Discord's Apple

Part of her entourage flanked her: the Curandera at her right hand, the Wanderer at her left. She still had to see about the girl. She owed it to Frank Walker to make sure she was safe.

Such a prosaic little house to serve as a repository for such great treasures. It was a common trick, hide something beautiful in something plain, disguise the desirable with the humble. It had worked, for a time. Now, though, the house’s roof had blown off, and debris buzzed in a whirlwind around them. The storm was ripping the house apart to its foundations. Hera and her lieutenants moved in a sphere of calm, protected and untroubled.

The Wanderer moved a few steps away. “Look, there,” he said, gesturing Hera closer.

On his side, half his face bloody and caved in, lay Robin Goodfellow. Beardless, boyish, and innocent—even dead, he looked like everything he was not. She’d told him not to attack the house on his own. She’d asked him to wait, and he’d said he would, with that mischievous glint in his eye that indicated he didn’t care if she thought he was lying. He’d always had his own agenda, and she never cared, as long as it didn’t interfere with hers.

It didn’t, even now.

“Come,” she said, and drew the others away from him.

The Storeroom was in the basement. In her space of calm, she went down the stairs, as the world howled around her.

At the base of the stairs, Arthur and Merlin stood guarding the doorway to the Storeroom.

They weren’t guarding much. The ceiling spun up and away, piece by piece, floorboards and wiring ripping and disappearing into the storm, pipes and ducts exposed like bones. Arthur held his sword, the legendary Excalibur, in both hands, and stood with his feet apart and well braced, his blond hair flying around his face. He grinned up at her, maniacal. Beside him, Merlin gazed with chilling calm, standing as if they were in a park on a summer day. He had enough power to be a god. She wouldn’t even have to train him, as she would the others.

What would she have to bribe them with, to bring them to her side?

“Arthur!”

Merlin tugged the warrior’s arm. Arthur laughed, spun, ducked through the doorway into the Storeroom—and disappeared.

The wizard offered a brief salute to Hera and followed him. A light sparked around the doorway and was still, and the door was just a door, leading to a room in the process of being ravaged by a tornado.

She saw no sign at all of Evie Walker and the Greek.

She finished the walk from the stairs to the door of the Storer

oom. The ceiling was gone now; the walls were following, and the contents of the room—shelves of artifacts, boxes and bags, spears and swords, cabinets of gowns, crowns, golden balls, ancient horns, lyres, flutes, and bones—spun up and away, caught in the whirlwind, and disappeared. All that magic, flying back into the world, scattering, and the cycle would begin again, the stories would begin again.

She raised her hands and laughed as notebook paper covered in writing fluttered around her.

Family, loyalty, duty. The stories his father told named these as the greatest attributes a man could have. All honor came from the way one behaved toward one’s family, friends, and comrades in arms. Abstract virtues were all well and good, but they could be twisted to serve unworthy ends or unscrupulous people. One marked the greatness of a man not by the crown upon his head, but by his actions.

Telemachus didn’t know his father until he was full grown. He didn’t hear these stories until he was a man with children of his own, and Odysseus told them to his grandchildren. But Telemachus knew the lessons because he had grown up with a symbol of them more powerful than any story Odysseus told: his mother, Penelope, at her loom. Her loyalty to Odysseus never wavered. Watching her, Telemachus learned of family, loyalty, and duty.

Telemachus never thought of having adventures of his own. His father’s adventures were so famous, how could the son ever match them? He would be content to stay at home and have the quiet life his father had missed.

He forgot, though, that Odysseus hadn’t asked for his adventures, and one day a stranger came to his door.

16

Sinon had thought Prometheus would open an enchanted doorway, and they would step through to the land of Ithaca in an instant. But he didn’t. They took a boat.

As Sinon stepped onto the shore of the island of Ithaca, he wrapped the edge of his cloak over his shoulder against the chill autumn breeze coming off the water.

“How long has it been since you’ve been back?” the man—man?—beside him asked.

“I set sail with Odysseus. Ten years before the fall of Troy.” That was how he marked time now. Before the fall of Troy, and after.

“Has it changed much?”

“I don’t know.”

It hadn’t changed, at least at first glance. Time played tricks, and he was a young man again, waiting to go to war. He expected to recognize faces in the village. He thought he did, almost. But he looked again, and saw that there were more houses, in different places. The fishing huts he had expected to see farther up the beach were gone. A stone wall separated the beach from the town. That hadn’t been there before. Many people worked and traveled on the path leading from the dock, all of them strangers. The island had prospered. And why not, when Odysseus had led them all these years?

“Are you coming?”