Page 39 of The Song of Achilles

What had Deidameia thought would happen, I wondered, when she had her women dance for me? Had she really thought I would not know him? I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.

“Patroclus.” He cupped my cheek with his hand. “Do you hear me? Please, say something.”

I could not stop imagining her skin beside his, her swelling breasts and curving hips. I remembered the long days I grieved for him, my hands empty and idle, plucking the air like birds peck at dry earth.

“Patroclus?”

“You did it for nothing.”

He flinched at the emptiness of my voice. But how else was I to sound?

“What do you mean?”

“Your mother did not tell me where you were. It was Peleus.”

His face had gone pale, bled dry. “She did not tell you?”

“No. Did you truly expect she would?” My voice cut harder than I meant it to.

“Yes,” he whispered.

There were a thousand things I might have said, to reproach him for his naïveté. He had always trusted too easily; he had had so little in his life to fear or suspect. In the days before our friendship, I had almost hated him for this, and some old spark of that flared in me, trying to relight. Anyone else would have known that Thetis acted for her own purposes only. How could he be so foolish? The angry words pricked in my mouth.

But when I tried to speak them, I found I could not. His cheeks were flushed with shame, and the skin beneath his eyes was weary. His trust was a part of him, as much as his hands or his miraculous feet. And despite my hurt, I would not wish to see it gone, to see him as uneasy and fearful as the rest of us, for any price.

He was watching me closely, reading my face over and over, like a priest searching the auguries for an answer. I could see the slight line in his forehead that meant utmost concentration.

Something shifted in me then, like the frozen surface of the Apidanos in spring. I had seen the way he looked at Deidameia; or rather the way he did not. It was the same way he had looked at the boys in Phthia, blank and unseeing. He had never, not once, looked at me that way.

“Forgive me,” he said again. “I did not want it. It was not you. I did not—I did not like it.”

Hearing it soothed the last of the jagged grief that had begun when Deidameia shouted his name. My throat was thick with the beginning of tears. “There is nothing to forgive,” I said.

L ATER THAT EVENING we returned to the palace. The great hall was dark, its fire burned to embers. Achilles had repaired his dress as best he could, but it still gaped to the waist; he held it closed in case we met a lingering guard.

The voice came from the shadows, startling us.

“You have returned.” The moonlight did not quite reach the thrones, but we saw the outline of a man there, thick with furs. His voice seemed deeper than it had before, heavier.

“We have,” Achilles said. I could hear the slight hesitation before he answered. He had not expected to face the king again so soon.

“Your mother is gone, I do not know where.” The king paused, as if awaiting a response.

Achilles said nothing.

“My daughter, your wife, is in her room crying. She hopes you will come to her.”

I felt the flinch of Achilles’ guilt. His words came out stiffly; it was not a feeling he was used to.

“It is unfortunate that she hopes for this.”

“It is indeed,” Lycomedes said.

We stood in silence a moment. Then Lycomedes drew a weary breath. “I suppose that you want a room for your friend?”

“If you do not mind,” Achilles said, carefully.

Lycomedes let out a soft laugh. “No, Prince Achilles, I do not mind.” There was another silence. I heard the king lift a goblet, drink, replace it on the table.