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Melinoë made it a point to never speak insincerely. The incantations could tell, the Arcana could tell, and worst of all, the Headmistress could always tell. Years and years of training under Hecate had forced the habit of opening her heart for every verse into her everyday mannerisms, and now lying came to her as easily as trying to convince Dora to leave Melinoë’s tent. Better that, she thinks, than to let the lax parts of her lifestyle bleed over into her work. Still, sometimes she wished she could mask her heart a little better. The only place in the whole Underworld where it was safe to wear her heart on her sleeve was the Crossroads. And even then—
I lost more than my mother, too. And I knew her. What’s yours to you? All you ever did was fall out of her womb.
That wasn’t always true.
Her candor frequently took people aback when she was younger. It still did, sometimes. Conversation would stutter or halt entirely when Melinoë jumped in. Sometimes she got a laugh and a dismissal. Few took it in stride. Maybe they expected her to be more like her allegedly charismatic brother. But how could that be when they never had the chance to grow up together? How was one born charming? Hecate assuaged her of the worries early. She told her it may be because the nature of most denizens of the Underworld was that of less honest, authentic character. But not all, of course, she’d said with a twinkle in her green eyes beneath the sweeping, shadowy brim of her hat.
Quite, Melinoë had agreed. Like Odysseus.
Him as well, said the Headmistress, though she’d paused for a brief note. Then she’d approached the boiling cauldron, and Melinoë joined her in their chanted warding prayer, and they went back to the split forks of their lives which marched along the same path.
Thus, when she’d offered a sore Nemesis the assistance in getting the complicated armor she wore back onto her scarred body after their bath in the springs, she’d meant it completely wholeheartedly. To her pleasant surprise, her saturnic compatriot didn’t insult her, or berate her, or even scoff at her. She’d merely tilted her head back, steam glistening off the pale taupe of her throat, and grunted, “Or taking it off, yeah. Though, can’t let myself get too used to this.”
“Maybe a little used to it,” Melinoë teased. Nemesis sank incrementally deeper into the pristine pools. Or maybe Melinoë’s infernal eye was seeing things.
She slid down until the point of her nose was almost grazing the green water and closed her eyes. Peace filled her lithe body. Memories of pain, dull thuds of fists to her gut and face, chilled, fleshy hands tearing at her limbs, awful, catchy, ear-splitting music, all the sharp shapes they took on her skin, faded. She gained more scars in the past two weeks than she had in the entire course of her training. She didn’t get the grace of starting it all over again through death, as her brother had, according to Hecate. She had to keep herself an inch away from total defeat and send herself home through the shadows. But that meant constant recovery, constant mouthfuls of horrible-tasting potions, constant aches that couldn’t all be magicked away, even by Hecate’s masterful hands.
She blinked up now and then to keep herself from dozing off. Each time, Nemesis still had her eyes open, staring into the water with a half-lidded gaze, or at the mossy columns crowding the spring. She didn’t fidget. Never made a move she didn’t intend to. Melinoë envied that. Even now, her hands ghosted the shapes of spells into the water.
Nemesis was a warrior through and through. A huntress in her own right. Artemis might take offense to the comparison, but Melinoë figured it might be at least a little flattering. Nemesis truly was capable. Fearsome. Intimidating. Hardworking, resolute, a number of words that would get her accused of buttering up the goddess by the lady of retribution herself, but they were all equally true. She sought intangible prey; the void of gratefulness, and she pierced it with her twin Stygian blades.
The Headmistress had the right idea of keeping her as a watch guard. No fool would dare cross her path without an army to back them up.
“What.”
Caught. Melinoë pulled her chin from the pools.
“I’m thinking,” she said.
Nemesis’ already severe brow deepened. “When aren’t you?”
“Is there ever a point where we stop? Even the dead keep going at it.”
“You’re avoiding the question.”
Perceptive, too. Or it was merely Melinoë’s inability to skate around a topic cropping up once more. It was more likely the latter. Nemesis didn’t perceive so much as bully the truth out of her victims. A tingle of sympathy squirmed in Melinoë’s breast like the worms digging in her reagent plots.
With no mortals moving into the realm of the dead properly, her hunt became fruitless. No wonder she raged for something, anything, to fulfill the hole a stolen duty left behind—even if that meant taking Melinoë’s.
“About you,” Melinoë said, “and Lady Hecate.” Nemesis’ nostrils flared. “I’m starting to see your point about never being allowed off your leash, so to speak.”
Nemesis scoffed. “Great. More pity from you is just what I need.”
“It’s not pity.” Melinoë pushed herself more upright. Her back tingled from the divots the stone left in her skin as she peeled away from the rock with a faintly sticky sound. Likewise, Nemesis lifted her chin to glare at Melinoë down her regal nose. “It’s logic.” Nemesis scoffed. “I mean it. The Crossroads are plenty protected even without you standing sentry. I or Lady Artemis could give plenty of warning before an invasion seems imminent. Odysseus has full command over the shades, and Lady Hecate is always here—”
“’Cept when she disappears to get in another training session with you,” Nemesis muttered. She lifted her glistening arms from the water and set her elbows on the edge of the pool, lounging back with a sharp glint to her hawk-yellow eyes. “She gets to abandon her post to run around in the woods whenever she damn well wants to.”
Melinoë pursed her lips. “She has her reasons. But I don’t see why the Headmistress won’t give you a chance. I’ve seen what you can do,” she said, hushed now, bracing her hands between her legs on the hewn stone seat and leaning forward, “and while slaying the Titan is hardly a one-man job, there’s plenty of other culling to attend to. Especially whilst I cannot yet step foot for more than an hour onto the surface.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“You know better than anyone.” Lady Hecate was wise already, and her attunement to the arcane and magick only made her all the wiser. Melinoë had her complete and total faith in her. But sometimes—being a goddess, and all, she wondered if she made too great an assumption about Nemesis. Moronically, she almost offered, “I could talk to her if you wished.” She might as well ask Nemesis to take her blade to her neck. No. Better to ask in her own time and pray Nemesis never hears word of her insolence.
But Nemesis’ gaze bore into her as though she could hear her each and every thought. Melinoë held her own. “So we both agree. I’m better suited for this job.”
“I’ve been carved to be the Titan killer since I was born. I alone can enter the House of Hades. I must do this on my own.”
Nemesis growled and rolled her eyes hard enough to move her whole head back. “So what? Chronos took something from everyone, from Tartarus to Olympus. The whole mountain’s gone to war over your family and mine. Hecate’s a Titaness. She’s the only one who doesn’t have a dog in this race, so who is she to dictate who down here gets —”
“That’s not true.”
Melinoë hadn’t meant to sound so firm. Nonetheless, Nemesis didn’t seem impressed, or at least she didn’t seem any more annoyed than she usually did. A slippery blond strand of wet hair slipped out from behind her ear. Melinoë irritatedly shoved it back and looked at Nemesis with a wide, flinty gaze.
“Hecate was very close to my mother,” she said. “Her handmaiden, she said. And my mother was very close to yours, according to her. Perhaps they weren’t blood relatives. But she misses her chosen family fiercely. She fights for them. That’s why she trains us as she does.”
The golden gleam in Nemesis’ eyes dulled. Tension left her broad shoulders in the steam cocooning her body in a shimmery gray veil. “So why am I not allowed to fight for my family?”
Melinoë couldn’t answer that. She flitted her eyes up and down, mind twirling as fast as Arachne’s spinnerets, but no honest comfort came to mind.
Nemesis spoke for herself.
“She doesn’t trust me.” Sighing, she rose, water cascading from her pitch hair with a splatter as sharp as spilled blood as she stood. “I knew that, already. Guess I thought she’d be able to see something else in me.”
“But she does!” Melinoë snatched her towel and scrambled upright, and before she could think, she reached and touched Nemesis’ thick wrist with her ghostly fingers. Nemesis instantly yanked her hand away, nearly pulling Melinoë straight into the pool. But at least she stopped moving. “She trusts you to keep watch of this entire camp. This is all we have right now, Nem. It’s not peace, but it’s the most we’ve got for the right way of doing things. We’re a precious, powerful few compared to the Titan’s armies. Any blow to our forces will be felt through the entire Underworld. We have to keep what cards we have close. You’re one of the best we’ve got to protect it. She has to trust you.”
“She wouldn’t if she had any other choice.”
“She could try Eris again. Or Moros. Or she could try to awaken Hypnos. Or she could summon a brute of a shade. But she doesn’t. She asks you to do it.”
“You’re comparing me to a bunch of lost causes.”
“You shouldn’t speak of your siblings like that.”
“Why not? We hardly talk. And it’s not like they’d go to hell and back for me.”
Melinoë paused. “You’re jealous.”
“What, that the hag gave you the task of killing Chronos when it should’ve been me from the beginning? Yeah, I guess I am.”
An exasperated sigh clicked from Melinoë’s throat and out her nose. “Please sit down, won’t you? Or at least get your towel? The shades are starting to stare.”
To her immense relief, Nemesis did. Melinoë didn’t, but even sitting, Nemesis was still only a couple of heads shorter than her.
“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” Melinoë said. “You’re jealous I’ve got siblings I care about.”
“Not in the least,” Nemesis retorted, but her unwavering glare was off unwaveringly glaring at a point somewhere to the right of Melinoë. Something told her she should stop. That she should’ve stopped ages ago and she should at least be trying to do damage control. Usually, she'd listen to her instincts. But bound by the peace of the hot springs, and the Crossroads as a whole, they could not fight, and she would never forgive herself if she let Nemesis run away yet again. “You haven’t got a family you love. You’re avenging altogether because it’s what you were told you should do.”
Her heart stung as though splattered with acid. She may as well have slapped her across the jaw.
Melinoë undid her towel and sat clumsily back down in the springs. The near-boiling water had turned the fresh scars lancing her body an angry pink. Or perhaps that was her stifled temper. Now they were next to each other. She was so much bigger up close. Melinoë had to shift back a few inches to face her properly without craning her neck.
“Fine,” she said. “You told me to say it to your face. So I will. It’s not that you’re jealous I’ve been tasked to kill Chronos. You’d be angry no matter how big or small the task was. You’re jealous I can do something to help my family.”
She struck home. Nemesis murmured, “Shut up,” but something painful was pressed into the shape of her lips now, eons of rage and contention and nowhere for it to go but out. And now expressly forbidden from that—in. It tightened her face into a mask harder than the steel of her armor.
Of course. She was loyal to Mother Nyx. Of all her children, Nemesis was the only one willing to pick up arms and fight. Perhaps the only one left. One wanted to fight for all the wrong reasons and reveled in the chaos. One was slave to the Fates. One was locked into an eternal sleep. All the others, gone, or taken by Chronos. And here was Hecate, forbidding her from doing anything about it. It wasn’t unlike how Hecate had to haul Melinoë from the wards by her wrist when she was a child, because she so desperately wanted to find her mother and father and brother and learn about them. But Nemesis wasn’t a child. She was a goddess, and unlike a child, was actually capable of putting her training and life to use. And here she was. Stuck with a camp of people she, frankly, didn’t care about, with all the people she did care about locked away so that someone else could rescue them.
It would drive Melinoë mad.
“I’m going to talk to Lady Hecate.”
She nearly flinched preemptively. It was only through decades of brutal training that she didn’t. But Nemesis, to her shock, didn’t instantly try to take her head off. She didn’t even move. A bolt of hair, silken and gentle as Nyx herself, swung down as her head sank. This was supposed to be a relaxing couple of hours in the springs. But, then again, Hecate told her surprises only came when she wasn’t expecting them.
Melinoë carefully retracted. The silvery ivy crawling along the edge of the spring was gorgeous. Shame it couldn’t be used in any incantation she knew thus far. It would be nice to have reagents in such abundance. “She ought to be listening to you,” she said after an unbroken minute of silence. “You’re right. I’m sorry I kept taking her word over yours. But she won’t harken you, so maybe she will to me.”
“Why?”
Melinoë glanced at her. “Why what?”
Nemesis finally met her eyes again. Bitterness dripped from her hair and into the pool, steady and quiet. The green light of the springs haloing her dark head faded to blue, and all at once, Melinoë understood why it was Nemesis who was retribution incarnate. She was beautiful. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“It’s not a punishment, Nem. And it’s not pity either. It’s what you deserve. You should know all about that, right?”
Nemesis never laughed. But she chuffed and blinked once, slowly. “Who’re you to tell me what my job is?”
“A nobody, really.” Melinoë smiled, small and sardonic. “Just someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The pair of them fell quiet, then. Something hot boiled in Melinoë’s gut for hours after they’d risen from the bath. Nemesis declined her offer to get her suit on. But she’d said, “Thanks,” after Melinoë handed her the last piece of her uniform: the silvery headband sporting the crescent moon sigil of Selene across the middle. The sharp chevron turned her face instantly fiercer, but it was softer this time, somehow. Melinoë didn’t think much of it until that evening, where she could not chase the sight of Nemesis’ sorrow from her mind as she lay in bed.
Tomorrow, she resolved as she turned over on her mass of blankets. Her hair was damp at the roots. The sharp smell of the bath salts had followed her for the rest of the day. Tomorrow, she would make her appeal to Lady Hecate. And maybe one night, she would not be alone as she descended into the abyss of her home.