‘How can you say that? He’s one of them!’
‘He’s a boy!’
Atalanta’s lip curled. ‘Don’t tell me you’re fooled by his looks. He’s just as flint-hearted as the rest of them.’
Danae drew a breath. ‘We cannot go on like this.’
Atalanta folded her arms, the rise and fall of her chest betraying the schooled chill of her glower.
‘Despite what we’ve been through together, in the war against Olympus I am your leader. You must follow my orders, like you once did with Heracles.’
Atalanta was quiet for a moment, then she huffed a sharp breath through her nose. ‘Do you know why Heracles, Telamon, Dolos, Hylas and I worked so well together all those years?’
Danae waited.
‘We never fucked each other.’
‘Atalanta …’ Darkness swirled at the edges of her vision: unspoken truths that might rip her apart if given voice. She’d made a choice like this before, standing in front of Heracles’ tent at the foot of a snow-swathed mountain. Duty before desire. She could do it again. She must.
‘You’re right.’
Atalanta’s eyebrows lifted in surprise.
‘Ending the reign of thunder is what matters most. Anything that jeopardizes my ability to do that is … I cannot …’ Danae swallowed the lump in her throat. She glanced down at the ground, churned to mud by yesterday’s downpour, then raised her eyes to meet Atalanta’s. ‘I need you to swear that I can depend on you. That you will follow my ordersas your captain. Just your captain. It is the only way this will work.’
The warrior gazed at her long and hard.
Part of her wanted Atalanta to rail, to fight for them, to drag the truth of why Danae had fled that night from the locked cavern of her chest.
Despite knowing it was for the best, she was crushed when Atalanta finally said, ‘I swear it.’
Danae paced through the labyrinth of tents.
Above her, clouds wisped across the bone-pale sky like a fire’s dying breath. Her black robe and cloak were soaked in mud up to her knees, like everything in the camp since the Greek army had returned the previous night, forced to call a stalemate with Troy before they dashed their entire force against those impenetrable walls. Groans wafted through the air from the scores of injured men left to heal in their tents, with nothing but a swig of wine to stave off the pain.
Beyond the Ithacan quarter, between the camp and the plain, a large trench had been dug. Hundreds of bodies lay within it, washed and stripped of their armour, ready for a journey to the Underworld they would never take. A ram had been slaughtered, its blood mixed with honey wine, water and barley. Libations for the dead.
In her disguise as a seer, Danae should have been with Calchas, prowling about the mass grave, intoning the funeral rites, but she had more pressing matters to attend to.
On reaching her destination, Danae flung open the awning draped over the King of Ithaca’s tent.
Odysseus looked up at her. One of his eyes was swollen shut, a freshly stitched gash above his brow. He stood before a map of the Trojan defences splayed on the table, candles burning in small bronze dishes at its corners.
‘Your plan failed,’ said Danae. ‘Only one god came to the battle.’
Hylas stood on the other side of the table, leaning on his crutch, his eyes flicking between Danae and the king.
‘Things did not play out as expected, however –’
‘Even now, you can’t admit you made a mistake,’ Danae spat. ‘Your sources were wrong.’
Odysseus pressed his fingers into the edges of the map. ‘Has Hermes revealed any useful information?’
Danae folded her arms. ‘He had the omphalos shard. He must have recovered it from the Underworld.’
Odysseus loosed a long breath. ‘It is good we have retrieved the shard, it will be invaluable in the war to come.’ He glanced up at her. ‘You should have told me about the collar.’
‘You should not have promised me a plan you could not deliver.’
