“Keep hearing what?”
“Three. The number has been coming up a lot lately.” First from Tami, then from that weird experience in the Pythian library, and now from a crazy dark mage. “It’s like it’s haunting me.”
“You would know.”
“Pritkin! I’m serious!”
He decided to indulge me, probably because he’d finished his salad. Which meant that he was out of food for the moment, since he had this weird thing about not eating bread with bread. Like with pasta or pizza, which was basically the same thing, at least according to him. It was an insane opinion to have, but I couldn’t shake him from it and had stopped trying.
He leaned back against the wall with a glass of wine. “How much time do you have?”
“Come again?”
“It’s a big subject.”
“Is it?”
He nodded. “Throughout history, the number three has been fundamental to how we understand the world. The space we inhabit is measured in length, width, and height. Time is measured in past, present, and future.” He paused, and I just sat there, expectant.
Until I realized that he was smiling slightly. “What?” I asked.
“What are you waiting for?”
“For the rest—” I stopped, realizing that I had unconsciously been waiting—for another example. I frowned.
“The third instance would be body, mind, and spirit,” he continued, “which is how we understand ourselves. But the fact that you knew—instinctively—that there was a third example indicates how our minds classify things.
“But . . . that’s just how people talk.”
“Yes. Because it’s how they think. People have always seen the world in threes. Look at religion: Christianity is fundamentally based on the Trinity—the father, son and holy spirit. The magi gave Christ three gifts, the devil tempted him three times, and he rose from the dead after three days. Even the Christian universe is traditionally seen as having three expressions: the upper world of heaven, the middle world of Earth, and the underworld of hell.”
“Okay,” I said, not really seeing where he was going with this.
“The Greeks were also particularly fond of the number: there were three Fates, three Graces, three Gorgons and three Furies. There were three brothers who ruled over three realms: Zeus, Hades and Poseidon. Artemis—your mother—is often seen as a triple goddess, a unity of the divine huntress, the Moon goddess and the goddess of the underworld. Even the Pythias traditionally sat on a tripod, a three-legged chair.”
“Yes, but—”
“And the rest of the world’s religions follow a similar pattern: the Sumerian Goddess Inanna is remembered for having spent three days and nights in the underworld. There are three main gods in Hinduism: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer. Yggdrasil, the sacred tree of life in the Norse religion, has three roots under which are three sacred wells—”
“Pritkin—”
“—not to mention how often the number shows up in the world’s imagery. The triskelion, a three-legged spiral, can be found on items dating back more than six thousand years. The Borromean rings are a centuries-old symbol of unity made up of three interlacing circles. The Valknut rune of Odin—”
“Pritkin!”
“—consisting of three interlocking triangles, stood for his power. Even the old superstition of not walking underneath a ladder stems from an ancient Egyptian belief that one should not “break a triangle’. The geometry of the number three was seen as being complete and perfect, and therefore not to be disturbed—”
“Pritkin!” Damn it! I’d forgotten how much he liked to lecture.
His lips quirked slightly. “Well, you did ask.”
“I asked what Jonathan was talking about, not for a speech!”
He shrugged. “Could be anything really. Did he give a context?”
I tried to remember. “I asked him who the assassin was targeting. He said you, and that it had something to do with three. Like he was trying to subtract one from that number by killing you. I know it doesn’t make sense—”
“No, that actually makes perfect sense,” Pritkin said, and then paused, because they had just delivered our pizza.