“I was trying to spare your feelings, why I don’t know,” Agnes told me severely. “You don’t spare any of ours. Every time you come—every time—it is nothing but strangeness and danger and chaos. And you,” she said, turning on Gertie, “are no better. It is as if the two of you feed off each other.”

“Now see here—”

“I have seen, and I have had enough. I am your heir; it is my responsibility to keep you safe if I can, to help you—”

“And you call this helping, do you?”

“I call this trying!” Agnes said, her eyes flashing. “Although it is difficult when you assure me—when you assure both of us—that the two of you merely plan to have a nice breakfast and talk. ‘Sleep in,’ you said. ‘You’ve had a long night,’ you said—”

“Well, you had,” Gertie replied, but she looked slightly awkward. For about a second, before her shoulders straightened, because this was Gertie. “It was a spur of the moment decision—”

“Yes! It frequently is! That’s the problem—”

“What would you have preferred?” Gertie asked. “For me to take you with us? Endanger you as well?”

“I would have preferred for you not to go at all! Haven’t we had enough upheaval in the last few days? Enough turmoil? A Pythia untethered in time—unheard of! A battle with a god in transition—something that threatened the timeline in unfathomable ways, not to mention nearly killing all of us! Some kind of nonsense in the middle of the night that Iris won’t stop prattling about—”

“That wasn’t my fault,” I pointed out, only to have Agnes’ ire turned on me.

“—and now,” she said furiously. “The very next day, the very next morning, what do we find? Both of you gone—no word to anyone, no idea of when you’ll be back or if you will, no idea if you’re even alive or dead—”

“I was going to bring us back just after we left,” Gertie said defensively. “You need never have known—”

“I needed to know!” Agnes’ face flushed. “And you didn’t come back for over an hour—”

“We ran into a spot of trouble—”

“Of course, you did!” It was practically a scream. “With the two of you off alone, I’m surprised to find the world still turning!”

I didn’t say anything. It was kind of hard to argue that the last few days hadn’t been a slow rolling disaster. But Gertie was made of stronger stuff, and she wasn’t taking that.

But she didn’t get a chance to utter so much as a word before Agnes grabbed the arrow and shook it under her nose. “Do you want to tell me how you obtained this?”