“You have to take me to Delos,” he said to Father, as soon as he understood how it had happened.

“It isn’t an unmitigated blessing,” Kallikles said. He hadn’t found a way to tell Rhea about his powers yet.

Euklides looked at Kallikles with cold dislike. “Let me be the judge of that.”

Phaedrus wasn’t home because he was going around the city healing everyone. I missed his friendly presence in the family argument. Neleus wasn’t home either, but then I’d barely seen him since the first afternoon when we came back, when Father had sung to us in the garden. He was spending a lot of time with Nikias, and also with Erinna. He was also working hard, with Maia and Manlius, on arranging the conference.

“If there’s another voyage, and if I have any say, I’ll make sure you get to visit Delos,” Father said. “And Alkibiades and Porphyry if they want to go. And maybe I should arrange it for Fabius in Lucia too.”

“If there isn’t another voyage, could we get there anyway?” Euklides asked. “Could you fly that far with me, Arete?”

“I don’t know. It’s a long way.”

“Could you fly to Amorgos and rest, and then to Naxos, and so on?” Kallikles suggested.

“I don’t know. I’ve never flown carrying anyone for longer than that time with you by the rock. There’s a big difference between flying for a few minutes and flying for hours. I’d want to try it somewhere I could land if I needed to rest, not over the open sea!”

“It’s a possibility anyway,” Euklides said.

“I hope it won’t come to that,” Father said. “They’ll have to send the Lucians home at the very least. And I expect we’ll have trade voyages, and missions of mercy helping the Lucians.”

“I wonder what powers I’ll have,” Euklides mused. “It seems so random.”

Perhaps it wasn’t as random as it seemed. I couldn’t quite see how my own powers fit together, but my brothers’ were beginning to make sense to me. I had spent one morning up on the mountain with Phaedrus, standing on the edge of the lava ready to swoop down and rescue him if he got into trouble. It didn’t bother me to see him walk through the lava, or when he diverted the flowing stream around himself. But I could hardly look when he lay down and sank into it.

“Didn’t you need to breathe?” I asked, when he came up after what felt like a long time.

“I could tell when I needed to,” he said. “And I did start to burn, but I healed myself.” And he had been thinking about developing an excellence of volcanoes before we went to Delos.