The Mystery of the Tenth

by Chantel Acevedo

  We all turned to look at Thalia.

  “What?” she said. “I’m funny, I make people laugh. Confidence, people! Know what I mean?”

  You could have heard a fly buzzing in that room.

  “Fine,” Thalia said after a beat. “I’m always afraid my jokes will bomb, and then everyone will know I’m a fraud. Now we’re all properly miserable. Happy?” She plopped down on a nearby eighteenth-century throne and wiped her eyes.

  That made me feel a lot better. They’d all had doubts about their place among the muses, too. All this time, I thought I’d been the only one having those feelings.

  I thought about my magic, and how it was different now. “Okay, so we’ve all doubted ourselves. But . . . have any of you felt your magic changing lately?”

  Mela looked at Nia, who shrugged. Thalia just wiped her nose, then cleaned her hand on the throne’s upholstery.

  “Nope,” Mela said.

  “Me neither,” Nia added.

  “Same old, same old,” Thalia said, and sniffed again. “Has yours changed?” she asked.

  “Um, no. No. I was just wondering,” I lied. How could I explain the way that my magic had gone from an easy-to-explain buzzing feeling on my skin to complex pictures in my brain, pictures of what could be?

  I could see it just then, an image of the three of them, confident and cheerful, forming in my head. I willed it away, the way you can sometimes stop yourself from sneezing. I didn’t know if this new ability was something I should be experimenting on friends with.

  “You all right?” Nia asked, noticing the face I was making.

  I was making an “I’m stopping myself from sneezing” face.

  “I’m good,” I said as I felt the magic drain away. But my friends looked so bummed out. They needed help. I was always good with a pep talk, even without magic.

  “Here’s the thing,” I started. “We know we have magic. We’ve used it to inspire people like Maya. And how awesome is she? Super awesome. We are muses, and we are meant to be muses. This tenth muse thing—well, we’ll just figure it out. Like we always figure stuff out. Together.”

  “Hear, hear,” Thalia said, still a little sniffly.

  “Well put,” Mela whispered.

  “Message received,” Nia said. “The pity party ends now.”

  Thalia rose from the throne and gave it a little pat. “I’m still rather sad, though. We have to leave the V and A. I’ll miss you,” Thalia said to the suits of armor in the hallway, and to the tapestries on the wall.

  “You live here in London. You can visit when the museum is open again,” Nia said.

  “Yes, but not magically,” Thalia whined.

  “I’ve never been to New York,” Mela said, excitement in her voice.

  “Me neither. But that will change tomorrow, I guess,” I said.

  We parted ways in front of the Great Bed of Ware. It looked lopsided.

  “I think it’s safe?” Nia said. She was still wearing the chain mail from the dress-up room. “But just in case.” She pulled off the heavy vest and wrapped it around me.

  “Here,” Mela added, and shoved a knight’s helmet on my head. “Don’t get crushed.”

  “I won’t be able to bring these back,” I said a little sadly, my voice muffled behind the armor. So I took everything off again. “I think I’ll be okay.”

  We hugged, and I watched as the others went their separate ways to their own entrance points. It would be the last time we’d use them, and that made my eyes sting. Stupid tears. I hated them so much.

  I thought of a new muse rule.

  Callie’s Muse Rule #347: Tears are annoying and dumb. Avoid if at all possible.

  I wiped my eyes and walked over to the nearest window, which looked out at the courtyard below. There was a round pond, which was Thalia’s entrance point. I watched until I saw her jump in the water and disappear. She’d end up in her bathtub back home. From here, I had a good view of the café, too. Nia wandered in, and I knew she’d be stepping into the beautiful fireplace that would take her to her own fireplace in Chicago. As for Mela, she was elsewhere, sliding behind a unicorn tapestry that would send her to New Delhi, behind the curtains in her living room.

  My eyes wandered over to a wall near the café. I couldn’t make out the letters of the dog tomb, which read TYCHO. But I knew that if I opened up the tomb, I’d find the portal to the other side, where Tia Annie was, guarding the source of muse magic. We called that magic the searchlights, because that’s what they looked like.

  We were leaving the V and A. I was leaving Tia Annie.

  She’d told me not to come looking for her again.

  She’d told me.

  But this was my last chance to see her. Maybe she knew about the tenth muse. Maybe she knew if one of the muses was in danger.

  I glanced back at the Great Bed of Ware. “Sit tight,” I said, as if the bed could hear me. Then I made for the stairs, the courtyard, and a dog’s grave.

  Chapter 4

  Packing Up the V and A

  It was dark out, and even though it was early June, London was cold. Grass crunching underneath my feet, I made my way to the Tycho tomb.

  I’d avoided the courtyard and the tomb ever since I saw Tia Annie for the last time. Her advice had helped us defeat the sirens. It was enough to know that Tia Annie, who had died when I was younger, existed beyond this life. The first time I saw her on the other side, I had pulled off the little plaque with the long-dead dog’s name on it to reveal a wide green space and a lake that went on forever. There, on a boat, was my tia Annie. We had talked. She had given me advice. She even had given me a big hug and called me Callie-Mallie, like she used to.

  Then she’d told me to go and not look back. I’d been good, following her advice, and totally avoiding the courtyard, mainly because it made me so sad to think that Tia Annie was there, just on the other side, and she didn’t want me to seek her out.

  But here I was again. I rested the tips of my fingers on the edge of the plaque. It was still somewhat loose, wiggling when I used just a little bit of force. My heart was pounding, and my knees shook. What if this time I went to where Tia Annie was and couldn’t come back? What if she got angry with me?

  “Oh, Tia Annie,” I whispered. “I wish you could come out of there and be alive again.”

  I pulled the plaque off the wall, and there were poor old Tycho’s bones again, in a pile off to the side. Last time, I’d pushed the back of the tomb to reveal a sunny, grassy plain, with water in the distance. Tia Annie was somewhere over there, on the other side.

  I extended my arm into the tomb. My fingers grazed the back wall. I pushed.

  Nothing happened.

  I tried again, hitting it harder, but the wall wouldn’t give.

  “What are you doing?”

  Startled, I fell backward, landing on my butt. Clio stood there, looking down at me. She held out her hand and I took it. Then she lifted me to my feet.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s just, we’re moving headquarters and—” I stopped. I had a good reason for what I was about to do, but I still knew it was wrong.

  Clio held my hand. “Grief. It doesn’t go away entirely. Some days, you think you’ve forgotten that you’ve lost someone important, and other days, it’s all you can think about. It comes and goes, like a wave. If you’re loved, and if you love, grief is a thing you’ll experience eventually. It means you’re human, Callie.”

  I wiped my cheeks, hating every single tear. Like I said, I cry more than I used to. Was that part of growing up? Because it was the worst.

  “What was the last thing your aunt Annie said to you in there?” Clio asked.

  “She said, ‘Now go, Callie-Mallie.’”

  Clio thought for a minute. “Something tells me you haven’t done as you were asked. Part of you is still inside that place, with Annie. But she’s not there. She’s here,” Clio said, pointing her finger at my heart.

  I sniffed. “Cheesy,” I said, but appre
ciated it anyway. I laid a hand on the plaque. “I did want to ask her something. Just one question, for me. I wanted to know what she asked of the gods on Mount Olympus.”

  “Hmm. She would have told you last time, don’t you think, if she thought it was a thing for you to know?”

  I didn’t have an answer to that. Clio was probably right. “Tia Annie came to me in a dream. Twice,” I said. That had been before our last meeting, though.

  “Well then, if she wants to give you an answer to that question, you can bet she will. Now, I have an office to pack. Would you like to help?”

  I froze. The only time I’d spent one-on-one with Clio was when I’d been in trouble.

  “Um. Okay,” I said, and followed Clio back through the museum.

  Clio’s office was a mess. Every drawer of every file cabinet was open. Cardboard boxes covered the floor and her desk. And here and there, plates with chocolaty crumbs littered the empty spaces.

  “You sure do love to bake,” I said.

  “My mother was a wonderful baker,” Clio said. “It reminds me of her.” Her voice broke a little on “her.”

  Waves. I thought of how Clio had just described grief, and took a guess as to why she suddenly sounded so sad.

  Clio handed me a big, dusty box and pointed at a shredder in the corner. “Shred the files in here, please, and I’ll get started on my desk drawers.”

  The box was heavy and musty. I set it down on the floor and sat cross-legged beside it. The papers inside were yellowing. Some were held together by rusty paper clips. All the writing was in Greek, and there were no photographs. The shredder made a loud whirring noise as the pages went through it, spitting out paper noodles on the other side.

  It helped to do a boring job. It cleared my head a lot, so that I wasn’t thinking about Tia Annie or having to say goodbye to the V and A, which I’d grown to love.

  I was reaching into the box for the last file when my fingers brushed cloth. Clio was underneath her desk, working at a drawer that was jammed shut and muttering angrily to herself. I grabbed the cloth and lifted it.

  It was heavy, like a rug had been folded into the bottom of the box.

  But it wasn’t a rug. It was more like a tapestry, similar to the ones that hung all over the museum.

  Except this was the most beautiful tapestry I had ever seen. As I opened it up, the tapestry seemed to grow larger in my hands. I could have sworn it wasn’t much bigger than a tablecloth when it was inside the box, but now, out of the box, it seemed to be wall-sized.

  In fact, I could barely lift it.

  “Magic,” I whispered. Clio didn’t hear me. My fingers trembled as I laid out as much of the tapestry as I could. The enormous cloth had five pictures on it, each image set off by metallic thread that glittered in the dim office light. There was a scene in the center, and then four others taking up the corners. I smoothed my hand over the central image to get the wrinkles out and took a good look.

  The central image was of a gorgeous woman wearing a golden helmet, facing off against a man with long, flowing hair, holding a trident. He looked like Ariel’s dad from The Little Mermaid. Poseidon, I thought. The god of the sea. But who was the woman? Then I noticed that she held a spear and she was pointing it at a little tree, full of fruit. As for Poseidon, the end of his trident was buried in the ground, and water was pouring out.

  The picture to the left caught my eye. It was pretty plain. Just two snowcapped mountains. But the snow really seemed to sparkle in the light, and I could swear that looking at it made me a little chilly, like I was on that mountain.

  The next image showed a tall stork with white feathers, its wings outstretched as if it were about to take off. The bird was surrounded by a bunch of guys holding swords, and the look in their eyes told me that they would be having stork stew for dinner.

  There was another bird in the next scene. A crane maybe? It was flying through the sky, and it was crying, tears streaming down its beak. But here was the weird thing—the bird had hair. Really long, pretty brown hair. I touched my own wavy hair, and noticed it was snarled, which was pretty much a permanent thing with me. I never met a hairbrush I didn’t eventually snap in half.

  The final picture depicted another weeping figure. This time it was a man—by the look of his crown, he was a king. He was sitting on a cliff, sobbing. Below him were many people who appeared to be flailing about in the water. The man looked so sad that my jaw started to ache, the way it sometimes felt when I might cry. It got so bad I wondered if Mela was nearby, using her magic on me.

  The tapestry was beautiful. In fact, it was so beautiful that it made me a little dizzy looking at it. But it also made me nervous in a way I couldn’t entirely explain.

  Suddenly, I heard a gasp. “Where did you find that?” Clio asked in a whisper.

  I let go of the tapestry. “In the box with the files to be shredded,” I said really quickly.

  Clio shut her eyes and tilted her face to the ceiling. Her nostrils flared. I’d seen that look before on my mom. It was a look that said, “Your room better be clean this time, Callie, or so help me.”

  But I hadn’t done anything wrong, had I?

  “I can’t believe that Athena’s tapestry was in that dusty box all these years,” Clio said with a sigh.

  “Athena? As in the Athena?”

  “Daughter of Zeus, Dread Goddess, goddess of wisdom, courage, war, et cetera, et cetera.” Clio approached the tapestry, holding it up to take it in. “It’s been lost for ages. Deadly thing,” she whispered as she looked at each panel.

  I took two huge steps backward. “D-deadly?”

  Clio nodded. “Well, technically that’s not the right word. Arachne wasn’t exactly killed.”

  I took another step back. I had no idea who this Arachne was. “Who’s that?” I asked.

  The tapestry fell out of Clio’s hand. “Honestly, you don’t know?”

  I shook my head.

  Clio started muttering in Greek. Probably something about how much I still had to learn.

  I waited for her to finish. When she did, she took a steadying breath before explaining.

  “Arachne was a regular girl, about your age. She was marvelously skilled at weaving and boasted about her talent all the time. Arachne wasn’t wrong. She truly was the best weaver the world had ever known. But the gods never liked to be bested at anything, and Athena, goddess of wisdom and war, and so many other things, was also the goddess of woven arts.

  “They held a weaving competition. Athena and Arachne both worked at their looms, and when they were done, the people who had been watching declared that Arachne’s tapestry was the finer of the two.

  “However, instead of saying, ‘No, no, Athena’s is better,’ as was expected of her as a human facing a god in a contest, Arachne simply said, ‘Yes, I know.’ In her rage at being so disrespected, Athena tore Arachne’s tapestry into four pieces and flung them to parts unknown. Then she turned Arachne into a spider, so that she might learn not to be so proud but could continue to weave as her heart desired. Webs instead of tapestries, of course.”

  Clio ran her fingers over Athena’s cloth. It really did feel deadly all of a sudden. But I needed to know more. “What do the pictures mean?”

  Clio waved me over, and I approached cautiously. “The center image is a contest between Athena and Poseidon, held in order to determine who would get to name the great city of Athens. Poseidon presented the people with a gift of spring water. Athena gave them the olive tree. The people went with olives, and the city became Athens forevermore.”

  Athena liked contests, I guess. But only if she won them. “Go on,” I said.

  Clio pointed at the two mountains. “These mountains were once people. A king and queen who dared compare themselves to Zeus and Hera, the king and queen of all the gods. So the humans were turned into mountains as a punishment for their pride.”

  I was sensing a theme. “How about this one?” I asked, tapping the picture of the stork.
>
  “Another queen. Gerana was her name. She claimed to be prettier than Hera, so she was transformed into a stork. And her own people hunted her down.” Clio moved on to the other bird, the one with the hair. “This crane was once a girl named Antigone. She was from Troy.”

  “Let me guess. She was really into her hair,” I said.

  “Indeed,” Clio responded. “She compared it to Hera’s.”

  “Hera didn’t like that and turned her into a crane, right?”

  “You’re getting it,” Clio said. “What do you think of the last image?”

  This was the one with the crying man, weeping on a cliff while the people below flapped about in the sea. “I’m guessing he angered Hera,” I said with a shrug.

  “Not this time. This king did not keep a promise to his friend, who then cursed him. So Apollo drowned his fifty daughters.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “First of all, fifty daughters? And second of all, I didn’t know the gods were so . . .” I paused. I was suddenly scared. “The daughters were innocent. I didn’t realize the gods could be so mean.”

  Clio made a sound like “hmm” in the back of her throat. “I suppose the tapestry was a warning against having too much pride. Arachne should have been paying attention.”

  “Hubris,” I said. It meant having excessive pride. I’d run into that myself last year. Everybody knew bragging wasn’t great, and nobody liked conceited people. And yet something bugged me about the Arachne story. “But Arachne was right. Her tapestry was the best one. She won fair and square.”

  “The gods are the gods,” Clio said. “They require deference.” I must have given Clio a really blank look, because she added, “Deference. It means respect. And humility. The gods demanded it once.”

  “Then the gods weren’t being fair,” I said before I could stop myself. I wrapped my arms around my chest, half expecting to be struck by lightning or something. “Just because they were in charge, that didn’t give them the right to be cruel,” I said in a whisper. I remembered what Etoro had said at the meeting about how the gods never changed their minds. What kind of people didn’t admit it when they were wrong? It just didn’t seem fair.