I reached into my bag and pulled out a small mason jar with a tiny yellow spark in it. “Hold this for a second.”

“What’s this?”

“It’s a flare moth.” I dug some more in my bag. “When you release it, it flies up and the higher it flies, the brighter it is. Here. Is this it?” I fished out a simple yellow apple and offered it to him.

He took it gingerly from my hand and held it up. “The apple of immortality. Where did you get this?”

“Funny story. Teddy Jo dropped them off one night out of the blue. He said he didn’t know what to do with them and he was pretty sure I could handle them given my family history. I made them into a pie I was going to feed to Curran on our big date. I’d lost a bet to him and promised to serve him dinner naked.”

Christopher smiled.

“He stood me up. It wasn’t his fault, but I didn’t know it at the time and I was really pissed off, so I trashed the food and I buried the pie.”

“Buried?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time. I had enough apples left to make Curran another pie later. Anyway, a few months after that I came back to my house near Savannah and found a brand-new apple tree. I talked to Teddy Jo about it and we decided that the apples were way too dangerous to leave unattended, so we dug out the tree and he replanted it by his cabin. He brings me apples every time some grow. He says the tree wants him to do it.”

“Have you eaten them?”

I nodded. “So far no immortality. But they do make a killer jam if you add some lemon peel. I thought the pegasi would appreciate them.”

He gave the apple back to me and laughed quietly.

I held out my hand. “Kate Daniels, daughter of Nimrod the Builder of Towers, Guardian of Atlanta.”

He looked at my hand and then took it with his long slender fingers. “Christopher Steed, twenty-second Legatus of the Golden Legion, god of terror.”

We shook.

“Legatus of the Golden Legion.” I whistled. If a Master of the Dead was especially gifted, he was selected to join the Golden Legion, the elite of the elite among my father’s navigators. The Legatus led them, the same way Hugh used to lead my father’s soldiers. The Legatus answered directly to my father.

“I climbed to power,” Christopher said. “It wasn’t given to me; I excelled and took it. I have . . . regrets.”