Lore

by Alexandra Bracken

Lore lowered her head and drove it straight into his chest. It was like ramming into a cement wall. Every joint in her body suffered, and her vision was dotted with black, but he went down, and she went down with him. Castor rolled them so he was on top,

careful not to crush her with his weight as he pinned her to the mat. Lore was gratified to hear him breathing as hard as she was.

Miles treated his body like a piece of art, letting it speak for him—his moods, his interests, and the people he carried in his heart.

He’s looking for something, and I don’t know if it’s you.

She had been hired to help take care of him after he had a bad fall and it became clear he couldn’t keep living alone, but he had done so much more for her. He had been a friend, a mentor, and a reminder that not all men were as harsh and cruel as the ones she had grown up around.

“I know . . . who killed them.”

You were never . . . a mere . . . little girl. I heard . . . what the others whispered about you . . . that you were the best of your generation . . . that it was a shame . . . you had been born to a different bloodline. . . .”

“To be free.”

“You deny your heritage. . . . You deny honor. . . . You deny your ancestors, and your gods. . . . But this, you cannot deny,” Athena said. “This, you know to be true. Tell me . . . what you desire.”

“I will kill the false Ares in your name,” Athena said, struggling for breath. “If you swear . . . you will aid me . . . if you vow . . . to bind your fate to mine until . . . this hunt ends . . . at sunrise . . . on the eighth day.”

The aegis. The shield of Zeus, carried into so many battles by his favorite daughter, Athena, bearing the head of the gorgon Medusa, and given to them by the king of gods himself to aid in their hunt. An object capable of summoning lightning and striking unnatural terror in the heart of all enemies who beheld it.

Kleos is the

honor that comes from becoming a legend—someone others keep alive through stories and songs. Your body can die, but your name will live forever.”

Parties, the kind that turned into hazy revels of wine and ritual, were common enough—what good, after all, was a glorious destiny if you were never allowed to luxuriate in it? Some involved ceremony, such as the favor-seeking sacrifices to Zeus in the days leading up to the Agon, and more rituals later, after its completion, when it was time to bury the dead. This was neither.

In that moment, the past became the present, and the present the past, and it was just the two of them in the shadows of their city, the way it had always been. The way it should have been forever.

“Have you ever heard the one about the turtles on Broadway?” The words struck her mind like a torch in the dark, sudden and bright, interrupting her thoughts. “Have I . . . what?” she asked, blinking to clear her vision. “The turtle show on Broadway,” Castor said softly. Lore still didn’t understand. “No—what are you talking about?” “Really?” he said, his gaze still intent on her. “Because it was a shell-out.”

“It’s not always the truth that survives, but the stories we wish to believe. The legends lie. They smooth over imperfections to tell a good tale, or to instruct us how we should behave, or to assign glory to victors and shame those who falter. Perhaps there were some in Sparta who embodied those myths. Perhaps. But how we are remembered is less important than what we do now.”

Sometimes, he’d said, the braver thing is to accept help when you’ve been made to believe you shouldn’t need it.

The city was a place where you only saw what you were looking for.