“Oh, they might have seen them in paintings, if they were paying attention. And I’m sure Jathery knows exactly what she’s doing,” Ikaros said.

Some things fit together with that pronoun, so I dropped back to speak to Athene as we came into the station. “Did Ikaros—I mean, is Ikaros Hilfa’s human parent?”

“Yes,” she said, as we got onto the train. “It was voluntary, except that he didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know about Hilfa, or didn’t know what Jathery was?”

“He didn’t know either of those things.” We sat down together on a double seat.

“There’s more than one kind of rape,” I said, quietly.

“You would know about that,” she said.

“That’s unfair. I’ve been working on equal significance and volition for a long time now. I think I understand something about them.”

“I know all about the theory,” she said. She was looking at Ikaros, who was talking to Porphyry but still casting glances at Jathery. “I’m going to lose him. Father will give him powers, and he’ll make a good Olympian. We’ll work together sometimes, I know, but it won’t be the same.”

“If he’d stayed human he would have died and you’d have lost him that way,” I said, thinking of Simmea, and Hyakinthos, and other friends. “Children grow up. You have to let them go. Lovers—” I thought about her, as Septima, saying that there was a perfectly good bit of Catullus and corrected myself. “People you love, it’s the same. At least you’ll see him sometimes and be able to talk to him.”

“I didn’t meet you in the Laurentian Library,” she said.