Circe(16)

“What do you mean?”

He was frowning at me, as if I were a face he could not quite remember. I tried to think of what my sister would do. I stepped to him, trailed my fingers on his arm.

“I mean, I know one who will love you better.”

“Who?” he said. But I could see him start to understand. His hands lifted, as though to ward me off. He, who was a towering god. “You have been a sister to me,” he said.

“I would be more,” I said. “I would be all.” I pressed my lips to his.

He pushed me from him. His face was caught, half in anger, half in a sort of fear. He looked almost like his old self.

“I have loved you since that first day I saw you sailing,” I said. “Scylla laughs at your fins and green beard, but I cherished you when there were fish guts on your hands and you wept from your father’s cruelty. I helped you when—”

“No!” He slashed his hand through the air. “I will not think on those days. Every hour some new bruise upon me, some new ache, always weary, always burdened and weak. I sit at councils with your father now. I do not have to beg for every scrap. Nymphs clamor for me, and I may choose the best among them, which is Scylla.”

The words struck like stones, but I would not give him up so easily.

“I can be best for you,” I said. “I can please you, I swear it. You will find none more loyal than me. I will do anything.”

I do think he loved me a little. For before I could say the thousand humiliating things in my heart, all the proofs of passion I had hoarded, the crawling devotions I would do, I felt his power come around me. And with that same flick he had used upon the cushions, he sent me back to my rooms.

I lay on the dirt, weeping. Those flowers had made him his true being, which was blue, and finned, and not mine. I thought I would die of such pain, which was not like the sinking numbness Ae?tes had left behind, but sharp and fierce as a blade through my chest. But of course I could not die. I would live on, through each scalding moment to the next. This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh.

Beautiful Scylla, dainty-doe Scylla, Scylla with her viper heart. Why had she done such a thing? It was not love, I had seen the sneer in her eyes when she spoke of his flippers. Perhaps it was because she loved my sister and brother, who scorned me. Perhaps it was because her father was a nothing river, and her mother a shark-faced sea-nymph, and she liked the thought of taking something from the daughter of the sun.

It did not matter. All I knew was that I hated her. For I was like any dull ass who has ever loved someone who loved another. I thought: if only she were gone, it would change everything.

I left my father’s halls. It was the time between the sun’s setting and my pale aunt’s rise. There was no one to see me. I gathered those flowers of true being and brought them to the cove where it was said Scylla bathed each day. I broke their stems and emptied their white sap drop by drop into the waters. She would not be able to hide her adder malice anymore. All her ugliness would be revealed. Her eyebrows would thicken, her hair would turn dull, and her nose would grow long and snouted. The halls would echo with her furious screams and the great gods would come to whip me, but I would welcome them, for every lash upon my skin would be only further proof to Glaucos of my love.





Chapter Six



NO FURIES CAME FOR me that night. None came the next morning either, or all that afternoon. By dusk I went to find my mother at her mirror.

“Where is Father?”

“Gone straight to Oceanos. The feast is there.” She wrinkled her nose, her pink tongue stuck between her teeth. “Your feet are filthy. Can you not at least wash them?”

I did not wash them. I did not want to wait another moment. What if Scylla was at the banquet, lounging in Glaucos’ lap? What if they were married already? What if the sap had not worked?

It is strange now, to remember how I worried that.

The halls were even more crowded than usual, stinking of the same rose oil every nymph insisted was her special charm. I could not see my father, but my aunt Selene was there. She stood at the center of a clot of upturned faces, a mother and her baby birds, waiting to be crammed.

“You must understand, I only went to look because the water was so roiled up. I thought perhaps it was some sort of…meeting. You know how Scylla is.”

I felt the breath stop in my chest. My cousins were snickering and cutting their eyes at each other. Whatever comes, I thought, do not show a thing.

“But she was flailing very strangely, like some sort of drowning cat. Then—I cannot say it.”

She pressed her silvery hand to her mouth. It was a lovely gesture. Everything about my aunt was lovely. Her husband was a beautiful shepherd enchanted with ageless sleep, dreaming of her for eternity.

“A leg,” she said. “A hideous leg. Like a squid’s, boneless and covered in slime. It burst from her belly, and another burst beside it, and more and more, until there were twelve all dangling from her.”

My fingertips stung faintly where the sap had leaked.

“That was only the beginning,” Selene said. “She was bucking, her shoulders writhing. Her skin turned gray and her neck began to stretch. From it tore five new heads, each filled with gaping teeth.”

My cousins gasped, but the sound was distant, like far-off waves. It felt impossible to picture the horror Selene described. To make myself believe: I did that.