Warrior Rising (Goddess Summoning #6)(45)

Achilles snorted. “I heard old Priam was too lenient with his children.”

“My father is not too lenient!” Kat said automatically, thinking about her dad back in Oklahoma who raised her to have a backbone and to value herself, but who didn’t tolerate any crap from her, especially when she had been an obnoxious teenager.

“Then explain to me why he would allow Paris to abduct the king of Sparta’s wife.”

Shit! Helen’s husband was the king of Sparta? As in the Spartansthat spawned the kick ass three hundred? Kat dug into the wet sand with her toe and wished, for the zillionth time, she’d paid more attention to mythology in college. Finally she shrugged and said what she figured was probably close to the truth based on the vague information she did have (that he was a middle child and that he’d stolen someone’s wife). “Paris has always made stupid decisions the rest of us get stuck cleaning up.” Before he could ask any more difficult-to-answer questions Kat asked one of her own. “So did it bother you today not to join the battle?”

Instead of answering her, Achilles pointed to a half circle of coral that was just a few feet off the shoreline. “Bass like to rest in the shady spot there.” This time he didn’t strip but waded, thick-soled leather shoes and all, out to the coral. He climbed up on a benchlike ledge and crouched so that he could look down into the water.

Kat sighed and picked up a smooth, round seashell, trying to think of something she could ask him he might actually answer.

“It did not bother me not to join the battle today.”

She glanced up from the shell to him.

“It does bother me that my absence might have caused the death of even one Greek.”

“But it’s wrong to have you and your men keep fighting for someone who treats you like Agamemnon does.”

“Is it more wrong than to cause men’s deaths?”

Kat wanted to tell him that his absence would cause the war to end sooner, and that would save lives, but Kat knew she couldn’t. He was on the side of the Greeks. No matter how badly Agamemnon had used him and then pissed him off, he still couldn’t want to hear that his people would be defeated. So instead she said the only thing she could: “I don’t know.”

In the silence that followed, Achilles suddenly moved with blurring swiftness and hurled the spear into the sea beneath him. When he pulled it up it had neatly impaled a large, writhing bass. He pulled it off the spear and tossed it up on the beach entirely too close to Kat’s feet and she skittered several steps away from the flopping thing.

“You said you liked sea bass.”

“I do. Cleaned and cooked. By someone else.”

Achilles crouched back on the coral outcropping and returned to staring down into the clear water. “Then I’ll have to have one of the maidservants who like to whisper escape schemes to you take care of the preparation.”

Kat realized she shouldn’t be surprised that he knew what was being whispered about in his own camp. “And were you told my answer to those escape schemes?”

He looked up from the water to her. “What was your answer?”

“I said no.”

“Why? Because you fear what I would do to you if I caught you trying to escape?”

Kat made sure her voice sounded as haughty as a princess. “No. Because a goddess sent me here. I’ll leave when she tells me to.”

“So you wish to leave me already?” His voice was neutral, verging on uncaring, but Kat recognized the loneliness in his eyes—she’d seen it the night before.

“No. I don’t want to leave you.” As she said the words she knew they were true. She didn’t want to leave him—not yet. Not until she had helped him to control the berserker and change his fate.

He didn’t comment. He simply turned his attention back to the water. In no time there were two more huge fish added to the flopping pile on the beach. When he speared a fourth, he waded back to her and rammed the point of the spear through all four fish. Then, while Achilles carried them over his shoulder like a bizarre knapsack, they headed back to camp.

They walked awhile in silence, which, at least to Kat, didn’t feel uncomfortable. But as they got closer to camp, and thereby closer to Achilles’ tent and the inevitability of them spending another night together, her pile of unanswered questions became too heavy.

“I saw you fight off the berserker when you were drilling with your men today,” she said.

He glanced at her and then looked away. “There really wasn’t any danger of the berserker overtaking me. I was simply surprised, that and the pain from the sword scratch were enough to make the men leery of me. But neither the pain nor the surprise was great enough to cause the monster to possess me.”

“It didn’t seem like Patroklos was very leery of you.”

Achilles smiled one of his rare full smiles. “My foolish cousin believes I would never harm him and he often acts much too rashly.”

“But you wouldn’t hurt him,” Kat said.

“I wouldn’t. He is the closest thing I have to a brother or a son, and I would give my life to protect his. The berserker has no such loyalties.”

Kat thought about that and wondered just how true that statement was. Odysseus had said that the berserker had been possessing Achilles since he was about sixteen. The berserker was a being of anger and hatred and passion and killing. But did that mean he had no ability to develop a relationship with anyone in Achilles’ life?