“You cannot give me a name?” I pressed.
“We are not our name. The fates know us by the song of our essence when our threads are strummed,” she said, just as Riordan had predicted she would.
“But you knewmyname,” I pointed out, recalling the moment she had opened the door.
“Yes. Your name and Riordan’s both are on his heart,” she explained and gestured at Orion. She smirked at me as if she knew that I was trying to trip her up.
I glanced at Orion, but he did not seem ashamed as he reached over to thread our fingers together on his thigh. That little smile on his lips even seemed pleased.
“Alright. Then can you tell me a little more about what makes this person—thread—unique?” I asked Hypatia.
She tilted her head as if she were listening to the song she had mentioned, which I could not hear.
“It is… unnatural. Threads layered over one another so that none of them can be cut,” she explained.
The Wild Hunt?I blurted to Orion down our bond.Ornella said they were interconnected.
Hypatia wrinkled her nose at me in reminder that she did not like the sensation of us using our bond.
“Does the interference come from Autumn Court?” Orion asked her calmly.
“Many threads are entwined between our realm and that of Living Death,” she acknowledged.
I sighed in frustration and took a moment to remind myself that I had known this might be the way of it. I just wasn’t sure how to get meaningful answers when she did not know people or places by their given names.
Hypatia seemed to take pity on me and leaned forward to take my free hand off my knee.
“The friend whose forgiveness your heart most yearns for is very nigh now. Your fates are entangled,” she told me with a trace of apparent sadness.
Sofia? That was unsurprising. But perhaps I had been going about this all wrong. Maybe it was best to just let Hypatia guide me to my answers rather than attempt to steer her to what I thought I needed to know.
“Tell me more,” I invited her, and Hypatia smiled as if she appreciated my decision tolet her speak freely.
“The one whose tune you know not whether to trust is a true song. That of the one you never questioned is not.”
Castor and… someone else? Someone I never thought to question was actually untrustworthy. I had to bite down the follow-up questions that sprung to mind immediately and nodded for her to go on.
“Your enemies are closing in, and your path diverges suddenly in the most painful of ways. But you must lose love to gain the forgiveness that will save your world.”
Oh.Oh, I did not like that. And neither did Orion who gave my hand a comforting squeeze.
“Fire can be easily smothered when its air is choked. That kind of power is in the blood. The stars will answer if you beckon to them with the one whose thread is split in two. Betrayal is the path to right your wrongs, but mind the darkness does not swallow the stars.”
“I take it she was about as unhelpful to you as she was to Riordan when he came,” Helena guessed the moment she saw my face once we returned to the clearing.
“You would be right,” I sighed. “Riordan said that she would be cryptic, but I had no idea how bad it would be.”
And even though what she had said made little sense, it still left me unsettled.
Fire can be easily smothered when its air is choked.
Betrayal is the path to right your wrongs.
You must lose love to gain the forgiveness that will save your world.
But mind the darkness does not swallow the stars.
“There is a stream just through the trees that is warm when it comes out of the earth. We should go there and you can freshen up before we start heading back home,” Orion suggested gently,his hand on my lower back.
