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Pirithous
Pirithous woke tied to a tree, the ropes digging into his wrists and ankles. He jerked against them, but his shoulder flared white-hot with shattering pain, and he strangled a cry, slumping back against the trunk behind him. At least his legs weren’t tied to anything but each other, even if his arms were wrapped around the tree at his back, wrenching his shoulder.
“Awake at last,” Cyllarus said from somewhere behind him, and by the centaur’s grunt and the crunch of leaves, Pirithous did not have to look to know he had risen stiffly. Good. Perhaps Cyllarus was weak enough to be foolish. Even better if the wound Pirithous had given him had festered, but he had seen no sign of a limp when the centaur had charged him earlier. Still, a healthy centaur made no noise on wooded grounds. A healthy centaur was only heard when he wished to be. Not unlike a healthy demigod.
Pirithous grimaced, twisting his good arm against the ropes. His shoulder burned. He had overworked the joint, without question, but what else could he have done? Leaving Nikki to the mercy of the centaurs would have been unforgivable. Facing the centaurs while injured might have been foolish, but at least he had kept his honor. At least Thalia would not resent him for letting her friend suffer such a miserable death.
Thalia. His heart ached at the thought of her, of his failure. He had sworn he would return to her, but he did not see how he might keep the vow, now. Even if Cyllarus’s wound had weakened him, Pirithous was still bound, and with his shoulder so ruined, he could not hope to escape. Perhaps if he had been free, he might have killed Cyllarus still, fleeing with his life, but like this? He ground his teeth.
“I feared I had hit you too hard,” Cyllarus said, the shadow of the horse-man falling over his body. Cyllarus grasped a fistful of Pirithous’s hair and jerked his head back. “Your woman escaped, but rest assured, butcher, I will find her, and you will watch her die, yet.”
“She is not fool enough to enter the woods, knowing you wait for her,” Pirithous said. “And if you leave the shelter of the trees, you will be killed before you can cause her harm. This is not the world we left behind, Cyllarus. You will not find her people to be easy prey.”
Cyllarus snorted, releasing him hard enough that his head struck the trunk painfully. “Perhaps if you had said as much before we took her, I might have believed you. She walked right into our hands with a basket of berries, no less.”
“The woman you took was not mine,” he said. “She would have done you no good as a tool against me. None of these women are worth more than the pleasure their bodies offer.”
“You expect me to believe such a lie?” The centaur’s eyes narrowed. “You think I did not see the way you looked upon her? We watched you, butcher-king.”
“You saw what you wished to see.” He tugged at the rope again, but it only served to make his shoulder ache more fiercely. “Just as you did at my wedding feast.”
Cyllarus laughed, shifting back a half-step. “As you say, betrayer.”
His lip curled and he let his anger show. “You have no right to name me so, after what you did to me and mine.”
“You murdered even our children!”
“We did what had to be done,” Pirithous spat. “To protect our people, our women, our daughters and sons!”
“And what of our sons?” Cyllarus roared. “Our daughters and mates?”
Pirithous sneered, his eyes burning as hot as his shoulder. His father’s strength. It was what he needed. He twisted his wrists against the bonds that held him. “You sought to punish us for your own madness. The wounds your people inflicted upon our women never healed, to say nothing of those who died at your hands, on the cusp of a lasting peace! We acted only in our own defense. And you call me betrayer?” The rope gave, but not enough, and his shoulder flamed. “When it was by my command that you were invited? When I honored you as guest-friends, welcoming you to my hearth?
“Hippodamia was your princess, your friend and your kin. She trusted you! And even after you raped our women, she tried to save your people. Begged me to spare you all. And for her sake, I tried! Until you came charging down the mountain, intent on burning our houses, slaughtering my men. Death was too good for you. Too good even for your sons.”
Cyllarus reared up, and Pirithous twisted away just before his hooves struck the trunk where his head had been. The tree cracked, the sound echoing into the woods, and Pirithous pressed his lips together. It wasn’t exactly the safest choice, to enrage a centaur into kicking down a tree, but if he could only splinter the trunk somehow, he might find a way to free himself from it.
“You missed,” Pirithous said, after Cyllarus landed with a thud, nostrils flared and face red. “Must be that ugly wound on your foreleg.”
Cyllarus grabbed him by the throat, jerking him up the trunk. Pirithous clenched his jaw against the pain that shot through his shoulder as his arms dragged against the bark. “You will be fortunate if I ever let you die, butcher.”
Then he dropped him, and Pirithous fell to his knees, his shoulder twisting so sharply he cried out at the fire in the joint, and his vision went black. He bit back a second cry, letting his head fall forward to shield the pain in his face from Cyllarus’s sight. He needn’t have worried. Cyllarus only turned from him, kicking dirt and leaves into his eyes with one hind leg as he went.
No. Enraging a centaur into kicking down a tree was not the best choice at all. Now that the wood had splintered, he could not even move his arms enough to work the sharp edges against the rope on his wrists. Not without groaning in pain as he did so, and he would not give Cyllarus the satisfaction of knowing he had been wounded.
Persephone, save me!
The gods knew he could not save himself.
***
CYLLARUS LEFT HIM NOT long after, club resting upon his shoulder, and Pirithous could only pray Thalia had done as he asked, or at the very least, that Alex had prevented her from leaving the safety of the house. Nikki must have found her way, for he imagined he would have heard her crashing about long before now, and Cyllarus would have dragged her back.
Please, keep them safe, he begged. Let my death serve at least that small a purpose, if nothing more. Every prayer was a risk, but if the gods meant him to die anyway, they could hardly use Thalia against him, too. He rested his head against the rough bark of the tree at his back and closed his eyes.
If he did not return by morning, she would try to search for him. He had no faith at all that Alexandros would stop her, and after Thalia had ignored Nikki’s advice at every turn since his own arrival, he could not imagine she would listen to her reason now. It would have made him smile if he had not been so afraid for her life.
But it had been that same recklessness which had captured him. The way she lived so easily without fear of the future or pain from the past, when he could not escape either. He loved her because she would come for him, though there was little she could do. He loved her because she would charge unflinching, and no man, no monster, no power would stop her once she had made her choice. And what would she do when Cyllarus found her? When she truly realized what she had chosen to face? He snorted. Shout at the beast, most likely, stabbing her finger at the centaur’s breastbone, if she could reach it.
A snap of a twig brought his head up, and he stared into the shadowed wood, searching for the source of the sound. A soft shuffle followed, and movement in the deadfall caught his eye. A snake, slithering through the dried leaves. But not large enough to break a twig as it passed over the ground.
“Pirithous?”
He swore. Thalia hadn’t even waited for morning, and the thought that Cyllarus might have crossed her path made his heart twist with fear. She followed the same path as the snake, slipping out from behind a tree with an iron rod held so tightly her knuckles were white.
“Thank God!”
“Quickly,” he urged her, biting his tongue on the rest of what he might have said. She had promised she would not enter the woods alone, for one. Could she not have brought her brother, at least? “Cyllarus will return shortly, if he has not found your trail already.”
“I didn’t see anything but snakes—a whole herd of them chased me the minute I got to the other side of the stream.” But she was already at his side, setting the iron rod in the mulch to tear at the knots that bound his hands. She mumbled something he knew from her tone to be a curse, though he did not understand the words. “I can’t untie this, Pirithous.”
Snakes. Snakes meant death more often than not, unless they belonged to the household. A herd of them could mean nothing good. “My knife and my sword are by the fire.”
She lurched toward it, almost tripping over his blade in her haste. Cyllarus had seen no reason to remove his belt once he had been disarmed, and one look at Thalia’s grip on his sword hilt told him she had never held one before in her life. She dropped back to her knees behind him, taking his knife to the ropes, and he grunted at the release of tension on his shoulder. Sparks exploded behind his eyes with the pain of movement, but he dared not take even a moment to rub the joint.
Thalia had moved already to his legs, cutting through the binding at his ankles. He closed his fingers around his sword hilt and rose unsteadily to his feet once he was freed.
Snakes. It made him uneasy to think of it. “Come, Thalia.”
“What about Cyllarus?” she asked.
“Is Nikki safe? And your brother?”
“They should both be inside the house. Unless Alex decided to be a hero after the fact. Nikki might have guilted him into following me.”
“Then we must go or you will have done nothing but trade one captive for another.” Were the snakes for Alexandros? Thalia might speak ill of her brother, but he felt certain she did not wish to see him dead for her sake. Persephone, protect them. Protect us all!
A snake slithered out from beneath his foot, leaving its pale molted skin behind, and he grabbed Thalia by the arm, jerking her back from the mass of long brown and green bodies before them. Where they had come from, he did not know, for he had not heard or seen them arrive.
“See?” she said.
The snakes came nearer, and Pirithous pushed Thalia behind him, backing away.
“They’re just garter snakes,” she said, but her fingers knotted in his tunic.
He shook his head, watching the way they shifted together, enveloping them on three sides and forcing him farther back. “They did this to you?”
“There weren’t—ah—quite so many.”
Persephone. Or Hades. Those were the only two gods who might have had reason to send such a creature in search of him. But if Hades wanted him dead, surely he would have found a more expedient means to see it done.
“Go,” he said. “Back the way you came.”
Her grip tightened on his tunic. “Not without you.”
“Snakes are an ill-omen, Thalia.”
“But they guided me here,” she said, the stubbornness of her tone an ache in his heart. Brave, willful Thalia. “They helped me find you.”
He pressed his lips together, but when he stopped moving, the snakes began to hiss. Too loudly. He stepped back again, pushing Thalia with him. One step at a time, and they made enough noise between them that it would not be long before Cyllarus heard, but Pirithous could not trust that the snakes would not lead them to the centaur either, and with his poor fortune, Alexandros was blundering through the woods as well.
“Let’s go, Pirithous. Please.”
He stared at the snakes a moment longer, and Thalia tugged at his sword arm. He turned, finally, and together, they ran.