“I knew before I can remember that when She was lost, I should write that and give it to You,” Hilfa said.

“Do you know what it says?” Thetis asked.

“No,” Hilfa said. He squatted down where he was, on the rug in the middle of the floor, sitting back on his haunches the way I had seen him do so often on the boat. It looked uncomfortable and unnatural, because human legs don’t bend comfortably that way, but I’d grown used to the fact that Saeli ones did. He was much greener than normal; the pinkish swirls that normally covered his skin only visible now in the center of his chest and back.

“Do you know where Athene is, or how she came to be lost?” Hermes asked, for the first time taking a sip of his wine.

“Not unless it says so there,” Hilfa said, gesturing to the paper. Pytheas was reading it intently and didn’t look up.

“Do you know what you are?” Thetis asked. I thought about Thetis and Marsilia opening the box Athene had told them not to open unless she was lost, and finding Hilfa inside. I understood why they had opened it. All the same, I wouldn’t have done it. You learn patience, fishing. Marsilia was starting to learn some now, working on the boat, but she hadn’t had a scrap of it when she’d first come to me.

“I don’t know. I think I am perhaps a hero.”

“A hero, the child of a god?” Marsilia was frowning. “One of the Saeli gods?”

“That is my guess,” Hilfa said, looking at Hermes, and then away. “But I can’t say. I don’t know where I come from, where I belong. I don’t want to go there. I like it here. I like the fish and the sea.”

“The wind and the waves,” I said. It was what he had said that afternoon.

He turned to me for a moment with the expression I thought was a real smile, then back to Marsilia. “I like Jason and Dion,” he said. “I like the boat. I like you and Thetis. I want to stay in the City. I want to take oath. I didn’t ask until now, because it wasn’t just until you knew.”

“Nobody’s going to make you leave—” Thetis began, setting down her empty winecup at her feet beside Pytheas’s full one.

“Don’t make any promises,” Marsilia said, cutting across her. “We will need to debate this. I think many of us will support Hilfa’s desire. I certainly will, but this is important.”

“What good is it you being consul, Marsilia, if—” Thetis began.