Hera did not stay frightened for long.
The pale shock of Poseidon's death drained from her face, and what replaced it was colder and far more patient. She smoothed her robes, stepped out of the trench, and looked at the two women in front of her the way a gardener looks at weeds.
"So you have teeth," she said. "Good. It would be tedious to kill something that did not."
She lifted one hand and the earth answered.
Green shoots broke through the churned mud around her feet, then vines, then a swelling bulb that rose higher than a man and split open with a soft wet sound. A flower unfolded from it, enormous and pink, each petal the size of a banner. It trembled once, and a fine rosy mist poured out and rolled across the plain in a slow, sweet tide.
"Ais," Alcy said. "Don't breathe it."
Ais had already stepped back, wings flaring. The mist reached her and curled around her ankles and her wrists, and then it did something strange. It slid away. The wind that lived in her blood stirred, old and green and stubborn, and the mist could find no purchase on a body that had been made by a forest spirit's sacrifice. She stood untouched in the rose-colored haze.
Alcy was not so lucky.
She had held her breath, but the mist did not need her lungs. It sank into her skin, and it was sweet, and it knew her. It had been waiting for her for years.
The plain tilted. The rain turned warm. When Alcy raised her head, Hera was gone, and a woman with golden hair and golden eyes stood in front of her with a drawn sword and a calm, tired face. Ais. Her friend. Her sister in everything but blood.
Beside her, where Ais had stood a moment ago, a tall old woman in green and white robes watched with a smile like a knife.
"There she is," said the woman in the robes, and it was Hera's voice coming out of Ais's mouth. No, out of Ais's face, which was wrong, which was backward, which Alcy could not make sense of. "Alcy. Listen to me. That thing is not Ais. That is Hera. She has been wearing her face. Kill her, now, before she kills us both."
The woman with the golden hair turned toward Alcy and spoke in a voice that was Ais's own. "Alcy. Look at me. Listen. It is a trick."
"Shut up," Alcy said. Her sword came up. "Shut your damn mouth. I know you and your tricks!"
She charged.
Ais caught the first blow on Desperate and felt it go through her arms into her teeth. It was a stroke meant to cleave a boulder, and the strength behind it belonged to a demigoddess who had spent her whole childhood being taught how to kill things much larger than herself. She turned it aside by an inch and let it slam into the earth, throwing a fan of mud into the air.
"Alcy!" Ais ducked a second swing. "It's me! It's Ais!"
"I know exactly who you are, Mother!" Alcy's voice cracked on the last word. The sword came around in a flat arc and Ais threw herself backward, wings snapping wide, and the blade passed so close it shaved a lock of golden hair.
Behind them, wearing Ais's face, Hera stood at the edge of the fight with one hand pressed to her chest. Her eyes were wide and frightened, and she looked as if she were afraid for Alcy's life. It was a flawless performance. She had given it before.
"Alcy, please!" she cried, in Ais's sweet, steady voice. "She is going to kill me! Strike her down! You can do it, you are the strongest of us, you always were!"
Each word landed like a hook in Alcy's chest.
She remembered the pits. She remembered being five years old, knee-deep in the mud of a training ground with a wooden sword too big for her hands, and a wolf the size of a pony circling her in the dark. She remembered the bite. She remembered the voice that called down from the platform above, Hera's voice, bored and dry, telling her to stop crying and get up. She remembered the beasts that came after the wolves. Bears. Serpents. Things with too many legs. A girl was a tool, Hera said, and tools were sharpened or they were thrown away. She had never once had a birthday. She had never once had a bedtime story. She had had a sword and a corpse to stand over, and a goddess watching with her chin on her hand.
She remembered the cup.
It had been a feast day, and Zeus had been drunk and laughing and had said, in front of everyone, that when the girl was grown she would make a fine addition to his bed. That night Hera had brought her a cup of warm milk with her own hands, smiling, and Alcy had been seven years old and had never been brought anything warm in her life. She drank it. She had spent three days afterward on the floor of a stone cell, vomiting blood, her hair coming out in handfuls, listening to her mother's footsteps pass the door without pausing.
"Stop talking," Alcy whispered. Her eyes were burning. "Stop talking in her voice."
"She is lying to you," the woman with Ais's face said softly. "Look at her. Look at what she is. You know what she did. Kill her."
The woman across the field, the one who was really Ais, had lowered her sword an inch. "Alcy," she said, and her voice shook. "I would never hurt you. I swear it on my mother's name."
"Don't LIE TO ME"
Alcy's sword came down with everything she had left, and Ais barely turned it. The two blades screamed against each other, and sparks scattered across the wet grass. Alcy's other hand dropped to the pouch at her belt, and the fingers closed on a small, warm weight.
The golden apple.
She could end this in two seconds. She could hold the sky on her shoulders and crush the thing in front of her to red mist, and it would all be over. She could do it right now.
'I will not need these crutches.'
She had promised herself that, on her knees in the dirt, covered in a monster's blood. She had promised herself that the next time would be the last. Her fingers hovered over the pouch, trembling, and in front of her the face of the woman she hated most in the world looked at her with grief.
Alcy let go of the apple.
Instead she drew her free hand across the flat of her sword, and black fire crawled along the steel, white-edged and silent, the same flame that had unmade a sea god and a thunder god and a hundred other certainties. It drank the rain. It lit her face from below.
The pink mist around the blade simply ended.
It did not burn. It stopped, the way a sentence stops when the person speaking is cut off. In the space of a heartbeat the sword's glow swept across the plain, and the world snapped back into place around Alcy. The wrong face sagged and became a stranger's. The woman in green and white robes turned and was Ais, golden hair stuck to her cheeks with rain, one wing bent where Alcy's blow had caught it, breathing hard.
And across the field, in a borrowed face that was beginning to slip, Hera laughed.
"Oh, that is wonderful." She wiped a tear from the corner of one eye. "You swung at her for a full minute. You nearly took her head. Tell me, Heracles, how does it feel to be so very, very stupid?"
Alcy stared at her own hands. She stared at the sword. At Ais, who had not hurt her once, who had taken every blow and kept saying her name.
"Ais," she said hoarsely. "I..."
"It is all right." Ais straightened and lifted Desperate. "Later."
She went for Hera.
Wind flared under her wings and she crossed the distance in a green streak, Desperate flashing, aimed at the heart. Hera shrieked and threw up a hand, and the plain filled with a thick rosy haze again, so close that Ais felt it brush her lips. She cut through it. She was a spirit's daughter, and it only tickled.
But the black fire was gone from her blade, because it had never been on it. It had only ever burned on Alcy's.
When Ais's sword met Hera's body, the goddess winked out of the way, and reappeared in the wreck of the pink flower with her hands raised high. The haze surged. It caught Alcy a second time, silent and sweet.
Alcy's eyes slid out of focus.
"Alcy!" It was Ais's voice again, sobbing and frightened, and it came from the woman lying in the mud in front of her, one hand stretched out. "Alcy, help me! Hera is going to kill me, she is right behind me, please!"
Alcy turned, and the woman standing behind the figure in the mud was Hera, with a drawn sword and a face she knew. Her heart slammed. She lifted her blade, and the black fire snapped to life along its edge, and she stepped forward.
Then she stopped.
Her sword hung in the air. She stood in the rain with her chest heaving, and for the longest moment she did not move at all.
"No," she said.
The woman in the mud blinked. "Alcy?"
"I am not doing this again." Her voice was low and rough. "I am not going to swing at anyone until I know. I do not care how long it takes. Say my name. Say something only she would know."
Silence.
The woman on the ground stared up at her. Then, slowly, the pleading look slid off her face like a mask sliding off a wall. She laughed. It was a delighted, ugly sound, and as she laughed she rose halfway to her knees, and her features rippled and dissolved into the sharp, ancient face of the Queen of Heaven.
"Oh, you are still a clever little beast," Hera purred. "A pity. I was enjoying it."
Her hand slashed down.
A yellow flower exploded out of the mud directly beneath the real Ais, who had been standing at Alcy's shoulder with her sword half raised. The petals peeled back and a thick amber mist belched out in a fountain, rolling over her face before she could turn. She gasped. She tried to fly and her wings stuttered. She tried to speak and a thin red line of blood ran from the corner of her mouth. She dropped to one knee, then both.
"Poison," Hera said pleasantly. "Slow, I am afraid. I do like to savor things. Do not worry, little wind. You will be dead long before it finishes."
Alcy was already moving.
Her hand dipped into the pouch and came out holding a single golden apple, and she threw it. It sailed across the choking haze in a gleaming arc, and Ais caught it in both shaking hands.
"Eat," Alcy said. "Now."
Ais bit into it. Light flared inside her like a sunrise. It ran down her throat and through her veins and drove the poison out of her in a gasping, shuddering breath, and the color rushed back into her face. She stayed on her knees a moment longer, wings trembling, and then she lifted her head and met Alcy's eyes and nodded.
Alcy turned to face her mother.
Hera was staring at her. The smile had gone from her mouth, and her hand was still half raised. The amber mist was rolling over the field and across Alcy's face, thick as soup, and Alcy was breathing it in. In and out. Slow. Steady.
"This should be killing you," Hera whispered. "You should be on the ground."
"You do not remember?" Alcy tilted her head. Her voice had gone soft and strange. "I was seven. You brought me warm milk. I spent three days on the floor of a cell and I thought I was going to die, and you walked past the door. After that you did it again. And again. A little more every time, to see how much I could take." She smiled, and it was terrible to look at. "I have been drinking your poison since I was a child, Mother. I do not even taste it."
The goddess's face went white.
"You ungrateful..." She flung up her hands. "I made you! I gave you everything!"
"You gave me a sword."
Alcy jumped.
She went up on a column of her own strength, her whole body folded behind the great blade, the black fire streaming off it like a comet's tail. Hera tried to vanish. The place where she had been was empty, and the sword came down through the air and met her halfway, because she had reappeared a hand's breadth too close. It was the one mistake she had made in ten thousand years.
The blade went through her neck.
It was clean. It was almost gentle. The black fire opened the divine body like paper and flowed through the seam, and Hera's head rolled free of her shoulders with the look of a woman who had been about to speak. It fell in the mud and lay there, eyes open, staring at the rain.
Alcy landed.
For a while she did not move. She stood over the body with the sword still in her hands and the black fire dying slowly along the steel, and the world was very quiet. Somewhere far behind her the fight against Thor was winding down, and somewhere further off the walls of Orario were calling out in wild voices. She heard none of it.
Hera's body began to glow.
Soft pink light welled up from the neck, and green light behind it, the color of leaves and new growth, and the body rose into the air with the severed head floating beside it. The flowers that had grown across the field wilted all at once, curled in on themselves, and turned to dust. The pink and the green swelled until the whole sky was washed in them, and then the light burst outward in a single ring and was gone.
The Queen of Heaven was dead.
Alcy let the sword fall from her fingers. She dropped to her knees in the mud and pressed both hands to her face, and her shoulders began to shake. It did not look like triumph. It looked like a seven year old girl finally allowed to put down a cup she had been holding for twenty years.
A pair of arms came around her from behind.
"I have you," Ais said quietly. She did not say anything else. She only held on while the rain fell, and Alcy cried into her sleeve, and neither of them let go.
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