by Joan Holub
She also felt oddly grateful that Hades hadn’t even realized that Minthe like-liked him. As Aphrodite often said, boys could be pretty clueless when it came to how girls felt about them. Despite girls leaving plenty of hints!
All too soon, the black stallion landed them beside the River Cocytus. “Wow, your new plant is hot!” said Hades the moment he dismounted. He shot her a smile as he used his new word for “cool.”
Persephone smiled back, glad that in a day full of difficulties his mood seemed to have actually lightened. And, as Kydoimos had said, the sweet smell of the mint really did mask the stinky sulfur. It was yet another thing to be grateful for, she thought. Without actually meaning to, she’d been able to use her talents as the goddess of growing things to create a plant with true usefulness!
Because he was godboy of the Underworld, Hades had no trouble extracting Minthe from the large patch of mint, despite Persephone’s earlier spell. He simply commanded, “Minthe, arise!”
At once the beautiful green-haired nymph rose up from the mint. “You!” she spat out, the moment she saw Persephone. “Look at what you’ve done. My hair! It’s all matted now. And I’ve got the worst headache from being stomped on!” She held up one of her arms. “See this bruise?” she said, pointing to a small purple spot on the inside of one of her forearms. “It’s all your fault,” she complained. “I don’t know why you had to go cast a spell on—”
“Stop!” Hades commanded, holding up a hand. Looking sternly at Minthe, he said, “I believe you owe Persephone an apology for trying to drown her friend.”
Minthe crossed her arms. Glowering at Persephone, she said, “If anyone should apologize, it should be her!”
Persephone couldn’t believe it! It would feel so great to put this lesser goddess in her place! She opened her mouth to do so, but then closed it. Because she had noticed that Minthe’s lower lip had begun to quiver. Was she about to cry?
Something shifted inside Persephone. Instead of seeing what she expected to see—a spiteful, angry, uppity nymph—she looked beyond Minthe’s glowering gaze and saw the fear and misery shimmering within the nymph’s dark eyes.
She considered how it must feel to be Minthe. Humiliated in front of the very boy she was crushing on. Bound to the sluggish and horrible River Cocytus day in and day out. Lonely.
Was Hades seeing what she was seeing? Persephone wondered as she looked steadily into Minthe’s eyes. Maybe. Or maybe he was simply remembering what Persephone had said about the nymph crushing on him. Whatever the reason, his voice softened as he said to the girl, “I’m afraid that after this I can’t let you go back to caring for the Cocytus.”
There was no way Persephone could miss the flash of happy hope in Minthe’s eyes upon hearing this. But that glint of hope soon turned to despair when Hades added, “I’ll transfer you to one of the other five rivers of the Underworld. Maybe the Acheron. Or Phlegethon.” At this, Minthe drooped.
The Acheron, known as the River of Woe, would hardly be a step up from the Cocytus, thought Persephone. Nor would the Phlegethon, a terrifying river of fire that flowed in the depths of Tartarus. Compared to her and her MOA friends, it didn’t seem like poor Minthe had much in her life to be grateful for. No wonder the nymph was so unhappy. (Not that unhappiness was any excuse for bad behavior, of course, but it certainly made it more understandable!)
As Hades began to debate aloud the merits of the Acheron versus the Phlegethon, Persephone got an idea. “Hold on a minute,” she said, interrupting him. “Can I ask Minthe something?”
“Yeah… sure,” he said.
Persephone looked deeply into Minthe’s eyes. “If you could live wherever you wanted to, where would that be?” she asked gently.
13
Mealtime at MOA
SO WHAT DID I MISS out on after you got back?” Persephone asked Athena as she plopped down her tray and joined her friends at their usual table in MOA’s cafeteria that evening.
She and Hades had arrived at the Academy on his stallion an hour or so after the others. Once they’d arrived, they’d needed to make a stop on the grounds near the sports fields before going into the Academy’s main building. And then, alone, she’d stopped by the cafeteria kitchen just as a huge thunderstorm had begun. Boom! Boom! Through a window she’d seen flashes of lightning slice the sky. Uh-oh, she’d thought. Zeus must be throwing thunderbolts around. He only did that when he was very angry about something, and she’d wondered what it could be.
Before leaving the Underworld, she’d realized that the mint she’d created was an herb, and therefore edible. So she’d pulled up some of it to take to a fellow student named Hestia. She was goddessgirl of the hearth and a talented cook. In fact, she worked in the kitchen during her spare time, creating new dishes, and Persephone and her friends had once taken a cooking class from her.
Hestia had been thrilled to receive the new herb from her only minutes ago. “Mm-mm,” she’d said, inhaling the mint deeply. “What a delicious scent! Thank you sooo much. I can’t wait to experiment with this. It’ll be perfect to flavor both savory and sweet dishes!”
Now, reunited at dinner with her BFFs, Persephone watched Athena trade looks with both Artemis and Aphrodite. “Well…,” Athena began uncertainly.
Although neither Artemis nor Aphrodite took Science-ology and they hadn’t gone geo-dashing, they obviously knew whatever Athena was about to say, Persephone realized. “Okay. Out with it,” she said. “Did Muse Urania declare a tie between our two teams?”
Athena set down her fork. “Actually, she decided not to pick a winner at all. She said she’ll save the trophies for another contest later this year.”
Persephone swallowed the sip of nectar she’d just taken and raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Huh? Why?” Truthfully, she’d almost forgotten about the trophies. Not that it wouldn’t have been nice to receive one. But after all that had happened that day, winning a trophy just didn’t seem that important anymore.
“Because there were some, er, irregularities and cheating,” Athena told her. She squirmed in her chair, looking uncomfortable.
“But it wasn’t my fault Minthe was holding the box when she dragged Antheia into the river,” Persephone protested. She speared a piece of tomato from her celestial salad.
Athena shook her head. “Muse Urania didn’t blame you for that irregularity. It was the cheating by that tech genius Pirithous that was the problem.”
“He cheated?” Persephone echoed, confused. “I know Makhai tried to, but he wasn’t able to make it happen.”
Artemis had leaned down under the table to feed her dogs bites of her dinner. Now she popped back up. “Well, Pirithous did make it happen. That boy genius discovered a way to hack all the scroll-gadgets,” she told Persephone. “He changed messages to lead the other six teams astray.”
“Huh? Changed them in what way?” Persephone asked.
Aphrodite swallowed a bite of yambrosia stew. “He deleted letters and words in the second clue and planted a bogus message to mislead other teams about where to go.”
While Persephone had been talking to Artemis and Aphrodite, Athena had taken a piece of papyrus from her scrollbook bag and scribbled something down on it. Now she showed Persephone what she’d written, saying, “This was the second clue all the teams were supposed to get.”
Persephone read the clue aloud: “ ‘We love frolicking in waves and sunning ourselves on beaches. To see us is an omen of good fortune. Our image is even on a coin! Can you find us?’ ”
“Yes, I remember that one,” she said. “You mean it’s not the same clue the rest of you got?”
Athena shook her head. “Not at all. I’ll show you what all the other teams got instead.” Leaning over the piece of papyrus, she quickly crossed out letters and words, so that now the clue was much shorter and read: We love licking ourselves. Our image is even on a coin! Can you find us?
Persephone’s jaw dropped. “If I read that, I’d think of cats!”
“Or a member of the cat family, right?” said Athena. “When we asked Archimedes, our team’s scroll-gadget scientist, about coins with engravings of cats on them, he told us about a tetrobol with a picture of a lion on it.”
As everyone knew, a tetrobol was a coin worth four obols.
“Wasn’t Archimedes that mathematician who made some important discovery while he was taking a bath?” Aphrodite asked, flipping a length of her golden hair over one shoulder.
Athena nodded. “Yes! The story goes that one day when he got into the tub, he noticed that the further he sank down, the higher the water rose and the more it spilled out. It dawned on him that the volume of water displaced by his body had to be equal to the volume of the part of his body underwater. This led to Archimedes’ principle, which explains why objects sink or float.”
“Interesting,” said Persephone. No surprise that her brainy friend would know that story! “But back to the cat family…”
“Oh, right. Sorry,” said Athena. “Got off on a tangent there.” She laughed. “Get it? A tangent can mean a completely different train of thought. But it’s also a geometrical concept—a line that touches a circle or ellipse at just one point.”
It took some effort for Persephone not to roll her eyes. Sometimes Athena was too smart for her own good! “So I’m guessing every team except mine went to look for lions in Africa?” she asked.
Athena nodded. “You got it!”
“That Pirithous!” Persephone huffed. “I wondered why he kept fiddling with his scroll-gadget. And why we hardly ever saw the other teams. I mean, I knew he was supposed to be good at tech stuff, but I had no idea—”
“Nobody else did either,” Athena said. “My team was misled by that false clue, but only for a while. I got super suspicious when we got another message soon afterward. Because though Archimedes delivered it, his voice sounded different from before.”
“Different how?” Persephone asked.
“I wasn’t sure at the time,” Athena told her. “But now I think maybe it was Pirithous’s voice. It said, ‘Urgent message: Competition canceled. Please return to Science-ology class immediately!’ ”
Persephone remembered Pirithous, out of range of the others, speaking to his scroll-gadget and tapping furiously on its keys back on Mount Cyllene. That was just after her team had received the second geo-dash clue, but before Athena’s team had gotten it. She’d assumed Pirithous had been asking the head of Theophrastus questions to help their team figure out the clue, but now it appeared he’d been recording his misleading clue and “urgent” message.
“He may be a genius, but he wasn’t smart about what he did, because obviously the teacher figured out something went wrong when the teams reported what had happened,” said Aphrodite. At least that’s what Ares told me. Pheme got wind of the news after we got back—she has her ways. Now everybody’s talking about it.” Pheme was the goddessgirl of gossip and could spread news, good or bad, faster than anyone they knew.
Persephone had been sipping from her carton of nectar, but now she set it down with a thump. Some of the nectar spilled onto the table. After wiping up the splash, she glanced around the cafeteria. “I’d like to give that crafty mortal boy a piece of my mind!” she exclaimed. “Too bad I don’t see him anywhere.”
Aphrodite pushed back a lock of golden hair that had fallen over her shoulder. “I’m pretty sure he and Theseus have already left MOA,” she told Persephone.
“They were in kind of a hurry,” Artemis added with a grin. “Principal Zeus wasn’t happy when he found out what Pirithous had done. After all, the scroll-gadgets were Zeus’s invention. He didn’t like that they’d been messed with.”
Athena nodded. “Yeah, Dad was more furious than the Furies! You know what he’s like when he’s angry. I’m sure everyone noticed all the noise he was making up in the heavens.”
Persephone blinked. “I guess that explains the thunderstorm I heard a little while ago! Maybe he should’ve aimed a bolt at Pirithous,” she grumbled. “Just a small zap that would make him think twice the next time he thought about cheating during a competition!”
Her friends laughed so hard that Artemis snorted some nectar out of her nose.
When they calmed down, Persephone added, “Not that I wish him real harm. But he should count himself lucky he’s gone. Because he would not have liked the tongue-lashing I would have given him!” Then she thought of something. “Was Theseus involved in the cheating too?” she asked. She hoped not. He was Heracles’ cousin, after all.
Athena shook her head. “Heracles said Theseus told him he didn’t know Pirithous had been cheating and actually felt bad for having invited him along. And for letting Pirithous talk him into sneaking into the Underworld.”
Persephone nodded. “Figures that was Pirithous’s idea. It was a dumb thing to do. Maybe even dumber than the cheating. If Heracles hadn’t helped to free them, they could’ve been stuck there forever.”
As angry as she was with Pirithous, Persephone was surprised to find herself feeling a bit sorry for him too. Yes, he’d acted rashly and foolishly. His mess-ups were numerous. He’d hacked the scroll-gadgets to cheat, let go of her hand while flying—on purpose, she was sure now—and sneaked into the Underworld. But despite all his faults, she’d enjoyed his enthusiasm for flying, and she could appreciate his genius in rigging the competition in his favor, even though that was a misguided thing to do.
People were never all good or all bad, and if you thought hard enough about it, you could usually figure out what was behind even their worst behavior, she reflected. Perhaps Pirithous’s seeming need to win at all costs sprang from a desire to feel important and impress others. Whatever. She hoped Theseus wouldn’t be too hard on his friend.
On the other hand, she thought, Pirithous had gotten off pretty easily. She doubted very much that he’d ever be allowed to visit Mount Olympus Academy again, however. Maybe that was punishment enough? And the fact that he hadn’t succeeded in winning a trophy after all? She supposed it was too much to hope that the mortal boy had learned a lasting lesson. Time would tell.
Having finished eating, Aphrodite touched her napkin to her mouth. “So what happened with Minthe?” she asked Persephone. “Athena told us you changed her into a groundcover plant called mint to rescue Antheia from her clutches?”
Persephone scraped up one last spoonful of ambrosia pudding. “Yeah! That plant is awesome. Minthe’s back to being herself, though. C’mon. I’ll show you.” She picked up her empty tray and headed for the tray return.
“Huh?” said Aphrodite. But she, Athena, and Artemis picked up their trays too, and followed. As they were putting their trays in the return, Persephone glanced toward Athena. “I’m confused about something. If Pirithous changed the second clue and then sent a false message to make teams return to the Academy, how did you figure out the true clues?”
“I was wondering about that too,” said Aphrodite.
Artemis nodded. “Likewise.”
“Well, as it turned out, we had two lucky breaks,” Athena said as the girls left the cafeteria. “The first was running into members of Team Two.”
“My brother was on that team,” Artemis remarked before Athena could go on. Her three dogs, Amby, a beagle, Nectar, a greyhound, and Suez, a bloodhound, had followed the girls out of the cafeteria. Now the dogs bounded ahead as Persephone led everyone to the entrance of the Academy and pushed through the doors to the outside.
“Yes, I know,” Athena told Artemis. She turned toward Persephone. “It was Apollo who told me he’d seen your team in a particular spot near some monk seals on the coast of the Aegean. He thought your team must have gotten clue number two really wrong. But because the message to return to the Academy had made me suspicious, I talked my team into flying to that spot anyway.” She paused. “Can you guess what we found there?”
Persephone nodded. “A large pink clamshell container with monk-seal figures in it.”
“Well, yes, that too,” A
thena agreed. “But near the container we also found a scroll-gadget that someone from your team had accidentally left behind.”
Persephone’s eyes widened. “Antheia’s! She thought it might’ve fallen into the Aegean after we left the beach. I guess it must have dropped out of her pocket just before we left, though.”
“Hey, where are we going?” Aphrodite interrupted to ask as Persephone led them all down the granite steps to the marble courtyard.
“You’ll see,” Persephone said with a grin.
“So, to make a long story short,” Athena went on, as the girls and the dogs followed Persephone across the now thunderless, sunny courtyard, “we followed the clues on the dropped scroll-gadget till we caught up with you in the Underworld. I, or one of my team members, probably would’ve told you and your team about the scroll-gadget then,” she added, “but right away we had bigger things to worry about.”
Persephone nodded before starting over a grassy lawn that sloped downward toward the sports fields. “Bigger things named Pirithous and Theseus and the Furies, you mean?”
“You got it,” said Athena. “Antheia told me about losing her scroll-gadget on our way back to the Academy,” she added. “She was worried my dad would be angry she’d lost it, so she was relieved when I told her my team had found it and I returned it to her.”
“Oh, good,” said Persephone. She really liked Antheia, and their near-tragic experience with Minthe had made her feel an even stronger friendship toward the goddessgirl. She was glad none of Zeus’s anger had been toward Antheia.
Halfway to the fields the four goddessgirls came to a stone fountain that Poseidon had designed in the shape of a big O for the Olympic Games a while back. At its center, water sprayed outward in loops and twists from the fountain’s many spigots. The water seemed to dance in the air for a few seconds before tumbling back into a mosaic-tiled pool below. That was new, thought Persephone. The waters hadn’t danced before. Come to think of it, the fountain’s waters looked bluer and cleaner, as did its mosaic tiles.