8

Below flowed the muddy Scamander River. I tucked myself into a dive. My fingers were inches from the brown water when Eurus grabbed my ankles. We thudded onto the bank. I came down on my left hip and shoulder.

In the distance, sheep baaed.

He sat up and bellowed, “You let go! You wanted to fly by yourself?”

I mustn’t yell at a god. I yelled, “I didn’t let go! Your wind blew me away!”

His fury flattened the grass, but it had veered away from me. “I’m a fool! I think I can do anything. I don’t think! Her fate and a city shouldn’t depend on a dawkin like me. How am I going to tell her she should find somebody better to help her?”

I was amazed that a god blamed himself.

What should I do? I had to reach Mount Ida soon.

It hurt to stand, but I discovered that I could walk, and my limp eased after a few steps. Maybe the lions would be too busy today to bother with me.

“Where are you going?” Eurus called, sounding surprised.

“If a lion doesn’t eat me, I’ll reach Mount Ida before dark.” My voice had a harrumph in it. He’d let me down—in more ways than one. “Maybe I won’t be too late.”

He walked backward in front of me. “But you should go with me. Lions won’t bother me.” He saw my confusion. “You thought I’d leave you here?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “We’ll go slower, not very high, side by side.”

He put his arm around my waist, and I clasped his waist too. I felt dizzy. Melo and Aminta and I sometimes danced this close, but they never made my head spin!

His wind lifted us gently and pushed us along. The tall grasses scraped my ankles. I raised my knees, and it was as if I was sitting in a chair. How wondrous!

The wind gained strength. He held me tight. My skin felt whisked as if with a brush. I grinned, and my teeth tingled.

We passed a spreading hazel tree. Sheep and bony cows grazed on the brown-green grass. We kept pace with a heron flying along the river not much higher than we were, until it landed. The horizon ahead grew lumps. One lump rose more than the rest—Mount Ida. Like Zeus’s Mount Olympus, its peak was cloud-wreathed.

Soon, we were close.

Would Paris hate me? Did he hate everyone in our family? Did he hate Troy?

The mountain appeared in stripes: green meadows below gray cliffs below white clouds.

We came down gently on a ledge above a ravine. Far below rushed a frothy river. A palace was embedded in the opposite rock wall with only the facade showing. A bridge, lined with coral-colored columns, spanned the gorge.

“That was better.” Eurus shook out his arms. “Wasn’t it?”

“Much better. It was a marvel.” I smiled at him. “Thank you.”

He blushed. “Good.”

Three crows weighed down a branch of a spindly mountain ash that grew out of a crevice next to us.

“Do you see them?”

“Gloomy birds.”

He saw them, though Aminta hadn’t. I supposed mortals couldn’t, except mortals touched by Apollo.

I chattered instead of crossing the bridge. “Isn’t the palace facade beautiful?” The entrance was topped by a white stone frieze carved with women diving off rocks. “I guess the women are nymphs.”

The goddesses could have arrived by now.

“Very grand,” Eurus said.

I nodded and gulped.

“If you ask me to,” Eurus added, “I’ll douse your brother in the river. I’ll spin him until he sees dozens of goddesses instead of three.”

How kind he was! I laughed. “I don’t know if it will help Troy for him to be wet and dizzy.”

A man emerged from the entrance and hurried toward us, smiling. “Sister!”

I smiled back, but I doubt I looked truly glad.

His wife must have told him I was coming and who I was. He seemed not to be angry. He opened his arms wide. “Welcome! Welcome! Welcome!”

Though he was making a show, he still might mean it.

“Oh, sister.” He had Father’s high forehead and chiseled cheekbones and Mother’s large gray eyes.

When he reached me, he stopped short, reached out, and touched my hair and then my shoulder. “Sister. Family. The family that had me. How I relish the words.”

The crows cawed their alarm:

“On Mount Ida a pitcher flower

cradles sticky syrup in its blossom cup.

A single sip will kill its prey!

Cassandra, do not taste your brother’s brew!”

He wanted his family, which made me think, despite what the crows said, that he and I might save Troy. I drank.

Paris seemed unaware of the birds. Nodding to Eurus, he said, “Welcome.”

Eurus nodded back, curtly.

“Thank you ever so much for coming with her.”

I introduced him as the east wind.

“Then thank you for blowing her here.” He paused. “Please tell me: Do my sister and I share a chin, in shape if not size? Are we sister and brother in chins?”

I resisted an urge to touch my chin.

“Your sister’s chin is more pleasing than yours.” Eurus allowed that our eyes were alike in shape, though not in color.

“Ah. At least there’s that.” Paris took my hand and tugged me along the bridge. “You’re my beautiful sister, who cared enough about me to enlist a god to help you journey here. I’m fortunate to be your brother.”

This was promising.

“Come and meet Oenone and Corythus, the family I made.”

I stepped onto the bridge, which swayed. “Er . . . brother, three great goddesses haven’t come yet, have they?”

“No. Oenone says they will, but now I don’t think so.”

Because of me.

“She’s vexed—I don’t know why—but she’s been eager all day for your arrival.”

The nymph could see my future, though I couldn’t see hers. Was she eager because her fate was terrible too? Did she believe we could alter it?

Eurus followed us to the palace entrance. “Cassandra . . .” His chin puckered, and he frowned—an unhappy face. “I can’t go into the earth. I’m sorry.”

I’d hoped we’d turn the ship of fate together, but I didn’t want him to be sad. “Thank you for the wind ride.”

He recovered. “I won’t drop you on the way back, either.”

“Come, sister!”

My stomach tightened. I clasped my hands together. Face the great goddesses!

Inside, the air smelled metallic. Paris took a flaming torch from a torchère and led me into a corridor whose rock walls sparkled with silver specks.

“Follow me, sister. How dear that word is. Sissster!” He sounded like a snake.

I shuddered. “If you were home, the word would soon stop being valuable. You have six sisters and eleven brothers and another brother on the way.” Why was I saying this? I didn’t want him to come home.

“Eighteen of us? Nineteen soon! An army!”

Ominous word—army.

He added, “It’s not a brother on the way, though Oenone says you can see the future.”

I sighed. Because I’d predicted a brother, he was sure the baby would be a girl.

We turned into a cavern on the left. Polished copper walls, gleaming in torchlight, rippled with the mountain’s contours. Fresh air suggested an opening to the outer world.

“Cassandra!” A woman, probably Oenone, rose from one of four couches, where she’d been sitting with a boy of five or six who had been reclining with his head in her lap. The boy lay back and stared at me.

Amid the couches was a long, low table for dining.

“Sister!” she added.

“This is Oenone,” Paris said unnecessarily.

Sister by marriage. The nymph dashed—shimmered—to me. Copper strands glinted in her dark hair, and her iron-colored peplos rustled as she drew close.

Her face was delicate, her small features as finely shaped as Apollo’s lyre.

“You’ve come.” Laughing, she reached up and brushed back my hair. “You should carry a comb when you ride a wind or people will think the Furies have acrazed your mind. Everyone will see you’re lovely anyway.”

The Furies were the three goddesses of vengeance, who sometimes punished wrongdoers by making them madful. Hastily, I raked my hair away from my face. I must have looked like a Gorgon—a monster with snakes for hair.

She changed the subject. “Paris can’t believe your prophecies. Don’t blame him.”

I didn’t, or I’d have to blame everyone.

“Paris, your sister was kanephoros and endured pain for her city.”

I blinked in surprise.

“I foresaw it. What did I tell you, love?”

He smiled down at her. “You said you’re proud to be part of my family because of her and my brother Hector.”

She slapped his arm playfully. “I’m not proud because of you! If anyone has the doggedness to change the terrible future, she does.”

Oh my! Another person who believed in my determination.

“I’ll be guided by you, sister,” Paris said.

I breathed so deeply my toes felt it. “Don’t judge the goddesses! The two you don’t pick will hate you.”

“That’s what I told him. Common sense, really.” She sat and lifted her son’s head back onto her lap. “Cassandra, you must be tired. Would you like to rest?”

“Thank you, but I’m not tired.” How formal I sounded.

The boy sat up. “Who’s she?”

Paris sat next to him. “Corythus, this is your aunt Cassandra.”

Oenone straightened her son’s tunic and kissed the top of his head. “Cassandra, if we succeed today, please teach me to weave. I will be terrible at it.”

I sat on the couch nearest theirs. “All of Troy will admire your work.”

If Paris didn’t judge the goddesses, he could probably safely come to Troy. How wonderful that future would be, the city unscathed and me with this sister-in-law for a friend.

Was Troy saved already because Paris had promised to listen to me?

No. “Brother, how—”

“I adore the word brother! Sister, ask me anything you’d like to know.”

I liked him even if Eurus didn’t. “How long have you been married?”

“I started young. Six years ago when I was sixteen. Corythus is five.”

“He married me because he wanted the love of a goddess, and no one higher would look at him.” She addressed him, smiling. “I’m not angry. I love you because I love you. I need nothing more.” She gripped his arm across their son. “I will never stop loving you. I will cease loving me when you choose someone else.” She added, “The goddesses will be here in a few minutes.”

The air seemed to turn solid in my throat. I imagined running out to Eurus and wind-flying away.

“Cassandra,” Paris said, “I keep telling her that I, who was abandoned, will never abandon anyone. I love only her and our son.”

Oenone waved a dismissive hand. “You love everyone. You love your sister, and you met her just a few minutes ago.” She winked at me. “I’ve watched you for years. When I foresaw I was going to marry Paris, I—Oh! Now!”

The cavern trembled. The table hopped on its legs.

The entire mountain seemed to thunder around us. My heart boomed with it. I flew up and slammed down on my couch. Oenone wrapped her arms around Corythus, who was howling.

Mustn’t run. Troy, I thought. Save Troy.

The mountain stilled. Three crows flapped through the cavern doorway and perched on the table, and three goddesses appeared behind Paris and Oenone’s couch.