“Feeds,” I said.
“Yes. She eats sailors. Six at a time, one for each mouth, and if the oars are too slow, she takes twelve. A few of them try to fight her, but you can imagine how that works out. You can hear them screaming for quite a ways.”
I was frozen to my chair. I had always imagined her swimming in the deeps, sucking cold flesh from squids. But no. Scylla had always wanted the light of day. She had always wanted to make others weep. And now she was a ravening monster filled with teeth and armored with immortality.
“Can no one stop her?”
“Zeus could, or your father, if they wished to. But why would they? Monsters are a boon to gods. Imagine all the prayers.”
My throat had closed over. Those men she had eaten were sailors as Glaucos had been, ragged, desperate, worn thin with fear. All dead. All of them cold smoke, marked with my name.
Hermes was watching me, his head cocked like a curious bird. He was waiting for my reaction. Would I be skimmed milk for crying, or a harpy with a heart of stone? There was nothing between. Anything else did not fit cleanly in the laughing tale he wanted to spin of it.
I let my hand fall on my lion’s head, felt her great, hard skull beneath my fingers. She never slept when Hermes was there. Her eyes were lidded and watchful.
“Scylla never was satisfied with just one,” I said.
He smiled. A bitch with a cliff for a heart.
“I meant to tell you,” he said. “I heard a prophecy of you. I had it from an old seeress who had left her temple and was wandering the fields giving fortunes.”
I was used to the swift movements of his mind, and now I was grateful for them. “And you just happened to be passing when she was speaking of me?”
“Of course not. I gave her an embossed gold cup to tell me all she knew of Circe, daughter of Helios, witch of Aiaia.”
“Well?”
“She said that a man named Odysseus, born from my blood, will come one day to your island.”
“And?”
“That’s it,” he said.
“That’s the worst prophecy I’ve ever heard,” I said.
He sighed. “I know. I think I lost my cup.”
I did not dream of him, as I said. I did not braid his name with mine. At night we lay together, and by midnight he was gone, and I could rise and step into my woods. Often my lion would pace beside me. It was the deepest pleasure, walking in the cool air, the damp leaves brushing at our legs. Sometimes I would stop to harvest this flower or that.
But the flower I truly wanted, I waited for. One month I let go by after Hermes and I first spoke, and then another. I did not want him watching. He had no place in this. It was mine.
I did not bring a torch. My eyes shone in the dark better than any owl’s. I walked through the shadowed trees, through the quiet orchards, the groves and brakes, across the sands, and up the cliffs. The birds were still, and the beasts. All the sounds were the air among the leaves and my own breath.
And there it was hidden in the leaf mold, beneath the ferns and mushrooms: a flower small as a fingernail, white as milk. The blood of that giant which my father had spilled in the sky. I plucked a stem out of the tangle. The roots clung hard a moment before yielding. They were black and thick, and smelled of metal and salt. The flower had no name that I knew, so I called it moly, root, from the antique language of the gods.
Oh, Father, did you know the gift you gave me? For that flower, so delicate it could dissolve beneath your stepping foot, carried within it the unyielding power of apotrope, the turning aside of evil. Curse-breaker. Ward and bulwark against ruin, worshipped like a god, for it was pure. The only thing in all the world you could be certain would not turn against you.
Day by day, the island bloomed. My garden climbed the walls of my house, breathed its scent through my windows. I left the shutters open by then. I did what I liked. If you had asked me, I would have said I was happy. Yet always I remembered.
Cold smoke, marked with my name.
Chapter Nine
IT WAS MORNING, THE sun just over the trees, and I was in the garden cutting anemones for my table. The pigs snuffled at their slops. One of the boars grew fractious, shoving and grunting to air his authority. I caught his eye. “Yesterday, I saw you blowing bubbles in the stream, and the day before the spotted sow sent you off with a bitten ear and nothing more. So you may behave.”
He huffed at the dirt, then flopped on his belly and subsided.
“Do you always talk to pigs when I am gone?”
Hermes stood in his traveling cloak, his broad-brimmed hat tilted over his eyes.
“I like to think of it the other way around,” I said. “What brings you out in the honest daylight?”
“A ship is coming,” he said. “I thought you might want to know.”
I stood. “Here? What ship?”
He smiled. He always liked seeing me at a loss. “What will you give me if I tell you?”
“Begone,” I said. “I prefer you in the dark.”
He laughed and vanished.
I made myself go about the morning as I usually would, in case Hermes watched, but I felt the tension in myself, the taut anticipation. I could not keep my eyes from flicking to the horizon. A ship. A ship with visitors that amused Hermes. Who?
They came at mid-afternoon, resolving out of the bright mirror of the waves. The vessel was ten times the size of Glaucos’, and even at a distance I could see how fine it was: sleek and brightly painted, with a huge rearing prow-piece. It cut through the sluggish air straight towards me, its oarsmen rowing steadily. As they approached, I felt that old eager jump in my throat. They were mortals.
The sailors dropped the anchor, and a single man leapt over the low side and splashed to shore. He followed the seam of beach and woods until he found a path, a small pig trail that wound upwards through the acanthus spears and laurel groves, past the thorn-bush thicket. I lost sight of him then, but I knew where the trail led. I waited.
He checked when he saw my lion, but only for a moment. With his shoulders straight and unbowed, he knelt to me in the clearing’s grass. I realized I knew him. He was older, the skin of his face more lined, but it was the same man, his head still shaved, his eyes clear. Of all the mortals on the earth, there are only a few the gods will ever hear of. Consider the practicalities. By the time we learn their names, they are dead. They must be meteors indeed to catch our attention. The merely good: you are dust to us.
“Lady,” he said, “I am sorry to trouble you.”
“You have not been trouble yet,” I said. “Please stand if you like.”
If he noticed my mortal voice, he gave no sign. He stood up—I will not say gracefully, for he was too solidly built for that—but easily, like a door swinging on a well-fitted hinge. His eyes met mine without flinching. He was used to gods, I thought. And witches too.
“What brings the famous Daedalus to my shores?”
“I am honored you would know me.” His voice was steady as a west wind, warm and constant. “I come as a messenger from your sister. She is with child, and her time approaches. She asks that you attend her delivery.”
I eyed him. “Are you certain you have come to the right place, messenger? There has never been love between my sister and me.”
“She does not send to you for love,” he said.
The breeze blew, carrying the scent of linden flowers. At its back, the muddy stink of the pigs.