t how God works anymore.”
“You have shown me a beautiful temple, to be sure,” he said slowly. “But I saw no sign of your god inside it.”
“If God gave straight and reliable answers, we wouldn’t need faith.”
He said nothing. Knowing Thalia, she would only become more insistent if he argued.
“Look,” she went on. “If I’m helping you to do what you have to do, they’d only be hurting themselves if they came after me, right?”
He grunted. “You assume the gods behave according to human reason.”
“Why shouldn’t they?” she asked, glancing at him quickly before her gaze returned to the road. “As long as I don’t offend them, why should they care what I do?”
“I doubt very much they care for you at all, one way or another. Do you not see? It will be nothing to them if you die, but it will be everything to me.”
She turned onto the dirt road that led to her home, weaving through the trees. The car stopped, the growling fading with one last snarl, but Thalia made no move to open her door.
“If I mean that much to you, will it matter that you’re here and I’m there?” She turned to look at him then, her forehead furrowed. “Won’t they still use me against you, only it will be worse because you won’t be able to see that I’m all right between one threat and the next?”
“I do not think they know yet, how much pain it would cause me to see you suffer,” he said. “But if I go with you, they will be certain of it.”
“How can they not know?” she asked. “Don’t they see whatever they want to see? Haven’t they been watching you this whole time? Listening to our conversations?”
He shook his head. “It is unlikely.”
“You’re probably the only person on the eastern seaboard who worships them properly, Pirithous. Maybe the only person in the entirety of the United States who knows without any doubt that they exist. If I were your gods, and you were the last hope I had of gathering new followers, I’d be watching every single move you made.”
His stomach twisted and he stared unseeing at the house for a long moment, turning her words over in his mind. Aphrodite had seen them at the temple, and he had prayed to his father for Thalia’s protection from the centaurs. But he would have prayed for the protection of any woman from the violence of those beasts. Except he hadn’t. He had prayed for Thalia with no consideration for the others who lived in these lands, and even if the gods did not watch him as closely as Thalia feared, that much would have been noted.
“Perhaps once the temple is built, I can strike some bargain with Persephone,” he said. “For your protection as well as mine.”
“If it makes you feel better,” Thalia murmured. “I’m not sure what Persephone can do for me that God won’t.”
He pressed his lips together. “You put too much faith in a silent god.”
She laughed, pushing the door open. “That’s really rich coming from you.”
“I do not trust my gods, Thalia, nor do I expect that you should.”
She shook her head, getting out of the car, and skipped up the stairs to the door. “You might want to figure out where you want all that stone offloaded. A shed I could have put in the yard without drawing too much attention, but an altar is going to have to go somewhere in the woods or Alex will have a fit.”
“At the treeline, then.” He followed her into the house, wondering if he should mention Aphrodite. Somehow he did not think Thalia would believe him. “I would not have anyone enter the woods here without sword, spear, and shield.”
“It’ll be a lot of work to move it.”
“All the better,” he said. “Persephone will be honored by my labor.”
“Right,” Thalia said, clearly doubtful.
“Have you no faith in me, still?” he asked gently.
She turned to look at him, her forehead furrowed with worry so plain he would not have missed it even if he had not felt her concern—her fear for him. “I have a hard time believing in anyone who isn’t all that interested in coming out of the fight alive.”
“As long as I fight in your defense, you need not fear for my life,” he promised. “I swear it, Thalia.”
“Pirithous.” She framed his face in her hands, bringing his head down to hers, forehead to forehead. “I would let you defend me from the whole world if you would just come with me.”
He smiled then and turned his head to kiss her palm. “If you meant it, I might even be tempted.”
“How do you know I don’t?” she asked, turning his face back to hers. “How do you know I wouldn’t let you?”
“Do not mistake me for a fool, Thalia.” His lips brushed against hers, just enough to take the sting from his words, to reassure her—he hoped—that they were born of affection more than offense. “Not when you have shown me your heart.”