“You dare—” Alcimede begins.
“Yes, Mother,” Jason says with deceptive lightness. “I do dare. That was the entire purpose of theArgo’s journey, wasn’t it? To dare, and to be victorious. And now, if you don’t mind—or even if you do—my wifeand I will take our leave.”
Jason grabs Medea’s hand and rushes from his mother’s house before he can lose his nerve.
The next day, Jason takes the Golden Fleece to Pelias, assuming that this interaction cannot possibly go as poorly as his visit to his mother.
He is wrong. Oh, how very wrong he is.
The worst part is coming home afterward and telling Medea what happened. She greets him at the door with a kiss on the cheek, the smell of burned cooking wafting around her. Though she is practiced at transforming one creature into another, Medea struggles to turn ingredients into edible food.
“So, when will we move into the palace?” Medea asks. She flits about him like a bird, brimming with endless enthusiasm. It fades when she takes in the look on his face.
Jason sits heavily on a rented stool in this little rented house, paid for using the currency of fame and Medea’s jewelry, both of which will soon run out, leaving them nothing at all.
Haltingly, he describes how Pelias examined the Golden Fleece like a suspicious customer in the market. When no flaw could be found, Pelias raised his chin and said,Youhave done well, Jason.I will give you the throne after my death.
Medea’s eyes narrow. “Only after his death? That wasn’t the agreement.”
“What does it matter?” Jason shrugs, disconsolate. “Pelias is the one with the army.”
Jason does not tell Medea what else happened: the titter of laughter that swept through the watching crowd, the cold triumph in Pelias’s eyes. How Jason burned with humiliation and could do nothing, nothing at all, about any of it.
Was it all pointless, their journey for the Fleece? The sacrificesand the challenges they overcame, were they really for nothing? As his wife rubs his back, Jason wallows in his shame. Pelias is an old man, but he is strong and might live another ten years or more. Worse, he now possesses the Fleece with none of the appropriate veneration. For Pelias, the Fleece is like the token children use to play snatch-away games; Pelias would have sent Jason to fetch Aeetes’s house slippers if he thought it would get Jason killed.
Perhaps, Jason considers with dawning horror, Pelias will still find a way to kill him. He killed Jason’s father, after all. Perhaps Jason will find himself on the wrong end of an assassin’s dagger some fine day between now and the death of Pelias, surviving a long, dangerous journey only to perish in his home city.
Suddenly desperate, Jason grabs Medea’s hands. She looks up at him in surprise, her uncanny gold eyes as unsettling as always.
“Help me, Medea,” Jason beseeches, though in a dim corner of his mind he knows it doesn’t do for a man to beseech his wife for anything. “Save me from this wicked king the way I once freed you from Aeetes. Set a charm against ignominy and failure the way you did against the fire of the bronze bulls. Rescue me like Ariadne saved Theseus from this labyrinth of deception and intrigue, and give me the throne of Iolcus.”
He holds her knee with one hand and cups her chin with the other, the traditional pose of the supplicant. Medea’s expression of astonishment hardens into something sharper.
“I think I know how to make Pelias give up the throne a little more quickly,” she says.
Jason gives a cry of relief and embraces his wife, burying his face in her shoulder. He doesn’t see the expression on Medea’s face. But if he had, he would have recognized it from the journey of theArgo.
Specifically, the moment when she raised the axe above the body of Absyrtos, blade glinting in the sun.
53
Medea
Even as my hand rubbed gentle circles on Jason’s back, I burned with anger. It was an outrage beyond bearing to be robbed of our prize at this late date, to have sacrificed so much only to end up empty-handed.
There was no reasoning with Pelias, of that I was certain. If he was anything like Aeetes, he would never consent to hear me. No, there had to be some other way, some witchcraft I could work. Over the next few days, I pondered what it might be.
I landed on my answer when I came upon Jason sitting alone in a dark room one afternoon. Immediately I went to open the shutters and let the sunlight in, but he came up to lay a gentle hand on mine, shaking his head.
“We must keep them closed,” he said, “lest assassins find a way inside.”
My heart exploded with rage.
Not at Jason, no, but at the wicked man who made my husband cower here in darkness at midday. My fury was reserved for Pelias and his followers, who not only denied Jason his throne but directly threatened our family’s future.
Assassins, in a pig’s eye!
At that moment, I decided that Pelias would die, and in the most ignominious manner possible. Poison was too good for him. He was a traitor, and I knew how to deal with traitors, havinglearned in the gardens of the Colchian palace when I watched prisoners being burned alive in the bronze bulls. Chalciope instructed me further when she used the blades of others to bring down our monstrous father.
