by Melody Rose
“I’m sorry to interrupt this sibling banter,” Arges said, not bothering to hide the annoyance in his voice. “But what quest would you be helping Cheyenne with?”
“To help her build a new version of the helm of invisibility,” Erich said simply.
The cyclops looked to me with shock written all over his face. “Is this your true purpose for being here?”
“What?” Erich turned to me, the same shock on his own face. “You didn’t tell him?”
“I might have fudged my application a little bit,” I said, my voice suddenly hoarse.
“You wish to recreate the helm of invisibility?” Arges said doubtfully. “Does the Lord of the Dead know you are trying to do this? I don’t think he would take too kindly to having another one of his precious items out in the world. It would certainly decrease the original’s value.”
“He knows,” I said, not really wanting to elaborate, but the cyclops’s arched eyebrow told me he wasn’t going to let me get away with being so vague. So I continued after a weighted sigh. “He wants another one because he’s misplaced the first one, and he thought I would be the best one to make it.”
“You mean you want something from him,” Arges corrected. “Because Hades and I have a good rapport. If he truly needed another helm, he would have asked me directly. But you need something from him, so he asked you, as not to be in my debt.”
“Something like that,” I agreed.
Arges pinched the bridge of his nose. “Was any part of your application true?”
“Yes!” I jumped in quickly. “I really do need to learn as much as I can so I can make the Ultimate Weapon like the prophecy said. I thought learning from the original blacksmiths would help me do that, especially since I lost my demigod mentor and my dad is MIA right now.”
The cyclops lowered his hand and looked at me with his piercing blue eye. Somehow, with only the one eyeball, the look was all that more intimidating. I did my best to stay strong under his gaze, but all I really wanted to do was crawl into a ball right then and there.
“Have you everything you need for this fight?” Arges asked, changing the subject.
“Uh… yes, yes, I do,” I said, my voice stalling. I swung the maul off my shoulder and held it with two hands, one closer to the head and the other further down the neck.
The cyclops blinked once at me. It was still unnerving to look at his one-eyed face. I hoped I would grow accustomed to it over time because I didn’t want my mentor to think I thought he was strange… even though he was.
“Well, then, the two of you can step into the ring, and we’ll begin,” Arges said with another booming clap of his hands.
17
For the first time, I looked at my opponent. Sure enough, she had her copper staff, and I smiled inwardly. I knew my maul would knock that out in seconds if I would get the right amount of strength behind my swing. However, it was then that I noticed she also wore a thin helmet. It covered her whole head, coming down to almost her shoulders, framing her face with a widow's peak at her forehead as it aligned with her jawbones.
Additionally, she wore more clothes than before. She had leather plates on her shins and forearms. Shoulder pads protruded out from her shoulders, and a breastplate was strapped securely to her body.
A flash of worry crossed my mind, but I didn’t get the chance to let it get to me as Arges began the instructions of the fight.
“This is a simple sparring match,” Arges informed the pair of us. “You will battle one another until the other is knocked out or calls Uncle.”
Shit, I thought. It was pretty intense to think that I had to knock Phae out completely. Normally in our battles at the Academy, it was to first blood or forfeit, but this wasn’t the Academy anymore.
The only comfort I had was that I couldn’t kill the goddess. Being immortal, I could injure her, but at least if I managed to get a good whack at her head, she wouldn’t straight up die.
Then I realized that the same couldn’t be said for me.
“Begin!” Arges shouted, his gravelly voice bursting forth, shocking me into action.
Without waiting for a second, Phae attacked. She twirled her staff over her head and slammed it down on me, the soft space between my neck and shoulder. I howled and immediately fell to one knee, slumping down on my left side. The top of the maul fell into the ground as I lost my grip on it.
The goddess changed her grip and leveled out the staff at me to strike horizontally at my head. I ducked low and felt the whoosh of air as the staff traveled over my head at an alarming rate. Despite my aching shoulder, I gripped the maul with two hands at the bottom and swung the weapon in the same manner Phae had swung her staff, except I kept my strike low to the ground, aiming for her shins.
Phae jumped up once in the air, like a little girl playing double dutch, and completely avoided my attack. The heavy end of the maul stuck in the dirt ground, and I pushed the handle up in the air at a ninety-degree angle. Using the handle as support for my weaker side, I jumped and kicked Phae in the stomach, finally landing a strike.
The goddess bent in two from my blow, but I couldn’t even manage to enjoy the moment because my foot throbbed. Her breastplate was harder than I expected and retaliated against my foot without even having to do anything. Now, I nursed a limp left arm and a sore right foot.
With no regard for my injuries, Phae continued her relentless attack. She quickly regained her breath and raised the staff over her head for another vertical strike. This time I lifted the maul with a violent grunt and blocked the copper staff with my wooden handle. The weight of the blow bent my elbows a bit, but I held true and prevented the strike. The muscles in my shoulder screamed with pain, but I couldn’t give up so easily. I needed to land at least more than one blow.
However, I never got the opportunity to. In a flash, Phae changed her footing and swung the staff around the back so that the bottom end, without the symbol of Helios, slammed into my ribs. My lungs exploded as my ribs cracked. I folded in two, my weapon falling with a thud to my feet.
Then the end of the staff came up and jabbed upward into my chin. My head snapped back, and I could feel my brain rattle around in my skull. I collided with the ground with barely enough breath left in me to move.
A surge of pride built up, and anger flared in my brain. I realized that the cyclops had tricked me. I never had a chance in this fight, no matter what I had made in those allotted six hours. It was an impossible task. I didn’t appreciate being set up to fail. I wanted to be tested for my ability to make weapons, not my ability to wield them.
That wasn’t the reason I had come all the way to Italy. I wanted to become a better blacksmith, not a better fighter.
My eyes cracked open to see Phae barreling for me with the final blow. Fed up, without my weapon, I threw out my arm and aimed my hand straight for her head. I concentrated on the helmet she wore and envisioned crushing it in my bare hands.
Immediately, Phae dropped her staff with a scream. She fell to her knees and pressed her hands to the side of her head as the helmet she wore got smaller and smaller. I pressed it against her head, contorting the metal to an uncomfortable size. The bottom edges curled in around her neck, threatening to pierce it with their sharp edges.
She shrieked, and it pained me to hear her cries. I wanted this whole stupid battle to be over with, but I was at a point where I refused to lose.
“Call it,” I pushed through gritted teeth. When Phae’s cries turned to whimpers like a kicked puppy, I strengthened my voice and demanded it of her again. “Call it!”
“Uncle!” the goddess shouted.
I lowered my arm with a loud exhale, and the metal expanded once more like a balloon, returning to its former shape. Phae fell back on the ground, mimicking my position as the pair of us just laid in the dirt, winded and exhausted.
“Well,” came Arges’s voice from outside the circle, “that was unexpected.”
Twenty minutes later, we sat on the closed-in p
orch in Arges’s villa, nursing our wounds. Despite the grandeur of the grounds and the villa itself, the furniture inside resembled a cheap Florida rental home. There were wicker chairs and a matching couch with thin cushions patterned with grapes on the fabric. There was an oval table with a glass top that needed to be wiped down. I got the impression that Arges didn’t spend a lot of time out here, but it was the closest place to sit down after the disaster that was the spar with Phae.
For that, I was grateful.
I had a bandage on my split chin and an ice pack strapped to my shoulder. Phae sat across from me, looking miserable as she pressed her own ice pack against her temple. Erich floated between the two of us, unable to look at either one without bursting into little fits of giggles.
“If you don’t shut up, I’m going to shove your ass back into the locket,” I threatened.
Thankfully, Erich realized I was in too much pain to be messed with, so he clapped his hand over his mouth and remained silent. Arges joined us soon after my threat to Erich with a tray of tea. He poured a cup for me and Phae. He looked up at the ghost and squinted his eyes as if he needed glasses to see my half-brother clearly.
“I assume I don’t need to serve you,” Arges asked the ghost.
Erich waved his hand and shook his head simultaneously. “No, thank you for the thought, though.”
Arges nodded and then finally poured himself a cup. It looked like a child’s tea set in his massive hands, but he cradled it with a surprising amount of care and grace. I cupped my own tea and sniffed the sweet aroma. My senses recognized it, associating the smell with the med bay on campus.
“Is there ambrosia in this?” I asked the cyclops.
“Yes,” Arges said after taking a sip of his own tea. “It should speed up the healing of your injuries.”
I sipped the tea and let the warmth fill me to the brim. It stretched out to all of my aches and bruises, soothing them right away. I opened my mouth and released a satisfied sigh.
“Now that the pair of you have been treated properly, let’s talk about that battle,” Arges said politely as he set down his tea on a nearby end table. He leaned back in the wicker chair and rested his arms open on both armrests, looking like a king on his throne.
“Are we going to talk about how Cheyenne cheated?” Phae grumbled, her voice muffled by the ice pack which had migrated down to her jaw.
“I did not!” I protested. “There was nothing in the rules about not using my powers.”
“If I had known we could use magic, I wouldn’t have bothered with weapons at all and would have used sun fire to fry you to a crisp,” Phae threatened, clearly sour from her defeat.
“Well, that wouldn’t have worked either,” I replied, adding an extra ounce of sass to my voice, “because I’m resistant to sun fire.”
Phae scoffed and glared at me as if I had poop on my face. “How many powers do you have?”
“Ladies!” Arges cut in, the consonants sharp enough to gather our attention. We both fell silent, but Phae took another sip of tea, a shady gaze coming at me from over the top of her teacup. “The purpose of the fight was not for one person to win over the other, and you knew that when you agreed to it, Phae.”
“Because I didn’t think she actually had a chance,” Phae grunted, speaking into her teacup.
“Regardless,” Arges said pointedly, “that was not the purpose.”
“What was the purpose?” I wondered, glad I finally got to figure out the reason behind his weird first lesson.
“I wanted to see what you would do when you thought about preparing for a battle, what you would equip yourself with,” Arges explained in a calm and knowing tone. “Unfortunately, you did exactly what I thought you would, so I cannot be that disappointed.”
“Disappointed?” I exclaimed. That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “What did I do?”
“You came with only a weapon,” Arges said.
“You said to make what I needed,” I argued, feeling defensive. “If you wanted me to make something else, you should have said so.”
“That was the point, Shy,” Erich jumped in. “He wanted to see how you would interpret that.”
“No one asked you,” I snapped at my half-brother, even though my annoyance had nothing to do with him.
Erich shrugged but closed his mouth. Arges picked up where the ghost left off.
“You only thought about the offensive,” the cyclops explained. “You made a weapon with which to attack, but you didn’t make anything with which to defend yourself.”
“If you have the right weapon, you don’t need anything to defend yourself,” I rattled back, as though I were reading off a textbook. In fact, I was quoting one of my assignments from the Academy, and the words burned in my throat even as I said them. I couldn’t believe that Arges had reduced me to spitting out the Military Academy of Olympus beliefs.
“You knew you were going into an uneven fight,” Arges argued. “Why would you only think of the attack and not of preserving and defending yourself as best as you could?”
“You actually expected me to make a weapon and a full suit of protective armor in six hours?” I said, a sudden surge of anger coming up. “That’s nearly impossible. I mean, I’m good, but that would take a level of magic I don’t have.”
“Did you think of asking for help?” Arges asked as he cocked his head to one side.
“You said I couldn’t ask for help!” I protested, confused as to why the cyclops would even ask a question.
“When did I say that?” Arges wondered, tilting his head to the other side.
“When you didn’t give me any other instruction or guidance or, I don’t know, when you left the cave,” I pointed out, my frustration rising.
“What were my instructions, Cheyenne?” Arges said pointedly, forcing my mind to go back and remember exactly what he said. As I replayed the conversion from several hours ago in my head, I realized that the cyclops was right. He was tricky, but he was right. He never said I had to make the items on my own.
“I…” I stalled as I tried to sort through my feelings and thoughts. “I thought you were testing my skills. I thought you wanted to see how strong I was.”
“I was testing more than just your skills as a blacksmith,” Arges said as he tapped the armrest with a single finger. “If you learn nothing else from me, hear me now, daughter of Hephaestus. Strength, true strength, is our ability to trust and ask others for help when we need it.”
“That’s not a strength. That’s a weakness,” I said automatically.
“Why do you think that?” Arges challenged.
“Because…” I began, but I couldn’t think of a reason. So my sentence trailed off, and I didn’t say anything.
“Because that isn’t what you were trained to think about,” Arges filled in for me. “While I admire the Academy’s teachings, they are very heavy-handed when it comes to their aggressive philosphies, especially for certain branches. I would assume that you were drafted to Fotia?”
“What gave it away?” I replied sarcastically. “The blacksmithing, the fire resistance, or the daughter of Hephaestus thing?”
“Your choice of maneuvers actually,” Arges said, surprising me. “It’s the same fighting style passed down from all Fotia soldiers. It’s very attack heavy. Phae was able to counter you quite well, attacking the places where you weren’t guarding or blocking your body.”
I thought about my exposed chest and face, whereas when I kicked Phae, it ended up hurting me more than her because of her armor. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, the cyclops had a point. It never even crossed my mind to make anything defensive. My whole life, I had been focused on making weapons, things with which to attack and harm, then I didn’t think about making anything that was defended and protected.
“I know you originally said you were here to learn more so you could make the Ultimate Weapon, but I think you have excellent skills as a bladesmith,” Arges complimented. “You do not need any help
in that area, and frankly, I don’t think there would be anything that I could teach you on that front anyhow. But defensive pieces, armor, and the like? That’s where you need help.”
“It would seem so,” I said. Even though it was clearly true, I didn’t like admitting my weaknesses, especially when it came to blacksmithing. I liked to think I was one of the greatest smiths, but only in one area. If I really wanted to be great, I needed to be great in all areas, on both the offensive and defensive sides.
“I see tremendous potential,” Arges said encouragingly, “but it will take some work in order to break down some of those habits you have built up over the last several years.” Then the cyclops demeanor completely changed. He leaned back in his chair and began to examine his nails. “However, if making the helm is all you are after, then I can teach you the simple techniques needed, and you can be on your way. For a smith of your skill, it won’t be that hard.”
A spark of hope flared in me. If the cyclops meant what he said, I could have the helm built and ready to go way before December 1st. I could rescue Ruby sooner. I could get home to Ansel and my friends, maybe finish out the semester on campus.
But a weight in my chest stopped me from taking Arges up on that offer. There was more here than I initially thought. Arges was a wise being, one who had lived and worked for eons. I had the opportunity to learn from one of the greatest craftsmen in the history of the world. If I agreed to this, I realized I would be in for more than I bargained for.
I nodded my head slowly, taking in his words one by one. Phae shifted in her seat, readjusting her legs, so they curled up to her chest, shrinking herself in the chair. Erich floated by one of the windows and watched the waves move out across the ocean. Even though we were all in the room together, it felt as though we were all in different places.
I was fiercely reminded of when I was in Ansel’s room with my friends, where I felt broken and distant from them. The same sinking feeling settled in my stomach when I looked at the assets that I had in the room with me right now.