I went back to Athene’s window seat. Nobody was in sight. A few people had been in the stacks, but they had fled when they saw my face. (Even without far-shooting arrows rattling on my shoulder, my wrath can have that effect on people.) I sat down and opened Athene’s secret compartment under the arm-rest. All I was thinking was of hiding Simmea’s notebooks. I wasn’t expecting anything to be there. Athene had been gone for almost twenty years. She’d had plenty of time to cover any traces she wanted to cover. But as I slid the notebooks in I felt that there was something there, stiff parchment, not paper. I pulled it out, curious.

It was a map of the Aegean, hand-drawn and colored, dolphins and triremes drawn in islandless spots on the lapis sea, but with all the islands and coasts drawn accurately. Kallisti was shown round, which meant it was a current map. The labeling was in the beautiful Renaissance Greek calligraphy that everyone in the City had learned, along with the corresponding Italic hand. Our city was marked, but not the other four cities on the island. There were cities marked in other places, some of them known to me, others strange. We didn’t have any maps like this, but anyone could have made it without too much trouble. We had parchment, we had the tools for making illuminated manuscripts, we even had accurate maps.

The thing that surprised me was the circle marked in red ink around a city on the northeastern edge of the island of Lesbos. The handwriting was entirely different from the rest of the map, it was a scrawl and nobody’s neat penmanship. This was clearly a later addition, drawn in after the map was made. “Goodness” it said. The handwriting was immediately recognizable. It was mine.

8. Arete

8

ARETE