When she wakes in darkness, no torch remains lit, only the moon. Stars washed out. The city turned to milk, stone smooth and cool and white. A world transformed, and no cruelty seems possible. All so still and soft. She’s able to move her arms and legs, stiff and sore and weak but intact. She edges closer to Jason, puts her arm over his chest.

Jason, she says.

He has remained on his back, unmoved since morning, but she feels his hand on her arm. This won’t last, he says. I promise.

Why did your father let your uncle do this?

He loved Pelias. And now everyone is gone. Father, mother, brother. I should have been here. The fleece was my idea. Pelias asked what I would do if I met the man who would destroy me. I said I would send him after the golden fleece.

So he believes you’ll destroy him.

Yes.

Medea watches the moon, familiar and unknowable. All pattern clear and unseen. The story of Pelias and Jason. The story of Medea and anyone else: her brother Apsyrtus, Aeetes, Pelias, Jason, even Acastus. What shape, and when, all of us walking into traps set by ourselves and unremembered.

You have to promise me one thing, Medea says.

Yes.

That whatever happens, we won’t be turned against each other.

How could that ever happen? he asks.

Just promise. For a time when all has slipped and become strange, even then.

I promise.

First love, Medea says. Only love. Pelias would make our wedding monstrous, but he has only made a stronger wedding. We were bound and nearly killed.

Wife, Jason says.

Until death.

Until death, he says.

30

30

Jason returning each day in darkness. White ghost covered in the dust of stone, curls of his hair the color of milk, some creature born of night and silence and dimly shining, faint replica of her husband lying down to hold her in his arms and then gone. Minutes each day left to them and nothing more. His arm heavy, grown larger quarrying to build more monuments to Pelias. Welts everywhere from whips, on his back and arms and legs and chest. He will do this unnumbered days until his body is old and broken, then they will lay him inside a wall, let him become one of these stones.

Medea rising early with him, in darkness still. No daylight is theirs, all light given over. Slavery a walking sleep, and Medea the lowest of the slaves. She is to serve the daughters of Pelias, but she will never see these daughters. She removes their shit and piss and blood, washes their clothing and pottery, sees every sign of their existence, every leaving, feels its texture in her fingers, smells each of them, knows their scent and health and moods, all without direct visitation, and so in her mind each of them takes on a shape and character, not unlike a god.