“Until my children are ready to be their pantheon, which shouldn’t be long now. Why? Did you think Athene would end up getting stuck with it, after she tired of the project and moved on?”

He grinned. “It’s hard to imagine. She always squeaks out of things. Well, you’d better get on and take care of them for her.”

“For Father,” I said. I was puzzled. I wondered why Father had sent this message. He must have known that I wouldn’t neglect Plato. I didn’t understand why there was any urgency about it. But I’d do it, of course. Nobody understood how Father knew anything, or how he prioritizes. Nor, for that matter, did we have any idea how he experiences time. He was there before it, after all. Mortals find it difficult to understand how we understand time, living outside it, but that’s simple, compared to how it is for Father.

We’re bound by our own actions, and, naturally, whether we’re in or out of time, by Fate and Necessity. There’s no getting around them. They make changing time extremely hard, and harder when we get away from our core concerns. And we’re limited by Father’s edicts, but only in so far as we respect them. They don’t have the same inevitable force. If I got caught up with Fate or Necessity it wouldn’t really be a matter of choice—resisting a force like that is almost impossible, even for me. But I could simply ignore Father’s message if I wanted to. It was usually a terrible idea to ignore such things, because Father does know more than the rest of us and generally means well, and also because he could have made my life a misery if I went against him. There was this one time at Troy—but that’s a different story. But it’s not like being caught up with Necessity, which is a compulsion on the soul.

“What’s this I hear about you playing my gift upside-down to beat somebody playing Athene’s syrinx?” Hermes asked.

Hermes had invented the lyre when he was three days old, as a way to win my friendship after stealing some of my cows. He’d given it to me. He’d also promised never again to steal anything else of mine, a promise I didn’t quite trust him to keep. He was much too fond of playing tricks.

“Yes, I played the lyre upside-down,” I acknowledged. “Won the contest that way, too.” The whole messy business seemed long ago and almost unimportant. I do enjoy being an Olympian and having a proper perspective.

“It sounds like something I’d do.”

“Feel free to teach yourself to play it that way,” I said, and grinned at him.

“Well, joy to you with all of it,” wing-footed Hermes said, smiling as he departed.