Klymene looked at Kallikles again, but he didn’t look at her. She caught my eye, and I spread my hands. I didn’t know what to say to her. I was also horrified that she had voted against Father, but if he was prepared to deal with it, so was I. She was Klymene, Mother’s friend, Kallikles’s mother. I had known her all my life.

“Kallikles,” she said.

He turned to her. “We won’t have a feud, since Father doesn’t want one, but you can’t expect me to feel the same toward you.”

“That’s fair,” she said. She turned and went below, moving as if she had aged twenty years in the last half hour.

25. Arete

25

ARETE

The voyage home was strange. On the voyage out, even during the storm, we’d had a sense of adventure, of the world opening before us. I know I wasn’t the only one who felt like that. Ficino had wanted to find the Trojan heroes. We had all sung in the evenings. We were sailing into the unknown, and we looked forward to what we would find. It was a voyage of discovery. The voyage home was a journey through anti-climax. I stood my regular watch, but all the joy had gone out of it. The ship still felt alive, and the sky and the sea and the islands were still beautiful, but that was all. Erinna seemed to be avoiding me, after the conversation on the masthead. She was polite when I spoke to her, but uncomfortable. I wasn’t sorry I had saved her life, how could I be? But I cried myself to sleep missing her, and missing Ficino, who might still be alive if I hadn’t thrown myself into the fight. I had always been told that all actions have consequences. Now I was starting to understand what that meant.

We had envoys aboard to Kallisti from Lucia—to all the five cities. And we had people who wanted to go to other Lucian cities, and a handful like Nikias who wanted to come back to the Remnant. There were no more secrets about where the Lucian cities were. Timon had given Maecenas a map, a beautiful thing, drawn like an illuminated manuscript, embellished with dolphins and triremes, with all their cities neatly marked.

“Ah,” Father said, when he saw it, and then when we looked at him curiously he just said “Beautifully drawn.”

We called at the Lucian cities, one after another, where the news that Kebes was dead and the Goodness destroyed was met each time with shock and horror. Aristomache tried to explain to them that it wasn’t really our fault, but it was hard to avoid feeling guilty nevertheless.