This Immortal Heart: A Novel of Aphrodite(33)

“Going home,” he answers. He glances down at me. “You had your chance to get off.”

“I’m not going to Thrace with you.” I twist around, looking at the receding shape of our cloud-wreathed mountain.

He shrugs. “Jump out now, then.”

But I’m not going to make an undignified dive over the side of his chariot. “Really?” I say. “You’re taking me hostage just because I said you’re like Zeus?”

“You’re hardly a hostage,” he says. “You’re an immortal goddess. You can turn into a dove and fly away from me anytime you like. And you’re wrong.”

“What do you mean, I’m wrong?”

He sighs. “Because it isn’t about power. Not for me.”

I hesitate, curious against my better judgment. “What was that display in the throne room about, if not power?” I ask.

“You were there.” He leans back, his armor shining bronze in the sunlight. For once, he’s answering, not firing back a jibe. “You could see Hera. She’s desperate for me to challenge him—a real challenge. She’d love for me to overthrow him.”

“And you wouldn’t?” I raise an eyebrow, skeptical.

“Not for her.” His smile is grim. “It won’t be any better with her at the helm. If I fight him—a real fight, not just a squabble in the throne room—I’d be doing what she wants. And if I obey him, he gets to win whatever warped game they’re playing with each other. All they care about is power, and I won’t help either of them get it.”

I frown. “I don’t understand.”

He loosens his grip on the reins, letting them rest on the dark wood. The horses trot onwards through the empty air, the fire they breathe flowing back toward us in two bright streams. “You heard Zeus, complaining about his city. He thinks that war is something he can control, that it can be fought when he wants, to get whatever it is that he wants.”

“And?” I say. “Don’t you control it?”

He shakes his head. “No. War can’t be controlled—it’s an impulse, an instinct. That’s what he can’t understand. He didn’t make me the God of War any more than he made you the Goddess of Love. It’s what we are, what we’ve always been. If he burned himself up with his own thunderbolt tomorrow, we wouldn’t be anything else.”

I can feel myself unbending, just a fraction. Listening to him again, when I know I should leave. But, despite myself, I’m intrigued by his words. How would he know what I am or always have been?

Has he been paying attention to me? Thinking about me? Watching me without my realizing?

Silence hangs between us.

“You’ve always been close to Zeus,” he says at last.

“I don’t argue with him,” I say. “It’s not the same thing.”

“Really?”

“I’m not here because of Zeus,” I say. “He didn’t send me.”

His eyes meet mine. “I believe you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” He smiles wryly. “Maybe it’s the way you sound when you talk about him. You have the same anger in your voice as when I refused your request to save Phaon. I believed you had nothing but contempt for me then. I can believe you feel the same about Zeus.”

“Well,” I say, “that makes you more perceptive than him at least.”

Ares laughs. “He has no idea.”

“No idea about what?”

“About us. Who we are, what we do. He doesn’t understand war. I’m sure he knows nothing about love either.” He snorts. “They’d both exist without him, and they’ll both outlast him. They aren’t tools that he can use.”

That he’s drawing a parallel between our realms again confuses me. There can’t be a common ground between our spheres of power. “But he will kill all your warriors, just like he said. Don’t you care about that?”

“Why would I?”

“Of course,” I say wearily. “I know what regard you have for mortal life.”

The horses arc upward, over a high mountain range, swooping above the snow-capped peaks.

“Aphrodite.”

This time he doesn’t sound exasperated. There’s an undercurrent of something else there, something dangerously close to warmth.

It makes me far more afraid than his anger did.

“No one goes to war thinking they won’t die. Phaon knew it. My tribes know it; they embrace it. If they die in battle, they die doing something glorious, something they can’t not do. If they die early, at least they know what it is to be alive.”

I shake my head. “There are better ways to discover what it is to be alive.”

He shrugs. “Maybe.”

“So Zeus can destroy your army, and you don’t care because you’ll raise another one,” I say. “Does it go on forever?”

Before he can answer, my breath is taken away by the sight in front of me. “What’s that?” I gasp.

On the upper slopes of a mountain, skeletal trees of a barren forest reach out their spindled branches, the bleak rock face forbidding all the way to the summit. A black mirror of Olympus—the same walls and gates and columns of our shining palace but built in iron and granite. It stands grim and so unwelcoming that even the rays of sunlight stretching across the sky seem to weaken when they reach it, managing to cast only a ghostly pall. An eagle-owl flies over the roof, its awful shriek echoing from the rock and dying away in the air.