That reminded me of something I hadn’t told my sisters yet. “Xander mentioned something strange to me last night. He said that my eyes turn green in our shared dreams. That it looks the same as when I do magic.”
More silence from the group.
“Do Xander’s eyes turn green in your dreams?” Io asked.
“No.” He always looked like himself. I was the one with changing hair lengths and different-colored eyes.
“Then that means that you’re using the goddess’s power. I would think that if it were due to the goddess creating the dreams, you’d both be affected, and so both of your eyes would turn green. The fact that it only happens to you ... you’re behind the dreams.”
That couldn’t have been true. “That would mean I have two aspects. That’s not possible.” It was something Maia had emphasized to us repeatedly—that we could connect with only one aspect of the goddess. Fury and controlling dreams? Those were two different aspects.
The only person I could ask about it, Lysimache, had eliminated herself as a possible resource.
“And I’ve never used the words,” I said. “I’ve never called on the goddess before dreaming.”
“Maybe because you’re the savior, it happens naturally. You don’t need to call on her,” Io replied.
“Are you saying there’s two kinds of magic?”
“There might be thousands,” Io said. “We don’t know.”
I thought of Rokh and his shape-shifting. How the women in his family could control the sex of their babies. I hadn’t heard of anythingsimilar in Ilion. There were obviously other types of magic in the world—I just hadn’t realized that we’d be dealing with that personally.
“When did the dreams start?” Zalira asked.
I thought back. “On theNikos. That was the first time.” I had dreamed of Xander. Or Jason, the name I called him back then.
Was he tied into this somehow? Was he responsible for me gaining this ability? I’d always felt a connection to him. Was this part of it?
“You should try it tonight,” Io said. “Use the aspect and see if you can control what happens.”
To a degree, I already had. There had been the night when I had started to dream of when Haemon left Locris. Xander had already seen some of my most vulnerable moments, and I hadn’t wanted him to witness that one as well. I had verbally complained that my dreams were always about my life and not about Xander’s.
And then the dream had shifted and changed and I saw him as a little boy, when he’d found his mother’s body after she killed herself.
Did this mean I was also responsible for the nightmares that had been plaguing me for the last few weeks? Had I somehow sent the message to Xander that he needed to hold me so that I wouldn’t have them? As if my subconscious were manifesting my desire to be close to him?
If that was true ... I would owe him another apology.
“What is the dream aspect again?” I asked, not sure if I remembered it correctly.
“Nyctipolus. Night walking,” Zalira said.
I had interpreted that aspect literally. When the goddess had searched for her missing daughter, the sun god had removed himself so that she wouldn’t have any light. She had carried a torch and walked through the endless night looking for her. It had never occurred to me that it might be speaking about dreaming. But that was true—in a sense, I had been night walking.
And night talking and night fighting and night kissing.
“I’ll try it,” I said. It still seemed unbelievable to me.
“You had better hope we can have more than one aspect,” Io said. “Because if we don’t, you won’t have a way to save Locris.”
She was right. I had been operating under the belief that the magic of the eye of the goddess would work without an aspect. That its power was independent of all this. But Lysimache had said she’d used her aspect to destroy, which meant that I’d need an aspect to create. My fury aspect wouldn’t restore anything. It wasn’t meant to.
“I can worry about that later,” I said. Although fixing Locris was my priority, too many other things had to happen first.
Namely, getting the eye back from Artemisia. “If Artemisia is carrying a god-weapon, how are we supposed to stand up against that?” I asked.
“It seems to me that the only way would be to have a god-weapon of our own,” Ahyana observed.
