The Ruin of Eros

Chapter Forty

Pearl-white. The color of no other scorpion in this land. It means something, but I can’t hold onto the thought. The pain is too much.

And the scorpion is gone now.

Into the vines.

Into the dark.

But Eros lets out a sound of fury, like nothing I’ve heard before.

Or not fury: pain. Because that’s what’s in his eyes now, as I slide back to the ground—the world is grey, I’m too dizzy to sit.

“Psyche…”

His voice hitches, my vision swims. But I can still see his look of despair. As though everything is over.

Before it had even begun.

“Psyche…”

All this effort. All this pain. For what? The visions I saw in his eyes…maybe it wasn’t anything fore-ordained. Maybe it wasn’t anything but imagination. Maybe the future I thought we would have belonged to some other universe, but not this one…

“I can’t move it,” I whisper. “I can’t feel my arm.”

The pain has given way to something worse now, a terrible numbness from my fingers to my shoulder, just a flare of pain on its perimeter.

She did this. I remember now: the white deer, the white scorpion. The knowledge sings clear in my head. And I know Eros knows it too. But none of that matters now. There’s a blue flush all down my arm, as if I’ve been held under in a barrel of ice.

His golden eyes lock on me as though to claim me all over again.

“The poison. We can’t let it get to your heart.” He takes my arm in his hands, looks for the scorpion bite, puts his mouth to it. He’s trying to suck the venom out, and I don’t have the heart to tell him it’s too late. As I watch it, the blue tint of my arm deepens. I can see the ice creeping past my shoulder now, toward my collarbone, a terrible, cold fire. And where the feeling creeps, the blue flush follows.

Is this death?

The look in his eyes tells me I must be. The scorpion was such a little thing, smaller than my hand. And yet it has poison enough, no doubt, for many mortals.

“I don’t think it’s any use,” I say at last, knowing he must know the same. I want him to be looking at my face when I go.

“Psyche…”

He bunches his fingers in my hair.

This is what it means to be mortal, I want to say to him. This is what it is to grieve .

Once more I think of those visions that swam in my head, when I first looked into his golden eyes. I thought they were a promise. I was so sure—so sure we’d have time.

He’s staring at me. I stare back, until eventually his eyes move to the blue flush that’s been crawling along my collarbone. And then he stares some more.

His hand grazes my neck. The grip of the ice must not be too bad yet, because I still feel his touch.

“Psyche, look.”

His hand shakes. I turn my head, blinking through the dizziness. My shoulder swims in and out of focus. I think I see what he’s staring at, though. The blue color isn’t advancing any more. A little past my collarbone, it seems to have stopped. But perhaps that’s just how this poison works. Perhaps its color fades once it has done its job. I suppose by now it’s working its way to my heart. I want to tell him not to hope too much. The eyes are tricksters, experts in false hope.

But the strangest thing…even as I stare at it, I see a pink flush blooming at the top of my collarbone, pushing back the blue. The pink is warm, healthy. I can feel it, a glow inside me.

What’s happening?

Eros’s eyes shift to my face, but he has no words either. Slowly, very slowly, the pink spreads: from my neck along the top of my chest; my collarbone; the ridge of my shoulder…

Can it be real?

“Are you doing this?” I say, and Eros shakes his head.

“I do not have that power.”

The blue has receded down to my arm now, just a little above my elbow. But now the advancing pink slows, seems to hesitate. It is as though two forces have reached a standstill, a battle neither side can win.

“You can do it,” Eros whispers.

“I’m not doing it,” I say, but then, if I’m not doing it, who is? I can feel the glow of it, the surge struggling through my body, life trying to push through. Maybe I am doing this.

I close my eyes. The pain is back, worse than before. The numbness was shielding me from it but now it’s like a thousand tiny stings, like picks of ice darting in and out of my flesh. Perhaps there’s no point fighting it. What can I hope to win back, when a goddess herself wants me dead? If she doesn’t kill me today, she’ll kill me tomorrow. I open my eyes again, and for a moment the blue patch quivers and spreads, regaining ground. I grit my teeth and close my eyes again.

I am doing this, I think to myself .

I will do this.

“Fight, Psyche.”

His voice sounds like a stranger’s.

When I open my eyes again, the blue glow has faded further. And as I watch, it fades further still. It shrinks—slowly, painfully—until it’s the size of a handprint, then just a thumbprint, a vivid blue circle, glowing and throbbing. At the center of the circle I see the mark of the scorpion, a small dark wound in the flesh. Around it, the blue glows brightly, as though all the poison has been concentrated in that one spot. I close my eyes; I’m bathed in sweat.

“Fight it,” Eros murmurs.

I screw my eyes tight and push with whatever energy is left in me. But I can’t force the poison out of me. I open my eyes.

“I can’t get it out,” I pant.

He grabs my hand, and puts his mouth to the wound again. And this time I feel it, the warmth of his mouth on me, and a dark thing, dense as lead, black as tar, whispering with evil as it leaves my body.

He spits onto the ground and wipes his mouth.

And when I look at my arm again…

There’s a tiny puncture wound, barely visible against the skin, and my forearm is flushed a little pink. But that’s the only sign of what just happened. Eros crouches over me. He cradles my arm, turns it this way and that, staring, wondering. Then he lays it back gently over my stomach. When I look into his eyes, they’re searching mine for answers. Answers I don’t have.

We sit and stare at each other. I feel the cold sweat drying on my bare skin.

“Psyche,” he says. “What you just did—what your body did. That is no mortal gift.”

I shake my head.

“I felt it,” I tell him. “It was like a hand trying to close around my heart. And I felt something in my own body fight back.” I don’t tell him that at its worst, I thought I heard voices. That it seemed to me the poison itself was speaking, in a voice that said kill her, kill the mortal, kill.

“Psyche, did you hear me?” He’s staring at me. “What you did,” he says. “That is not something an ordinary mortal can do.”

I wipe my face. I feel like he’s accusing me of something.

“Well, maybe I’m not an ordinary mortal.”

“You’re far from ordinary. And now I think…” He’s staring at me as though he’s trying to make me understand. “Psyche, I think perhaps you are not fully mortal, either. I think you’re part mortal. Part mortal, and part something else.”

I close my eyes again. This is all too much. All these words. All this confusion. What just happened doesn’t make sense, but his words don’t make sense either. I suppose it’s the shock, but tears are forming under my eyelids, and now they’re sliding down my face. We lie in silence a little while. Slowly I let his words sink in, and the more I do, the more I have to admit it. What just happened was impossible.

I open my eyes and stare into his amber gaze.

“How can I be anything but mortal? I have no powers. No special gifts.” I shake my head. “My parents were mortals.”

He narrows his eyes, and sits back from me.

“Your leg—when Ajax trod on it, it healed overnight when it should have been broken. Your hair grew back in one night, when it should have stayed shorn. You did not go mad when you saw my face, as a mortal is supposed to. It is not about powers, Psyche, but your life force. It is stronger than an ordinary mortal’s. Your body—it resists injury. It is not easily broken.”

I stare at him.

I have been used to explaining things away. But the truth is, there have been occurrences before this one, just as strange, if not so miraculous. There are the ones he mentions: my hair, my quick-healing leg. The winter night on Mount Olympus: the harpies swore I would die of the cold, that they’d pluck my body from the icy ground, yet I lived through it. But there were other things too.

Every childhood scrape and scratch that disappeared overnight; every ailment the other children had, or that Father and Dimitra contracted but I escaped.

They said I was healthy. They said I was lucky. They said I had my mother’s strong constitution.

But others in Sikyon said my mother was a witch.

That my mother brewed potions and cast spells.

That she was something for mortals to fear.

What if they were right?

She owned a blade of adamantine.

I screw my eyes tight, trying to make sense of it all.

“My mother died giving birth to me,” I say. “My father saw it. The midwife saw it. She was mortal.”

My father put the coins upon her eyes himself; he adorned her with her funeral wreath and led her procession to the tomb.

Didn’t he?

Could he have lied?

I shake my head. Old Lydia was the woman who tended to my mother in her birthing-bed; Lydia was there the day my mother died. She was the one who chased Dimitra from the doorway; who comforted my sister at the sight of my mother’s corpse. My mother died .

I cannot figure it out.

Eros’s words go round in my mind. Something more than mortal.

“I don’t understand. It doesn’t make sense.” I look at him. “I’m alive, Eros. Isn’t that enough?”

He moves toward me, and takes my head in his hands.

“It is everything,” he says.

But how long can such a reprieve last? I stare into his eyes, still wide and dazed, as though part of him even now still sees me dying.

“How did she find us?” I say. It’s cold, now, in the treehouse. The white moonflowers have closed up, as though they have already seen too much. The golden glow of the place has dimmed. I pull at the Shroud around my neck. “I thought this was supposed to hide me.”

Eros shakes his head.

“My mother has many spies in this realm to do her bidding, animal and human. Think, Psyche. Who did you see at the market today? Might there have been someone there who knew you?”

I shake my head, then stop.

No one at the market recognized me , but the stallholder recognized Ajax. I don’t think he knew the full truth, but he knew enough, I suspect now, to see that I rode a horse of the gods.

And asked for a fugitive’s cape.

I close my eyes again. Even if we are careful, terribly careful…can we really hope to make it to Atlantis? And if we do, what then?

“She will try it again,” I say.

I feel Eros slide close to me. There is a long silence.

“I blame myself for endangering you, Psyche. Name me a place and I will take you there. I will leave you safe, and ride on alone. I will draw my mother’s wrath onto myself.”

I open my eyes again.

“You will not . You will not leave me behind, not now.”

He smiles at that, just a little. And then he lets me rest. And then, when the night is thickest, he carries me to where Ajax stands waiting, and settles me on his back.