Thus, walking now, and staring at sand and rocks later. A few times, he’d invited her join him atop the tower, to stare into the braziers there. She suspected he saw something in those dancing flames, but to her, it was just pretty patterns and soothing quiet.
As she passed beyond the spice field, a scream echoed out from the farmer’s dwelling. He must have heard it too, for he took off at a mad dash back to his house. Pandora hesitated only a moment. Someone might need help. If it turned out to be a private family affair, she could leave. She broke into a run.
Inside, she found the farmer holding his wife in his arms. The woman shrieked like an animal, flailing about, clawing at the air and her husband both.
“Zoe!”
What in Hades’s infernal court? Pandora dropped to her knees and grabbed the woman’s wrists. Her fingernails were torn bloody. After a frantic glance around, Pandora spied why. The farmwife had seemingly tried to dig through the mudbricks of her house and actually broken off several nails.
“What’s wrong with her?” Pandora asked. “What happened?”
“Zoe …” the man moaned, seeming not to even hear Pandora.
Maybe some wine would calm the woman down. Pandora cast about the tiny farmhouse looking for an amphora. Beside the hearth she found one. Alongside a cracked ceramic vial. A hint of glistening, amber liquid wet the floor before the unlit hearth.
After a glance over her shoulder at the still oblivious husband and wife, Pandora sniffed the spill. A sweet fruity aroma tinged with some kind of exotic herbs. Definitely not wine or even Kemetian beer. That scent … Pandora had smelled that before. In Kalypso’s garden, that unidentifiable herb she’d noticed.
Her mind raced. Atlantis was plagued by Nectar, an Ambrosial facsimile being peddled to Men. Nectar addicts oft went mad, she’d heard. Maybe just like this farmwife.
Gnawing on her lip, she turned back to the woman. The farmer had managed to ease her into a bed and was dabbing at her brow with a cloth. There wasn’t aught Pandora could do for her, but if Nectar had spread into Marsa, then …
Ah. No, it hadn’t spread to here. It had come from here, hadn’t it? From the garden of the daughter of one of the Pleiades. Was Zeus right? Had the Pleiades been complicit in the distribution and spread of this drug? Pandora’s mind spun. Did it even matter? Even if the Nymph queens were guilty, Zeus’s response had been madness … but still it meant part of what happened on Atlantis fell at their feet.
After finding another cloth, Pandora mopped up what remained of the gilded fluid and wrapped up some of the ceramic shards as well. Prometheus needed to know what his grandniece was up to.
If he didn’t already.
Outside the farm, she hesitated. Prometheus had offered her a home and considerable generosity. It didn’t mean he’d want to hear his kin besmirched without proof.
Which meant Pandora needed more than a hint of a smell that might have been a mysterious herb. At the very least, she needed the herb itself. She needed to be certain of the truth.
Though she knew it for reckless, Pandora climbed the hill to Kalypso’s estate. The gate remained unbarred, so she slipped behind the wall. Keeping low, she crept around the house itself to the garden in the back.
The voices came to her before she reached the corner.
“He won’t act against Zeus,” a woman said. Daring to peek, Pandora spotted Kalypso and Kirke facing off against one another in the midst of the garden.
“He lost his status in the Ouranid League,” Kalypso objected.
Kirke scoffed. “After he betrayed them for Zeus, yeah. He won’t take any step that might risk him losing what remains of his empire. My father yet controls Helion, Thrinakia, and numerous smaller islands, you know? He is the most powerful Titan outside of Olympus. You think he’d jeopardize that?”
“Not even if it meant the chance to rule instead of licking Zeus’s sandals?”
Kirke folded her arms. “We don’t have any moves left right now. The best we can do is lay low and hope Zeus and his minions won’t associate us with the Nectar.”
“They just murdered my mother!” Kalypso blurted. “You want me to lay low? Shall I perhaps fetch a rod for them to beat me with while I’m at it?”
The Heliad glowered at the other Nymph. “You think I’ve no quarrel with them? But if you don’t want to join the Pleiades in the Underworld, you have to bide your time. Sell what’s left of the stock. We cannot afford any chance of discovery right now. I can always make more when things have quieted a little.”
“You’re leaving.” Kalypso fair spat the words in accusation.
“For now. Laying low, remember.”
Kalypso groaned and stormed back into the house. Pandora pressed herself flat against the wall until she was certain Kirke had walked off as well.
Her heart hammered in her chest. Maybe she ought to just leave. Their words had confirmed their guilt—of both of them!
But what if Prometheus wanted more proof? She slipped to her knees, crawling forward into the garden. And if the Titan already knew what his niece was about? Well, then Pandora might in fact be damning herself. Too late to worry on that now, though. She crept up to the unknown herb and dug her fingers into the dirt so as to ease out as much of the roots as possible. It had little white bulbs and looked so innocuous. Could it really be an ingredient in a drug insidious enough to have sparked such slaughter on the acropolis island?
Plant in hand, she crawled up to the estate’s wall. She dare not go back out the front while not knowing where the Nymphs were. But the wall was only about
