Discord's Apple

“I don’t think I can trust you.”

While Alex’s—Sinon’s—smile didn’t fade, it took on an edge, a different gleam to his eye. “Because I lied my way past the walls of Troy?”

She flushed, a wave of dizziness burning along her skin. She hadn’t wanted to believe. How much easier it was to think he was just a clever, witty man.

“You were terrorists. The Trojan Horse—it was the Bronze Age version of a car bomb—”

“That’s only because you read Virgil’s side of it. We waged honest war for ten years. Then we became desperate. No one can blame us for what we did. We paid for our victory.”

He seemed so calm. But then he’d had to deal with it for three thousand years. How could he not be calm? “You were a spy. What would you do to get into the Storeroom?”

“Nothing,” he said gently. “I’ll stay away, if you want me to.”

“Will you tell me something?”

“Anything.” His earnestness made her nervous.

“Are you working for Hera?”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because I don’t know anything about you, because you were following me. You’re spying on the house, you know more about what’s happening here than I do, you could read the writing on the apple. You act like you know her—what are you doing here? Why aren’t you dead?” She ran out of breath before she could ask him what the Trojan War had been like.

Standing there, slouched in his jacket, he didn’t look like a Greek warrior. She tried to imagine him in one of those crested helms from the pottery glazes.

Then she blurted, “Was Helen really the most beautiful woman in the world?”

He looked away, bit his lip, then said, “Yes. I saw her once, standing on the wall of Troy. It wasn’t just her looks, but the way she moved. Every turn of her head was grace itself. Nothing wasted. Remember, though, she was a demigoddess. Zeus’s daughter. Comparing apples and oranges, putting her up against mortal women.”

Evie shook her head, amazed, awed, befuddled. She didn’t believe it, looking at him, his creased expression like he was getting ready to laugh at a joke at her expense. He seemed—normal. Pleasant. Not mythological at all, not like Hera, who’d shaken Evie to her bones.

Yet that haunted voice that kept drawing her to the Storeroom murmured, He’s old, this one. Very old.

She sighed. “All the things you’ve seen. All the things you must have forgotten—how can you stand it?”

“I don’t have a choice. I—I have this vision, that a billion years from now the world ends, swallowed up at last by a bloated sun or crumbled to ash. And I’m still here. I live through it, floating in space with nothing to do and no place to go. The lone repository of human history, and a mediocre one at that. Maybe some god out there will have pity on me and take me in—but I think they’ve all gone away. I can’t blame them. But I don’t have their power, so I’m stuck here with whatever fate hands me.”

“Have you thought about going insane?” It would seem like a reasonable thing to do, given his circumstances.

“Did once. Got boring, so I snapped out of it.”

She looked hard at him, wanting to be kind. “I can’t think of anything in the Storeroom that will help you. I’m sorry.”

“Listen,” he said, running his hand through his hair. “Hera’s planning something. She’s a bitter old bitch. But I can get close to her, find out what she’s planning—”

“Can I trust you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you say the same thing to her?

”

He closed his mouth on whatever obvious answer he’d been ready to give.

Someone was walking up the driveway. Evie stared at the figure over Alex’s shoulder. He caught her gaze and turned to look.

She wondered who it would be this time: Jack come to fetch some golden eggs, a Persian merchant searching for a rolled-up piece of flying carpet, a Viking unfrozen from the permafrost wanting Thor’s hammer. Her gut sank, and she waited for the instinct that would drag her unerringly to the basement.