“I really don’t know,” Father said. “You’ll have to find out for yourselves, find your limits. You should be looking for your domain, what you care about, where you have excellence. I told you about that. It’s different for everyone. And go slowly, be careful. Test what you do. Think like philosophers. Pursue excellence, in this as in all things.”

I wanted to try things. But I was afraid, too. I wanted to be a god, or I had thought that I did. Now I wasn’t sure. I could see a chasm opening between me and everyone but Father and my brothers. I didn’t need the warning to hide my new powers from the others. It was the same way I felt about growing up. I wanted to be grown up, of course I did, to vote in the Assembly and be assigned a metal—gold, of course, and there wasn’t much doubt I’d make it. At the same time I didn’t want to stop being a child, secure, looked after. There were ways that was comfortable. I’d always been the youngest in the family, and there were advantages to that. There were advantages to being human. Not the only one Father ever talked about, dying and being reborn as a completely new person. I couldn’t see that as an advantage at all! I liked being me, and I wanted to keep on doing it. The advantages I could see were more to do with being like everyone else, living the kind of life we all lived. Having somebody love me one day, even if it couldn’t be somebody as wonderful as Erinna. Being excellent but still relatively normal. Like Mother, I thought, instead of like Father. But I had the power now. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t.

“I want to be free and choose for myself,” I said, as we came out of the trees again just above the beach. I hadn’t disliked feeling in the hand of Fate. But the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to feel that again. Fate and Necessity are what binds the gods. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be bound that way.

“Then keep away from gods,” Father said, looking over his shoulder at me, half-smiling. Then suddenly he looked serious. “One thing you will have enough power to do now, all of you, is reach the gods with your prayers. Be careful what you pray, and what you ask and whose attention you draw.”