Pegasus

“Have mercy! My sister is with child!” Euryale pleaded. She clung to Pelayo’s tunic as the sailor waded back toward the galley that bobbed against the sandbar in the low surf. The rowers sat their oars, eyes fixed, ready to pull as soon as their captain was aboard. “You treacherous dog!" Eurayle screamed. "You cannot leave us!”

The grizzled sailor backhanded her, sending her sprawling into the shallow water. Euryale’s hand spiked with pain as a sharp rock tore the skin. She struggled to her feet, screaming at Pelayo’s receding back.

“I curse you!” she cried. “Poseidon Earth-Shaker drag your miserable raft to the blackest depths!”

Pelayo turned, his hand on the gunwale.

“You and your sister are the ones who are cursed!” His voice faltered in its determined fierceness and a note of pleading forced its way to the surface. Face twisted in a grimace, he continued in a low hiss. “If I do not leave you, my crew will kill you and feed you to the sharks, and likely me as well.” He shook his head. “I am sorry, girl, but your fate is your own, now.”

With that, he leaped aboard and the rowers stretched to their oars.

Euryale watched, sobbing, as the ship drew away from shore. It lofted its great sail, which bellied with wind, and soon rounded the headland and disappeared.

She waded back to the beach where her sister lay curled in a ball around her pregnant belly. A bit of shade from a large stone outcrop her only protection from the boiling sun. The wrappings on her face had been torn away in the sailors’ haste to cast her ashore, and the filthy linen lay in coils around her in the black sand.

Euryale could hear her sister weeping softly. She fell to her knees and reached out to touch one heaving shoulder.

“I am sorry, my sister,” came a quiet, sniffling voice. “I was eating and … and the wind took my wrap …” She looked up at Euryale with her good eye, the other lid swollen to a scaly slit. “Am I grown so hideous?” she asked, an edge of hysterical pleading in her voice.

Euryale wiped a tear from her own eye and stroked her sister’s hair, gritting her teeth at the revulsion she felt at the stiff mass of ringlets, crusted thick with the growth that had obliterated her sister’s beauty.

She lay down next to her sister and put an arm around her, feeling the protruding pregnant belly beneath the ragged robe. “I think the goddess grew jealous, to hide you so, but you will remain my word for beauty.” Euryale closed her eyes. “The star of the west,” she said softly, “fair-cheeked Medusa.”

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Eventually, the sun rose high and heat sheeted off the island with almost unbelievable intensity. Euryale left Medusa with assurances that she would find water and a place for them to shelter, that she would be safe, that the worst had passed. The lies were easier than the truth.

The path leading up from the dark sand of the beach was steep and deep-cut. It seemed as much a water-dug trench as a footpath, but Euryale soon spotted hard, dry pellets of goat droppings. Cautious relief flooded her mind, and she quickened her pace.

The stone of the island was uncommon sharp and rough, and her sandals could hardly have been called rugged. Soon the laces chafed her, and her feet ached with a thousand cuts and scrapes.

She reached an area where the slope leveled out for a stretch, and the extent of their new home was revealed to her. Brown, dry brush seemed the most common feature, and huge, jagged stones, tumbled and cracked. The island rose to three low, broken hills that she could see, the slopes of which were a bit greener than the rest of the landscape. Most of the rest of the island seemed as the area in which she stood -- gently sloping ground covered in rocky outcroppings, frozen in their tumble to the sea.

It was alarmingly small -- unless the hills hid land from her eyes, it was quite a small island indeed. Perhaps an hour or two to walk the length, were it flat, and had she proper sandals.

The far-off bleat of a goat caught her attention, and Euryale shielded her eyes from the sun for a moment, scanning the hillside. Nearer than she’d dared hope, a small herd of the animals clustered in twos and threes, a short way up the slope.

Euryale began to climb toward the herd. She took off her sandals and nearly flung them away before deciding, rather, to stick them in her sash. As she did so, she caught sight of her fingernails and her hands shook.

The black had become more noticeable in recent days, seeming to spread as a drop of ink will spread in water, but slowly, slowly clouding her nails and staining them with its cursed dark. Now the skin around the edges had become rough and cracked, though there was no pain.

What made her heart climb into her throat at the sight of the stain’s slow spread was its resemblance to what had happened to her sister.

From childhood, the sisters had been given to Neith, bathed in the river Triton and blessed by the waters of creation. While Euryale had not the beauty of Medusa, she too had raised her voice to sing the hymns of the goddess, and bathed with the crocodiles unharmed, for Sobek was her brother in the water of creation.

Greeks in particular had marveled at the beauty and wisdom of Medusa and the faith and fearlessness of Euryale, and the sisters had risen in the goddess’ favor as the foreigners carried tales of them, and her name, home to their lands.

It was thus that Medusa, the eldest, was in the night visited by the hooded sisters, who carried a single candle that they passed between them as they spoke. In excited whispers, Medusa told her sister, from whom she had no secrets, that she was to be bride to the Unnamed Son of Neith. She was afraid, of course, but her excitement was plain, and her embrace the night of the ceremony had been fierce, and not without tears.

Euryale had not slept, her worry for her sister causing her to toss and turn. In the morning, Mother Kifi had come to her, looking very grave.

“Medusa is cast out,” the matron had said, her voice trembling. “The goddess has cursed her, for she has rejected …" the old woman, ever kind to the sisters, faltered for a moment, and then simply shook her head and finished in a tight, emotionless voice. "She has failed.”

The thought of her sister, expelled from the temple, had struck Euryale dumb.

“You will go with her,” Mother Kifi added. “She must leave the city. She must not look upon the waters of the Triton again.”

“Where will we go?” Euryale had moaned. “What will become of us?”

She had feared exile and leaving the place she loved. She had mourned the love of Neith, taken from her and from her sister in a fell blow. But even then, she had loved the goddess still, for she had not yet seen her sister.


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The goatherd was so weatherbeaten and sun-baked that he hardly looked a man. It seemed for a moment that he might be blind as well, for he did not seem to see Euryale as she climbed the slope toward him. When she called out, however, he started, and she realized he had been asleep on his feet, basking in the blazing sun.

“Hello?” she called in Greek. “Can you help me, please? I must have water, and my sister lies upon the beach there,” she pointed back down the hill.

He ran a hand through short, ragged hair the color of the island’s stones, and looked puzzled. He shook his head, and Euryale pantomimed holding a wineskin and drinking from it. The goatherd smiled and nodded and handed her a warm bladder of foul-tasting but nonetheless welcome goat’s milk.

Euryale drank gratefully and handed it back to him. Through gestures and urgent prompting, she managed to get him to follow her to the beach, making sure to precede him and fix Medusa’s wrappings before he reached her.

The goatherd clucked his tongue, his face marked with concern, and he took the pregnant woman in his arms, lifting her and half-carrying her to the path.

They reached his shack in short order, and he placed Medusa on a bed of dry grass. They shared the bladder of milk and the goatherd chattered away in his unfamiliar tongue.

Euryale was able to discern that he lived alone on the island, and he showed her a few small piles of stone that she took to be burial cairns. She smiled as he spoke, and nodded as if she understood. The man seemed pleasant and, despite his rough and rustic appearance, he was well-mannered.

That night, the goatherd, who Euryale believed to be named “Harik,” built a fire and roasted a goat for the two marooned sisters. Even Medusa was cheered somewhat by the man’s kindness.

He was in the middle of telling them some story that he seemed to find very amusing when he suddenly frowned and clutched at his arm. Euryale rose and looked at Medusa with alarm as the goatherd toppled over, gasping for breath.

Quickly, Euryale rolled him onto his back, as she had sometimes seen done, and she gasped to see his eyes rolling with terror. She pulled open his wrapped garment to give him air, and then fell back, terrified.

A black patch covered his chest and shoulders, rough-looking and cracked. He wailed and choked, and Euryale and Medusa both screamed as he retched black bile that stained his lips and neck and did not fade.

Agonizing minutes passed, in which they could do nothing for the man who had been so kind to them. The sisters wept bitterly, long after his struggles ceased and he lay stiff on the ground.

The black stain spread even after Euryale was sure the poor man was dead. Within a few minutes, his twisted body had become entirely black and dull as burned wood. She moved the corpse away from the shack, to the place of the cairns, but had no will or strength to bury him.

“I killed him,” Medusa said when Euryale returned. She had rekindled the fire and was slowly feeding her filthy linen wrap into it, watching the damp cloth sputter and catch, the flame green and blue for a moment before merging with the rest of the blaze. She glanced up at her Euryale, then down at her sister's hands, and her chest hitched in a quiet sob. “I am killing you, as well, sweet Euryale.”

Euryale sat down across from her and gave a ragged sigh. “It is not your fault, sister,” she soothed.

Medusa threw the rest of the linen into the fire in one wadded ball. Her lips drew tight, and the white of her teeth was stark against her black and blistered skin. She shook her head and Euryale suppressed a revolted shudder at the faint cloud of dust that sifted down from the stiff, stalk-like growths that twined in her sister’s hair.

“He was a monster,” Medusa said after a long silence, and it took Euryale a moment to realize she wasn’t referring to the poor dead man. “I … I was already afraid when the hooded sisters parted the water of the pool of visions.” She closed her eyes, remembering. “Those waters, always mirror-still … there was something terrible in disturbing them. I sensed it and yet I followed them down the steps they had revealed.

“We went down and down, far below the temple. The walls were wet -- in some places water ran freely -- and they were rough to the touch. Hardly worked at all, but rather hewn.

“‘These steps, these walls,’ one of the sisters told me, ‘are older than the temple. They are older than the city. They are older than the gods.’

“At last, we came to the base of the stair, and there was a breeze that smelled of damp. Great black clumps of what I took to be smooth stone proved rough and spongy to the touch, like moldy fruit.”

Euryale was silent, listening with a fascinated dread to her sister’s tale.

“The sisters showed me a pool, of a size very near to the pool of visions, but the water was dark and it roiled as I watched.

“‘He comes, sister,’ one of them said, and all of them moved away from me, carrying their light to the base of the stair. The waters parted and the … he emerged. He was all of a mass, dark and slickly wet. I thought, at first, it was Sobek himself, for his skin was ridged and rough-scaled as a crocodile’s, though black as night, but his head was a man’s, or like a man’s, but scaly, lumped and wrong.

“The sisters called to him, and their words were somehow familiar to me and yet unknown at once. He answered them, and I saw his eyes fall on me.” She looked out over the sea. “Such sorrow,” she said quietly, “and yet I could not feel pity over my revulsion. He was foul of smell and appearance. He unfurled himself, as if he wore a cloak, and I saw great wings, webbed, like  the bat’s, though the image they pressed into my terror was that of the feet of a frog. My stomach turned, but the sisters would not let me leave. They held me, and their words to the Unnamed Son became more urgent, almost pleading, I thought.

“Finally, he stepped close and …” Medusa’s voice shook and then died in her throat.

Euryale wept. “Oh my poor sister.”

“Where he touched,” Medusa said softly, “I burned and felt I would die. After, something seemed to be wrong. I was confused, disoriented, and the sisters swore oaths and cursed at me. They said I had not drunk of the waters, but I had! We both had done. And the Unnamed Son lay still beside his pool, and, I thought, seemed dead.

“My skin still burned, cold, where he had touched me, and his cold seed was within my body. I knew even at the very instant, that I was with child, for such is the potency of the gods." Medusa's eye narrowed. "But I did not tell the sisters.”

Medusa stroked her protruding belly and Euryale looked away, a wave of nausea gripping her.

A noise in the darkness startled them both, and Medusa moved quickly to sit beside her sister. It came again -- a low, snuffling sound and then a scraping. Fear gripped them as a pair of eyes, wide-set, reflected in the firelight.

The shape that revealed itself as it approached was massive and hairy, and it took Euryale a moment to understand what she was looking at.

“It is a bear, sister,” she whispered. “The Libyan mountains have many. You remember the ones that fought dogs at the festival--”

“Of course!” Medusa hissed, “But what do we do?”

The animal gazed at them placidly and then sniffed around the fire, pawing at and taking in its mouth the forgotten joint of meat that poor Harik had dropped when he became ill.

Euryale stood. The bear eyed her but did not otherwise react. She set her mind as she had when swimming with the crocodiles in the sacred pools.

“I am fearless,” she whispered, and reached out to touch the beast. It grunted and blew a warm, wet breath against her from its snout.

“Fearless Euryale,” Medusa murmured, eyes wide in awe. She stood up and joined her, and the two sisters stroked the bear’s soft fur as it gnawed the ragged bone, which parted with a crack in the heavy jaws.

Medusa chuckled. “Such strength,” she said, looking at Euryale. “What shall we call her?”

Euryale smiled. “Stheno,” she said, and Medusa cocked her head to one side.

“Greek?” she asked, and then tentatively, “‘Strong?’”

Euryale shook her head. “‘Forceful.’”


-----------------


It was a few days before they noticed the black growths that snaked up through Stheno’s pelt. Medusa was inconsolable. They waited, and as they could hardly stop the bear from coming and going, they simply waited for its visits to stop.

To their surprise and delight, though the bear grew sluggish at times, and lost most of its fur to the infection, it survived.

Medusa grew very fond of the beast, and took to calling it their sister, though neither of them really knew if Stheno was male or female. Soon she rarely left Medusa’s side.


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Euryale stood, staring at the sea and letting her mind drift, as she often did when tending the goats. They needed little tending, as Stheno was the only predator of any size, and she was quite tame, but if left to themselves they could easily wander halfway across the island.

A call from down slope roused her and she stared, uncomprehending for a moment, at a man. A man in bright blue and white. He waved and called to her with vaguely familiar words and Euryale tentatively waved back, before she recalled herself and was filled with panic.

She moved quickly to place a bush between herself and the sailor, who smiled inquisitively as he puffed his way up the slope.

“Hello there? Girl?” he said, holding up his hands.“Do not be frightened.”

“Wh-who are you?” Euryale called out. “How come you here?”

He smiled. “I am called Nereus.” He pointed down the hill. “That is … well, if you could see the cove from here, you would see my ship, Aleppo.” He wiped sweat from his brow. “We thought perhaps to take on some water, here, and a few turtles if any are about.” He craned his neck to see around the bush, but Euryale kept herself well-shielded. “We did not know anyone lived on this island.”

A voice, strange and yet too familiar, came from up the slope.

“Someone lives here.” 

At the sound of Medusa’s voice, Nereus turned. Euryale’s heart skipped a beat, as the man cried out in dismay.

“Gods protect me!” Euryale saw him backpedal and stumble past her bush. “What are you?”

“Am I not beautiful?” Medusa asked, in a false tone of hurt. “Do you not wish to return home and tell your people that you have beheld Medusa, beloved of Neith? Beloved of the Unnamed Son?”

“Medusa!” Euryale cried. Foreboding gripped her heart.

Nereus stammered for a moment. “P-please …” There was a sharp snapping noise and he fell with a scream.

Euryale leapt from behind her bush and stared down in disbelief. Nereus lay on the ground, one of Medusa’s black arrows buried in the meat of his thigh.

“What have you done, sister?” Euryale wailed, kneeling next to the stricken man, who, despite his obvious agony, tried to crawl away from her, his eyes holding the same terror and revulsion for her as they had for Medusa. He choked out a few fading words, spitting them in Medusa’s direction, and then moaned, body stiff and trembling.

Her sister leaned calmly upon her bow and watched the creeping stain of her sickness spread across the man’s skin from the arrow wound. Her eyes were cold.

“If I cannot be beautiful,” Medusa whispered, “then I will be terrible.” She met her sister’s horrified stare. “If I cannot be loved, I will be feared.” Ponderously, she stepped forward and nudged Nereus with a scaled foot. Stheno shuffled out from a nearby defile and sniffed at the dying man curiously.

“What did he call me, sister?” she asked. “Was it Greek?”

“‘Gorgos,” Euryale said, turning her head away from the dying man’s last, choking sob.

“‘Gorgos,’” Medusa repeated, pondering. Her lips curled into a hateful smile. “‘Dreadful.’” Euryale heard madness creep in as her sister uttered a rasping laugh.

“Stheno, Euryale,” Medusa called, and the bear nuzzled her, wheezing. She stroked the great creature’s black-scabbed head. “Come, my sisters,” she said. “Let us find his companions and drive them from the island. Let them carry our names back to their people.”

Without waiting for Euryale, Medusa and the bear started down the path to the beach, the path kind Harik had once carried her pregnant sister up when they were hopeless maroonees. Numbly, Euryale followed, and heard the cacophony of screams just before the sailors came into view.

A dozen men scrambled on the sand. Two brandished spears, shouting curses at Medusa and Stheno. Their hands shook with fear and they made no move to advance. The rest fled into the surf, shoving at their small galley with urgent cries.

Euryale watched Medusa draw one of her carved arrows, black with the stain of her affliction,  and notch it into her bow.

“No!” she shouted, and was rewarded with startled glances from the two spearmen, whose terror seemed redoubled by the appearance of another monster.

Medusa let fly the arrow and it sunk into the upper arm of the taller man, who dropped his spear and howled in pain. His compatriot seemed to lose his courage at the same moment, and he grabbed his wounded friend and tried to drag him toward the ship.

They made it a few steps and then the wounded man staggered, his body stiffening in agony. The other tried to drag him, but Euryale could already see the black stain on the man’s neck.

“So quick …” she whispered to herself, amazed and horrified.

Stheno reached them then, and the bear’s great forepaw caught the unwounded sailor on his flank, sending him sprawling into the water.

Medusa raged at the sailors who were, heedless of the plight of their comrades on shore, scrambling for their oars.

“Run away, dogs!” she screeched at them in Greek. “Run and say to all who may hear that it is death to come here! Death to look upon Medusa and her sisters! Tell your children of the gorgons!” She broke off as they scudded away from the shore, and a rasping laugh echoed across the cove. “ Medusa! Euryale! Stheno!” Medusa screamed across the water.

“You have gone mad, sister!” Euryale scolded. The two bodies, both already black with infection, bobbed slowly in the water. “These men did no wrong to us!”

Medusa sneered. “No wrong? And do you suppose they would have carried us home to their village, rescued us from our fate here?” She spat black saliva onto one of the bodies. “No, sister. You did not see that captain’s eyes. They were just like Pelayo’s, who abandoned us here. They would have done the same, or worse, if I had not rid us of them.” She gazed at the retreating galley. “Now they will carry word of us away from here, word of the death we offer to all who violate our island, and none shall dare our shore.” Her voice faltered a bit, and Euryale saw the tracks of tears stain her sister’s cheeks. “I would not have any man look at me again, my sister,” Medusa said, quiet and fierce. “Never again.”

---------------

“I have planted a garden,” Medusa announced when she appeared at Euryale’s cave.

Euryale looked up from the straw mat she was weaving, but said nothing.

“Come, sister,” Medusa urged, beckoning. “Let us not quarrel.”

Reluctantly, Euryale stood and brushed herself off, causing a shower of black dust to drift to the floor of the cave. She followed as Medusa waddled, belly distended with the never-born, chattering in the chaotic tumble of words that had become her only voice in recent months. They walked past Medusa’s own cave, slightly lower than Euryale’s but offering a better view of the cove, until they came to the cleared area where Harik’s hut had once stood.

Euryale surveyed the ‘garden’ in silence.

Blackened bodies stood or leaned against stones in a grim parody of a topiary. Euryale recognized, or thought she recognized, several of the corpses. There was the fisherman, blown to the island in the same storm that swept away the old hut. There, the pair of Phoenician merchant sailors whose crew had died of fever. Several of the bodies were of the soldiers who had nearly succeeded in killing Euryale the previous spring, apparently motivated by nothing more than the desire for fame.

Medusa hovered, wringing her hands anxiously. “Do you like it?” she asked, her voice almost that of a child.

“It is beautiful,” Euryale sighed, hollow. “Forgive me, sister, but I am tired. I think I will go back to my cave.”

Medusa nodded, looking hurt, but said nothing else.


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“He comes, my sister!” Medusa proclaimed, her scaled hands gripping Euryale’s. “My love has shed his great affliction and is new-made!” She pointed out at the approaching sail. “He comes for us, and we shall be healed and beautiful again, and the goddess shall welcome us into her arms once more,” her voice weakened and she groaned with the exertion, clutching at her belly. “And my son … my son shall stand astride his father before the goddess and …”

Medusa sat down heavily, at the shallow black pool at the center of her cave moaning with pain. Her gaze still lingered on Euryale’s, searching for the same joy that she seemed to feel.

“Perhaps, sister,” Euryale allowed, “but --” she stopped herself as Medusa’s expression changed and she yanked her hands away.

“I have seen it!” Medusa half-screamed at her, pointing at the pool. “My visions …”

“Please,” Euryale soothed. “Please, sister, I know you have seen much, but we must be careful.” She wrung her hands. “So … so many have come here to do us harm.”

Medusa laughed hoarsely. “Harm? Who can bring harm upon us?” She stroked the matted fur of sleeping Stheno. “We are touched by the gods, my sister, and preserved from harm until my love comes to redeem us.”


-------------

Euryale spied upon the warrior as he climbed through the dusk. A beast of a man, muscled and hairy, he nonetheless moved with a certain grace. He carried a naked blade, glinting in the sun’s last rays, and a great round shield of bronze, polished to a high gloss.

As she watched, he stopped and gazed up the hill. Unlimbering the shield, he placed it carefully on the ground. Euryale watched with a curious sense of elusive memory as he peeled away a seal of wax on a large wineskin.

He took the skin and carefully poured the contents into the shield, as though it were a bowl. Euryale was transfixed as she watched him. His motions were so familiar. When he gazed into the water, she gasped, knowing the source of the precious liquid.

Instantly, he leapt to his feet, though he took care to leave the shield undisturbed. He stared out into the fading dusk, the blade unwavering.

“Who are you?” Euryale asked, and she saw his eyes widen.

“I am the Destroyer,” he answered her, in Greek. Perseus, she echoed to herself. “I come for the head of Medusa.” His tone was flat, a challenge.

“Beautiful Medusa.”

“Beautiful?” He looked confused for a moment, and snorted derisively, but then his expression hardened. “I have the gifts,” he said. “I have drunk of the water, and I have seen her in the reflection, there.” He pointed at the shield. “Her gaze will not harm me.”

“Her gaze?”

“To behold the countenance of the gorgon is to invite death,” he told her, his tone almost pedantic, as if this were something everyone knew. “Her aspect is so hideous, it turns men into stone.”

Euryale shook her head slowly, wondering what tales had been spun. Then she thought of the statue garden, and the stiff black corpses of her sister’s victims. “You are here to slay Medusa?” she said softly. “What of Euryale?”

The warrior squinted stupidly. “Who?”

“Her sister.”

He nodded, understanding, and then shrugged. “The sisters, I know, are immortal,” he replied, “I shall endeavor to avoid them.” He narrowed his eyes. “Who are you?” he asked, suspicious, and stepped toward the patch of shadow in which she hid.

“I am no one,” she told him. “She you seek lies in the cave, just there.”

He nodded and knelt again by the shield. Picking it up, he drank down the contents and then strapped the dripping disc to his arm.

“Tell her that you love her,” Euryale whispered.

The warrior hesitated. Euryale could no longer see his face, but she felt his curiosity pluck at her, and his unease. She stepped further into the shadows. For a moment, he seemed about to say something, but then he turned and began to walk toward the cave.

“My love?” croaked Medusa from within.

Perseus stepped into the cave mouth, his sword arm tense, shield raised high to shield his eyes, despite his professed faith in the power of the waters.

Medusa groaned with pain. “Your sons are coming.”

Euryale crept near the cave, but could not bring herself to look within.

“My love?” Medusa called again, a note of confusion in her voice.

Then she screamed, rage and terror rising and cut suddenly, wetly short.

Stheno roared, then, and the Greek leaped out of the cave as if borne on wings. The great bear, infuriated, shot out after him, but could not match his speed downhill.

Euryale’s final glimpse of the man was of his fist, clutching her sister’s dead head by her brittle ringlets. Blood and water dripped thickly from her severed neck. The Water of Creation. Euryale wondered if it would keep the murderer safe. Medusa’s eyes were wide and accusing, and Euryale turned away.

For long minutes, she sat beside the cave and wept. Eventually, she realized that her sobs were not the only sound, and she became silent and listened. There was a sound, rustling, scraping, coming from inside the cave and she turned and slowly stepped inside.

Medusa’s headless body lay in a slowly spreading pool that glistened black in the light of her small fire, and mingled with the waters. Her corpse was still spasming, though whether with the horror of death or unhinged rage at this injustice, Euryale could not tell.

As she watched with wide eyes, the body shuddered, the black skin of her belly distending.

It took several minutes for the child to free itself from its mother’s corpse. It crawled toward Euryale with a wet, bleating cry before staggering up on four gangly legs. It turned its long head to the side to look at her with one round, dark eye.

Euryale reached out to touch the bloody creature’s mane, and it shook itself, spattering her with gore. It drew itself up and let out a sharp cry.

It unfolded its wings and gave them a wet flap, and then fanned them slowly.

“Your father’s wings,” Euryale whispered.