by Joan Holub
Quickly she headed out the front doors, down the school steps, and across the courtyard. At the far side of the marble expanse, she sat on a low stone bench. There she strapped the winged sandals on over her homemade vine ones, which were thin enough to fit inside the magic footwear. Immortals had the power to make these sandals fly, but would the wings work for a nymph, who only had half the magical power of a goddessgirl? Still seated, she unleashed the wings on the sandals. Big mistake.
The wings immediately started flapping, causing her feet to rise, so that her legs stuck straight out in front of her. The sandals tugged higher as if eager to fly, almost tipping her over backward.
“No! Wait. Stop,” she called to them. If they took off now, she would fall backward on the bench and wind up flying upside down! Bending her knees to bring the sandals closer, she quickly leashed the wings again.
“I guess I should stand up before takeoff,” she murmured, rising to her feet. “Let’s try this again.”
With both feet firmly on the ground, Echo braced one hand on a stone planter next to the bench. Then she reached down and unleashed the wings. As she straightened, the sandals lifted off to hover a few inches above the ground. Success!
Sort of. Back in the labyrinth the goddessgirls had made flying look effortless. Turned out it wasn’t that easy. Her legs kept trying to do splits. And why wasn’t she going anywhere? She pictured the way Artemis had looked when she’d flown into the maze that morning. Then she tried to do what the goddessgirl had done, straightening her legs, pressing them together, and then leaning forward a little. Yes! The sandals moved her ahead. And when she leaned back, they took her backward.
“Aha! I think I’m getting the hang of this,” she murmured, zooming forward again. Whack! She bumped into a tree. “Notescroll to self, remember to bank left or right around solid objects,” she mumbled. Leaning left now, she banked around the tree and winged off.
Although her nymph magic was enough to make the sandals fly, she found she wasn’t able to achieve the same heights or speeds as the immortals. Still, an hour later she spotted the Immortal Marketplace, halfway down the mountain from MOA. She leaned back just a little, and her sandals began to slow. She touched down in front of the enormous, high-ceilinged building, then stumbled ahead a few steps before she was able to come to a complete stop.
After loosening the straps at her ankles, she looped them around the wings to hold them in place so she could walk normally. Straightening, she admired the colorful decorative floats she’d seen from Artemis’s chariot that were outside the IM, being readied for the parade tomorrow. The air was filled with the sounds of saws and hammers and the smell of paint as workers busily added details to the floats, such as wooden figureheads and garlands of flowers. Should she check for Zeus out here? He might be overseeing the construction.
But then she heard another sound, a whinny. There, grazing behind one of the floats, was Zeus’s white-winged horse, Pegasus. She went over and gave him a pat on the nose. “I bet you know where Zeus is, don’t you?” Unfortunately, the horse couldn’t talk and didn’t reply.
Echo noticed, however, that Pegasus was standing near an outer door to the IM marked SHOP DELIVERY ENTRANCE. Was Zeus beyond that door? She turned the knob and stepped into a delivery and storage area at the back of a shop. As she wound past racks of froufrou clothing to the main part of the shop, she heard what sounded like an interview in progress.
“Please tell us about your esteemed guests,” a voice was asking someone she couldn’t yet see.
“My pleasure,” a booming voice replied. “As you all know by now, I grew up in a cave on Mount Ida in Crete. And Melissa and Amalthea were my nannies.” This was Zeus speaking, of course. Heart thumping, Echo moved up to the edge of a crowd that had gathered to watch him being interviewed.
“Amalthea fed me goat milk and Melissa brought me honey,” the seven-foot-tall King of the Gods went on. His muscles bulged, and electricity crackled off his arms as he gestured toward the goat beside him and a bee buzzing around his head. On cue the goat and bee shape-shifted into two women. Melissa (the bee nanny) had honey-colored hair and Amalthea (the goat nanny) had hair the color of milk.
“These ladies made me what I am today!” Zeus said, smiling at them broadly. “And now please meet Melissa’s daughter, Ide, who is soon to be wed!” he proclaimed. A happy-looking younger woman with bee wings at her back stepped up to join the group, and Echo recognized her as the bride-to-be pictured in that article she’d seen in Teen Scrollazine. Her hair was honey-colored too, just like her mom’s.
“My nannies are opening a shop right here in the Immortal Marketplace, with specialty soaps and candles with pure ingredients like beeswax and goats’ milk,” Zeus went on. “Tomorrow’s parade will help showcase their products and the products of other IM stores too. Two dozen floats will circle outside the IM, tossing samples out to lucky shoppers in the parade crowds.”
Breaking off momentarily, he posed for the reporter’s artist, flexing his muscles and smiling big.
In the crowd near Echo, a man in a yellow-and-black checkered suit twirled his elaborate mustache, then leaned toward a woman with lots of skillfully applied makeup on her three eyes. “Good! The IM could use some promotion,” he told her. The woman nodded, adding, “Too true. That Typhon windbag scared half of my Cleo’s Cosmetics customers away, and they’ve never come back.”
“The IM welcomes business from mortals, immortals, and everything in between. So pass it on,” Zeus said, speaking now both to the reporter who’d been interviewing him and to the crowd. Abruptly, he paused, sniffing the air. A strange, dreamy look came over his face. “Well, thanks for listening, everyone! I have to go—King of the Gods business. I’ll leave my nannies to take you on a tour of their store out in the IM. And don’t forget—get out there and spread the word that the IM is safe and customers should come and START SHOPPING!”
Echo and those around her jumped at the loudness of Zeus’s command. With the interview apparently over, the crowd began to spill out of the shop, along with his nannies. Everyone appeared to be heading into the main atrium of the marketplace, where Echo assumed most of the stores were located.
She ducked behind a rack of fancy chitons as Zeus said a hurried farewell to the reporter and ushered him out the door as well. Once they’d all gone, only the few workers who belonged in this shop remained. Zeus looked around as if to be certain the coast was clear. Then he made a beeline straight for a storage closet at the center of the shop. He pushed through the curtains that served as the closet’s door and went inside.
Echo tiptoed over and paced outside the curtains for a few minutes. As she waited for Zeus to come out, she tried to work up the courage she would need to demand that he fix the problems he’d caused for her and her tree.
What was he up to in there, anyway? she wondered when he didn’t come out right away. Could he be making new bolts of thunder and lightning? Plotting to strike something else with them just for fun? She was in the right, and he was in the wrong. What was she waiting for? It was now or never. She burst through the curtains.
6
Cupcakes
ZEUS’S BACK WAS TO ECHO, but he must have heard her enter the storage closet, because he whirled around at once. “Whah?” he mumbled. There was a guilty look on his face, as if he’d been caught stealing jewels. Actually, he was holding a cupcake and had a smear of pink frosting in his beard. She’d surprised him in the act of sneaking a snack!
For several seconds the two of them just stared at one another. The gold thunderbolt on Zeus’s belt buckle flashed, as did the gold bands at his wrists. Up this close, he towered over her like a giant.
Her feistiness had carried her this far, but suddenly Echo was feeling unsure. Confronting Zeus like this was a crazy idea. If she made him mad, he could zap her into smithereens in an instant.
But instead of zapping her, Zeus heaved a relieved sigh. “Oh gooh. Thought you wuh someone elsthe . . .” He fin
ished off the pink cupcake he’d been holding and then popped a yellow one (lemon, maybe?) into his mouth, and finished in two bites. “Mmm,” he said, sounding happy.
Echo frowned. Why should he get to be happy when he’d messed up her whole life? A renewed determination to make him pay filled her. “My name is Echo,” she announced quickly, before she could change her mind. “I’m an Oreiad nymph, and you zapped my FirHeart with one of your lightning bolts!” Her voice trembled at her own daring.
“Whah? What’s fur art? Art made out of fur?” Zeus replied around bites of a new cupcake. This one was dark brown, so probably chocolate.
“No, it’s my tree!” she exclaimed. “I figured you were passing over the forested mountains of Boeotia the day before yesterday. Near the Forest of the Beasts?”
“Well, I . . . ,” began Zeus, looking thoughtful.
“And one of your bolts struck my tree and destroyed it. Ka-boom!” She waved both hands outward to indicate a big explosion. Remembering the highly emotional moment, unhappiness welled up inside her.
Zeus swallowed the last bite of chocolate cupcake. “I was nowhere near the forest of Boeotia Wednesday,” he said, speaking clearly now. Then he pulled a strawberry off a fresh cupcake. Echo noticed there was a whole platter of various flavored ones on the counter behind him. Zeus popped the strawberry into his mouth and then gobbled the cupcake. He offered her one, but she shook her head. How could he eat at a time like this?
“What? But you must have been,” she insisted. “There was lightning. And a bolt struck my tree!” She thrust her chin forward. “And so I want you to . . . No, I demand that you . . .”
At her forceful tone Zeus frowned. Electricity sizzled up and down his mighty arms. Uh-oh. She’d better be careful. She’d heard what could happen if someone made him mad. And she’d seen those scorch marks in his office. She took a step back, hoping he wasn’t planning to zap her.
But before he could speak or act, a woman’s voice called to him from outside the closet’s curtains.
“Zeus?”
At the sound of that voice, Zeus’s eyes practically boinged out of their sockets. Now he was the one who looked scared. With his big hands holding three more cupcakes, and with icing in his beard, he looked like a little kid caught breaking a no-sweets rule.
“Zeus?” the woman called through the curtains again. “Are you in there?”
Echo watched him toss the three cupcakes he’d been holding over his shoulder to land back on the platter. Plop! Plop! Plop! His blue eyes blazed into Echo’s brown ones. “I’ll give you anything you want if you stall her,” he hissed.
“Stall her?” Echo repeated, not understanding. “Stall who?”
“Hera! My wife! She owns this shop.” Without waiting for a reply, Zeus put a hand on Echo’s back and pushed her out through the slit in the curtains.
“Eek!” she squeaked. He probably hadn’t meant to, but he’d zapped her a little. Echo lurched out of the storage closet and came face-to-face with the regal-looking Hera. She had thick blond hair styled high up on her head, and a no-nonsense look in her eye. Although she wasn’t unusually tall, she was statuesque.
“Oh, hello, young lady,” Zeus’s wife said, looking at her with a mix of surprise and curiosity.
“Oh, hello,” Echo repeated, trying to get Hera’s accent just right. She felt an instant desire to copy the goddess’s voice. It was so beautiful, melodious, and full of confidence.
“What were you doing in the . . .” the woman started to say, glancing at the curtain behind Echo.
Zeus had promised to give Echo anything she wanted. So, hoping that it might be within his power to restore FirHeart to life, she began to chatter nonstop, trying to draw Hera away from the curtained storage room as Zeus had requested.
“I’m Echo,” she said cheerily. “This bakery is sooo mega-cool. Is it yours? I mean, you don’t really look like a chef or anything. And this doesn’t exactly look like a bakery, but—”
“Oh, well, it’s not . . .” the woman began.
“Really?” Echo interrupted. She gestured toward a table of delicacies near the front of the shop and started to move in that direction, hoping Hera would follow. “Then what’s all this yummy-looking stuff?” she said as she went past more racks of clothing toward the table. “Cakes, pillow mints, heart-shaped cookies, candies, macaroons, chocolates. Oh, maybe this is a sweets shop? But then what are all the racks of frilly clothes for?”
Unfortunately, Hera stayed where she was. “The foods are samples. So are the chitons,” said the shop goddess, craning her neck toward the curtained storage area as if she suspected what Echo was up to. “This is a wedding shop.”
Echo hurried back to block the curtain. “It is? Wow! No wonder everything looks so dreamy and extra special.”
“Well, my shop does specialize in happy endings,” said Hera. She stepped to one side of Echo as if she meant to go around her and push through the curtain.
“Oh!” Echo took a step in the same direction, blocking the goddess again. She clasped her hands together in excitement that, though exaggerated, was genuine. “I’ve heard of your shop! Hera’s Happy Endings, right?” Taking a good look around the store, she saw that it contained much more than bridal chitons. There were shelves with long gloves and sandals dyed to match, as well as tiaras and books with ideas for invitations, flower arrangements, and bridal gown adornments. For someone with an interest in fashion like her, this shop was better than a sweets shop!
“Exactly. Brides try these sample wedding chitons on and choose one, and then we create an identical but completely new chiton for them, using their measurements. Sometimes the bride makes a few alterations in the design, and we always add embellishments—”
“Like for the wedding I read about in Teen Scrollazine? Is the chiton for that bride in here? Could I see it?”
“No. It has already shipped out,” Hera said in exasperation. “Now, young lady, could you please stop talking and—” But Echo’s words were like a runaway chariot. She jabbered on and on, mostly from interest, but also hoping to give Zeus time to escape or hide the evidence or whatever. What was he doing in there anyway?
At last, just as Echo ran out of things to say, the curtains behind her parted and Zeus stepped from the storage closet to join them. “Well, hello, sugarplum,” he said to Hera, bending to give her a peck on the cheek.
Hera folded her arms and gazed at him with suspicion. “What were you doing in there with those cupcakes?”
“Cupcakes?” Zeus echoed innocently.
Echo grinned. Ha-ha. Even the King of the Gods repeated what people said now and then. It was a good stalling tactic, if nothing else.
“The sample cupcakes,” said Hera. She whipped the curtains open and stepped into the storage closet. Echo peeked in too, and gasped. All the cupcakes were gone! There must’ve been about two dozen of them on those platters. Had Zeus eaten them all?
“That’s odd. The Oracle-O Bakery was supposed to put samples in here so that Ide could taste them and choose which she liked best before her wedding on Monday,” said Hera. “I wonder what happened to my order?”
Was that really what Zeus was doing while I was talking to Hera? Echo thought in amazement. Finishing off a couple dozen cupcakes? All by himself? Then she noticed a drop of pink icing on his tunic. While Hera’s back was turned, Echo pointed to it, whispering, “Icing.”
Zeus’s brows scrunched together, indicating that he hadn’t understood. He sent her a questioning look just as Hera turned back. His wife caught the look, and the suspicion in her eyes increased.
Hera frowned at Echo, as if sure that she was in cahoots with Zeus and they were playing some trick. Then Hera’s eyes dropped to the pink spot on Zeus’s chest. “Is that icing on your tunic?”
“Uh,” said Zeus, quickly wiping at the spot. “Must be that honey Melissa sent. I gave it a tiny taste so the Greekly Weekly artist could draw me enjoying it, remember?”
Hera wagged a f
inger at him. “Pink honey? I don’t think so, mister.”
Echo thought fast. “Wait!” she exclaimed. “Please don’t be mad. It was me. I ate most of the cupcakes. Zeus was just covering for me,” she fibbed. “You see, er, I’m going to be a bridesmaid in a wedding soon, and the bride-to-be asked me to scout around for ideas. I came a long way from the forest and was starving by the time I got here.” She wasn’t sure where the words came from, but they did the trick. Hera’s attention was caught.
“Oh? A wedding? Like I was saying before, if there’s one thing I know about, it’s weddings,” said Hera. “Invitations, flowers, fancy chitons for special occasions . . .”
Bam! Just then the main shop door blew open and a scroll flew in on a honey-scented breeze. It went straight to Hera. After unrolling the scroll and scanning its message, she looked a little exasperated.
“Problem?” Zeus asked. “Can I help?”
Hera looked up and blinked at him, quickly closing the scroll as the breeze blew away. “Oh. No. No problem at all,” she replied in a perky voice. But her smile was a little strained and didn’t quite reach her eyes, Echo noticed. “Ide was just in the store and said the bridal chiton we designed for her was perfect. However, she has apparently changed her mind in the last few minutes and will be returning it today with a request for some changes,” Hera explained. “Nothing I can’t handle.”
“Well, she’s in good hands. With you in charge, hers is sure to be the wedding of the century!” Zeus seemed to be trying extra hard to be nice to his wife after the cupcake caper.
Hera smiled fondly at him. “I know how much Melissa means to you, and that makes her daughter’s wedding super important to me. I’m happy to help in any way I can.”
Then her expression firmed, and she gestured toward the empty cupcake platters in the closet, which Zeus had failed to hide. “But I’m still a little disappointed in you. Echo may have eaten some of these cupcakes, but I have a feeling you helped. We talked about this sort of binging on sweets. Are you going to cut back and start eating healthfully?”