Dropping my gaze to the stone, I nodded quickly. It had to be enough, unless they shared more. But I wouldn’t take it again. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t need your apology.” The words were cutting, and I winced at how sharp they were.
We sat in silence, each of us caught up, I imagined, in our own thoughts and worries. “What are you going to do with it?” I asked.
“Drop it in the middle of the ocean,” Achilles answered. “Though you’ll have to guess which one, because we sure as hell aren’t telling you.”
Ouch.I wanted to touch it, move it from side to side to see what else the stone was hiding. “Are there more pieces?” I asked. “Or is this it?”
No answer. Of course not.
“I’m going to touch it again,” I said, and then glanced at each of them. “I won’t touch you, so just stay back.”
This time, they didn’t fight me. I reached for it carefully, grazed my fingers over the roughness and then lifted it. From the angle of the symbol, I thought the piece curved inward. I would have to delicately sand away the stone to reveal the rest of the shard.
The stone was probably over a foot long, eight or nine inches high, and rectangular-ish. Not a perfect rectangle by any means—no sharp edges or angles—but it had been stacked tightly with other similar shaped stones to form the stone wall.
I turned it in my hands, studying the surface. Stone like this was relatively soft, and I could easily rub it away to get to the obsidian inside it. But I could also damage the obsidian. Unlike popular belief, while it was a hard stone, it wasn’t indestructible.
“What are you looking for?” Achilles asked, clearly hating that he was curious at all.
Given how forthcoming—eye roll—they were, part of me wanted to refuse to answer, but I wasn’t that petty. “I’m trying to figure out how much of the seal is in the stone. It could be that I can answer my own question.”
“About how many pieces there are,” he filled in.
Nodding, I turned it toward the weak sunlight streaming through the window. It would be easier in direct sunlight, so I stood, moving toward Paris, who was quick to get out of my way.
Or away from me.
I tried not to take it personally, but it hurt.
There was no green or black tint to the stone beside what surrounded the gold Greek symbol, which meant everything was inside it. Sighing, I sat in the spot Paris had vacated.
“You could chip away the stone.” It was Pollux who spoke.
And no one argued with him.
“I could,” I said the words carefully, slowly, because any wrong movement on my part could make them change their mind. I was desperate to get at the seal.
“What do you need to do that?” Hector asked.
“Time, mostly.” Then I listed everything I could think of. “Sieves. Buckets. Picks. Brushes.”
As I spoke, Hector nodded. “We can get you that.”
“I could do a better job of it back at Oxford.”
That got a quick reaction. “Absolutely not,” Hector replied, just as Pollux and Orestes offered simple,no’s,”and Achilles, “Dream on, loon.”
Paris just shook his head.
“Right. Well. In that case, I would need those things and a space to work.”
“You can do it here,” Hector said, reminding me he was the decision maker. Former general. Former prince.
God.I wanted to know everything.
These five men were on opposite sides of the Trojan War. Hector and Paris were Trojans, while Orestes was the son of a Greek general, Achilleswasa Greek general, and Pollux was sort of in the middle. He was Helen’s brother, and according to the stories, had rescued her from other peril, and he just happened to be Paris’s brother-in-law.