“You’re one to talk,” she retorted. “How long after you found out did your wife become ... uncelibate?”
He laughed and I had to press my lips together.
Io added, “There’s something I want to show you.”
“Oh, I think we’ve seen quite enough,” he teased her.
She glared at him and told us to follow her. We all went to her room, where she picked up two books. “Suri and I went down to my mother’s library and found these.”
“What are they?” I asked as she handed them to me.
“They’re manuals on how to operate the temple. The rules of what should be done. What the actual vows are. I think they came from Locris.”
That made sense—Lysimache would have made sure to destroy any Ilionian copies.
“I’m going to send one of them to the scribes here at the palace so that they can make multiple copies,” she said. She went over and puther hand in Suri’s. “Suri and I are going to reopen the temple here in Ilion together, and we will run it the way it was always intended to be.”
“Maia did say that so long as there was one priestess who still believed, the temple could keep going. And with a manual, anybody could reopen ...”
A thought occurred to me, and I got excited.
I had the answer I had been looking for.
“Antiope is going to Locris,” I said. “And now that we have a manual on how to run a temple—”
“You could ask Antiope to open the temple in Locris!” Xander finished, looking every bit as happy as I felt.
“Let’s go ask her now!” I said, handing the books back to Io. I grabbed him by the hand and pulled him out into the hallway.
“Or we could ask her in about half an hour,” he said.
“One hour,” I countered.
He grinned. “Fine. Greedy little princess.”
“That’s entirely your fault.”
“I know, and I thank the goddess for it every day.”
Two weeks later we crossed the Acheron Sea to go to Locris. Xander and I were accompanied by my former regiment, Luna, Quynh, Thrax, Haemon, Demaratus, Antiope, Themis, and her youngest son, Adonis. I had thoroughly vetted him, and it seemed like he might be a good match for Kallisto.
I would leave it to my older sister to decide.
Antiope had quickly agreed to my proposal that she open the temple in Locris and reinstate worship of the goddess. “The chance to begin again, to do things the way the goddess intended? And to be able to have a relationship while doing so? I was worried about what I would do in Locris, and this is the answer.”
Demaratus had already agreed to help her with the training since the manuals Io had discovered said that men were allowed onto the temple grounds to worship.
It wouldn’t be easy—Locrians had so thoroughly removed the goddess from their lives that I was certain there would be some resistance. I found myself feeling a little sorry for anyone who tried to cross Antiope.
We drew ever closer to Locris. Unfortunately the ship went over a high wave, and I gripped the railing so tightly that my knuckles turned white. I was most certainly pregnant. The light inside me grew stronger with each passing day, and my monthly courses hadn’t ever come. I had also started vomiting every morning. My husband held my hair back and told me how much he loved and adored me while I threatened him with an ever-growing list of ways that I wanted to torture him for doing this to me.
The voyage to Locris nearly did me in. Seasickness combined with pregnancy sickness was one of the worst things I had ever endured.
“Worse than drowning?” Xander asked me teasingly.
“Have you not learned that you shouldn’t provoke your temperamental, pregnant wife?” I took the gingerroot he offered me, but it didn’t seem to help much.
I was on the deck when Mount Knemis came into view. A lump rose in my throat. I had promised myself that I would see it again, and now here I was.
