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Her limbs lift into the grey waves like the steady beats of wings. She has always been the strongest swimmer of the three of us. She used to swear she’d gone to Tenedos once, two hours by boat. I feel wild triumph as she pulls farther and farther from shore. The only man whose spear could have reached her is dead. She is free.
I am harvesting basket-reeds when she washes onto my island, spear-struck and silent. Her hair is strung through with coral and seaweed. Her limbs carve into the sand. A moment later, as from the belly of a harpooned whale, I see the blood follow.
I sigh. They have sent me another hero.
The woman looks up as I approach, dark eyes slitted with pain and triumph. She is half-drowned, beautiful. She heaves her first breath since breaching my shore and holds it in her chest, a golden prize. If I were to kill her now, I sense, she would have no regrets; she has seized her freedom.
Her lips are forming soundless words: Patroclus. Patroclus. I do not know the shape of them yet, though I will—for now, I think they are a prayer. It is a good guess.
I kneel beside her and touch her sun-cracked face. It would be easier to kill her now, half-gone in the breaking surf, before she is more than this. Like a culm coming loose from the weaving.
But I know from the first touch that I am not going to kill her. I am going to love her. And it will be worse.
—
The woman tried her best to stay conscious while I carried her, lost and distrusting. I knew only fragments of her language, my tongue heavy from disuse. Even if I could explain it to her she would not believe it. Her face, like the others, spoke of a life of war and blood, no gentleness to be found.
Calypso, I told her instead. My name is Calypso. Behind the loping syllables, in the careful curve of my arms and the steady length of my stride, I meant: You are safe.
We came to the cave, and I laid her down on the pallet. Her eyelids were fluttering like the quick beat of insect wings. Beneath them, her gaze darted to the crystals jutting from the walls, the roots and squashes hung from the ceiling, the pots and wooden cups. Ogygia’s spirits drifted in behind us and brought with them the scent of soft fruit: persimmons and oranges, dates and pears. The very air ripened—a joyous thing even after eternity.
Lying there, the woman shuddered as if the joy pained her. She reached out and grasped my wrist, her skin burning.
“Dead?” she rasped. Her voice was full of cautious wonder, like sprigs of mint after winter.
“No,” I said, and she groaned thinly. “But you are free. Nothing will harm you here.”
At that word—free—all the tension drained from her. Her grip on my wrist loosened to just a curl of her fingers, as soft as thread. She lifted her fevered gaze to mine and whispered many words I did not know, but which fell from her lips in a familiar stream: like an old song, like prayer, like relief.
—
She recovered slowly, waking at odd intervals, in the weak yellow of dawn or the diffused softness of twilight. I kept vigil. I fed her water and broth, ran cloth across her furrowed brow, and tended her wound.
I felt raw as a wound myself, when I first uncovered the ragged flesh. Tears rose swift and powerful within me, more immediate than any sorrow I had known in some time. I thought I would have cried even if I had not felt the tug of the curse inside me; such an act of cruelty had been done to her.
The spear had struck just under the ribcage. A precise hit, like puncturing the gut of a fish. He had designed it not to kill her cleanly but to weigh her down, his heavy bronze flashing, letting her spiral writhing into the depths. Then, when divers lifted her body from the mud, it would be as an animal spilled upon the altar. It was a blow designed to prove.
She woke again as my tears slid over the wound, whimpering. Her eyes held confusion, but she could not muster the strength to speak, and I could not muster an explanation. Had I not seen many wounded heroes? Had I not dressed a thousand marks of cruelty, without weeping over each one? I could say she was different, but that would be a lie. Each hero drifting onto my shore had felt different, lovely, precious.
Maybe I was weeping because I could sense it again, that love I could not choose wrapping like a chain around my throat. Maybe I was weeping because I could see the king raising his lightning bolt, his judgment spearing the clouds as cruelly as the sea, another blow designed to prove.
“Why—” said the woman. She had found the strength after all. “Why do you cry?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Lied?
She looked at me with keenness, a spark of her through the fever. In rough-hewn Greek: “You said we were free.”
I had not. I said she was free. And she would be, when the raft of the messenger came, when the sea bore her away on limbs of cypress, same going out as in. And I would watch.
Anger and gratitude rushed through me as she tried to add me to her freedom, but I did not show it. My tears had dried to salt on my cheeks. “You can return when you are well,” I said. “I will not keep you here, but this wound will take time to heal.”
She tilted her head, glossy hair shifting along her shoulder. She seemed to consider my honesty. “Who are you?” she said after a moment.
“My name is Calypso.”
Recognition crossed her face, like something moving under dark water; a part of her must have heard me as I carried her ashore. “A god?”
I snorted indelicately. I couldn’t help it. “No.”
“Good,” she said, with a faint smile. “A soldier?”
“Certainly not.”
“A healer, then.” She sounded sure. A fondness crept into her voice, the fig-ripe sweetness of a memory. I wondered who she had left behind. “That is good,” she said.
She sighed, and all at once the sweetness was swept away, stripped bare as a thin branch. She turned her face from me. “When will I be well?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” The truth this time, fully. “Months, perhaps. But time moves differently on Ogygia.”
She sighed again. Her chest caved, as though bending in to accept another weight. It struck my own chest, shamed me.
“I will leave you,” I said, rising. Her gaze flickered back to me, startled, fast as light. I had no illusions: I had seen her torn dress floating in the brine, her sunbaked skin, her hands rough and blistered like bark. A slave. How many times had she been taken to a stranger’s bed? How many times had someone coveted her, without truly knowing her, without her will?
The resignation had gone from her face, replaced with curiosity. That shamed me, too. I knew my desire would come, monstrous, clawing at me, filling my chest like the hollow of a cup. But I would take no more from her.
I left.
—
Even on Ogygia, the seasons turned. The wind grew sharper and heralded frost. The tips of the waves seemed to grow brighter, as if they too would turn to ice.
I fished until everything had gone to warmer currents, hung the meat up to dry. I gathered fruits to preserve in clay jars till fresh things ripened again. The woman would need a heavier coat, and soon, and so I fitted old furs that one of my heroes had left behind. Tried not to think about my stitches resting across the dark line of her neck in the firelight.
I bathed till I was numb, in waters that bit my skin. I sang mindless songs. I paced the length of the island I knew as well as my own body. So many things I turned to, to keep me out of the cave.
She did not need me as much, as time went on. She gained strength, little by little. At nights I crept back in and found her watching me, her gaze like a bird’s: curious, intelligent, assessing.
Every time, I flushed, feeling the heat of it like oil under my skin. I was clinging to the fact that I did not love her yet—not entirely. But I knew that as soon as I opened my mouth, spoke to her, met those quiet, observing eyes: that fight would be over.
One night, late enough that even the restless water seemed still, I entered the cave. My feet were sandy from walking, my body tired from everything else. Usually the woman had gone to sleep by now, and I did not have to guard my expressions so much. I would collapse into my bedroll, press my face into the unmoving crystal, and try not to cry. I would sleep until it was time to exhaust myself again.
This time, the woman had waited for me. She lay awake in her own bedroll. Even across the cave, I felt her voice tremble up my spine like wind through a hollow reed.
“My name is Briseis,” she said. “I am sorry.”
“For what?” I whispered.
“For whatever I have done to offend you.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. There was that chain around my throat, choking me. “You have not offended me. I—”
Silence, over us. In the distance, I heard the wind sliding across the water; it seemed, unbidden, to form the shape of her name: Briseis, Briseis.
Briseis did not move to break the silence, but I was so tired of it. I turned toward her, my face hooded with shame.
I watched her curious expression turn gentle; a tiny swell of breath ebbed from her throat. It surprised me. I thought, if I revealed myself, she would know, and fear would chill her. But seeing me seemed to bring only comfort.
“You do not have to avoid me,” Briseis said. “I do not mind, whatever it is. I—”
It was her turn for words to fail, but this I knew. There was a home she missed. There was a person she had lost. She was lonely.
I could not deny her.
—
We had thawed as winter froze in earnest, and so we spent the days huddled together in the warmth of the cave. It smelled, a little, for how close we were. The smoke of our fires mixed together with the salt of preserved fish, the tang of dried persimmons, Briseis, me. It made me dizzy with warmth and fear.
Briseis taught me more of her language. She had a clever, mischievous mind behind her serious expression, her tongue quick to laugh as to instruct. “You speak like him,” she said. “Patroclus.”
The name softened in her mouth, as though she were touching the petals of a flower. “Who is that?” I asked. I was eager to know this part of her; I was weary to know it, too. Again, this: the beloveds of my beloveds.
But Briseis only lowered her gaze for a moment, then said a word in Anatolian. Brother, I thought. Or dearest companion. The word strained a little, for all its softness; there was a deep, familiar anger, too. It struck a flicker of memory within me, a half-shaped understanding.
“He is dead,” Briseis continued in Greek. “He was killed in the war.”
“You loved him,” I said.
Her eyes yielded like soil, remembering. The firelight glinted off the fall of her shoulder. I imagined a man standing at that shoulder, brown-skinned like her, with curls that did not fit into his helmet and a tongue that tripped as earnestly on syllables as children on loose stones.
“Yes,” said Briseis, finally. “But his heart was with Achilles. That is what killed him.”
—
The winter ice made the island impassable, though the spirits protected us from the worst of it. Sometimes I woke to find Briseis at the mouth of the cave, watching the sunrise flare brightly on the snow. She could move a little now: slowly, the scar tissue pulling in the curve of her belly. Enough for restlessness.
Seeing her was like seeing a memory. There was Odysseus against the ice, plotting his course to Ithaca. There was Antiope, considering her Amazons. There was Keos and Lamachos and Aleus and Phaia and all of them whom I had loved, silhouettes at the threshold of my cage.
She turned to me one morning, a silent invitation. My feet moved across the stone.
We did not speak much in the ice-thickened hush of these mornings, especially not of Anatolia or Patroclus. It seemed wrong to scar new days with the complications of the past. Instead Briseis and I looked up into the sky as wide as a bowl and marveled. Sometimes she would lean close to me and point—the speck of a wheeling bird in the sky—and name it. Teal. Jackdaw. Harrier. Starling.
I wondered for a time if Patroclus had taught her this, or Achilles, whose name still ground like rocks in her mouth. But this seemed like older knowledge. And when I could recognize the wing patterns as she could, she looked faintly surprised, as though she had forgotten I would listen; perhaps she had not even shared this with him. Was there time for birds in war?
It saddened me as much as it thrilled me. I imagined Briseis, smaller there, huddled against laughing, war-stained Patroclus in his tent. And here was Briseis, alone, unfurling.
When the ice split, and the first murmurings of spring came stubbornly through the ground, I did my best to return her bits of knowledge. I knew the growing things of my island, as vast and unbound as the sky. Cyclamen. Aconite. Jasmine. Heath.
Duck, she challenged me once, eyes twinkling.
I rolled my own. Pointed at the speckled green beneath the water. Duckweed.
We spilled with laughter, breaking the morning with its brightness, and it was good.
—
This is what Briseis tells me: Patroclus was a kind, gentle man, the best of the Myrmidons. He could not fight, but he could heal; he was the best at finding mushrooms hidden in the cracks of logs, half-crushed flowers that could still be salvaged. He laughed when he found them before her, clear and bright like a current.
His beloved, Achilles, was a soldier—half-god, a roaring tempest. He had a face like gold. His spear brought down the walls of her village, and he birthed the man whose spear found her back. He enslaved her, saved her, then traded her away for honor. He loved Patroclus.
“Badly, sometimes,” frowns Briseis. We are playing a game with dried beans as pieces, a game from her childhood, and she turns her frown to the board. “But completely.”
“And Patroclus?” I ask. I am still trying to understand her feelings for him. I think she is, too. “How did he love Achilles?”
Briseis pauses. I watch her roll the bean between the pads of her fingers, quick then slow, as if guiding too the bead of my pulse. When she reaches across to make a move, it is deliberate. The way her arms cut through the water then. The way her arm brushes mine now. She smells of hyacinths and berries, crushed smoke, my island.
“Patroclus...” she mutters, “like a boy in a riptide. Like he had no choice. It was almost a curse, how much he loved him.”
Her hand flashes across the board, taking my pieces. I feel my heart pound in my ears like an echo of myself.
Please, I think, please don’t look up.
It is another moment before she does. The anger is gone from her face, because she is not angry with me. Her eyes are quick and dancing; her smile slants and gleams like the rim of a fine cask, filling the cup of my chest with desire. It is as rich as wine. It is as much as the wine-dark sea.
“There!” Briseis smiles. “I win.”
“Yes,” I say helplessly. And I have lost.
—
Spring arrived in force, and all at once the world came unstuck. Leaves leapt from coltish branches; icewater puddled and ran everywhere, like juice burst from the peel. Wildflowers rioted with the junipers, cypress, honeysuckle. Squirrels and rabbits peered bright-eyed from their warrens.
I had given up resisting it now; I loved Briseis. But I was glad to meet my island again, for I loved Ogygia too.
Briseis stumbled from the cave, strong and stubborn. At first she watched me, spinning in the waves, writing poems in the sand. When I felt her eyes on me (always), I turned to smile at her, unabashed. That was the best part of yielding to my curse: I had stopped fighting the shame. It simply existed now, in the familiar mix of love and resignation.
One day, Briseis stood and hobbled down the dunes, her brown feet sliding in the sand. I had been picking blackberries from the thicket; they were so ripe they bruised between my fingers.
I grinned as she came down, offered her a handful. The juice stained her lips and ran down her chin, and when she smiled back, small dark seeds had stuck in her teeth. “You’ve got something there,” I teased.
She winked and shoved another handful into her mouth. “They’re sweet ,” she said with a bemused sort of awe. “Like it’s summer.”
“It’s Ogygia,” I told her, my chest puffed out. My Ogygia.
“It’s magic,” said Briseis, and reached into the thicket greedily. Her hand brushed mine within, and we feasted until we were sick, covered in berry juice, laughing like children.
—
Sometimes I see Briseis trek to the top of the dunes overlooking the sea. She clasps her hands together, but she does not bow her head; her mouth tightens. “Patroclus,” she snaps. “Brother. You—” She sighs and cannot finish.
I understand this, too—the anger. It stirs something old in me beneath the weariness and resignation. I am a young goddess again, and Atlas my father is leaving to fight the Olympians. He smiles. He is strong and broad-shouldered like an ox, his beard well-oiled, his countenance sure. They cannot take this from us, daughter, he tells me. We will win.
My father is kind, in his own way. But he also brings the war to me, and when all the walls have been smashed and the blood shed, I am left behind. It is hard to forgive something like that.
Almost as hard as loving him still.
—
“Have you ever been in love?” Briseis asked me one night.
We slept in the cave still, though it was warm enough to sleep outside. I kept waiting for Briseis to offer, or to simply not return to the cave at night. As spring lengthened into summer, even the natural coolness of the cave could not keep out the humidity, the stickiness of two people in close proximity. And Ogygian nights were beautiful.
I bit my lip against the immediate answer, the swell of resentment like salt. “I suppose.”
Briseis laughed with her sharp, sharp eyes. “What kind of answer is that?”
“I don’t know!” I told her. I laughed too; I was drunk on summer wine, careless with affection, tired of hiding. “I don’t know if it was real. And besides, they did not love me back.”
Briseis’ sharp eyes turned soft and shadowed, the way they did when she remembered Patroclus. I leaned back on the pallet till only my elbows held me up, smiling at her lazily. I wondered if she noticed the bitter tint. If I looked, to her memory-soaked gaze, anything like that gentle, tragic man who died of too much love.
But Briseis only hummed. “Why wouldn’t it be real? You felt it.”
I shrugged, an awkward motion with my elbows dug into the pallet. My eyes were fixed on the ceiling, tracing the grooves like rivers worn into the rock. I had made my home in this cave when the stone was smooth. “Perhaps,” I said. “But my feelings have never been—” I waved a hand. Mine, I meant. Important. Good.
“That is cruel,” Briseis said with quiet seriousness.
“That is the gods’ way,” I said. “Anyway,” I continued before Briseis could respond, “do you want to sleep outside tonight? I will help you move your pallet.”
Briseis made a little noise in the back of her throat. I imagined the flicker of her eyelids, blinking. “Why?”
“Because the stars are beautiful,” I shrugged again. I remembered how Briseis had clawed her way out of the sea with a spear in her belly, each breath a defiance. The way she had gasped at the sky. “Because you can. Because it’s freedom.”
Briseis remained quiet for a moment, and I wondered if she might go without another word, her feet treading well-worn paths out of the cave and down to the beach. I ached at the thought, but that ache felt familiar—an old friend. I would not blame her. There were many things I would do for freedom.
Instead, Briseis’ face appeared above me, her eyes shining. Her hair brushed my shoulders like a fall of feathers. Slowly I realized our stomachs were touching, too, a whisper of contact between her scar and my skin. I shivered, keenly aware of it and unable to tell us apart in the same breath; there was Briseis and where my hands had washed her, healed her, touched her, and there was me, and where Briseis had wrapped her burning fingers around every part of me.
I felt her breathe before I saw it—wry, incredulous. “No,” she said simply.
We slept like that, folded against each other like a pair of resting wings, and when I woke she had stayed. She had stayed.
—
I could not linger, my chest too tight with joy; I slipped out as gently as I could. It was early enough that the water lay as still and grey as sleep, and the minnows darted like flashes of light in the shallows. The sun cracked a lazy eye over the horizon.
I sang mindlessly as I cast my line. So many mornings I had done this, avoiding Briseis with a wrenching terror; now when I thought of her sleeping in my cave, her dark hair mussed against her forehead, there was only a softness like a breath in me. The tug of the exhale.
“You know that song?” came Briseis’ voice. The words were faint, wondering.
I started. She had come down to stand beside me, and the reflection of her face in the water was open shock. She must have heard me singing.
Maybe, the wishful, cursed part of me whispered, maybe she felt the tug, too.
“I learned it a long time ago,” I said. Another Anatolian hero, from before Briseis’ village had even been marked in the soil. He had been tall, and strong, and faithful; he had walked the beach at sunrise to gather shells and sea glass for his wife and child. As soon as the raft touched the sand, he had one sandaled foot on the wood, flashing a bittersweet smile at me.
Briseis’ voice rang with an odd intensity, like a gong struck, vibrating. “From the person you loved?”
“One of them.”
“There were many.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Were they taken?”
“No,” I said, my smile growing tired and lopsided. “They got well, and they left. As you will.”
Briseis shook her head. “I haven’t heard that song since I was a child,” she said. “It was passed down from elders in my village. An old song. I didn’t think—I thought it was lost.”
“Well,” I said ruefully, “I haven’t gotten the hang of all the words, but. No. Not lost.”
“Not lost,” Briseis repeated, sounding almost breathless. She had not stopped looking at me since she came down; her eyes were wide and dark as they’d ever been, like pools of wine, like earth threatening to move underneath me. She had looked at me like this last night, too.
It startled me; for a moment, she looked nothing like anyone I had ever known.
“You—” I said. I frowned, trying to regain my footing. “You did not teach Patroclus this?”
“No,” Briseis said with unrelenting intensity. She stepped forward. “He would not have tried. Not this. Not like you.”
Her closeness was dizzying, but when I tried to step back, my heel hit the surf. The waves leapt and soaked the hem of my chiton, and it felt inevitable: either way, I would be swallowed by a sea. Of salt, or of my own desire. “You do not know—” I said desperately, my voice cracking, “If you thnk I am like him, if that’s why—I am only like him in the ways you are angry at him for.”
She had drawn close enough to touch me now, her hands hovering at my waist. Her eyes searched mine, wild and tender, but she did not seem to be looking for anyone but me. I am here, I wanted to say. I have always been here. Waiting. It should have felt like this with every hero—like I had been waiting for them—but at that moment I knew that out of a thousand heroes and a thousand cursed loves, I had truly been waiting for this.
“Calypso,” Briseis breathed, and her lips met mine.
It wasn’t like the sea after all. It was soft and true and steady; she held me, firm enough that when the waves struck my ankles I did not fall. I tasted the sweetness of blackberries and the curve of a smile I’d learned over a board game. She raised a hand to cup my cheek, the trembling line of my jaw, and I knew those fingers delicately tracing a jackdaw’s flight through the sky. All of this. A year of loving her, pressed into the space of her lips against mine.
When Briseis pulled back, she smiled, bright and soft as the morning sunlight. “He is not why I love you,” she said. “I promise this. Tell me you believe me.”
“Yes,” I said fervently, not because I did, but because I wanted to, more than I had wanted anything before. “Yes.”
—
This is how she made me believe: her fingers along my hip. Her lips brushed the shell of my throat, sucking; when I trembled she pulled back to search me with those dark, serious eyes. Calypso, she said.
I said, Please.
My dress pooled and crumpled beneath me; Briseis guided it down. Her touch was even more delicate than cloth, as though she traced the veins on a leaf, the fragile bone of a bird’s wing. I gasped to be handled like a precious thing. Wanted, as she splayed her fingers on the quickening leap of my stomach—
Please, I begged.
She leaned down and pressed her mouth to mine. We melted like wax. Her hand dipped below, where I lifted into her, my body an answer to hers. My hands found her spine, arching, and tugged her closer.
Briseis, I said, like the wind across the water long months ago. Briseis, Briseis.
She was gentle as she reached inside me, her breath stuttering into me. She whispered against my lips, then against my neck, the length of my collarbone; I could not hear her. There was nothing except the feeling of her, the way I opened for her in a shy, tender rush. The air swam like honey around us.
The pleasure built as she moved inside me like a tide, like a pulse. Desire rose, filled my chest to brimming. It did not feel—it had always clawed at me, a well of shame. It did not feel like that now, and it frightened me.
My mouth gaped soundlessly; I clutched the slender line of her wrist, and she seemed to understand. She kissed the crown of my head and buried her fingers into my hair, as surely as new roots in the earth. Calypso, she breathed, I have you.
You are safe, she meant. And for a moment bright and wordless and wonderful, I was.
—
After, lying there slick and heavy-breathed in the quiet of the cave, I tell her of my curse. “I tried—” I say helplessly, the words twisting, “I could not—I do not blame you. If you are sorry.”
Briseis looks at me, brushes the pad of a finger along a line of freckles at my hip. “I am not, if you are not,” she says.
“I think—” I remember all the other heroes washed up on my shore, or at least the fuzzy edges of them. Some of them I had lain with. I cannot remember when it last had felt like this, like something free of regret. “I think, if it had not been a curse, I would have chosen this.”
Briseis blinks, her lashes fine and dark. She smells of persimmons and sweet wine, the lingering tang of our tenderness. “I am sorry you could not choose,” she says.
“I am sorry about your Patroclus.”
Briseis narrows her eyes across the thin strip of bedding between us, but then softens. Her mouth goes a little rueful. “I’m sorry about him, too.” She reaches out to touch my cheek. “But I do not compare you.”
I open my mouth, but Briseis’ finger glides down to lay across it. “Stop,” she says. “You both are hopeless in love. You both are very kind. But Patroclus could not have let Achilles go for anything in the world. He never learned of my language, my home, my songs, because it would have betrayed Achilles. He could not love me like you—and he would not have chosen to.”
Something releases inside me, and I can’t help but smile shyly. Briseis removes her finger from my lips and tangles her hand in mine. Her returning grin is swift, sly, heated.
“Let us not speak of Patroclus anymore,” she suggests. And that night, we do not.
—
At dawn, the raft is waiting for her.
It bobs in the water, unassuming but well-built. Five or six cypress logs lashed together with good rope, smelling strongly, as though the trees have just been felled. The sun glints off smooth wood.
Briseis stares down at it, the tide pulling at the sand under her feet. It pulls at me, too, and the thread of my fingers woven with hers. It would be easier to let go now, I think. Like coming loose.
But I know I will not. Not until she does—and if she doesn’t, not until the earth erodes from under us, not until death, not until the gods themselves flicker and fall.
“The Fates sent this?” Briseis asks. I cannot read her voice.
“To carry you home,” I say. “To free you.”
Brisies laughs, an ugly, tearing thing, the way she coughed when she came ashore half-drowned. I know the look in her eyes—a memory of Patroclus. I imagine, if it was not the Fates, his spirit standing on the other side of the sea and sending this raft, this best hope, an earnest wish. He would want Briseis to return home in safety, even if it was to a home he had never learned anything of, that he had invaded, that his lover had made a grave.
He had loved her, unfairly and the best he could. And now he is gone.
And now.
Briseis clutches my hand tighter, and for a moment, fear flutters in my chest. It is selfish, but the curse has been so long. So many times the chain has loosened around my neck, only for the Fates to yank it tight.
Then Briseis looks up, and the fear fades like the last of the clouds in the rising light. She turns away from the raft and kisses me, her feet planted in the surf like she might break the tide itself before it moved her.
When she pulls back her face is bright and lined with grief. “Will you help me?” she says.
We drag the raft from the water; the wind spirits help us carry it down a lone stretch of beach into the forest. The rain has made the earth soft and cool, despite the summer heat only starting to yield. Briseis finds a good patch, and together, we drive the end of the raft into the ground like a spear. Like a stone.
It stands. We will leave it there, our imperfect memorial to those imperfect beings who brought us here.
“I’m free here,” says Briseis quietly. “With you. That’s my choice.”
I kiss her knuckles, fit my lips against the divots between. “I love you,” I murmur.
That’s mine.
I do not feel a weight lift, or the heavens ease; perhaps the curse will never break like that. Perhaps it has pierced through and cannot be undone, just as Briseis’ grief for Patroclus will always be lanced through with anger. But we have chosen this.
We will leave what we can behind—spears and gods and heroes and shame—and make our own way.
“I love you,” I say again, clearer now.
Above us, to a sky as wide as anything, a jackdaw lifts its wings.