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Let me say what sorcery is not: it is not divine power, which comes with a thought and a blink. It must be made and worked, planned and searched out, dug up, dried, chopped and ground, cooked, spoken over, and sung. Even after all that, it can fail, as gods do not.

That is how it works, Circe. I tell Father that my sorcery was an accident, he pretends to believe me, and Zeus pretends to believe him, and so the world is balanced.

I had begun to know what fear was. What could make a god afraid? I knew that answer too.
A power greater than their own.

That is one thing gods and mortals share. When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.

“You are a daughter of Helios, are you not?” he said, when he had finished, and I’d stepped back.
“Yes.” The question stung. If I had been a proper daughter, he would not have had to ask. I would have been perfect and gleaming with beauty poured straight from my father’s source.

You cannot know how frightened gods are of pain. There is nothing more foreign to them, and so nothing they ache more deeply to see.

My father’s halls were dark and silent. His palace was a neighbor to Oceanos’, buried in the earth’s rock, and its walls were made of polished obsidian. Why not? They could have been anything in the world, blood-red marble from Egypt or balsam from Araby, my father had only to wish it so. But he liked the way the obsidian reflected his light, the way its slick surfaces caught fire as he passed. Of course, he did not consider how black it would be when he was gone.

Often those men in most need hate most to be grateful, and will strike at you just to feel whole again.

I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer.
Then, child, make another.

A true-made bow, Odysseus had called her. A fixed star. A woman who knew herself.

I had used to imagine Telemachus so often. As a quiet boy keeping watch for Odysseus, as a burning youth bearing vengeance across land and sea. But now he was a man, and his voice was dull and drained. He was like those messengers who run great distances with news for kings. They gasp out their words, then fall to the ground and do not rise.

I looked at her, as vivid in my doorway as the moon in the autumn sky. Her eyes held mine, gray and steady. It is a common saying that women are delicate creatures, flowers, eggs, anything that may be crushed in a moment’s carelessness. If I had ever believed it, I no longer did.

“So that is what I must hope for then? That one day I will see my father in the underworld and he will be sorry?”
It is better than some of us get.

When I was young, I overheard our palace surgeon talking. He said that the medicines he sold were only for show. Most hurts heal by themselves, he said, if you give them enough time. It was the sort of secret I loved to discover, for it made me feel cynical and wise. I took it for a philosophy.

There was a sort of innocence to him, I thought. I do not mean this as the poets mean it: a virtue to be broken by the story’s end, or else upheld at greatest cost. Nor do I mean that he was foolish or guileless. I mean that he was made only of himself, without the dregs that clog the rest of us. He thought and felt and acted, and all these things made a straight line.

“You have always been the worst of my children,” he said. “Be sure you do not dishonor me.”
“I have a better idea. I will do as I please, and when you count your children, leave me out.”

Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.

“It is not fair,” I said. “It cannot be.”
“Those are two different things,” my grandmother said.

My mind was bare, my skin bristling as if it would rise off my flesh. Every noise, every touch, the stones beneath my feet, the splash of fountains from a window, crept evilly upon my senses. The air had a stinging weight like ocean waves. I felt myself a stranger to the world.

Brides, nymphs were called, but that is not really how the world saw us. We were an endless feast laid out upon a table, beautiful and renewing. And so very bad at getting away.