The Ruin of Eros

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Cold rushes through my body—no longer frozen but a wave, a torrent, moving from the ground up through my body like fetid river water. I choke, spewing it out at my feet. And for a moment my mind sings with emptiness, as though I have just rid myself of the deepest poison.

The god Deimos is sprawled on his knees, one of his white wings lying severed at his feet. His back is bloody, one wing still intact, the other just a stump, a mound of raw flesh. He screams again, staring at the sight before him. He’s scrabbling to pull himself forward through the scattered feathers, and the blood.

“What have you done! Brother!” He turns, howling, to Eros’s chair. “She has brought adamantine here! She has brought death upon us!”

The look in Eros’s eyes is like a knife through my heart. He did not think I was capable of such a thing. Even though his brother is a monster, he was still his brother—and a god. Now he crawls, with a wound of pink raw flesh below his shoulder blade.

“I am ruined,” Deimos cries, in a voice that begins as a snarl and ends as a sob.

My stomach swirls with more bile. I needed to survive. I aimed for the wing only, not the heart or face or hand. But looking at the young god now, his blood mixing with the earth…

“Brother!” Deimos calls again, and I see the pain in Eros’s face.

“ No mortal may do this and live!” Deimos’s hand is bloody; he keeps feeling for the wound at his back, trying to touch it. “You will avenge your family. She will die at your hands for what she has done!”

Eros stares at me, then at Deimos. I can’t read what he’s thinking. For once, his emotions are totally opaque to me.

“She will not be killed.” His voice is steady, resonating through the cave. “Not by my hand, nor by yours, nor anyone’s. I am her husband, and sworn to protect her.”

Deimos stares at him, livid.

“Swear to avenge me and kill the girl, or you will die!”

“You have heard me, Deimos,” Eros answers, and now I hear the tremor in his voice—whether from sorrow or from anger, I can’t tell.

“Do not insult me by asking again.”

Deimos’s words shake too—with disbelief and hatred.

“You choose her over me? This murderous, foul thing? She will kill you in your sleep!”

The words sicken me. I would never hurt Eros, never…and yet this pool of blood on the floor, this maimed creature crawling on the earth: I did that.

“I do not choose her over you .” Eros’s voice rises, though he is still imprisoned in his chair. He looks at me now.

“I choose her, I will always choose her”—his gaze turns back to his brother—“but I do not choose her over you . That was your choice, not mine. Remember that she has but one life, Deimos, and you would happily have stolen it from her.” His voice thickens. “She spared you, Deimos. Her aim is true. If she had wanted that knife through your heart she could have done it. She did not.”

Deimos howls again and arches his back.

“You are a fool, brother. You have always been a fool!” he shouts. “You are bewitched, a traitor in thrall to a mortal whore!”

“Watch your tongue,” Eros spits. “Call me what you will, but you’ll insult my wife no further.”

Deimos calls out from the ground.

“Or what? You will kill me, too? I suppose she’s promised you a share of that adamantine! You’re plotting against us now.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Eros scoffs.

“Me? Me , the fool?”

Deimos lunges, and snatches something from the ground: the knife. As he holds it aloft, it still drips with blood. I cry out as he swivels around, bracing himself to drive it into Eros’s leg. But Eros sees it too; he levers back his leg and kicks, landing a foot against his brother’s jaw. I see Deimos’s head snap back as the knife skitters across the floor to land at the foot of Eros’s chair. Eros picks it up and I feel Deimos’s fear—but all he does is cut the two remaining shackles. He stands, and Deimos stares; the stump on his back quivers.

“You dare .”

Eros walks slowly across the room to where I’m standing.

“Psyche.”

I find it hard to look at him. But the touch of his hand— that , I feel. I feel it like a promise, like the first green shoots of life.

“Psyche. Take my hand. We must go. Now.”

I want to move, and yet the command seems not to make it to my feet. I take a step forward, but my whole body shakes. And then I feel him taking me in his arms—just as he did that first night. Only I can feel now how weakened he is, how changed. I did that. I caused this change in him. This weakness.

He lifts me; my neck rests against his shoulder. His great wings unfold.

I glance back, although I know I should not. The blood on the ground is almost black now, mixed with mud, but white feathers mark the darkness. Deimos hisses at the sight of me.

“Run while you can, worm.” His eyes burn with a fire I know will haunt my dreams.

*

Once clear of the cavern, Eros draws in his wings and lowers us to the floor of the tunnel.

“I cannot fly far,” he admits.

“I can walk,” I say, but he does not put me down. He walks on with me cradled against him. I struggle with the words I want to say.

“I’m sorry. I did not wish to hurt him.” There’s silence for a moment.

“If you had not stopped him, he would have killed you. And then I would have killed him.”

His face is dark, and so are the words: they should not warm me, I think, and yet they do. When I look at his face it’s as though my lungs have been tied shut, and I have to force myself to inhale. I can see he’s deliberately avoiding my glance, his eyes on the tunnel mouth ahead, the circle of sunlight. Why won’t he look at me?

“What your brother said, before…” I hesitate. “You believe me, about the dagger? You know I would never mean you harm?”

“I believe you.”

My head swims; letting my eyes close, I lean back into him. The smell of the woods at night. Of incense swinging in the temple.

What will happen to us? I want to ask, but I don’t know if I want to hear the answer.

At the entrance to the tunnel he puts me down—and there, like a vision against the sky, is a black stallion. As though he had been waiting here for a thousand years and could wait a thousand more. At the sound of his master’s feet, he whinnies.

“Ajax,” I murmur, and his tail swishes, ever so gently. He waits quietly until we reach his side, then kneels—kneels! I have never seen such a proud creature do such a thing—to let us mount. Eros sits me onto the broad back first. Then l feel his warm weight behind me and he gathers the reins. Ajax rises, and without Eros seeming to command him, breaks into a gallop. As he hurtles down the mountain it seems to me we move faster—much faster—than before. There is magic in his stride now. I suppose it is because he rides with a god on his back.

The mountain, too, is changed. It feels silent, watchful—as though its creatures have retreated to eye us from their lairs.

“News will travel fast,” Eros murmurs in my ear, one warm arm around me, clasping the reins. The small of my back presses against his chest. “We must put as much distance between ourselves and the mountain as we can by nightfall.”

I look at the silent wilderness around us. The enormity of what has happened is starting to sink in. I know—I have always known—what happens to mortals who get involved with the gods.

“They will kill us,” I say quietly. “They will find us, and they will kill us.”

“They will not harm you, Psyche.” His warm voice buzzes at my ear, his chest against my back. “I will not let it happen.”

“And who will protect you?” I whisper. “Your powers are weakened. If they come after us…”

“They will not find us,” he says, and there is a finality in his voice.

We hurtle out of the winter storms, past the falling snow, past the ice and white-coated forests.

“We will make for the crossroads of Elassona,” Eros says. I know the name of Elassona. It is a great meeting-place: the roads there go in all directions, bringing travelers north to Illyria and Macedonia, south to Corinth and Sparta, and even across the seas to east and west, as far as Persia or Italos.

“And from there,” he says, “we will travel south: to the Gulf of Patras, where the crossing is shortest; then from Achaea to Elis, and find passage west, to the isle of Atlantis.”

Atlantis?

“Why Atlantis?” I say; my head is spinning again.

“It is where my father fights.”

Ares . The god of war.

The war at Atlantis has been on and off for many years—its resources are too plentiful for mankind to leave it alone. But recently, I hear the battles have renewed with new fury.

Of course the god of war camps there .

Atlantis.

My mother’s home.

We hurtle through the dank autumn leaves, the brown mulch, and then the amber, still-crisp ones.

“You think your father will help us?” I say, and when he doesn’t answer, I wonder if my question got lost in the wind. I’m about to repeat it when he speaks.

“I cannot say.” His voice is flat. If he feels hope, he refuses to let it show. “But he is fearless as to the opinions of his fellow gods. He may side with us for principle, or if not that, for sport.”

I think of the oracle’s words to me: a chance , she said. And now I think a chance may be enough.

Eros tells me of his brothers, how, once Aphrodite declared that Eros had betrayed her, the twins were quick to seek their mother’s favor. How they would do anything she asked of them.

“She has stolen them from my father’s side. I think he will not be pleased with that, either.”

I shiver. It is not much to depend on—the whims of angry gods.

“I did not kill the ketos ,” I blurt out. “Not quite.” And I tell him about the last arrow. I need to tell him the story. I don’t know why, until I stop speaking and find I’m shaking again, and then I realize: I want him to comfort me somehow. To tell me that the power in those arrows wasn’t as evil as it seemed. It seems to me that it must be an evil power—to make a creature fall in love against its inclination, against nature, against all reason; even to its own destruction. The power to manipulate and control, distort and exploit.

But if he knows I’m looking for comfort, he won’t give it.

“I cannot change my powers, Psyche. They are the ones I was born with. I told you, didn’t I? One man’s god may be another’s demon. I am what I am.”

“But you’re no demon,” I say, though I think I hear a note of pleading in my voice. Because I want it to be true. I want him to be capable of only good things. But deep down, don’t I know better?

He doesn’t say anything to that, maybe because of what happens next—a sight so arresting, so beautiful, I catch his arm. Is it an omen? A white doe stands on the path before us, watching us, motionless, unafraid. And then she turns and bounds into the forest, back uphill.

“Beautiful,” I breathe. Something in the sight was so mesmerizing, so perfectly bewitching.

But behind me, Eros is breathing faster.

“Forward, Ajax!” he says in a low, hard voice. “As fast as you can.”

Ajax flicks his dark mane, the touch of it like silk against my forearms. Now we’re going so fast, the world is a blur.

“What is it?” I say, my voice barely audible now over the sound of hooves. My teeth meet with a jolt at every pace.

“That was no ordinary deer,” Eros says, and I hear his jaw shut, too.

“That, Psyche, was my mother.”