“I didn’t know for sure Delos would affect you,” Father said. “And I didn’t want to disappoint you if it didn’t. I did tell Arete that it might help.”

“Was it our souls?” I asked.

“Your souls and my island,” he said. “What happened?”

“Nothing much, really,” Phaedrus said. “We went to the spring and waited, and Arete came and gave us water. That’s all. But I’ve never felt anything like it.”

“It felt right,” I said. “It felt like knowing what was right and doing it because it was inevitable. There wasn’t any choice.”

“Then you were in the hand of Necessity, at the edge of your Fate, doing what was inevitable,” Father said. “All of you. Once you were on Delos, you had to go through that ritual, and you knew it and you did it. The sprinkling on the shore is the echo of that.”

“I hated it,” Kallikles said. “Not at the time. At the time it just felt right, the way Arete said. But the more I think about it the more it felt like having my own self taken over. I wasn’t in control of what I did. And afterward when Klymene spoke to me it took a real effort to answer. I felt drained, even though all I’d done was walk through the woods and drink some water.”

Father put his hand on Kallikles’s shoulder. “It’s hard for anyone to resist Fate and Necessity.”

“I didn’t even try,” I said, and saw my brothers nod. None of us had tried.

“What did it do?” Kallikles asked.

“Connects you to me, to the world. If you weren’t my children it would mark you as votaries. As it is, it marks you as what you are. My children. Heroes.”

“How does it work?”

“It’s a Mystery.”

“Mother always said you said that when you didn’t understand something,” I said.

“That’s exactly what a Mystery is, something the gods don’t properly understand,” he said. “Fate and Necessity are the bounds set on us. All of us. Fate is the share our souls chose before birth. Necessity is the edges of that.”

“If we were marked as heroes, did the others notice?” Phaedrus asked.

“I don’t know, I wasn’t there. Did they?”

“Ficino noticed something, but he didn’t say anything,” I said. “And maybe Klymene—she was looking at Kallikles in a funny way. But nobody said anything. Is it going to happen again?”

He spread his hands. “I don’t know. If you go back to Delos, probably. And in Delphi, perhaps.”

“You said it marks us,” Phaedrus said, coming back to that. “Who does it mark us to?”

“The gods,” Father said, casually. “If you meet them, they will know what you are, now.”

“But not Porphyry and Alkibiades and Euklides back on Kallisti?” Phaedrus asked.