If she stops, they’ll be killed, but finally her legs lock and she’s standing in place directly under the sun on earth white and blinding. She drops the arms of her sons, looks down to see her hands covered in blood. The skin just above their wrists torn and bleeding but not cut deep.

They lie unmoving on the ground, curled inward like two seeds, but she can see them breathing hard.

Shade, she says. We need trees. And water.

Open raised valley between hills, no water in sight, but at the base of one hill, a cut of small pines. She pulls her sons to their feet, tells them to follow, staggers toward shade.

Grove in a desert, receding, farther away than it looks, long twisting path through low scrub and rock, the earth never smooth, even the air thickening to slow them, but they do reach the trees and lie down in pine straw. Sun directly overhead, so they hide close to the trunks, burrowed in, and Medea watches the path from Iolcus.

Ashen spears and shields, same in every land, all unthinking, blind power of men. She expects them to appear at any moment, unstoppable, without need of water or rest or reason except command. Medea has never had an army. She has always had to work alone. No less effective in killing a king, but still, what was it like for Hatshepsut, long ago, to command an army, thousands of men, and a navy? She built her ships on the Nile, then her men took them apart, piece by piece, and carried over the desert to reassemble at the sea and sail to the land of Punt. Ships as large as the Argo. What was it to know that power?

Hatshepsut without children, without weakness. Wearing her beard, untouchable, and further back in time, closer to the gods and origins, but also alone.

Medea keeps a hand on Aeson, her older son, named for Jason’s father. His face scratched now, thin red lines and the flesh swelling pink on either side. Hair uncut, slave unwashed, but that has ended. He looks like Jason, but unimaginably soft. She crawls closer to put her lips in the hollow between eye and nose, perfect hollow. Her first baby. Scent of him, still new. And when he’s grown into a man?

Medea closes her eyes, keeps her lips against his skin, and falls closer and closer, her foot over her younger son, the three of them alone in oblivion. They won’t be taken from her, flesh of her flesh, the only kingdom she owns. She will lead them through wilderness, cross this desert, until they can find some new place to form new lives. Whether Jason will be there, she doesn’t know. Untrue, betrayer, no father or husband.