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I kissed him back. “You don’t have to babysit me. I promise to tell you when I finish.”
His gaze went serious. “I know you will. Shout if you need me. I’m going to find Hector. He’s probably charting a course to the Mariana trench.”
Shaking my head, I went back to brushing aside the fine grains of sand I’d picked away. Hours might have passed, but I didn’t notice. Soon, the seal was free of the stone, and I was comparing what I had with what I’d put in my notebook.
My heart sank. This wasn’t all of it. Somewhere out in the world there was another shard of the seal.
But this was done, and I would have answers for the men waiting for me downstairs. Just not the answers they’d like. “Shit.”
“There’s more, isn’t there?”
“Yeah.” I peered over my shoulder to find Paris at the top of the stairs. My face heated as our eyes met. He looked… different. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” he answered, coming to stand next to me. “Why?”
“You seem…” I trailed off, not sure how to describe the change. More relaxed maybe? “Less tense.”
I must have guessed right, because he smiled. “Close. So what’s your best guess? One more piece? Two?”
“Well…” I pulled my notebook closer, opening it to the sketches I’d done of the first piece, the piece Diana found, and this one. “The piece I found had Hector and Astyanax on it, the next had Orestes and the Furies, this one has Achilles. My theory is that each of the pieces show a central part of your story, or history, since it’s not a story.” I touched each sketch with my finger. “So this is Hector’s piece, Orestes’s piece, and Achilles’. Yours and Pollux’s are still out there. If I’m right, that is.”
“I think you are,” Paris replied quietly. “After all, each of us pushed our power into the seal. It stands to reason there would be five pieces out in the world.”
Flipping the notebook page so I could show him the entire sketch, I sighed. “I hoped that this would be a bigger section. It curved enough—” I shrugged. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have anything to apologize for.” He sounded like he actually believed that. Suspicious, I lifted my gaze from my notebook to study him. His blonde hair had fallen from behind his ears and grazed his chin. He studied my notebook, tracing the sketches like I had. “You’re a very good artist.”
“Not naturally. I took art classes and practiced sketching for years when I decided what I wanted to do.”
Nodding, he lightly stroked the face of Astyanax, Hector’s son. “How long have you known what you wanted to do?”
The sketch he was studying wasn’t exactly based on the shard I’d found. It was one of many sketches, but I’d added details that weren’t on the original image. “Since I was eight.”
Glancing up sharply, he grinned. “You’ve been practicing your sketches for a career you wanted since you were eight?” He didn’t believe me.
“Well, I hadn’t narrowed it down to classical history yet, but I knew it was going to involve digging in the dirt. And Greece.”
“Greece?”
“Definitely Greece.”
He pressed his lips together and nodded, the sides of his eyes crinkled a little, like he was trying to hide a smile. “I’m not a fan of the Greeks.”
“I think you’ve been lumped in with them. All those city-states—Sparta, Thebes, Delphi—people just call them Greece.”
He turned the page again, and froze. “What is this?”
It was an image of what I imagined the seal looked like, and the image I believed would represent each of them. “I did that when I found the first piece of the seal. It’s not right. I was really far off the mark. Pollux is missing completely.”
I had theorized it would be a scene from the Trojan War, but because Hector’s image was on the piece I found, I had only considered other Trojans.
“Is this me?” he asked.
It was. I had drawn an image in the ancient Greek style of black-figure painting, where the figures were painted almost like silhouettes. They were dark against an ochre background. I had drawn Paris as an archer, arrow drawn back, ready to be released.
“Not…” He let out a breath. “You drew me as an archer, and not with Helen? Why?”
When I believed they’d been painted by an artist, it was the heartbreak on Hector’s face that inspired me to imagine something similar on the other Trojan heroes. It had made sense to me that Paris’s image would be just as heartbroken. Though it wasn’t an artist that had rendered the images on the seal—it was them. “I thought that next to Helen, you must have loved Hector best.”
