They still looked stunned. I smiled, and sat down and began to eat a lemon.

“Have you ever written something for a chorus before?” Neleus asked. “Ever, ever? I know you haven’t done it in the City.”

“I haven’t, and it was an interesting challenge, especially without any privacy on the boat to work on it. But you wait until you hear the choral version, with the men’s chorus singing low down home and hearth and love and life and the women’s chorus singing high up worth the cost of risking life and the lines working with and against each other.” I sang the lines as I quoted them. They kept on staring at me. “Yes, it’s a new thing for me. But life is about moving forward and learning new things.”

“You’ve stopped being cracked,” Arete said.

“Yes, I think I finally have. I haven’t stopped missing her. But I’m whole again. I’m finally doing what she wanted.”

“Stopping the art raids?” Euklides asked.

“That’s part of it,” I said.

27

ARETE

In our absence, my brother Euklides had run away from Psyche and sworn a new oath to the Remnant City. He was staying in Thessaly and drilling with the Delphian troop. His armor stood on a stand in the corner, and he had moved things around in the house. He apologized for disturbing things, and said he didn’t know whether he was host or guest, welcoming us back. It was wonderful to see him, but on the second day after our return he discovered that Kallikles and Phaedrus and I had powers.

“You have to take me to Delos,” he said to Father, as soon as he understood how it had happened.

“It isn’t an unmitigated blessing,” Kallikles said. He hadn’t found a way to tell Rhea about his powers yet.

Euklides looked at Kallikles with cold dislike. “Let me be the judge of that.”

Phaedrus wasn’t home because he was going around the city healing everyone. I missed his friendly presence in the family argument. Neleus wasn’t home either, but then I’d barely seen him since the first afternoon when we came back, when Father had sung to us in the garden. He was spending a lot of time with Nikias, and also with Erinna. He was also working hard, with Maia and Manlius, on arranging the conference.

“If there’s another voyage, and if I have any say, I’ll make sure you get to visit Delos,” Father said. “And Alkibiades and Porphyry if they want to go. And maybe I should arrange it for Fabius in Lucia too.”

“If there isn’t another voyage, could we get there anyway?” Euklides asked. “Could you fly that far with me, Arete?”

“I don’t know. It’s a long way.”

“Could you fly to Amorgos and rest, and then to Naxos, and so on?” Kallikles suggested.

“I don’t know. I’ve never flown carrying anyone for longer than that time with you by the rock. There’s a big difference between flying for a few minutes and flying for hours. I’d want to try it somewhere I could land if I needed to rest, not over the open sea!”

“It’s a possibility anyway,” Euklides said.

“I hope it won’t come to that,” Father said. “They’ll have to send the Lucians home at the very least. And I expect we’ll have trade voyages, and missions of mercy helping the Lucians.”

“I wonder what powers I’ll have,” Euklides mused. “It seems so random.”

Perhaps it wasn’t as random as it seemed. I couldn’t quite see how my own powers fit together, but my brothers’ were beginning to make sense to me. I had spent one morning up on the mountain with Phaedrus, standing on the edge of the lava ready to swoop down and rescue him if he got into trouble. It didn’t bother me to see him walk through the lava, or when he diverted the flowing stream around himself. But I could hardly look when he lay down and sank into it.

“Didn’t you need to breathe?” I asked, when he came up after what felt like a long time.

“I could tell when I needed to,” he said. “And I did start to burn, but I healed myself.” And he had been thinking about developing an excellence of volcanoes before we went to Delos.

As for Kallikles, lightning and weather working certainly fit together. “Perhaps Zeus will devolve weather to you,” I suggested, when Kallikles demonstrated his lightning by blasting a rowan tree on the lower slopes of the mountain. There was nothing left of the tree but blackened roots at the edge of the little pool.

“I wish I could do that to Klymene,” was all Kallikles said. He wasn’t getting over his anger at his mother. He was having fun with electricity, though. He could make the light-beams in Thessaly come on without touching the switches.

My own abilities didn’t seem in any way coherent. They also weren’t very useful. Nobody on Kallisti spoke different languages, so I never had the chance to use that ability. I already knew Greek and Latin. And I could only fly when I was sure I was unobserved. The truth recognition was useful, and I think that was why Father decided to take me with him on his missions to the other cities. Well, that and wanting me to sing the harmonies to “The Glory of Peace.”

Over the course of the next month I went on four embassies, accompanying Father on his new quest to end the art raids. His proposal was radically simple—everyone would return everything they had stolen, and then the art would be fairly distributed according to population. This had been Psyche’s original proposition, which we had rejected with scorn the first time we had heard it. Mother had wanted to accept it, but back then she couldn’t persuade enough people. Then the raids had started, and the honor of people and cities had become tangled up with them.

Father had three advantages in stopping the art raids now. First was the song, which really was a wonderful tool. It made people stop and think. We’d been trained to fight, but we’d also been trained to think and debate, and the song broke the cycle of raids and revenge by making people question why they were fighting and whether it was worth it. Secondly, because people generally liked and respected Father, and because he had been so vehemently in favor of vengeance for so long, his renouncing that now was very powerful—especially at home in the Remnant, where everyone had seen the force of his madness. Everyone had also heard what he’d done to Kebes, from those of us who had been there. To go from that to singing about peace and civilization and excellence made a powerful statement on its own. And thirdly, there were the Lucians. The specific way the Lucians were falling into timarchy was easy for us to see—the bloodsports and torture, and their focus on the physical side of life over the intellectual side. But their horror at our wars made us see that we were doing the same thing in our own way. The existence of the Lucians, and the need to do something about them, provided a new factor that made everyone refocus.

The people who really needed to be persuaded most were our own people at home in the Remnant. Most of the art was still safely there, and people had no desire to part with any of it. People tended to be especially attached to the art in their own eating halls. It wasn’t difficult to get people to agree that the art in the temples and streets should be shared, but they tended to feel that the art in their eating hall belonged to them personally. I had heard Mother talking about this since the art raids began.

What Father proposed was that there should be an art conference, combined with a Kallisti-wide conference on deciding what to do about the Lucians. This was clever, because the Lucians were, or could be made to appear to be, a common enemy. Everyone in Chamber agreed on the foreign conference, and Father and Maia made the art conference seem like the thing that would make all the other cities agree to come.

We went to Sokratea first. Sokratea was our closest ally. They had never been much engaged in art raids against us, though they had raided the other cities. I had been there before, on a mission with Mother. This was not all that different. We sailed there on the Excellence, which remained in the harbor there while we stayed in a guest house.