“It’s time,” he repeated firmly. “His apprenticeship is over. And when he has his powers, you won’t have to worry about who’s going to rescue him from Bologna, will you?”

“No, Father.” She looked down.

“Have you learned from this?”

“I have learned many lessons, including some about who to trust,” she said, looking at Jathery and then at me.

“And you?” he asked Jathery.

“Oh yes, incalculably much,” Jathery said, but Father seemed more interested in reading the hieroglyphs writhing over gla skin.

“After the debate on Plato, you will spend a year as servant to Hermes, in payment for stealing his name and form,” Father said.

Jathery lowered his bright eyelids over his eyes. “Yes,” gla said.

“And Hermes will go in your place to conceive Alkippe. He will always have been her father.”

Even as relief washed through me, I wondered what Hermes would think about that particular command from Father.

“Yes,” Jathery said, sounding a little relieved.

“And you will spend ten years in service to me, as messenger.” As punishment for pretending to carry Father’s messages, he would really carry some. Ten years was a hard punishment, but not undeserved.

“Yes,” Jathery said again. “It is worth it. Platonism is good for the Saeli. It gives them new thoughts, new chances, a better future. It helps them to be free. And freedom is my greatest gift.”

“But Plato is all becoming so much more ordinary,” Athene protested. “So few of the Golds are really proper philosophers, whatever they call themselves.”

Father smiled to himself.

“We thought you might be angry,” I said. “I thought of coming to you, but Athene wrote that she thought you might be angry and even use the Darkness of the Oak. We were afraid. But then as soon as I was there I knew you wouldn’t be. We didn’t know what it was like, out there.”

“You understood,” he said. “And when you understand things, I understand them too. It saves me learning it all myself. I’m not likely to throw all this away and start again while you keep learning things for me. The same way you had to learn how to be a human, I have had to learn how to be a god.”

“When we learn things?” I asked. Even though learning to be human had been so hard, it was even harder to imagine him learning how to be a god, learning personal time and consequence after beginning out there. “And when we undertake projects towards better understanding?”

“Yes. All of you.”

“But some of us please you more than others because we learn more new things? And that’s why you always forgive Athene?”

“Yes.” Athene was staring straight ahead, but her owl was glaring at Jathery.