There are two ways to love: to break, or to be broken.
His mother falls; his grandfather lets himself fall. Eugenides chases down something that looks like loyalty head-on and ambition out of the corners of his eyes.
Love was not supposed to have much to do with it. Of course he loves Helen, and probably his father, and maybe a few others, but this is not for love, this is for duty.
He loves her, and she breaks him. Broken things have never been content to lie in pieces.
The secret is that he offered himself to her in the first place.
It looks like madness head-on, and like devotion everywhere else.
He hears her name shouted aloud every time he doesn't say it to Eddis. He could die here, flung far and farther by the mercy of his own fate—and he still would not forget her.
Gods, whisper the winds, are never crueler than when they are just.
Justice is more than mortals can bear.
Justice is not betrayal, but sometimes it feels like it.
(No, he will not forget her.)
In the dark, in his room, he raises his hands to cover his face. But as always, that he has forgotten—that he lifts only one hand and an empty space.
He has been in her chamber when she slept, on his night-missions. When there, he had been a boy in the treetops again. Breath held and hands clenched, worshipping.
Later, he would beg her to set him free.
And she would smile, but not as goddesses smile. The jagged edge of a threat is a very human thing. Goddesses know no fear. Through the hum of pain above his bleary eyes, he felt the threat he was to her, pinned like an arrow to the string. Nothing he could say would convince her otherwise.
He thought she would kill him.
It would have been a good deal simpler.
Legends tell of fools.
Fools have the trusting hearts and the boastful lips of happy men, striding across field and forest in seven-league boots, placing their gold in the hands of tricksters.
Eugenides has rarely trusted, has often boasted, and has stolen gold from fools.
So what does that make him?
What does that make the man who saves his kingdom from the wreckage of winds, only to lose his heart to the hurricane?
A fool indeed.