They held the trial in the throne room of Olympus, under a ceiling of stars that Annabeth had designed.
Percy noticed that first, when they marched him in with celestial bronze manacles on his wrists. He had watched her draw that ceiling. He had sat on the floor of her dorm room in New Rome eating cold pizza while she muttered about load-bearing constellations, and he had told her it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen, and she had thrown an eraser at him. Now it hung over his head like a sentence, glittering and silent.
The twelve thrones were full. The hearth in the center of the room burned low, and Hestia sat beside it on the floor, as she always did, a small girl in brown with her knees pulled up to her chest. Beside the thrones, on a bench set out for the purpose, sat the witnesses. Percy looked at each of them as he was led past, and he learned more in that walk than he had learned in six years of quests.
Grover was there, his eyes swollen from crying. When Percy passed, he reached out and gripped Percy's manacled hand for one second before a guard knocked his arm away.
Clarisse was there, still in her mud-caked armor, her jaw set like iron. She met his eyes and nodded once. It was the most Clarisse thing she could have done, and it meant everything.
Tyson was there. Percy didn't know who had brought him up from the forges, but his half-brother was sitting hunched on the bench with his huge hands knotted in his lap and tears running steadily out of his one big brown eye. When he saw Percy, he made a sound like a whale calling and tried to stand, and it took three of the throne-room guards to hold him down.
Rachel Elizabeth Dare was there, sitting very upright in her paint-spattered jeans, green smoke curling faintly at the edges of her lips. Thalia was there, in her silver Hunter's jacket, arms folded, the air around her humming with static. And Nico. Nico di Angelo was standing in the shadow of a pillar, not sitting, because Nico never sat when he was angry, and he was very, very angry. Darkness pooled around his feet like spilled ink.
And on the other side of the room, at the foot of Poseidon's throne, sat Ezra Vance, his face already healing under his father's blessing, a bandage over one eye. Beside him sat Annabeth.
She didn't look at Percy when he walked past. She was staring at the floor. Her hands were clenched together so tightly that the knuckles had gone white.
The trial took three hours. It felt like three years.
Zeus presided. He laid out the charges in his thundering voice: breaking the sacred borders of Camp Half-Blood, assault upon sixty-one demigods, attempted murder of a son of Poseidon. Hermes read the list of injured campers from a scroll so long it unrolled across the floor and over the edge of the dais. Not one of them had been badly hurt, Percy noted. Not one bone broken. Not one cut that needed more than a square of ambrosia. He had been very, very careful. Nobody mentioned that.
Then Zeus asked for testimony.
Ezra went first. He stood in front of the thrones with his bandaged eye and his healing bruises and his voice trembling just enough, and he told them a story. It was a good story. Percy Jackson, jealous of the new son of Poseidon. Percy Jackson, who couldn't stand that he wasn't special anymore. Percy Jackson, who had come back to camp determined to make Ezra's life a misery, who had stolen a dead boy's sword and drowned the Demeter cabin's strawberries and finally, unable to bear it any longer, had broken through the barrier in the middle of the night to murder his rival in his bed.
"And my mother," Percy said. "Tell them about my mother, Ezra."
Ezra looked at him with his one good eye, wounded and sincere. "I'm so sorry about your mom, Percy," he said. "I really am. But I was at camp. Everyone saw me at camp. You can't blame me just because you need someone to blame."
"There was a note—"
"The mortal police found no note," Hermes said, consulting another scroll. He didn't meet Percy's eyes either. "They found the deceased, and evidence of a flood from a burst water main, and a missing son with a history of property damage and disappearing from schools."
Percy laughed. He couldn't help it. "Of course they did."
Then Thalia stood up. She didn't wait to be called. She walked out into the middle of the floor and planted herself in front of her father's throne.
"This is garbage," she said. "Every word of it. I've known Percy since he was twelve. He's the most stubborn, reckless, annoying idiot I've ever met, and he would cut off his own hand before he hurt a camper. And that kid," she jabbed a finger at Ezra, "smells wrong. I don't know what he is, but he smells like old magic. Like something somebody built."
"Sit down, daughter," Zeus rumbled.
"No."
The throne room went very quiet. Thunder muttered somewhere far below.
Nico stepped out of the shadows to stand beside her. "She's right," he said. "I can feel death on him. Two fresh ones. A man and a woman, drowned. It's all over his hands." He turned his black eyes on Ezra, and Ezra's smile slipped for the first time all night. "You can lie to them, Vance. You can't lie to the dead. They know who killed them."
"Hades," Zeus said sharply, turning to look toward the darkened corner of the room where the lord of the Underworld had appeared, unbidden, without a throne. "Control your son."
Hades smiled thinly. "My son speaks for me, brother. Sally Jackson and Paul Blofis arrived at my gates last night. I had a very interesting conversation with them." He paused. "Would you like to hear it?"
"No," said Zeus. "The dead are not witnesses before this council. That law is older than you are."
"How convenient."
Clarisse stood up next. Then Grover, his legs shaking. Then Tyson, wiping his eye with his fist. They lined up next to Thalia and Nico in front of the thrones, a wall of people, and Rachel came last, walking slowly, the green smoke thickening around her.
"I am the Oracle of Delphi," she said, and her voice had a strange double echo, as though another voice spoke underneath her own. "And I tell you this, lords of Olympus. The thread of this world is being cut with a stolen blade. You are holding the scissors in your hand, and you do not see whose hand is guiding yours."
The gods shifted uneasily on their thrones. Apollo looked deeply uncomfortable. Athena's eyes narrowed. Then Zeus waved his hand, and the moment broke.
"The Oracle is overwrought," he said. "Understandably. Sit down, all of you."
They did not sit down.
The last witness was Annabeth.
She stood up from beside Ezra slowly, as if her body hurt. She walked out into the middle of the floor and stood between the two lines of people, those standing with Percy and those sitting with Ezra, and for a long moment she said nothing at all.
"Annabeth Chase," Zeus said. "You knew the accused better than anyone. Tell this council what manner of man he is."
Annabeth looked at Percy. It was the first time she'd looked at him since he walked in. Her face was pale and her gray eyes were enormous, and the crease between her brows was so deep it looked like a scar.
"I don't know," she said. Her voice broke. "I don't know anymore. I remember things. I remember him carrying me out of the Labyrinth. I remember the sky. I remember he—" She stopped. She pressed her hands to her temples. "But I remember other things, too. I remember him being cruel. I remember being afraid of him. And I can't, I can't tell which ones are real. I've tried. I've been trying all night." She was crying now, silently, tears running down her face. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I can't stand with him. Not when I don't know."
She walked back and sat down next to Ezra. Ezra put his arm around her, and she let him.
That was the moment, Percy would think later, years later, at the bottom of the world. Not the betrayal in the amphitheater, not the strawberry thrown at his back, not even his father's face on the cabin green. It was Annabeth Chase, the smartest person he had ever known, looking at him in front of the gods and saying, I don't know. And choosing the side that didn't scare her.
They voted.
Zeus, guilty. Hera, guilty, with a small, cold smile. Poseidon took the longest. He looked at Ezra, and at Percy, and at the line of witnesses standing in front of his throne. His hands gripped the arms of his chair so hard that the coral cracked.
"Guilty," said the god of the sea, and did not look at his eldest living son again.
Athena, guilty. Ares, guilty, laughing. Aphrodite, guilty, with a sigh about how tragic it all was. Hephaestus, guilty. Hermes, after a long pause, guilty. Demeter, guilty. Apollo, abstaining. Dionysus, abstaining, and when Zeus glared at him, the wine god shrugged and said, "I don't vote on trials where the jury's already been fixed, Father. Gives me a headache."
Artemis stood. She was in her twelve-year-old form, auburn hair tied back, silver eyes cold as winter. "Not guilty," she said. "And I will remember who voted otherwise." Then she turned and walked out of the throne room, and her lieutenant Thalia hesitated only a moment before she followed, throwing one last fierce look at Percy over her shoulder.
Hestia did not have a throne, and so she did not have a vote. But as the count was finished she rose from beside the hearth and said, quietly, "The fire remembers him. Let that be written somewhere." And the hearth flared up, bright and warm, for one second, and then sank down to embers.
Zeus rose to his full height. "Perseus Jackson," he said, "you are found guilty. For the crimes of kinslaying and the breaking of the sacred borders, you are sentenced to the same fate as the Titans before you." He pointed the master bolt at the floor of the throne room, and a crack opened in the marble, black and bottomless, breathing up a cold that smelled like the end of everything. "You will be cast into Tartarus. You will not return."
Nico shouted something and lunged, darkness exploding outward from him. Tyson roared. Clarisse brought up her spear. And Zeus simply waved his hand, and all of them froze where they stood, held motionless by the will of the king of the gods.
Percy looked at them all, his friends, his family, the people who had stood up. He looked at Hades, who inclined his head very slightly, and at Hestia, whose firelit eyes were wet.
"Thank you," he said to them. "For standing up."
Then he looked at Ezra one last time. Ezra was still smiling.
"This isn't over," Percy told him.
"Bro," Ezra said softly. "It really is."
The floor opened under Percy's feet, and he fell.
He had been to Tartarus once before. He had gone in with Annabeth holding his hand, and he had come out because of her, and because of a Titan named Bob and a giant named Damasen and every ounce of stubbornness either of them owned.
This time he went in alone.
The first year was rage.
He woke at the bottom of the pit in the river of fire, Phlegethon, and he drank from it, because it was the only thing that would keep him alive, and it burned, and he welcomed the burn. He fought his way out of the river onto a plain of black glass and found the monsters waiting for him. Arai, the curses, who had cursed him the last time and who remembered him. Empousai. Hellhounds the size of buses. Things that had no names, things that had been dissolving in the pit since before the gods were born.
He killed them. All of them. He killed them with Riptide until Riptide's edge was nicked like a saw, and then he killed them with his hands, and then he learned how to make the poisonous mist of Tartarus condense into water, filthy and black and burning, and he killed them with that. Every one of them had Ezra's face. Every night, if there were nights in that place, he dreamed of the cabin green, and of his fist coming down, and of Zeus's light striking the earth one second too soon.
He would get out. He would climb. He would find a way to the Doors of Death, or a crack in the world, or some forgotten path, and he would climb out, and he would find Ezra Vance, and that time no god would stop him.
The second year was rage too, but quieter.
The third year, he found Bob's broom.
It was lying in a gully of black sand, half-buried, the bristles singed. He didn't know how it had gotten there; the Titan was gone, faded back into the pit after the Doors of Death, and maybe something of him had washed up here the way driftwood washes up on a beach. Percy picked it up and held it for a long time. Then he sat down in the sand and cried, for the first time since his mother's kitchen. He cried for Sally and for Paul and for Bob and for every person who had ever loved him and paid for it. He cried until there was nothing left.
Afterward, he made himself a camp.
It was a ridiculous thing. A circle of stones on a ridge above the fire river. A lean-to of monster bones and petrified hide. A fire pit, because Hestia had said the fire remembered him, and he wanted to give it something to remember. He used Bob's broom to sweep the black sand out of it every morning, if there were mornings. He talked out loud to the people who weren't there. He told Sally about his day. He argued with Paul about baseball. He told Grover jokes.
Some of the monsters started to leave him alone. Some of them, the stupid ones, the young ones, the ones that were too new to the pit to understand what it was, started coming to the edge of his fire and just watching. He didn't kill them. A baby drakon, black as tar, followed him for a month before he gave it a scrap of meat, and after that it slept by his fire every night.
The fourth year, he met the Titans' prisoners. Old, broken things, too weak to re-form, drifting in the darkness. He listened to their stories. He learned that hate was a fire, and that the pit was full of beings who had burned in that fire for ten thousand years until there was nothing left of them but ash.
The fifth year, he realized he had not thought about Ezra in a month.
The sixth year, Tartarus himself came to see him.
The primordial god of the pit took the form of a man made of shifting darkness, faceless, with eyes like dying stars. He stood at the edge of Percy's little camp and looked at the stones and the bones and the drakon sleeping by the fire.
You should be dead, said Tartarus. Or mad. Or one of mine.
"Yeah," Percy said. "I hear that a lot."
What are you, demigod?
Percy thought about it. He thought about it for a long time, sitting on a rock in the pit at the bottom of the world, with Bob's broom across his knees and his mother's photograph, cracked and faded, in his pocket.
"Tired," he said at last. "I'm just tired."
Tartarus studied him with those dying-star eyes. Then, without another word, the darkness went away, and it did not come back.
In the seventh year, the Fates came.
He was sweeping his camp when he heard it. A sound that did not belong in Tartarus, so out of place that he froze with the broom in his hands. It was the sound of knitting needles. Click, click, click.
There were three old women sitting by his fire.
He had seen them before. Once, on the side of a road in New York, when he was twelve years old, outside a fruit stand. Three grandmothers in rocking chairs with a pair of socks so big they could only be for a giant, and one of them had held up a pair of shears and cut a single blue thread. He'd thought, then, that it was his.
They looked just the same. Clotho, spinning thread from a great basket of wool. Lachesis, measuring it against a yardstick. Atropos, with her shears. They had pulled up three rocking chairs to his fire at the bottom of Tartarus, and they rocked in them, and the drakon slept peacefully at their feet.
"Percy Jackson," said Clotho, and her voice was like the creak of an old house. "Sit with us."
Percy didn't move. "Are you here to cut my thread?"
"No, child," said Lachesis. "We are here to apologize."
That was so unexpected that he sat down.
"Your thread was never meant to run this way," said Atropos. She held up a strand of blue yarn, and he saw that it was knotted and tangled and stretched thin, and that in one place, near the middle, it had been spliced to another thread, a sickly green one, that had wound around it like a vine around a tree and tried to choke it. "Someone tampered with the tapestry. Someone reached into the loom and wove a false thread into the pattern, a thread that wore your place like a stolen coat."
"Ezra," Percy said.
"Ezra Vance was a thread spun by other hands," Clotho agreed. "We do not yet know whose. In this world, the damage is done. We cannot unweave it without unweaving everything."
Percy looked into the fire. "So why are you here?"
The three sisters looked at each other. Then Lachesis set down her yardstick and leaned forward, and her ancient eyes were kind in a way he had not expected.
"Because you have earned something," she said. "You gave your whole life to the gods. You held up the sky, you turned down immortality, you fought for a world that cast you down into the pit. And down here, where no one was watching, you did not become a monster. You found peace, child. That is a rarer thing than you know. Few heroes ever find it. None ever find it here."
"We offer you a new life," Atropos said. "Not this world. Another, woven alongside it. There, you would be born again. A mortal child. No gods. No monsters. No prophecies. A mother and a father who love you, and a long, quiet, ordinary life."
Percy's throat went tight. "A mother," he said. "Which mother?"
Clotho smiled, and her wrinkled face folded like a map. "Sally Jackson," she said. "And Paul Blofis. In that world, they met sooner, and you are their son. Only theirs."
He couldn't speak. He put a hand over his eyes.
"You would keep your memories," Lachesis said gently. "We will not take them from you. You have earned them, too, the good with the bad. But you would be a child again, and you would grow up as a child does. You would have a chance to simply live."
"What's the catch?" he managed. "There's always a catch."
The three Fates were quiet for a moment. The fire crackled. The drakon sighed in its sleep.
"There is no catch," Atropos said at last. "Not today. Today, there is only the offer."
Percy looked around his camp. The circle of stones. The bone lean-to. The swept black sand. Seven years. He was twenty-eight years old, he thought, or something close to it. He had spent a quarter of his life in this place.
He thought about Ezra, and found that the name didn't burn anymore. It was just a name.
He thought about his mother's hands, folded on her chest.
He thought about her alive.
"Okay," said Percy Jackson. "I'll take it."
Atropos lifted her shears. Lachesis held out his thread, the knotted, tangled, beautiful blue thread of his life, and Clotho took the cut end of it in her old fingers and began, very carefully, to spin it into something new.
"Take care of the drakon," Percy said, as the world started to dissolve around him. "He's a good boy."
The last thing he heard was the click of the needles, and the snip of the shears, and the sound of the old women laughing, soft and warm, like a grandmother by a fire.