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i. Penelope
The shuttle shushes, the scent of cedar wafts into the air, and a weft joins the stack. Penelope feels her granddaughter watching with intent, with learning. She is too small, still, to properly handle the loom, but with summer comes the shearing, and with that fleece aplenty to spin. Agamede holds a spindle in her hand, spun wool fat around it, all the while keeping her eyes on Penelope’s tapestry taking form.
There is little vanity left in Penelope, with her grey eyes and grey dresses and grey hair, but she still enjoys the attentions of her granddaughter, the admiration. Betimes she can pretend to be a little less mortal, when Agamede sits by her. It will change. It always does. But Agamede is not ten, yearning for adulthood, naïve to the aches that come with it.
Agamede turns her eyes from the movements of Penelope’s loom and looks towards the sea. Following her granddaughter’s gaze, Penelope pulls herself back from the near-finished tapestry. “What is it?” she asks.
“There is someone at the shore.”
“A god?” Penelope prods, for a lone mortal would likely not find his own way to the island, and because Agamede needs to learn. Circe and Penelope both have been training the girl in witchcraft, but while Circe transforms and Penelope weaves, Agamede watches and listens.
Agamede frowns. Talented she may be, but her grasp of the art is tenuous still, even on this island which she’s known her whole life. “A goddess, I think,” she says finally.
Penelope stands. Her joints have begun to creak, age setting in. There are ointments and draughts to ease such things, yet they only do so much against the unceasing current of time. “Come,” she tells Agamede. “We will tell your mother.” Aiaia may be Penelope’s island, but it had grown up under Circe’s feet, just as Circe had grown up under the feet of gods and goddesses.
Circe is in the room that was Telegonus’, now a nursery for the coming baby. She sits in a rocking chair, her swelling belly half-cradled by her arms while her hands twist and plait herbs in her lap. Lavender and dittany. Calmness and healing. She will place a sachet between every piece of clothing the baby will wear, Penelope knows. These are not strong enchantments, all-encompassing, but the work of an idling mother confined by her pregnancy. Telemachus keeps her company, his own hands busied by his carving knife and a block of cedar.
“A goddess is come to our shore, Mother,” Agamede announces, her face solemn.
Circe doesn’t ask which one. She instead puts away her herbs and reaches out. Telemachus readily supports her, and side-by-side they go to the hall where they will welcome this goddess.
“Who do you think it is?” Telemachus asks.
“If we are lucky, a nymph sent to her confinement for falling in love with a mortal.” Circe has mentioned these nymphs in passing, the unwanted company foisted upon her in her exile. She still holds the belief that it may one day happen again, though Penelope doubts it.
“Are we so lucky?” Telemachus asks, with that secret smile he keeps for his wife.
Circe glances at her daughter’s face, then says, “No.” She sits on the silver chair and draws a fur over her belly. “She will have to come and knock. I will not walk down to the beach like this.” One of the wolves comes and rests its head on her lap, and she strokes it idly.
Penelope draws her shawl around her. The spider on her shoulder skitters up, resting in her hair. There are now more of them, skittering on the rafters, stringing their webs between pillars, but this one particularly favours her. Telemachus had said it might be all the weaving, and though he said it in jest, the way Circe quietly smiled into her cup at the joke, at least, indicated partial truth.
So there Penelope stands, witch of Aiaia with a spider in her hair, ready to greet her guest.
The goddess does not knock. She pushes the doors open, and after she is inside, they slam behind her. All the light in the room seems to gather around her, or maybe she shines brighter than all else—it is as hard to fathom as it is to look away from her molten copper hair, her bright gold eyes. The goddess, Penelope thinks, is the opposite of Circe before she’d shed her divinity. But to be opposites, they must first be comparable, and it is that thought that informs Penelope of the goddess’ name.
“Lady Pasiphaë,” Penelope greets with a slight bow. “Be welcome to my house.” At the edge of her sight, she can see Circe’s smile. No doubt she remembers the time Penelope knelt to anger her.
“You insult me,” Pasiphaë says. “I am the Queen of Crete and no middling nobility.” Her gaze burns Penelope, bonfire-hot, but Penelope has had a decade’s worth of uninvited guests try to cow her, and she is not startled by Pasiphaë’s haughtiness, the way she wears a title she has long lost.
“And I, of Ithaca,” Penelope replies, amused. There’s a certain headiness to taunting a goddess. Penelope had done so years ago, inadvertent or otherwise, and she is pleased to note that despite the differences in their divinities, all goddesses are the same.
Pasiphaë does not tout her other titles. She does not boast of her blood or her line or her pharmakeia. She turns away from Penelope, who tries to hide her buckling legs and relieved sigh. “Mother is not pleased with you,” Pasiphaë says to Circe.
Circe runs a hand over her swelling belly, as though to soothe her restless baby. “I imagine she is displeased to count a mortal among her children?”
“If she does not, she has whelped three pharmakis, not four.”
“Is that all she bade you tell me? That I have become a taint upon her pride?” Circe asks. “Did she tell you to curse me? To slay me and mine? Did she promise to give you the katharsis for your great evil herself?”
A flash of surprised crosses Pasiphaë’s face, then it is gone as anger knots her brows and twists her mouth. Her teeth are sharp. Like mink, Circe said when she told them all of the witch queen of Crete.
And yet, Circe continues, demanding, “Or did Father send you? Mother will never dare, but Father fears me. A witch, to slay another, why—”
“Mother, stop!” Agamede cries, and finally Circe falls silent. The girl, not even ten years old, looks up to Pasiphaë, despite her own shaking frame. “Honoured Aunt. Is it true they cast you out of their halls?”
Just as Pasiphaë’s mouth falls open in astonishment, the room falls into darkness as though a cloud has swallowed the sun. Pasiphaë draws a breath, then another. Addressing Telemachus for the first time, she says, “You would do well to teach your child how to properly address a goddess.” And then, to Penelope, “If you send me away, you will taste regret in your mouth until your mortal body surrenders to grief.”
The threat does not shake Penelope, who has defied Athena herself. Still, she says, “I will not. Be welcome, Queen Pasiphaë.”
Pasiphaë nods, strides into an unoccupied room somewhere, and slams the door. The stone and marble house almost seems to judder with it.
“Only half as lucky, then,” Telemachus says, breaking the silence when the house finally stills again.
Circe looks at him, a question in her brows.
“I doubt it’s love for a mortal that sent her here, but I believe Mother has found herself blessed with a confined nymph of her own.”
ii. Agamede
“She will not take dinner with us,” Agamede says to her grandmother. What Agamede doesn’t say is that Aunt Pasiphaë didn’t answer the door, and if not for her Sight, Agamede would have thought her aunt gone or worse.
Grandmother is quiet, always, as she prepares dinner: breads and cheeses, potatoes and a fish the length of Agamede’s arm, stuffed with herbs and steamed. Glancing at Agamede, Grandmother says, “Take a tray for her, then.”
Grandmother carves the fish herself, her hand steady and true as she separates a strip of white flesh from the bone. She places it on a plate, with some potatoes on the side, while Agamede prepares another plate with a loaf of bread and slices of cheese. A small bowl containing a handful of berries drizzled with honey and a jug of spring water with a cup beside it complete the tray.
“Careful, now,” Grandmother says as Agamede lifts the tray.
“Yes, Grandmother.” The tray is heavy. Mother would tell Agamede to do something else, while Father would take the tray off Agamede’s hands, but Grandmother merely watches. Agamede is as steady with the tray as Grandmother was with her knife, and there is no Mother to admonish her or Father to steal her task between the kitchen and Aunt Pasiphaë’s room.
Aunt Pasiphaë is still at the window, watching the sun set. She is akin to Mother in her stewing, though Mother prefers to watch the rising sun from the eastward window when she is upset. Agamede sets the tray on a bureau by the door. She knocks on the door again. “Aunt, I have brought you dinner.”
“Begone, child, and keep your eyes to yourself,” her aunt says from behind her door.
The first thing Mother taught Agamede upon discovering her talent is that there are things that Agamede shouldn’t see, not because she cannot, but because people should be given certain privacies. Agamede has learned to look away from Mother’s and Father’s room, or Grandmother’s when she is crying. But people have different things they wish to hide, and Agamede had never met her aunt. When she saw the laughter that chased away her aunt from the halls of the gods, she thought it a necessary knowledge to reveal.
She wonders if it wasn’t, after all.
She leaves the tray on the bureau and joins her parents and grandmother.
After dinner, Mother asks, “What did you see, about your aunt?” and Agamede hesitates. Mother sees it—among the four in their family, only Grandmother is skilled at concealing her emotions. “It is all right,” she coaxes. “I need to know if she is sent to do harm to us, and even when she isn’t, Pasiphaë can be…”
“Unpredictable,” Father finishes. He exchanges a glance with Mother, and Agamede does not need her Sight to see that there are stories they hold back from her. Would that she could See into the past, or into the hearts of others! Mother says she may, in the future, but for now Agamede is restrained to the present and the recent. She hears Helios has the gift of prophecy, but Agamede doesn’t want it. She wants understanding, not foreknowledge.
Agamede looks at Grandmother, who is quiet as always. When her grey eyes catch Agamede’s, she nods, slightly.
And so Agamede tells them, “I only saw the gods laughing about her. Mocking her.” She does not say of the crude insults, but her face burns as she thinks of them. “And I saw a nymph, wearing amber beads, and she says something of how Aunt has become boorish, as of late.”
“You have never seen anything so far away,” Father says. “Are you well?”
Agamede tethers her Sight on spells, animal bones carved with words of power which she plants in the ground and hangs from windows and trees. She has no such aid in the halls of gods, tethering her Sight instead on the luminescent figure of her aunt, who had until this morning been there. The effort had taken a lot from her, but she didn’t feel the exhaustion until after Father asked. Now, she feels as though she could sleep for a season. “It is tiring,” Agamede admits. She is glad that her Sight isn’t some heavy tray Father can take from her.
“Rest,” Father says. “I am sure your grandmother can spare you for a day.”
“A morning,” Grandmother counters. “The dandelions will be in full bloom, and I want to harvest them at noon.”
“I will wake before noon,” Agamede promises, and rises from the table.
“Agamede,” Mother calls. Agamede halts. Mother searches her face, and at last she says, “You’ve done well.”
“Thank you, Mother.”
Before she goes to bed, Agamede stops by her aunt’s room. The tray rests still on the bureau, but the pitcher and bowl of berries are both empty.
iii. Telemachus
Telemachus knows not what to make of their guest. His mother acts as though there is no guest altogether. Telemachus can almost believe that. If Queen Pasiphaë ever leaves her room, she does so late at night when the house is asleep. She is instead present in the lines of Circe’s shoulders, squared as though waiting for an insult, a rebuke, a lash. Circe slips moly everywhere; stitches it into the lining of their clothes, places it in their wine, their food. For protection, she says, when she sees Telemachus watching her, though he hasn’t said anything. Never has he seen her use the herb with such abandon. She uses so much that at night she goes up the cliffs to harvest more. The first night, she waits for Telemachus to sleep before sneaking out like a youth with a secret love.
The second night, Telemachus stays up until she tells him what she will do, then forbids him from coming with her.
“It is dangerous for mortals,” Circe says.
“As dangerous as cliffs are to pregnant mothers?” He does not say that she, too, is now mortal. She knows it, chafes against it despite the witchcraft she still retains. “Allow me to ensure your safe passage, at least. I will not touch the flowers,” he promises.
She agrees. Summer will tip into autumn in a few days. A breeze has arrived early, making her back ache, though there’s scarcely a day when it does not. The baby is heavy in her. It is easier, still, than her first, she insists, but Athena had tried to kill Telegonus since his conception and Circe had sliced her womb open herself to deliver him. A nymph’s immortal form only meant there was no limit to what an Olympian might do to her and her unborn child.
It is good that Telemachus accepts the life of no one, as his children will not be burdened by divine patronage as he once was.
Telemachus lets his wife lean on his arm as they climb up the cliff. He stands guard as Circe kneels in the grass, plucking, cutting. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to her methods. For one flower, she breaks the stem with the edge of her thumbnail, another, she cuts with a small knife. Some she pulls whole from the ground, tubers and all. All goes in the basket she carries. Her temples glitter under the moonlight. It is a great exertion, to lean further forward so as to accommodate her belly; to listen to each flower so she does not spoil it.
He can only watch.
He thinks he will build her a chair with a sloped back, and a small pillowed stool for her to rest her feet. He will do it when she is asleep, for she sleeps more than he does.
When she is done, there are other herbs: dittany, crocus, fennel, clover. He knows the names, but cannot remember all their properties. He carries the basket under one arm, while the other supports her. When they return, she insists on stringing some herbs up, crushing another into a paste and hiding the jar behind their pots, scattering the rest on a woven tray.
“Come, it is almost morning,” he says to her.
“Put this on the roof to dry, and we will sleep.”
He does without complaint, glad that she doesn’t try to climb the roof herself.
And at last, all is done. As he lies with her in the growing light of dawn, he runs a hand over her belly. His child kicks gently against his touch. “Will you have breakfast?” he asks her, but she is already asleep.
Telemachus cannot remember falling asleep. He remembers waking with the habit so deeply embedded in his body. When he looks out the window, he can still see the sun. Only two hours has passed, or a little more. It was not enough, but he cannot return to sleep.
Outside, he hears sounds of breakfast being readied. He goes to help. His mother does not mention the fresh herbs hanging with the older herbs, but he is not fooled. His mother notices. As ever, he finds it difficult to guess what her silence means.
Agamede is peeling pears, halving them, taking out the seeds and boiling them in syrup. The bubbling pot smells of star anise and cinnamon. “I am done, Grandmother,” she says after the last pear. “What do I do now?”
“Leave it be. It will be ready by dinnertime. You best prepare a tray for your aunt. Good morning, Telemachus.”
“Good morning, mother. Agamede.” He watches his daughter put together a tray, notes how she ignores the bread in favour of the cheeses, how she avoids the ham but includes a few pieces of salted fish, how she runs her fingers over each grape before plucking it and placing it into a bowl. “You know your aunt’s appetite.”
“She ignores the same things each time,” Agamede says. “It is hard not to notice.”
It has been two days. Two, and his daughter already caters to the whims of Queen Pasiphaë. “Does she talk to you?” he asks. He fears the answer, fears that Circe may speak the truth.
Agamede pouts. “Only once, to shoo me away. I tell her every meal that Mother suspects a scheme, and she needs to speak to Mother.”
Pasiphaë sent Agamede away, and the girl was drawn in. Telemachus remembers Circe’s story of the Minotaur, told once more, this time slower and without Telegonus’ eager interruptions. She said, at the end, my sister finds her triumphs through unlikely means.
“I also told her what I chose for her meals. She never says anything, but I know she is there. Most times, she just watches the window.” Turning to Penelope, Agamede asks, “Do you think Aunt Pasiphaë will like the pears, Grandmother?”
“We will see after dinner,” Penelope says, though it is Telemachus’ eyes she looks into. In her eyes is a warning. Against what, Telemachus cannot guess. There is just grey, a deep portent.
The pot of syrup and pears bubble until sundown, Agamede dutifully feeding the fire.
At dinnertime, Pasiphaë emerges from her room and stands over the table. Her lambent eyes observe the fare, the family seated around it. She says, “Agamede told me she boiled some pears.”
Agamede’s joy is uncontained. She leaps to fetch Pasiphaë a plate, piling it with food. The rest of the dinner is more cheese, Aunt? and yes, thank you, child, and how did you like the salted fish this morning, Lady Pasiphaë? and it was not unpleasant, Lady Penelope, though I prefer them smoked. Telemachus carves the meat for them. Penelope keeps their cups full. Circe watches with the same squared shoulders. But the lash she waits for never comes, nor the insults. Pasiphaë accepts a second cut of halved pear. She does not explain her visit and they do not ask her.
By the end, as she is leaving, Pasiphaë says to Agamede, “I found the rabbit bone in my room. Clever, but there are ways to scry without such tethers. I will teach you, if you wish it.”
Circe speaks, then. “She is too young to See beyond the island,” she says. “And if you mean to take my daughter away from me, Sister, you will never leave this house.” The lions, previously content with lounging by the fireplace, raise their heads. One sits up, walks to her mistress.
Pasiphaë grows bright with scorn, but she inclines her head. “Your mother disallows it,” she says to Agamede, “and I will not pick a quarrel with her when she is so close to bursting.”
Circe opens her mouth, but Telemachus places a hand on her wrist, and whatever power she has built around her dissipates into the air. Her hands curl around her spoon, but her eyes flick to the herbs. She waits until Agamede returns to her room, and then she says to Penelope, “Hellebore. Have we any left?”
“Too old to be potent against her,” Penelope says. “Shall we find some tonight?”
“I will come with you,” Telemachus says. He brings a lantern that Circe coaxes to glow as bright as a full moon, and as he stands sentinel, he notices a cypress at the edge of the clearing. The timber will suffice for a chair and then some. He watches his mother’s hands, tapered fingers plucking hellebore with care. She is not young. She had struggled when they climbed the hill leading to this clearing.
A walking staff, he thinks, carved and polished until smooth to the touch, and an ivory spider for its head.
iv. Circe
The early autumn breeze brings sickness with it. Circe is the first to suffer it, with Telemachus following a day after. There is no cure for this kind of sickness, Penelope tells her. Circe knows. Telegonus had such fevers which only time cured. The knowledge brings no relief.
Penelope boils lemons and honey and cinnamon, then chills the pot in the well. With their throats aching and their noses clogged, all food is stale as sand. Instead they sip broth, and half a bowl will have to do, for more turns their stomachs. Telemachus endures better, having experienced this sickness enough times to know it will pass. Circe’s waking hours are spent stewing. She has experienced pain no mortal can withstand; she has had her father burn her flesh to the bone. The fever, the weakness, the minor pains—these are all nothing, yet they keep her from her work. She is awake and she cannot leave her bed. It is infuriating.
The night Circe’s fever breaks, Penelope, or maybe Agamede, takes the washcloth from Circe’s forehead, rinses and wrings it and places it back. Her hand brushes Circe’s temple, and the heat of daytime sun against the dark night and the cool cloth startles her.
Circe opens her eyes and meets warm gold. “This must be so amusing to you,” she croaks to Pasiphaë. Nothing is more pleasing to the gods than novelty, and what is more novel than a born goddess with mortal pains?
Pasiphaë is silent. She rinses and replaces Telemachus’ washcloth, too. Circe sees no joy in her, no glee. There is the sullenness of an unwanted yoke, and there it comes to Circe. Penelope would not entrust this task to Pasiphaë. So fragile are Telemachus and Circe that dried mandrake leaves, crushed into dust and blown into their breaths, would be all it takes.
Circe wills herself to stand, to chase, to demand her sister spill her designs, to bring to mind the word of power that would transform her, but her eyelids are heavy and burning, and despite great struggle she sinks back to sleep.
She wakes at dawn, parched, famished, her baby kicking. Next to her Telemachus sleeps, his breaths even despite the simmering fever.
In the kitchen Pasiphaë stands before a bowl of porridge. “Eat,” she says. “You will need it.”
The order shakes loose something that has lodged in her, and Circe spits it out like gravel in her grain. “I will not cast you out, I have passed this island to Penelope. So you will stay, though if you keep your silence, you may as well be a bull.” She thinks it rather poetic, in a sense. Pasiphaë has lain with a bull and borne a half-bull, and she may yet turn into that which she had imitated. By the fireplace, Daedalus’ loom sits. A reminder. Circe remembers what Agamede is too young to know. A thousand times Circe has suffered Pasiphaë’s cruelty. No more.
“Did Agamede not tell you what she saw? I had thought you would demand she tell you.”
Agamede. And Penelope, absent. Circe has forgotten, briefly, that it was Pasiphaë who wet the cloth on her forehead last night. The fear must be apparent on Circe’s face, for Pasiphaë snorts in derision.
“Don’t be stupid. I did not harm them. They caught your illness last night. Mortals. So fragile. It is no wonder our kind is endlessly fascinated by them. There are so many ways for them to perish. Sometimes you have only to wait. And sometimes, waiting—”
Circe does not wait for Pasiphaë to finish her speech. She walks as fast as her heavy body allows her to Agamede’s room. The door is closed. The room is quiet. Circe is not blessed with Sight like her daughter.
Opening the door is an ordeal. There is a bargain she makes with herself: if she does not open the door, all is right. If she does not open the door, Agamede will open it herself, and she will ask why Circe has a strange look on her face.
If Circe does not open the door, she will never know what Pasiphaë has wrought on her daughter, and so she opens it.
Agamede, flushed and fevered. Behind her lids, her eyes move rapidly, as if she dreams. Circe reaches for the cloth on her forehead, but it is freshly wet.
Pasiphaë stands at the doorway, but for once Circe’s eyes are not drawn to her light. Agamede stirs, whimpers.
Pasiphaë says, “She would not eat. So easily ill, and then they refuse that which will cure them. In Crete, they used to have an altar for me. The offerings flowed like rainfall, and in exchange I would not curse them with plagues.” Circe does not see her sister’s face as she says this.
Agamede is hot to the touch. Helios’ blood often is, but not like this. Not diluted in a mortal child. It should not be so. Circe will sit here until it is no longer so. She says to Pasiphaë, “Is that what you want of me? Offerings? Come, my stores are endless. I have fed hundreds of ships, and still the grain overflows.”
Pasiphaë shakes her head. “I thought, when you tore down your exile and turned mortal, you understood. All your supplications, they do not matter.”
“And yet for my daughter, I will do what I will not for anything else.”
“Still you do not listen. I have done no harm to your daughter. I have fed her broth and washed her face. It is the sickness that took you that is with her, that is with the old woman.” Pasiphaë snorts. “Of your daughters, she is not the one I have come to see.”
Pasiphaë looks at Circe then, and it is perhaps a divine joke, or perhaps the heat of Pasiphaë’s golden eyes boring into her womb. No matter the case, there is pain, sudden, washing through Circe’s body like a tide of blows in battle. It is good that she is kneeling by Agamede’s bed, for if not her knees would buckle beneath her.
With each wave Circe feels warm water leaking out of her, wetting her robe, pooling on the floor.
And then it is over. She turns to Pasiphaë, who watches with no small degree of satisfaction on her face.
“Eileithyia said it would happen today,” Pasiphaë says. “Come. There’s some time before the next one for you to have breakfast, as you will need your strength more than ever.”
v. Pasiphaë
Circe cannot eat much. She swallows some porridge and retches it when the next bout of pain arrives. She does not complain—an old habit from their childhood—but she trembles so much that Pasiphaë fears for her.
Pasiphaë has never feared for her sister.
A thousand times Pasiphaë tormented Circe so Perses could, too. After all, Pasiphaë and Perses were twins, and so they must be the same in all things, or opposites in all. The gods demanded symmetry. But Pasiphaë always remembered holding Perses when he was born. She was first, elder, and no twin of Perses, but Father called them so, and their mother did, too. Did Mother do it to please Father, or did she forget her own labours? Or perhaps, Pasiphaë misremembered?
Pasiphaë chose to believe them over herself. She must have been wrong, and of course she was, being young and not knowing yet how to count days the mortal way. But after her husband and all her children died, and her throne was taken from her and her line, she returned to the halls of the gods. She thought she would spend the remainder of her days complacent in Oceanus’ halls, where nothing could come and shake her as the deaths of her children had. On the first day, she bathed with Mother, and after, Mother donned the amber necklaces Father strung for each child, one by one. It was then that Pasiphaë knew.
It should not have come as a surprise that Mother pretended ignorance to please Father, yet it did, and it stung.
She often wonders if she should have clung to Circe more, but Circe contented herself with Aeetes’ condescension. Soon after it was too late to contemplate sisterly affection, as Pasiphaë grew too jealous to try.
Once, Pasiphaë summoned Circe across the ocean to help with Asterion’s birth.
The debt is one of two that Eileithyia invoked, but Pasiphaë never understood why. Pasiphaë tormented Circe a thousand times. Circe endured, each time. Now, in Pasiphaë’s bed, her strong, enduring sister is white and cold as a corpse. Only her trembling lips and whimpering breaths show that she's yet alive.
Fear is often entwined with comprehension.
Pasiphaë feeds logs into the fireplace, stokes it until the room is a furnace. A giddy thought passes through her mind: she is not quite cooked, let her bake for a little more.
“I will get you some food you may keep down, and until then, be someone else and don’t do anything foolish,” Pasiphaë says as she pulls a blanket over Circe. It is beautifully knit and even more beautifully dyed in saffron yellow. Penelope is skilled with the loom, Pasiphaë knows.
When she leaves the room, she meets Penelope. Fever glazes her eyes and slicks her skin. She drinks deeply from a tankard, though Pasiphaë smells no mead. When Penelope puts down the tankard, she explains, “I am too parched for modest cups.” Then, gesturing to the spatters of sick on the floor, “Has it started, then?”
“It has,” Pasiphaë confirms. “She cannot eat,” she adds. There are the peaches Pasiphaë plucked last night and lowered into the well in a basket, for she had considered the nausea. Circe was to eat the porridge before, and the peaches during. Pasiphaë had planned for this. Still, she looked to Penelope for guidance. Penelope, who birthed one to Pasiphaë’s five, who had lived for but a fraction of Pasiphaë’s immortal life. Penelope, who obeyed the laws of hospitality by leaving elixirs of moly on Pasiphaë’s windowsill every day since she arrived on the island, so she would be protected from Circe’s ire.
Yet Penelope gives no counsel, no advice. Instead she says, “I am glad you have come to our aid.”
Somehow, Pasiphaë finds it enough to still her being. She opens the door, daylight embracing her in a way she loathes, and leaves the house with sure feet.
The well is just outside the kitchen. She pulls the basket out and places it on the stones laid around it. The peaches are wet and cold to the touch. Pasiphaë takes one, warms it between her palms for a few breaths, then digs her fingernails into the skin to split it in two. She places the halves on a flat rock, breaks off a sprig of cypress fir and sets that with the peach. She then gathers her divinity, pulls it to her throat, as though pulling arrow on a bowstring, and calls, “Eileithyia, daughter of Zeus, goddess of childbirth, I offer you this and beg you come to my aid.”
A breeze of primroses heralds Eileithyia’s arrival, who now stands before Pasiphaë. The goddess of childbirth has storms in her eyes, marking her of Zeus, and blood on her hands, under her nails, up her elbows. The blood is not of war, but of the womb, of the birthing bed. A different sort of battlefield, and often more dangerous.
Pasiphaë kneels. Supplication, sacrifices, offerings. These are not her custom, and she is clumsy in her gestures. Yet she kneels, and she does not regret the broken grass beneath her staining her dress. “Goddess, my sister is ailing.”
“Is it not why I sent you here?” she asks. Eileithyia has the patience of a mountain, but her words are cutting enough.
“She cannot hold her food down, and her strength fades from her mortal body,” Pasiphaë continues, for she will not have Eileithyia question her.
“And yet you are here, summoning me while your sister’s soul inches closer to the river Styx.”
Pasiphaë makes her voice as close to mortal as she can. Another shape of supplication. “Goddess, you have given me aim when I was cast away from the halls of my uncle.”
Pasiphaë recalls the jeers, the laughter. A kingdom of your own? You could not even birth a monster without begging me to break your sister’s exile, Father had said, and he then burned her as he burned Circe long ago. We have been generous to welcome your return, after your failure to secure your line. You had your kingdom. If you so long for another, then build it yourself, or conquer it with your arts.
Pasiphaë remembers going to Thebes. Mortals bloom and wither in a single summer, and she had thought to trade one son of Zeus with another. But her meeting with Heracles never came to be, for Eileithyia came to her bearing a command.
Pasiphaë says, “You have invoked my debt to my sister, the debt of attending to her birthing bed, but you too have invoked your own, for abandoning her when she prayed to you. Will you abandon her?”
“I have not. I have sent her sister, Pasiphaë, daughter of Helios, to attend to her birthing bed.”
Pasiphae feels the rage flare inside her, and shame. Once more, she is a failure. She could not secure a marriage with an immortal son of Zeus, as her mother dreamt for her. She could not secure her blood on the throne of Crete, as her father wished. Now, she cannot save her sister as this goddess sent her to. At last, she says, “I am not enough. I am the weakest of my siblings. My pharmakeia is of poisons and curses.” And then, as Pasiphaë has never been meek, despite all her other failings, she meets Eileithyia’s stormy eyes. “Are you fool enough to think I would be here if I could save her myself?”
The goddess stares back, silent. The sky rumbles, a cloud flickers with lightning. A warning from her father.
“She is too weak to pray to you now, Goddess, but I am not. Help us.”
“I had not taken you for a coward,” Eileithyia says. “Witch Queen Pasiphaë, who cursed her husband for straying, who held Daedalus’ son hostage, who birthed the dreaded Minotaur. So easily you give up and beg for aid?”
But Pasiphaë is a coward. Eileithyia has said no mistruth, and so Pasiphaë says nothing.
Eileithyia takes the basket of peaches off the well and hands it to Pasiphaë. “Feed your sister and deliver her child, and let my name not cross your lips until the task is done.”
Pasiphaë stands alone. A breeze of primroses and a streak of blood staining the handle of the basket of peaches are the only sign that Eileithyia had come at all.
Pasiphaë should have known better. Olympians and their children are no less callous than the titans, no matter how much they pretend otherwise. Before the air stills and the scent disperses, she leaves the crude altar. She has wasted her time. Circe is in need, and Eileithyia will not answer. But little Agamede has left offerings at Pasiphaë’s door, thrice a day. It will behoove her to reward such offerings.
She returns to find Circe sipping water from a cup that Telemachus holds up to her lips. His fever has broken too, it seems. He sees Pasiphaë, and presses his lips to Circe’s temple before leaving. Pasiphaë is glad she does not have to send him away, yet she is unmoored by his absence. But a man has no use at a birthing bed, least of all one such as Telemachus, so she does not call him back. Instead, she slices the peaches into thin slivers with a knife she does not remember taking from the kitchen. Circe swallows them, the cool softness of the flesh easing its passage. Just as the colour returns to her face, she stiffens—another wave of pain.
She does not retch the peaches out.
So Pasiphaë keeps feeding Circe the peaches, one sliver after another. When Circe stops shivering, Pasiphaë says, “It is a pity we cannot just cut the baby out of you, now that you are mortal.”
Her sister stares, incredulous. “My child is no monster like your Minotaur!”
“No,” Pasiphaë agrees. “Only mortal. I’ve had those, too. Some I lost to the games that gods play to amuse themselves. Some, to death.” Her Phaedra, her only joy. Sharp as a whip and lost to death by the gods’ hands like her sister Ariadne. Pasiphaë has heard poets calling Theseus a hero, yet he abandoned her daughter, kidnapped another, and killed her son.
“You are here to take mine from me,” Circe accuses.
“I offered to teach Agamede because she is mortal, and a girl. You know our kind—my kind. How many mortal women have they crushed for their own selfishness? Will your pride deny your daughter the strength to protect herself?”
Circe falls silent, then. Pasiphaë offers Circe another sliver of peach, then a quarter of it when Circe protests being fed like a child.
“If you can, try standing, or walking around the room. It will help.”
“I have birthed babies before,” Circe says, though without venom.
Pasiphaë inclines her head. “I will boil some water and fetch some linens, and I will return.” She sets aside the blanket that she’d pulled over Circe. There is no need, now. “It would be a shame to stain Penelope’s work with blood,” Pasiphaë says.
Circe laughs, a strange sound Pasiphaë has never heard before. “I spun, dyed, and wove this blanket,” she says. “It is older than Penelope.”
Pasiphaë looks at Circe, long and hard. “I suppose it was you for whom Daedalus crafted the loom.” Mortal as Circe looks now, and with Penelope on the loom most days, Pasiphaë has briefly forgotten that the island once belonged to Circe.
It is past noon when there is only one peach left. The fruit is as cool as the previous ones, still dotted with dew. Not wet with well water, but dews from a spring morning. It glitters in the daylight. The basket handle is still bloodstained.
Pasiphaë stops herself from calling out to thank Eileithyia. The task is not done, yet. The name shall not cross her lips.
“Soon, I think,” Pasiphaë says after the last wave of pain shakes Circe’s body. They arrive closer together, now. “Can you still eat?”
“You should have the last,” Circe says when her breaths are even again.
Eileithyia may take it as a slight, if Pasiphaë eats it, but she cannot refuse her sister, not like this. So, Pasiphaë halves the peach and hands Circe one piece while she has the other. It is sweeter than anything, and one taste fills Pasiphaë with such strength and will. Such is divine power: what pharmakeia can achieve with weeks of harvest and drying and crushing and distilling, Eileithyia did by passing a basket to Pasiphaë’s hand.
The rest is no hardship. The baby’s head pushes through, and the rest of her follows. A girl, whole and fragile, with a cry that is as loud as the lions’ roar. She is so angry at this world, so full of pain. Pasiphaë recalls her children, all gone. She does not long to have another, for they are each so different than the next, and she cannot bear losing another child. But there’s heartache, still, of the unnamable kind.
She does not betray it. She cuts the cord and brings the baby to Circe, who greedily embraces her, cradling her atop her bare breasts so she can latch and drink.
As the baby suckles, content at last, Circe says, cautiously, “I suppose I must thank you, but you have not told me why you came here.”
“Eileithyia,” Pasiphaë says, the name spilling out of her now that her task is done. “She sent me here.”
And at last, Pasiphaë tells her story.