The Mighty Ones' Fall

Chapter 7: Battle Practice and a Storm

Alec walked away, still fuming. I didn't know where he went, but his shirt and the severed pieces of leather whip were left in the grass. Hannah knelt down to pick them up. I wanted to tell her not to, just because Alec should have known better than to leave them, but I couldn't seem to find the right words. I was speechless and ashamed, like every other Knowing member.

In some sort of slow motion, everyone started to help clean up the party before getting ready for bed. There wasn't much talking. By finally speaking his mind about Jason, Alec had miraculously scared everyone into silence. I hadn't thought that was possible for anyone but a god to do. But again I thought about what I had told Layna earlier and then about the way Alec almost never referred to the gods as "lords" or "ladies" like everyone else (people had stopped trying to correct him), and I figured Alec was a better friend to them than I thought. I honestly wasn't sure there was a big difference between gods and heroes, but I guessed that was why the hero Heracles eventually reached godhood. However, I knew the great Alec would never reach godhood, given the fact that we were in between generations of gods and that the Golden Age of the Greeks had been over for thousands of years.

Just before I was going to follow the twins back to our tent, Hannah approached me, asking if I would come with her to return Alec's shirt. I agreed, and so we quickly walked to the infirmary, hoping we would have time to race back to bed before curfew.

When we walked into the tent, Alec was just lying face down on a dark green cot near the front of the tent, and Jan was busying herself in the back. Alec only sighed and buried his head in the pillow when we walked into the room, while Jan turned around to watch us, drying her hands on her apron. Bravely, Hannah approached him and set the old, blue t-shirt by his head. "I thought you might want this back," she whispered to him in Greek, but at the sound of her voice, Alec tensed up and took a white-knuckled grip of the support bar at the front of the cot as if he was in pain. Hannah took a step back.

"You're doing it again, boy," Jan muttered hoarsely, clucking her tongue at him.

"Doing what?" the hero hissed back at her.

"Living in the past." The middle-aged nurse crossed her arms and frowned. But this time Alec actually lifted his head to listen, his icy blue eyes meeting her soft brown ones, and Jan ordered, "Come back over here. You can sleep on any other cot but that one. You've slept there too many times, and it's done nothing for you."

"I get my best sleep on this cot! And you know exactly why," Alec argued, his voice rising as he bolted upright. Meanwhile, I exchanged bewildered glances with Hannah, who also seemed to think that there was a large part of the story we didn't understand.

Jan sighed and rolled her eyes as she said, "Fine. But do yourself a favor and be social for a minute." Then she did a little bow, picked up her long skirts, and trotted out of the room, leaving Hannah and I alone with possibly the most dangerous teen on the planet: a mentally unstable monster-killer.

After a long, awkward pause, Hannah sat down beside the hero and asked nervously, "Did you really mean what you said about the Lady Athena killing Jason?"

"Yes," Alec said, looking at her with raised eyebrows and wide eyes as if his answer was obvious. "You must not have seen the look in her eyes when she first tackled him on the stage. But I don't expect you to understand. No one does."

Hannah carefully moved her hand over Alec, but he immediately slid his back into his lap and started scratching his head nervously. She sighed. "I do understand, Alec. I understand that the Knowing hasn't changed nearly as much as you or Lady Athena thought it would. It hasn't changed as much as I thought it would, either."

"You mean you still aren't allowed to train," the hero inferred bitterly.

"Well, the other archers are allowed to train at will now, but Jason still has that stupid age rule in place," Hannah explained. Before the War of the Woods, the Knowing followed the belief of Lord Ares that said archers were cowards because they didn't do hand-to-hand combat. The persecuted archers were once forced to train in secret at the dead of night. However, many finally realized the benefits of archery during the Battle of the Small Meadow, the biggest and bloodiest battle in the war, and so archers were no longer alienated. Unfortunately, that didn't matter much if you were under age sixteen, a problem Alec knew well. When he had his vision at the start of summer and asked to start training for his journey early, Jason gave him no exception. Alec ran away only one day after that.