Telchine (Secunda) Amelia Armstrong Windrose • Phaethusa,
Daughter of Helion and Neaera of Myriagon (Tertia) Vanity Bonfire Fair • Nausicaa, Daughter of Alcinuous and Arete (Quartinus) Colin Iblis mac FirBolg • Phobetor, son of Morpheus and Nepenthe Quentin Nemo • Eidotheia, child of Proteus and the Graeae
Headmaster Reginald Boggin • Boreas, of the North Wind
Dr. Ananias Fell • Telemus, Cyclopes
Mrs. Jenny Wren • Erichtho the Witch
Miss Christabel Daw • Thelxiepia the Siren
Grendel Glum • Grendel, son of Echidna
Dr. Miles Drinkwater • Mestor of Atlantis
Taffy ap Cymru • Laverna, Lady of Fraud
Lord Terminus • Zeus
The Great Queen, Lady Basilissa • Hera
Lord Pelagaeus, also called the Earthshaker • Poseidon
The Grain Mother • Demeter
Lord Dis, also called the Unseen One • Hades
The Maiden, also called Kore • Proserpine
Phoebus the Bright God, also called the Destroyer •
Apollo Phoebe, also called the Huntress • Artemis Lord Mavors • Ares Lady Cyprian • Aphrodite Trismegistus • Hermes Tritogenia, also called Lady Wisdom • Athena Mulciber • Hephaestus Lady Hestia Lord Anacreon, also called Lord Vintner and the Vine God • Dionysus
1.
I was dead for about half a day.
There was still a 'me,' a girl who woke up in the infirmary, but she only had my memories dated earlier than a fortnight ago. She was a suspicious girl, yes, and she knew her elders were up to something, and she was pretty sure she was not a human being.
But the last two weeks had never been, so she had never crawled through impossible secret passages with Vanity, never flown with Quentin, never seen the Old Gods sitting at their revelry at the meeting of the Board of Visitors and Governors, or learned the horrid tale of the Lamia. She never heard the ringing in a locked safe of the hypersphere shaking from the shock of the music of a siren. She never had a pancake fight with Colin on a morning when all the staff slept, the first day we ever made our own food for ourselves; she never followed Victor into the woods, walked across a snowy landscape that could not be the Gower Peninsula, and never saw a white ship from beyond the edge of the world.
I do not know what it was that happened during those events or during the imprisonment that followed. I cannot point to the moment.
But something had changed me. Amelia was a girl involved in playing an elaborate prank on her elders, keep-ing secrets from them, trying to find out about her past; serious, yes, but still a prank. She was doing it more to please Victor than for herself. Amelia occupied only the three normal dimensions, like everyone else.
Phaethusa was a woman involved in a war.
It was Amelia who woke up in the infirmary.
2.
Amelia spent about an hour simply lying in her bed in the infirmary while a thin and severe Doctor Fell and an equally severe Sister Twitchett fretted over her, took her temperature, bent their heads together over charts.
Finally Dr. Fell said, 'The medications I have been giving you once a month are for some reason ineffective. Are you certain you have been taking the doses as prescribed?'
Amelia tried to hide her dread. Of course she had not been taking those damned medications. Victor did not want her to.
She said, 'But, of course, Doctor. You know what's best.'
'Znf I I also know you do not believe that. You have reached that unfortunate age where you have all of life's answers and you know everything more perfectly and more profoundly than your elders. But you are a bright girl; you get good marks in math. If I am 3.4375 times your age, and not cognitively deficient, surely I have 3.4375 times your experience and knowledge?'
She blinked up at him. 'I am sure I don't know, Doctor. How old am I?'
'Sixteen. Now get up. The Sister will bring you your clothes. Obey instructions in the future or you will find yourself in this place again, or perhaps in someplace worse.'
3.
Amelia saw two things that struck her as slightly peculiar and 'sensed' one thing that was so very peculiar as to be without any sane explanation. Did she ask questions? Did she ask Dr. Fell for help? She did not.
Amelia might have been a child, but she was not a stupid one.
The first odd thing she saw, through the disinfectant plastic drapes hanging around her bed, and through a crack in the open door to the waiting room, was Sister Twitchett, carefully examining the pockets and inner lining of the skirt and blouse she had gotten from Amelia's room. She had an instrument shaped like a horseshoe (a metal detector?), and she was rubbing it slowly up and down the seams. With her other hand, the Sister was feeling every
