“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

“You knew I helped to set up the city. Now I’m living in it for a little while, and still helping. It needs my help.” Septima frowned. “Is my brother right? Will you keep this secret?”

“Why is it a secret?” I asked.

“So I can live here quietly, without any fuss, and experience it normally,” she said.

I thought about Septima, about her strange halfway status in the library. Was she experiencing it normally? It didn’t seem so, especially if half the masters knew who she was. Yet anyone would naturally want to live in the city, and without undue attention. “I won’t tell the children who you are,” I said.

“Good enough,” Pytheas said.

Septima—Pallas Athene—turned to him. “That’s not your decision.”

“Yes it is,” he said.

“Why?” She seemed to get taller as she spoke.

“Simmea’s my votary. I take full responsibility for her. You can trust me that she’ll keep her word.” All this time Pytheas kept his eyes on his sister and did not even glance at me.

“You are behaving irresponsibly and taking stupid risks,” Athene snapped. “I was against this intervention from the start, but you couldn’t wait. Your votary. Is she now? Ask her if she is. You’re besotted with her. It’s Daphne all over again.”

“I am,” I said, full of my new-found clarity, and not considering whether it was a good idea to intervene.

“You are?” She towered above me now. She had a great helmet and a shield on her arm. “Do you even know what it means?”

“If he’s Pytheas, I’m his friend. Since he’s the god Apollo, I’m his votary. But you can trust me to keep my word without his guarantee. You know me well enough for that. I have always served you well. And I am a gold of the Just City. You helped to set it up. If you can’t trust my word, what have we been doing here?”

Pytheas laughed. Athene turned on him angrily, then shook her head and shrank back down into her Septima form. “I’ll trust your word,” she said. “As a gold of this city and my brother’s votary.” She stalked off down the street, her hair flying behind her in the breeze.

I looked at Pytheas. “You’re the god Apollo? You told me we were doing agape! You said you needed me.”

He blinked. His expression was surprisingly reminiscent of the moment in the palaestra when I’d beaten him up. “It’s because I’m Apollo that I need you,” he said. “You help me so much.”

I took a step towards him. “And you didn’t tell me because?”

“Because I didn’t want to have this conversation?” He tried a smile. “Because I really am trying mortality and to live here and experience the city?”

“You’re the god Apollo,” I repeated. It was strange, simultaneously surprising and inevitable. “Of course you are. I’m an idiot. I don’t know why I didn’t figure it out before.”

“I’m Pytheas,” he said. “That’s real too.”

I took another step forward. “Can you turn back into a god at any moment, like Athene just did?”

“No.” He looked awkward. “I wanted the authentic experience. The only way I can take my powers up again is by dying. I’m here for the long haul. And you’ve really helped me understand so much about how it works.”

“She said you were taking stupid risks. Did she mean your becoming incarnate, or did she mean healing me?”

He nodded. “Healing you. But that as well, because I had to ask her for help, without my own powers. You were trapped in your body, in your sickness. It was horrible. I couldn’t leave you like that for months or years.”

“It really was horrible,” I agreed. “I didn’t care about anything. That was the worst. Worse than fainting all the time. Thank you for helping me.”

“But you’re all right now?”

“I’m starving, but I feel as good as I ever did. But I’ve had an awful shock.” He hadn’t moved, but I had closed the space between us and stood close in front of him. “You were taking stupid risks for me?”

“It wasn’t all that—all right, yes, I suppose I was.” He met my eyes.

“You’re a god.” A god. He was thousands of years old. He had unimaginable powers. And he was just standing there.

“That doesn’t stop me being confused and wanting to learn things.”

“Evidently not.”

“Or truly liking you.” The strange thing was how little it changed the way I felt about him. I felt unworthy of him. But I had always felt unworthy of him. And there was still a vulnerability in his eyes. “Are you going to hit me?”

I reached out and tapped his chest lightly. “If I’m going to hit you we should go to the palaestra. There are people passing, and this temple is open all around. They’d see us wrestling in here.” It wasn’t wrestling I wanted to do with him. It never had been. “But I think we should go to Thessaly.”

“Good idea,” he said. “For one thing, it’s close. For another, Sokrates has been missing you. And thirdly, Sokrates knows. He’s the only one. I didn’t tell him. He recognized me.”

“Of course he did. I was there. And that’s why he immediately started off on whether we can trust the gods.” I felt stupid for not understanding at the time.

Pytheas took my hand. His hand didn’t feel any different from the way it always did—always when I was myself and cared about it, that is. “He can trust me,” he said. “And so can you.”

I looked at him sideways. “Those the gods love … tend to come to terrible ends.”

“That’s Father. And … some of the others, I suppose. But I do my best for my friends. I can’t do anything about Fate or Necessity, or directly against the will of other gods, but so far as I can, I always do my best for them.”

We started walking together towards Thessaly. I thought through all the stories I knew about Apollo. “What about Niobe?”

“She badmouthed my mother. Besides, I didn’t say I didn’t punish my enemies.” He was looking at me sideways, awkwardly.

“Well, being a god explains why you’re so hopeless at being a human being sometimes,” I said.

He laughed. “I was so worried about you finding out. I can’t believe you know and it doesn’t make any difference.”

“It makes a difference,” I said.

“But you’re talking to me the same way?” He seemed tentative.

“You’re still you.” That was what I felt very strongly. Pytheas was still Pytheas, the way he always had been. I just understood him better now. It was like the thing with Klymene. I didn’t feel that he’d been deceiving me, just that this was the thing he had kept quiet, a thing that helped me make sense of him. But the implications were still slowly sinking in. Maybe it was because my mind had been wrapped in wool for so long.

“And what you said to Athene?” he asked.

“That I’m a gold of this city and she’d better trust my word if she hasn’t been wasting her time here for eight years?”

Pytheas laughed. “That was perfect, though she’ll take a while to get over it. But I meant the other thing. That you’re my friend and my votary.”

“Yes.” I stopped walking, and he stopped too. “But you know that. You knew that before. What else were we talking about up on the wall? Except for you not mentioning the fact that you’re Apollo.”

“What it means for you to be my votary is that the other gods can’t do anything to you without my permission,” he said.

“I know. And you can do anything you want. I have read about this.” We started walking again. We were quite close to Thessaly now. “I’m walking with the gods,” I said, and giggled. Then I stopped. “What’s that?”

The marble slabs of the pathway stretching out before us, as far as Thessaly and further, stretching out up the street from there, were all cut with words. “It’s the workers’ halves of dialogues,” Pytheas said. “I did want to tell you, but you weren’t listening to anything anyone said.”

“They’re talking back?” I was delighted. “I knew it wasn’t Kebes.”

“They’re talking back to Sokrates at great length,” Pytheas said. “So it seems he was right and everyone else was wrong, not for the first time. They’ve had a major debate about slavery in the Chamber, and Sokrates is trying to persuade the workers to work, by first finding out what they want and then seeing whether we can offer it to them. It’s all terribly exciting. Aristomache apparently made a wonderful speech about Plato and freedom.”