Ikaros was looking green, not the way Saeli are green, but the way pale-skinned humans turn green when they’re about to be sick. He walked rapidly into the fountain room, and I soon heard the sound of him tossing his guts up joining the familiar sound of Marsilia doing the same. Almost everyone gets queasy sometimes on boats and has to spew. I might have felt the same way if I’d found out somebody I’d been to bed with was actually Jathery in disguise. The thought of it was a bit stomach-churning.

“I couldn’t tell you. Do you understand, Jason?” Hilfa asked quietly from beside me.

“I understand,” I said. He started to rock to and fro again. I put my arms around him.

Thetis picked up the papers Marsilia had dropped and sat down with them in Pytheas’s empty chair. She glanced towards the fountain room.

“Joy to you, Sokrates, I’m delighted to meet you, I have heard so much about you,” Arete said.

“I hear you’re Simmea’s daughter, and you see through falsehood. That must be useful in debate.”

“Not as much as you might think,” Arete said.

Sokrates laughed. “But you saw through Jathery pretending to be Hermes when he had fooled us all?”

“It seems so,” Arete said.

“How did none of us guess?” Sokrates asked.

“Deception and name-changing are part of what gla is,” Hilfa said.

“Even so, I’m surprised gla could fool Pytheas,” Sokrates said. “Hermes is his own brother.”

Ikaros came back in. He smiled wanly, picked up his wine-beaker and drained it, then sat down in the other chair.

“Where did Pytheas and Jathery go?” I asked.

“To yell at each other outside time, I expect. It’s a thing gods do,” Ikaros said, shaking his head. “They’ll be back, for those if nothing else.” He gestured at the papers Thetis was holding. She offered them to him, and he took them, turning them over curiously. “There are at least four alphabets here, and I think there was a different one on the piece I had, Etruscan maybe.”

Marsilia came back in, with the strands of her dark hair damp around her face where she must have dashed water on it. “Oh Marsilia, is there anything that could help?”

She shook her head. I passed her my winecup and she took a sip. She sat down on the floor in front of us.

Arete took the papers from Ikaros. “Oh, interesting, we need all of them together to be able to read them.”

“Did finding out who Jathery was make you sick?” Hilfa asked Marsi.

Marsilia nodded.

“Me too,” Ikaros said, smiling companionably at her. “I think many people would throw up on learning that a lover was really an alien god.”

She nodded again.