‘You have not asked.’
It was an exercise in restraint, not sending the statue careering into pieces. ‘What must I do?’
The owl flapped its wings again. The queen blinked. She had not noticed the statue expanding; she was sure it had not always been that size, that warm and glowing. It had happened in her peripheral vision, as the goddess had always existed, and now the air tasted of ringing metal and was so cold that it bit.
‘She burns too hot, she must share her heat with another. She hangs upside down, she must be turned and kept upright. She must be joined by another.’
‘I will go,’ the answer came immediately, ‘I will do it.’
‘You are alive. You would leave your children?’ Thegoddess tutted, impatient once more. The statue pointed an arm that surely had not always been so massive and gestured at her belt. ‘You carry pieces of stars with you now.’
The queen’s hands went protectively to her middle. ‘No. They are keepsakes, only.’ She pulled out two carved hippos, one fashioned in brown from wood, the other in red from coral.
‘I do not mean those.’
Slowly, tremblingly, the queen fished out the fragments of rock that had once been the monster that tried to devour her.
‘These are not pieces of stars.’
‘Not yet.’
The queen stared into her hands. Hunks of grey and infinitely precious. ‘You would put these beside my mother?’
‘They would keep her upright for half of the year. They would not weight her entirely. But they would borrow her shine and burn together. Turn her pain into a poem for the bards to write. It would be better than nothing.’
The queen swallowed with difficulty. The trembling had spread and she shook where she stood.
‘And she—’ she held up the stones, she had not said the name in ten years, now would not be the first time, ‘she would burn too?’
‘The burden would be shared and so lessened. A dull sort of heat. And the sea monster’s hide was thick.’
‘She was not always a sea monster. Her skin was soft.’
The goddess considered this for a while. It was a long while.
‘It is only the sea monster that would accompany your mother. The Nereid is elsewhere.’
The queen shook so violently that her teeth chattered. She closed her hands tight around the pieces, so afraid was she that they would rattle out of her palms.
‘Elsewhere?’
‘Yes. Some part of her remained, so I am told. In the Coral Kingdom.’
The queen sank to the ground. The pieces of stone dug into her hands and she anchored herself to the sensation. It enabled her to ask, ‘She is alive?’
The goddess shrugged. ‘What is alive? What is not? She is not mortal but then neither was the Gorgon. She is something.’
‘You did not say.’
‘You did not ask.’
Games and lessons and lessons and games, the queen was quite mad with it. She fisted at her hair and gritted her teeth. She tried to breathe, she fought the tearing, it had been so long since she had felt such a vicious pull.
‘I did not know there was a question.’
‘Well. Now you do.’
‘Tell me,’ the queen did not ask this; she ordered it between pants, ‘tell me how to get to her.’
