“I haven’t forgotten anything,” she said, taking my hand. “Only it all seems distant, like you said, and also very emotional, felt not thought. Is it like that for you?”

“Well it was certainly very emotional,” I said, diplomatically. I wondered how much she had really lost.

She released my hand and we all began walking up the slope, away from Lethe. “Thank you,” she said, and she didn’t mean for the help out of the river. “I’m sorry I didn’t trust you and made it so complicated. I thought you’d go to Father and I was afraid of what might happen.”

“Florent-Claude sends his love,” I said.

“I’ll go to Father now and tell him everything.”

“Do you want us to come, or would you rather see him alone?” I asked. There was a grey glimmer of true light ahead. We were almost out of the Underworld and close to Olympos.

“I can manage alone, but I’ll accept your offer of company,” she said.

“And you, Jathery? You can go and sort things out about Alkippe now. You probably have other things to do, too? Eggs to hatch, names to change, Saeli to fool? So we won’t see you again for a long time?”

The writing on Jathery’s skin shifted and changed, and I was sorry I couldn’t make it out, even if it probably now read “Apollo sucks.”

“I agreed to abide by Father’s judgement,” gla said. “As for Alkippe, no.”

“No? What do you mean, no?”

Jathery blinked gla multicolored eyelids slowly. “I now feel Necessity forbidding me even more strongly than it compelled me before. Perhaps the existence of that child is the price we have paid.”

“No,” I protested. “You have to deal with that. It wouldn’t be right for Marsilia and Thetis and Alkippe to pay for what we have done. Necessity couldn’t require—” But of course it could, it could be that cruel. A bright philosophical child. Would they even remember she had existed? I felt much more sympathetic to Thetis’s wailing than I had been when I heard it.

“We can ask Father about that too,” Athene said.