by Diana Tyler
“And your master demanded one-hundred thousand drachmae from the Temple treasury instead,” Tycho interjects. “When Eirene got word of it, the whole city sent a beggar’s basket around on his behalf.”
“To raise money for the poor, poor Alpha Guardian…” Lysander chimes in with a thespian’s lamenting wail.
“Acheron couldn’t stand being made a mockery of,” Tycho finishes the story, the one I would die a hundred times to rewrite and bring my brother back. I look up at him. Able to read his eyes this time, I see in them what I have not perceived in a mortal’s face for years…compassion. “I am sorry, I – ”
“Sorry? Why are you sorry?” Lysander interrupts crossly. “You had nothing to do with it. The only one who should be sorry is her as long as she continues to wash the feet and take the lashes of her brother’s murderer!” He lunges toward me and laughs as I shrink back from the knife like a tendril from winter’s touch. “What is your answer, slave!”
“I will kill him,” I whisper.
“Speak louder!” shouts Lysander.
“I will kill him!” I exclaim. As I shout, I feel familiar tingling in my veins again, and seconds later, the same burning arrows I felt coursing through me the night Jasper died, only worse. Much, much worse.
I feel every eye on me, each one waiting to watch me try in vain to run away or recant my declaration. But the heat grows hotter and settles in the palms of my hands. “Stop…” I whisper to myself. “Calm down.” I take a deep breath, but it does no good. My hands feel like they’re going to explode. I cry out in pain and shake my arms as though they’re covered with vicious bees.
“What’s wrong with her?” I hear someone say.
“She’s crazed! Look at her hands!” shouts another.
I look down at my palms. They’re glowing orange with fire. The tips of my fingers are red as irons in a furnace.
“It’s a doma,” Lysander whispers. He lowers his knife and carefully backs away from me.
I turn toward the river and violently try to throw the fire out of my hands.
It works. Two fireballs, the size of my fists, sizzle and hiss through my skin, then soar through the air, arcing over the water like shooting stars and landing with a crackling roar in the center of a Juniper’s trunk.
“You’re an Asher!” Lysander says with an awe-struck grin spreading across his face. “Why didn’t you say so?”
I blow on my hands and look up at the dumbfounded faces staring back at me. “I didn’t know I had the gift. Until now.”
I feel like I’ve just stepped into a dream. To be sure it isn’t, I turn and look back at the fire burning across the river. The Juniper has become a lantern flickering in the darkness.
“Looks like you have your chance. To have your vengeance,” says Lysander.
He looks up into a shaft of morning light piercing though the armor of trees around us, then fiercely throws his dagger into a willow ten yards away. “Another gift for you,” he says pointing after it.
With a whistle, he sends all of the outlaws scattering into the remaining shadows. He starts after them, but turns, remembering something. I gasp as I watch him punt Acheron’s water pot into the middle of the river. “Don’t worry, Iris. He won’t need it anymore,” he smiles.
I hasten back to Enochos, hoping to make it to Acheron’s house before both daylight and reason catch up with me and pull this knife from my shaking fist, forcing me to stop and consider this newfound power. As I run, I wonder how I created the fire at Okeanos. Was it formed as a response to feeling threatened? Angry? Afraid?
In my mind’s eye I replay my brother’s pyre going up in flames, then Acheron’s drunken grin flashing in the smoke. Hot needles prick my skin from the inside, sending streams of heat from the tops of my shoulders all the way down to my knuckles. That’s it…Hate.
I soundlessly push my way into the courtyard surrounding Acheron’s house through a small door, the one nearest the entrance into the andron where he spends most of his time, listening to poets, hosting a symposium, punishing his slaves… It is where I left him last night, locked in a slumber of wine and wickedness, unwittingly drawing his last breaths.
I pull my cloak over my head and make my way to an open window where I crouch and wait for my breathing to slow and my heart rate to settle. I can’t lose control. Not now. It feels as if time has stopped, standing still just long enough to see the slave girl become an assassin.
I step into the andron and approach a crumpled body lying upon the mosaic River Styx. A body whose head has blond hair that’s been unevenly cut by Acheron’s knife. I run to her, to Niobe, but I’m too late. A whip is wrapped tightly around her lifeless throat.
CHAPTER FOUR
HUNTER
I try to summon the fire. I want to burn down this place and incinerate every trace of Acheron’s existence. I feel the heat inside me, beating in my heart, burning in my lungs, but it isn’t the same. I turn my hands over and see only pink flesh still cooling from their exhibition at Okeanos. I grit my teeth, close my eyes, and flex every muscle in my body, trying so hard to conjure the doma that I make myself lightheaded.
Why isn’t it working?
I wander back into the courtyard, every muscle cramping, my head swimming, and slide down the rough mud brick wall, and weep for Niobe.
After what feels like hours, I open my eyes and watch the pale blue haze of morning light creep closer, like an ominous Enochos wave. Suddenly I feel as though I’m back in that icy sea and that at any moment, Acheron, the gallant Guardian, will hook his arm around my flailing body and force me onto shore. Only this time, he will not view me as a harmless, able-bodied slave girl worth saving, but as an expendable, untrustworthy Eusebian deserving death.
I wonder what Niobe did to provoke him; it could have been anything. Perhaps she spent one too many minutes ridding the mosaic river of my blood, or spoke heedlessly of the Oracles and the Moonbow’s promise as she did three years ago. The next possibility makes my blood run cold…
Could it be that Niobe spoke in my defense, once again wrongly believing she had won his favor and the right to speak freely? I never considered Niobe a friend. She resented any woman to whom Acheron showed affection, whether actual or pretended, especially one whose life he’d saved. But she was no enemy either. Had she been, what would have prevented her from slipping hemlock or mandrake into my soup the night I was brought in, brain and body numb from hypothermia? I was on the edge of death, and she chose to pull me away from it. What would have kept her from whispering lies about me into Acheron’s ear, feeding his suspicions that I had been corrupted with revolutionary ideas?
When I was helpless, bleeding on the floor, she didn’t look on with satisfaction. She fled the room, aghast at the sight of her sister Eusebian suffering at the hands of a charming tyrant. I’m almost sure of it. Niobe had allowed her mind to rip the mask from Acheron’s face, revealing the coldness of his eyes, the poison of his silver tongue, the cruelty of his kiss.
I hear the wooden gate creak open and the rustling of the groundskeepers as they enter to begin another day, just as they did yesterday and the day before, and the day before that. Alphas all of them, they’ve never known suffering at Acheron’s hand; they’ve merely stood by stoically and watched his wrath fall, hard and sporadic like hail from a thunderhead, before returning to their precious pomegranate trees and dainty trellises of bougainvillea. I try not to despise them. It isn’t their fault that I am Eusebian, “a daughter of Duna,” and they are Alpha, children of a petty pantheon of lost immortals who have inherited their ancestors’ lust for power.
Before the servants notice me and, I fear, report my whereabouts to Acheron, I navigate around the house on hands and knees until I am well hidden beneath the shade and foliage of a flowering myrtle.
Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop. My heartbeat mimics the sharp staccato rhythm of horse hooves pounding the cobblestone path outside the wall. I know only one person who travels on horseback.
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br /> “Good morning, Darius,” I hear Acheron say, using a sickeningly blithe tone only an unfeeling murderer could be capable of after strangling a slave. “I’ve been called to Eirene for the day. Clean up the mess inside after you’ve pruned the olive trees, and tell the girl to wait for me in the andron when she returns.”
I don’t linger another moment. I make my way, low like a lizard, to the entrance nearest the slaves’ quarters and quietly trespass into the chamber I shared with Niobe. The pungent smell of leeks, onions, and celery simmered together fills my nostrils, and I feel my belly begin to ache for it. As I survey the room in search of the food, a flash of red catches my eye.
There, shimmering in a sliver of sunlight upon a bronze spoon, is my jasper stone. I must have dropped it during my nightmare last night. Acheron had strict rules about slaves’ possessions. The only things we were allowed to keep were the clothes on our backs and sandals on our feet. The jasper stone, luckily, was small enough to fit inside my sandal while I worked and stay wrapped under my fingers as I slept.
I fall down before the tiny red rock as though it were a recovered relic atop a temple altar, then carefully draw it to my heart.
“That’s the last time I leave you behind,” I swear to it. And then I begin to cry again when I think of Niobe, whom I also left behind. I try to tell myself that there was nothing I could do to stop Acheron from killing her. Nothing, that is, without the doma.
If only I had received it last night! My eyes burn with tears once more. “I could have stopped him… I could have killed him!” I nearly shout.
In the corner of the room, below the window and away from the light, is the lentil soup contained in one of Acheron’s finest black bowls. It depicts two persimmon-colored women standing at an upright loom, busy turning raw wool into cloth. I hold the lukewarm vessel to my face and take in its earthy aroma, then fetch the spoon and gingerly dip it into the broth. As I bring the spoon to my lips, I notice a crabbed inscription etched vertically into the bowl above a basket full of yarn: ἀδελφός…Sisters.
Niobe, my Eusebian sister, is nourishing me, bringing my soul and body back to life as she did before; but this time with intangible sustenance far more invigorating than lentil soup alone. Clasping the jasper stone and filling my belly with her final gift, I resolve that every fiber and thread of my life will be woven with one unwavering purpose – to watch Acheron melt head to foot in the volcanic heat from my hands.
The fever is ready to release my mother’s broken body from its torturous hands – one ice-cold, the other fire-hot. My brother surrendered to sleep hours ago, but I stay close by her bed near the window, trusting the moonlight to keep me awake.
As if spiraling down from the ceiling above us, a cool breeze sweeps through the room, and at once I feel peace settle upon me like a mantle. My mother’s groaning ceases completely; was it not for a smile appearing on her pale, cracked lips, I would think her dead.
Lifting my eyes from hers, still closed, I see something peculiar forming low in the midnight sky. First, a faint arc of silvery light with a misty sheet of rain falling through it, then seven transparent ribbons of color materializing one by one beneath the first. I close an eye and hold my thumb and forefinger to the bow, creating a frame around the portrait, perfectly aglow with brushstrokes, barely golden.
If only I could pull it into the room with us and let my mother hold it, just for a while, I thought.
“Mother…” I whispered, as if a tone any louder would chase away the Moonbow, or worse, dissolve the serenity it was casting over us.
“Iris…” I felt the color escape my face as I turned to see the source of a young girl’s voice, just like mine only sweetened with poetry.
There she is, a goddess-like nymph standing in the room’s single shaft of light, arrayed in royal robes and the soothing scents of springtime herbs. She takes a step toward me and smiles up at the Moonbow. Somehow, I know without question that this intruder is a friend.
“ … Iris, Child of the Rainbow,
I am Carya, sent by Duna. I’ve known you from afar.
Take heart, Iris, gaze upon the Moonbow,
Your mother flies beyond it, passed the furthest star.
Hear me, she is well now, free from fever’s pain,
A promise for you, Iris: you can be with her again.”
The nymph spends the rest of the night kneeling at my side, sometimes weeping with me, other times softly humming. All the while, I struggle to let my mother go, battling to believe her spirit has soared through the Moonbow’s arches as Carya has promised.
As the sunrise climbs out of the distant hills, Carya embraces me and places a smooth red jasper stone in my hand, whispering:
“Red, the color of courage, of passion, strength, and love.
Jasper will point the way to the Moonbow’s light above.”
Before my lips can part to ask the meaning of the strange gift, Carya has already vanished.
After the sun finishes transforming the Moonbow into ordinary sky, Jasper walks in and takes Carya’s place beside me. He folds his arms on the bed and buries his head into them, sobbing. Not sure what else to do, I do what Carya did and cry alongside him.
“Why didn’t you wake me?” Jasper asks just as the morning chorus of birds stops singing.
I can’t speak. My focus is fixed on the emptiness of the indigo horizon.
Noticing my restless fingers rubbing Carya’s stone between them, Jasper sighs with pity. “Remember what mother said, Iris. It isn’t over.”
“Did you see her?” I ask him before I lose my courage.
“Who?”
“The girl. Carya. She was just here before you came in. I think she’s a goddess, Jasper.”
“You were just imagining, sister,” he says. The time he takes to think about his words tells me he feels sorry for me. “Our minds… Well, they can play tricks on us. And there’s no such thing as goddesses. Those are just made-up Alpha stories.”
“No, Jasper!” I say, gripping his wrist, not wanting to be talked to like a child. “She’s real. She gave me this.” I hold out my other hand for him to see the stone. “It’s jasper, like the ones we used to find on the beach.”
Jasper sighs and scratches his forehead. “We have boxes full of those, Iris.” He lowers his hand and wraps his arm around my shoulder, drawing me into his side. “I love you. I thank Duna we can comfort one another.”
Of course. He thinks I’ve taken a stone from our collection and have fancied it an enchanted keepsake from a mythical goddess.
As Jasper gently takes our mother from the bed, I swear never to speak another word to him about Carya – partly because I don’t want to be thought crazy, and partly because I fear that I am.
I’m startled awake by the strident screech of a hawk flying somewhere above me. I squeeze my hand around the jasper stone and carefully roll onto my back, which feels significantly better that it did last night…thanks to Carya. “See, Jasper. I’m not crazy,” I speak to the sky, hoping my brother hears me.
My eyes flutter open to see a vulture pecking at a carcass just an arm span from where I lie. I jump to my feet and amble toward a small ravine, lest it think that I, too, am something to be scavenged.
I trudged all morning through the rocky hills enclosing Enochos until my wearied legs refused to take me any farther. When I kill him, I will also take his horse. I smile at the thought. At the rate I’m traveling, it could be weeks before I make it to the Eusebian city of Limén where I hope to find work. If I want to kill Acheron, I will have to keep myself alive, and I don’t want to steal or kill for food if I can help it.
I peer into the stream and scan the face looking back at me. No longer a vulnerable orphan or a defenseless slave, I see the capricious visage of a liar, a thief, a fugitive, and yes… an assassin. I will become anything I must in order to avenge my brother and the other innocents who have died to satisfy Acheron’s black-hearted whims. And I won’t need the doma to help me.
I hear a low-pitched growl and watch the water waken with ripples creeping across it from the opposite shore. My gaze leaves my reflection’s eyes and meets those of a gray wolf; his slight yet powerful paws have already begun advancing toward me. It is easy to judge from his long, scrawny limbs and protruding ribcage that he won’t leave any part of me behind for the vultures…if he has his way.
He stops seven feet from me, standing stiff-legged and tall. When he sees me reach for my knife, he crouches and curls up his lips, revealing six sharp incisors ready to tear open my throat.
Staring into the wolf’s golden eyes, I try to imagine that I am face to face with Acheron. I anticipate the thrill of walking away from his dead body without turning back. No regrets.
The passing of a cloud over the midday sun sends a shadow over our battleground, and a swell of confidence through my body. I initiate the charge with a long lunge and an extended hand tipped with the solitary blade, daring my enemy to attack. He points his ears and barks quietly, perhaps humored by my modest display of bravery. In the next second, he is six feet in the air and my arm is outstretched as high as it can reach. Every muscle and sinew in me remains rigid and unmoving as I wait with suspended breath and unblinking eyes for the animal to descend.
As the darkness of his body falls over me, I thrust my dagger up into his underbelly, and together we collapse into the shallow riverbed. I lock eyes with the beast as his eyes soften and mouth closes. He whimpers as I retract the knife and roll him off of my chest.
Though my father was a tanner, we never saw the animals alive. I’ve never killed anything…at least not on purpose. Years ago I once hurled a spotted stone at the nest of two barn swallows I’d found under a bridge near my family’s house, curious to see if the mother bird might sit upon it like one of her eggs. The rock struck her glossy blue wing and she warbled wildly until her male companion joined her side. All at once, as though I’d been buried by an avalanche propelled by my own voice, I felt what it was to regret.
