The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo #3)(27)

‘No, sweetheart, I would never hurt the tree. Mesquite offered to shape herself into a desk for me.’

This, too, did not seem unusual to five-year-old Meg – calling a tree she, talking to it the way you would speak to a person.

Tonight, though, Meg didn’t feel so comfortable in the living room. She didn’t like the way Daddy’s voice was shaking. She reached his desk and found, instead of the usual seed packets and drawings and flowers, a stack of mail – typed letters, thick stapled documents, envelopes – all in dandelion yellow.

Meg couldn’t read, but she didn’t like those letters. They looked important and bossy and angry. The colour hurt her eyes. It wasn’t as nice as real dandelions.

‘You don’t understand,’ Daddy said into the phone. ‘This is more than my life’s work. It’s centuries. Thousands of years’ work … I don’t care if that sounds crazy. You can’t just –’

He turned and froze, seeing Meg at his desk. A spasm crossed his face – his expression shifting from anger to fear to concern, then settling into a forced cheerfulness. He slipped his phone into his pocket.

‘Hey, sweetheart,’ he said, his voice stretched thin. ‘Couldn’t sleep, huh? Yeah, me neither.’

He walked to the desk, swept the dandelion-yellow papers into a tree hollow and offered Meg his hand. ‘Want to check the greenhouses?’

The scene changed again.

A jumbled, fragmentary memory: Meg was wearing her favourite outfit, a green dress and yellow leggings. She liked it because Daddy said it made her look like one of their greenhouse friends – a beautiful, growing thing. She stumbled down the driveway in the dark, following Daddy, her backpack stuffed with her favourite blanket because Daddy said they had to hurry. They could only take what they could carry.

They were halfway to the car when Meg stopped, noticing that the lights were on in the greenhouses.

‘Meg,’ her father said, his voice as broken as the gravel under their feet. ‘Come on, sweetheart.’

‘But Er-klees,’ she said. ‘And the others.’

‘We can’t bring them,’ Daddy said, swallowing back a sob.

Meg had never heard her father cry before. It made her feel like the earth was dropping out from underneath her.

‘The magic seeds?’ she asked. ‘We can plant them – where we’re going?’

The idea of going somewhere else seemed impossible, scary. She’d never known any home but Aeithales.

‘We can’t, Meg.’ Daddy sounded like he could barely talk. ‘They have to grow here. And now …’

He looked back at the house, floating on its massive stone supports, its windows ablaze with gold light. But something was wrong. Dark shapes moved across the hillside – men, or something like men, dressed in black, encircling the property. And more dark shapes swirling overhead, wings blotting out the stars.

Daddy grabbed her hand. ‘No time, sweetheart. We have to leave. Now.’

Meg’s last memory of Aeithales: she sat in the back of her father’s station wagon, her face and hands pressed against the rear window, trying to keep the lights of the house in view for as long as possible. They’d driven only halfway down the hill when their home erupted in a blossom of fire.

I gasped, my senses suddenly yanked back to the present. Meg removed her hand from my wrist.

I stared at her in amazement, my sense of reality wobbling so much I was afraid I might fall into the strawberry pit. ‘Meg, how did you …?’

She picked at a callus on her palm. ‘Dunno. Just needed to.’

Such a very Meg answer. Still, the memories had been so painful and vivid they made my chest hurt, as if I’d been hit with a defibrillator.

How had Meg shared her past with me? I knew satyrs could create an empathy link with their closest friends. Grover Underwood had one with Percy Jackson, which he said explained why he sometimes got an inexplicable craving for blueberry pancakes. Did Meg have a similar talent, perhaps because we were linked as master and servant?

I didn’t know.

I did know that Meg was hurting, much more than she expressed. The tragedies of her short life had started before her father’s death. They had started here. These ruins were all that remained of a life that could have been.

I wanted to hug her. And, believe me, that was not a feeling I had often. It was liable to result in an elbow to my ribcage or a sword hilt to my nose.

‘Did you …?’ I faltered. ‘Did you have these memories all along? Do you know what your father was trying to do here?’

A listless shrug. She grabbed a handful of dust and trickled it into the pit as if sowing seeds.

‘Phillip,’ Meg said, as if the name had just occurred to her. ‘My dad’s name was Phillip McCaffrey.’

The name made me think of the Macedonian king, father of Alexander. A good fighter, but no fun at all. Never any interest in music or poetry or even archery. With Philip it was all phalanxes, all the time. Boring.

‘Phillip McCaffrey was a very good father,’ I said, trying to keep the bitterness out of my voice. I myself did not have much experience with good fathers.

‘He smelled like mulch,’ Meg remembered. ‘In a good way.’

I didn’t know the difference between a good mulch smell and a bad mulch smell, but I nodded respectfully.