The fountain room was as full as the sleeping room, but there was nobody over ten in the garden. It was far too cold to linger out of doors unless you were young enough to hurtle around in a chasing game. Hermes turned to me as I was snicking my jacket closed. The clouds had parted and the winter stars shone clear and cold above us. Hermes didn’t seem to feel the cold at all, though he was naked. I was almost knocked over by two of my young cousins, who dashed past me racing to be first to slap their palms on the herm. Hermes looked at them wryly. “I take it I don’t have any other children here. That you know of?”

“Not that I know of, no,” I said, flustered by the question.

“Only Alkippe?” The hurtling children broke around us as a wave breaks on a rock, and re-formed on the other side of us.

“Yes.” The affirmation came out much too quietly. I felt slightly sick and a little lightheaded. I took a deep breath and swallowed, which helped.

“I didn’t know she existed until now.” He frowned, staring over at the herm where the children were still dodging and squealing. “This is all terribly awkward. I was intending to pay court to your sister.”

Plato has extremely harsh things to say about jealousy, which I repeated to myself. I was struggling hard with this in my soul, as well as feeling all the physical symptoms, heat flushing my cheeks and hands and my stomach tightening. Then Pytheas appeared beside me. One instant he wasn’t there, the next he was, as if he’d taken a step from nowhere. He didn’t look the way he did in his statues—he was dressed normally, for one thing—but he didn’t look like the old man he’d been when I saw him a few days before. He looked not so much young as ageless. Yet I recognized him immediately as my grandfather.

“I thought you were in Alexandria,” he said, frowning at Hermes.

“Moving rapidly is my specialty,” Hermes said, with a teasing smile.

“Yes, but—”

“I’m here now,” Hermes said.

Pytheas was still frowning. “Well, it’s good that you came, you can test something for me. I was going to find Porphyry, but you’ll be better.”

“Let me finish with this first.”

“No, it’s important,” Pytheas said.

“So is this.”

“What, dallying with my granddaughter? Surely that can wait.” Pytheas smiled at me.

“We weren’t dallying,” I protested. My voice sounded strange in my ears.

“Necessity has me by the foot,” Hermes said.

I instinctively looked down at his feet. He had wings on his sandals. He hadn’t had those when I’d met him before. As I was looking down, the children noticed Pytheas and came running up, crowding round him asking questions.