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Pirithous
“Simply pour it over the wound?” he asked.
She nodded, staring at her foot. As she had been since they’d rinsed it. As if she could not stand to look at him. “A couple good splashes should do it.”
He opened the bottle, the smell of the potion filling the room. He grimaced, but gripped her foot by the ankle, angling it gently and tipping some of the foul liquid out.
Thalia hissed, jerking her foot nearly out of his grasp as the liquid spat and foamed. He held her firm, glancing up at her face. Her jaw was tense, but she did not look startled.
“Is this potion supposed to hurt?”
“That’s how you know it’s working,” she growled, leaning forward to examine her foot. “I should probably do it once more, but I’d really rather not.” She turned the water on, sticking her foot back under it, and only then did she look up at him again, offering a small smile. “It just stings a lot.”
He grunted. Better a small puncture on her foot than a trip to Hades. The voice still worried him, and the tracks he’d seen. If he had not seen the map, and how far he was now from Thessaly, he would have sworn the hoof prints he’d seen in the wood belonged to centaurs.
“Do your neighbors have horses, Thalia?”
“Up the road, they used to. I’m not sure if they still do or not.” She turned the water back off, and he toweled her foot dry for the second time, careful around the cut.
Her legs were covered in scratches from the brush, dotted lines of pink against the olive of her skin. He pressed his lips together, tracing the lines with a fingertip. Sometimes he forgot how fragile mortal women were. A flash of hoof-shaped bruises and blood smeared skin as smooth and fine as Thalia’s made his stomach twist into knots. Centaurs would rip Thalia to pieces, and she would not even realize what came for her. She would probably doubt her own eyes, judging by her response to him, until they clubbed her over the head.
“Pirithous?” Thalia covered his hand on her knee, her fingers curling around his. “Are you all right?”
“Promise me you will stay out of the woods, Thalia.”
She snorted. “Just because someone was calling my name?”
“Because I have spent three thousand years trying to save my wife from being raped and beaten to death on our wedding day, and I have no wish for another nightmare, finding your body bloody and still in the woods.” He stroked her cheek. Her eyes were rich and warm as turned earth. “Give me that much peace, until I have settled my debt to Persephone.”
“I’m not going to put myself under house arrest because the neighbors decided to play a prank, Pirithous.”
She pulled his hand away, tearing her gaze from his and removing a bandage from the box before tossing it back down on the counter with a clatter. She slapped the bandage on the bottom of her foot and slipped off the counter, raising her chin to glare at him with an anger so fierce, it might have been god-given. Certainly, it was beautiful, her cheeks glowing rose-red, and her eyes flashing.
“The last thing I need is another person trying to protect me by running my life.”
She shoved the towel against his chest, startling him into a step back as she brushed by him. He grabbed her arm, but she jerked it free, whirling to face him. The flash of her fury and the tensing of her shoulders warned him and he caught her wrist before her hand struck his face.
“I am a son of Zeus, Thalia.” He spoke low and carefully, that there might be no confusion. “Friend to Heracles and Theseus and feared warrior in my own right. You will have to be much faster than that if you wish to strike me. And much, much faster to escape whatever might hunt you on horseback in those trees. Were I you, I would not be so quick to spite the offered protections of a demigod.”
“Let me go,” she said, twisting her arm.
He tightened his grip, a hair’s breadth from bruising. “I may not have been a true hero, for I fought the gods more often than I served them, but if you think I will allow you to suffer for my sins, you are greatly mistaken.”
“Let me go!” She struggled against his hold in earnest now, clawing at his fingers on her wrist, her pulse flying and her breath ragged. Brave, foolish woman. She would chew off her own arm before she gave in to him, and if he pressed her any further, she wouldn’t forgive it.
He released her, careful to do so in such a way that she would not fall or throw herself into the wall. “If I wanted to rule your life, or command you in any way, I would not bother asking you for your promise, Thalia. Nor would I be forced to resort to brute strength to earn your obedience, though I will admit pinning you against a wall when you fly into a rage is a tempting idea.”
She rubbed her wrist. “That must be the kidnapper coming out in you. Or maybe it’s the rapist that I keep trying to pretend you aren’t.”
His eyes burned with the insult. “Is it so hard for you to believe that women came to me willingly?”
“After you stole them?” She raised her chin. “Yes. As a matter of fact, I find it very hard to believe.”
“And yet, you came for me in the woods. Would have lost yourself in the trees to reach me, believing I am so repulsive.”
Even angry, he could admire her bravery, to challenge him this way, knowing what he was, his power. He twisted a piece of her hair between his fingers, soft and shining. It fell in wisps and single strands, escaping from the horse-tail and framing her face. Even when she insulted him, he still ached to touch her, to taste her skin, her mouth. She licked her lips, and he grinned at the flash of desire, quickly smothered, though he wished she would feel something other than disgust when she tried to stifle it.
He leaned down, lowering his voice. “You do not so much as flinch from me now.”
“I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction.” It would have been more convincing if her voice didn’t tremble, her eyes half-closing.
“If you do not trust me, Thalia, if you truly believe what you say—that I am the kind of man to force myself on a woman, then I will disappear into the woods, and throw myself upon the mercy of the gods.” He dropped his forehead to hers, breathing in her scent, like almonds and cream. Her hands pressed against his chest, though she tipped her face up, inviting him closer. “But I will see you made safe first, from whatever called to you in the woods.”
Her eyes flashed open and she shoved him. Weak as a kitten, but he gave half a step, his hand falling away from her face.
“You don’t get it, do you? You can’t understand that I don’t need your protection. I don’t want to be safe! If I did, I would have left you on the side of the road.”
“I am no threat to you.” And how she could still think he would be— “Have I not proved as much? Have I not sworn it? Or is that why you keep trying to provoke me, hoping I will forswear myself and do you some kind of harm in spite of my words?”
The idea infuriated him, and he felt his eyes blaze hot. The insults she had given him, the way she went on about his raiding, and the women he stole. Her insistence that he must have forced them. His heart twisted. Perhaps she was a witch, after all, sent to ruin him.
A flush blossomed on her cheeks. “That isn’t what I meant.”
“Isn’t it?” His hands balled into fists. He should have let the gods take her. “Have you no honor of your own that you wish to steal mine?”
“No!” Her fingers twisted into the fabric of his tunic. “That isn’t—I don’t want that.”
He closed his hand around her wrist. He did not want her so near, did not want to feel her desperation, or the ache of his body for her touch. “Release me.”
She tightened her grip. “I just want to live my life, Pirithous. I want to be left alone, with no one telling me what I can and can’t do, what I should or shouldn’t want.”
“I will make you a promise, Thalia, if you will listen.” He pressed his thumb into the tendons of her wrist, forcing her fingers free of the fabric. “Whatever threat awaits you in the wood, you may rest assured my sword will not stand in its way.”
And then he left her, before he shamed them both.
***
IT WAS ONLY FOR HIMSELF that he hunted now, sword and knife hanging on his belt. An offering to Persephone might appease her, and he needed time to build even a small temple. But if the people of these lands did not worship the gods at all, he could not build only for Persephone. He could not hunt only for Persephone. And she had not meant that he should.
We need your prayers, she had said. Not I.
Pirithous crouched silently in the branches of a tree. Not so high that he could not vault from it to the ground without injury, but high enough that the deer would not see him while they foraged. Without a bow or rope for snares, ambush would have to serve him. It was not as though he had not hunted so poorly before, in the days of his youth when he had been eager to test himself and the ichor that ran through his veins.
Father, protect me. He could not help the prayer. Protect her.
He grimaced. Thalia. He was not certain if she acted in ignorance or out of spite, but he had no wish to return to her long enough to learn the truth of it. Not now. He’d heard her calling to him, her voice broken with tears, and he’d thought for a moment she would follow him into the trees, defying him further. But she had stopped at the thorned berry bushes. Pirithous had waited in the lengthening shadows, telling himself he did not care if she endangered herself, only that it wasted his time to hunt while she crashed about behind, screaming his name. When the snarl of Nikki’s car reached him, Thalia returned to the shelter of the house, and he moved deeper into the woods. Nikki would not let her go wandering about with night falling. Especially not in search of him.
Pirithous snorted. Thalia had every reason to resent the woman’s clucking, he could admit that much. But the rest he could not understand. Did she not see that he wished only to protect her from the danger he had brought? Let her run naked through the streets of her city tempting the fates, if it was what she wished to do he would not have stopped her.
But the flash of memory, of centaurs rutting, leaving nothing but a battered corpse behind, twisted in his guts. Horses carried their weight more evenly, the front hooves biting no more deeply into the ground than their back. The tracks he had seen in the mud by the stream sank heavily at the fore, and shallowly behind. Even if the horse had bent to drink, and even accounting for the softness of the earth closer to the stream, it should not have made such a mark.
America lay oceans away, he reminded himself. The centaurs would drown long before they crossed such a body of water, if any lived to do so. The Lapiths had hunted them to nothing in Thessaly, some men, whose wives had not escaped during the wedding, had even left their homes, traveling far and wide to see the creatures killed wherever they roamed.
He would not wish a rutting centaur on any woman, and despite his words, he did not think he could stand by and watch if one came for Thalia and her friend. He would have to return to her, if only so she might release him from such a foolish vow. But he had been furious with her, offended more deeply than he had believed possible. The woman drove him to distraction, between her insults and her teasing. He had barely stopped himself from cursing her, his father’s name on his lips to do so, but the sound of her sob had choked him before he could utter the words, saving him from forswearing himself. Whatever she had done, she had accepted his gift, and he had accepted hers. He had enough trouble with the gods without betraying her guest-friendship as well.
He had enough trouble and more if centaurs roamed these woods, for he could think of only one way they might find him here. But could he have been so stunned by his sudden freedom that he truly had not noticed when they followed him out of Hades?
Father, protect me, he repeated. But protect Thalia, first.