Discord’s Apple (18 page)

“You’d think she’d let it go. It’s just an apple. Aphrodite bribed her out of it fair and square.”

A soft-spoken goddess who sat by the reflecting pool at the edge of the courtyard, touching her fingers to the water, looked up and raised her voice. “She used to be stronger. She used to be Queen in her own right. That was when mothers and priestesses were more important than warriors. Most of
you are too young to remember a time when she was not always jealous.”

She had long golden hair, the color of barley at harvest, and far-seeing eyes the blue of a summer sky. She frowned, creasing her face, making her seem old, which meant that the winter season was upon the earth. She was Demeter.

None of the others could say anything trite after this. They could not mock her sadness or her memories. While they might have blamed her for bringing a somber mood to their festivities, no one did. For her beauty and thoughtfulness, she was welcome everywhere.

Apollo brought out his lyre and played a light tune, and the deities seemed content to sit back and drink their wine.

Sinon went to Demeter and got down on one knee to pour her wine. Out of them all, she understood sadness.

Dad?” Evie tapped on his bedroom door. She’d wanted to check on him last night, but had hesitated at the late hour. If he was resting, she didn’t want to disturb him. And if he wasn’t okay . . . surely he’d have said something. He had a telephone. He could call 911.

“Dad?” She knocked louder. “I made coffee, you want some? Dad?” Her heart thudded. How long should she wait before she burst in? What if he was hurt? Unconscious? She closed her eyes and rested her forehead on the wall. “Dad?”

“Huh? Evie? What’s wrong?” His voice came muffled, slurred, as if struggling to wakefulness.

She exhaled a relieved breath. “Nothing, I just wanted to see”
—if you’re all right—
“if I could get you some coffee or something.”

“Come in so I can hear you.”

Carefully, she pushed open the door.

Her father was propped on a mound of pillows. His half-lidded gaze shifted slowly to track her progress. She found a chair in the corner and brought it near his bed.

“Can I bring you breakfast?” she said, whispering, as if her voice would rattle him. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him eat anything.

“Not hungry. Appetite’s shot to hell.” He shook his head and shifted against the pillows. He wore a T-shirt and held the bed’s comforter flat across his waist. He looked as sick as Evie
could have imagined him looking: pale to a shade of grayness, his voice muffled, his manner vacant. For a moment, she wished she’d stayed in L.A. Then he took a deep breath, gathering the energy to focus on her and speak clearly. “Is that Alex character gone?”

“Yeah.”

He frowned, an expression she remembered from her high school days.

“Don’t look at me like that, he didn’t stay the night or anything. He’s totally not my type.”

He chuckled, tipping his head back and closing his eyes. “Whatever you say.”

“I’ve been trying to find out who he is. He never has a straight answer. When I asked last night, he gave me a copy of the
Aeneid
and walked out.”

“The
Aeneid
? If he’s in there, do you know how old that would make him?”

He spoke as if there were nothing strange about it. She could tell him about Hera and he wouldn’t be surprised.

She did some quick math, back to when the Trojan War was thought to have taken place. “Thirty-two hundred years or so.”

“Hm. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone that old.”

So—whom had he met that made a character from the
Aeneid
showing up seem not out of the ordinary?

She managed to convince herself that he wasn’t going to die in the next few moments. Sitting back in her chair, she looked around. The room was an amalgam: the furniture—the four-poster bed, oak dresser, beat-up vanity table—had been here in her grandparents’ time. The faded floral comforter had been her parents’ as long as she could remember, and his wallet and watch were sitting on the dresser, where he always kept them.

On the nightstand by the bed was a lamp with a half-dozen orange pill bottles clustered around its base. She wondered how many of them were painkillers. His breathing was slow,
deep, like he was on the verge of falling asleep. Like he’d been drugged. She should go away and let him sleep.

She was about to stand when he spoke.

He took a long time, saying the words slowly and methodically; she waited motionless and patient. “When I was growing up here, I think my father went into the Storeroom once, to get something for someone who came to the door. Twelve-league boots. The guy was on a quest. I don’t remember what for anymore. In the last month, I’ve had a dozen people come asking for what belongs to them, and that doesn’t count the ones who’ve come who don’t have a right to anything. It’s like—the Storeroom is dispersing. Magic’s going back into the world.”

It was hard to believe in magic in a world where things like the Seattle bombing happened. Then again, maybe magic was the only way to stop things like Seattle happening.

“Dad—why did you put Mom’s papers in the Storeroom?”

“Wanted to save them,” he said. His eyes opened to slits, and a different self seemed to look out of them. “Do you know who that was, asking for the sword?”

She nodded, and he nodded back.

“Do you know what it means, if Merlin and Arthur have come back?”

She shook her head, but the movement changed. Again, she nodded, because somehow she knew. “The stories,” she said.

He winced, stiffening, clutching the edge of the comforter. “Joints,” he muttered. “Hip. Back. Everything.”

She almost reached for him. Her muscles flinched to do so. But there was nothing she could do. In another heartbeat, his face relaxed, and the spell went away.

“When Britain needs its King again,” he said. “He’ll come. Something’s going to happen, Evie.”

“I know,” she said, thinking of Hera, of the apple that
started a war that changed the world. What would happen if the apple went back into the world?

A calm smile softened his face. “I know you do.”

She knew, the same way she knew to find the glass slippers and that nothing in the basement would kill Alex. The same way she knew she couldn’t let Hera into the house.

For each thing she knew, for every new insight she learned about the Storeroom and everything inside it, her father slid a little closer to death.

Evie waited for someone to knock at the door. Someone would. She’d done nothing but answer the door since she got here. Well, that wasn’t true. It only seemed like it. But if she worried about the door and who’d be at it next, she wasn’t worrying about her father. He’d fallen asleep in the middle of a sentence, speculating about what Arthur would be like and when he would return, speaking with an awe-inspiring certainty that it would happen, that it wasn’t just a story.

She left him alone, went to the living room to lie on the sofa, and sobbed into a pillow so she wouldn’t wake him up. Mab came and put her chin on Evie’s leg, gazing at her with sad brown eyes. Evie wondered where she’d come from, if she was another piece of the magic that protected the house and bound her and her father to it. Another magical artifact, emerging when she was needed.

She wondered if Alex would come back. She still couldn’t guess who he was, but she kept returning to the descriptions of the fall of Troy in the
Aeneid.
He might have been part of Aeneas’s crew, which sailed to Italy and founded Rome. But he’d said the language on the apple was Greek. She’d even found a book on the shelves, a coffee table book with lots of photos and illustrations, and a chart showing the script from
the apple: Linear B, the language of Mycenae from around the time of the Trojan War.

Virgil provided a solution to what Evie had always thought was a supreme failure of logic in the story: Why had the Trojans been so eager to bring such a bizarre and suspicious object as the horse into the city? The answer: The Greeks must have left behind a spy to convince the Trojans that the horse would bring them luck. Odysseus, master of the plan of the horse, chose his friend Sinon, a persuasive and credible speaker.

Evie could see them: they must have known that if Sinon failed to tell his story convincingly, the Trojans would kill him along with all those within the horse. It was not just his own life he was offering to sacrifice. He must have known that the lives of all his friends and comrades rested on his words. He would have been honored and flattered that Odysseus had asked him. He would have been afraid. But Odysseus’s hand on his shoulder, his intense gaze, would have made him confident. Odysseus would have given Sinon the bruises and chafed wrists that lent proof to his tale. It was hard, beating his friend, but he would not have given the task to another. For his part, Sinon would have thrown himself into the role. So much depended on it.

At least that was how Evie would write it, if she were telling the story.

While many tales traced the fates of the heroes of the Trojan War, she couldn’t find out what happened to Sinon. Not in any of the stories, not so much as a line from a poem that said he was among the company that traveled home with Odysseus and was caught up in those adventures. She would have expected to find him there, if he had survived the sacking of the city. His name faded from the record. He might even have been a pure invention of Virgil’s, an ultimate example of Greek treachery, a well-wrought piece of propaganda. He could have been killed—but surely the story would have said so.

Or he could have dropped out of history. The gods who backed Troy must have been furious with him. Any one of them could have laid a curse on him. If they were anything like Hera . . . Evie’s skin prickled, thinking of what they could do to him.

Sinon, then. The Liar. Why didn’t that make her feel any better about Alex?

She thought about going to look for him. Hopes Fort wasn’t that big. He might even have been hanging around the house still, watching, as he’d been doing all week. She could go into the yard and yell
Sinon
and see if he answered. But she didn’t leave the house, because she wanted to stay near in case her father needed her.

She didn’t have to stay and do nothing. She had work. She’d left Tracker in a fix. She pulled her laptop to her and returned to the story.

Tracker, alone on the tundra, hoped she would be able to keep her bearings. She felt right on the edge of losing herself. And if something happened out here, the chances of the others rescuing her were slim.

Now how was she going to get out of
this
fix? Talon could sweep in and rescue her. It wouldn’t be any more unlikely than a dozen other storylines she’d done. It would return the characters back to the main plot. But this was supposed to be Tracker’s story. This was Tracker’s chance to shine.

She couldn’t spend the whole time wallowing in self-doubt, either. So all Evie had to do was get her to the bunker at the gulag, then see what happened next. Her hands paused over the keys. She looked over the back of the sofa to the kitchen door, waiting for someone to knock.

Her father emerged around suppertime, moving slowly but appearing alert. Evie rushed to help him, and of all the wonders,
he let her. She heated up soup for him. He ate half a bowl and a few crackers, and seemed pleased with the accomplishment. They spoke little, commenting on the weather, passing on the gossip from town.

“Did anyone stop by?” he said.

“No.”

He limped back to bed, stopping on the way to scratch Mab’s back. Evie was proud of herself for not asking, yet again, if he needed help, if he was all right. She just had to hope she could get to him in time if he stumbled.

She returned to the sofa in the living room and tried to write. How long could she keep Tracker wandering on the tundra? Because when she reached her destination, Evie would have to figure out how she was going to beat up the bad guys and rescue the prisoner. All by herself.

Both she and her laptop fell asleep after midnight.

In the morning, her mobile phone and the house’s landline rang at the same time. Evie started awake, remembered where she was, and sat frozen while she decided which one to answer first. In the end she answered her mobile, which was closer and didn’t require a mad dash to the kitchen. Then the house phone stopped ringing.

“They’ve done it,” Bruce said as greeting. “They’ve fucking done it.”

Bruce kept harping on about the world, the news, everything, when her own world had shrunk to this house and her father. She ought to care—the world situation was going to hell. Even without watching the news, she could sense the tension in Bruce’s voice. She ought to care. But she only felt tired.

“Who’s done what?”

“Congress voted to back China. Who’d have guessed? Ten years ago, China was the fucking ninth level of hell, and now we’re
allies
? It’s unreal.”

She winced. “Wasn’t China backing terrorists? The Mongolians? We’re not supposed to be backing a country that backs terrorists.”