Meleager was gentle and kind. He kept his promises. Sure enough, when the woman came to the spot he had told her, five minutes walk West of where the centaurs had fallen, there he was with Leto, washing out her wounds in the water. The arrows were gone from her body— only the holes they’d left remained, and he’d already managed to slow the bleeding a good deal. These were useful tricks. They’d helped him before. There were friends he still had because of it. “She’ll recover,” he declared when he saw the woman approaching. “It’ll take a bit, she’ll certainly spend a little while off her feet, but she’s not leaving the world anytime soon, I don’t think. Somehow that centaur managed to avoid hitting anything too important.”

  “That was on purpose,” the woman whispered. “He was toying with her. Something about how famous she is.”

  It was all because of her, the woman. It was all her fault. All of this.

  Meleager sighed a sad sigh. “That’s how people are, sometimes. Two arrows in the side before the kill shows off a longer struggle, a more glorious hunt, a more impressive trophy.”

  The woman had no idea what he was talking about, a hunt being glorious, struggles and trophies. These were just sounds to her, not words, these were crickets and birdsong, and so she thought about them just that much. But the man fascinated her. She couldn’t take her eyes off of him.

  Not for lust— she had never felt lust for anyone, or even the idea of anyone, and after what had happened and nearly happened today she was dully determined to never let herself feel such a thing, never even once, not even for a moment. Despite Meleager’s beauty, it was not lust that drew her, it was something else.

  She had never seen anyone do quite what he had done, before, to Hylaios— she had never imagined anyone doing that. It was a different way to kill. Rhoecus, yes, he had come up quietly behind and gotten the jump on him. He had been clumsy with it, if not for the intensity of the moment, the centaurs would have heard him coming— and the woman would have, too, if it had not been for the frantic pounding of her heart and the numb-fuzzy words still echoing in her head. But with Hylaios he had not bothered with any sort of tactic at all. He had challenged him directly, taunted him, taken him head on, force upon force, and now only Meleager was left standing. She couldn’t make sense of him. She couldn’t take her eyes off of him.

  Doubly so when he turned his head to meet her gaze, when he glanced at her, and then studied her quickly, up and down— took note of the strength of her arms and legs, the calluses of her own hands, calluses to far outmatch his own, the impressive bow tied to the back of her belt, the moonstone grip of the silver knife tucked in beside it. “Why didn’t you kill them yourself?” he asked her, and she did not know how to answer him. She did not even entirely understand the question. He did not press her. He turned his attention back to Leto, who had shut her eyes for a time, alive, still, but resting. “You are different among the different, Starchild, that much is certain among the certain.”

  He meant it kindly. Meleager was gentle and kind, always, whenever he could be. But the woman’s blood was still steeped in fear and ado, and her heart was still flushed with bitterness— for weeks, now, it had been flushed with bitterness and so little else, towards the Half Moon. “The power to always be different.”— a boon, She had called it. So then why did it make the woman feel ill to hear it? She gripped the handle of her silver knife. “You would be wise to speak nothing of me that I have not told you myself to be true… and I hope that you are not wise.”

  She imagined herself being the same as Meleager. She imagined herself doing to him what he had done to Hylaios, so elegantly, so effectively. None of the stalking and tracking and hiding and waiting— simply telling a thing that they are going to be killed, and then killing them, like they were small. Like they were helpless. Like they were nothing. It was a different way of killing. She couldn’t take her eyes off of him. She couldn’t make sense of him. This, this, was what she wanted to do to the shadow. This was what the centaurs would have done to Leto, they had overpowered her, they’d been ready to kill her like she was nothing. This was what she should have done to the centaurs. But what she had done instead was run away. Abandon her friend. What she had done instead just stand there, waiting. Why hadn’t she killed them herself?

  “Well, I hope that I am wise,” answered Meleager. “Or at least I hope that I can be. Nothing good could come from me making an enemy such as you… with a spirit so fearsome as yours. I would be better off, I would be safer, I think, hurling deep-cutting insults at wild lions. Consider your warnings heard and heeded, Starchild. Say to me how you wish to be spoken of, and so shall I speak of you.”

  “So you shall. Good, then.”

  The woman released her grip on the knife. What had she been about to do with it? What had she really been about to do with it? Nothing, truly. What she had wanted was to hold it in her hand, as he had been holding his spear, and to say those words, as he had said his words. She wanted to know what it felt like. She was fascinated.

  “How long have you and Leto been traveling, Starchild?” asked Meleager. “And where are you traveling to?”

  “Why do you ask so many questions?”

  “I don’t ask so many. Count them. I have asked you five questions, now, your knowledge of safely removing arrows, your name, why you didn’t kill those centaurs, and these last two, how long you and your friend have been traveling and your destination. Of those five, the only one that you have answered is that you don’t know how to remove arrows from a wound without worsening the damage. This, I will teach you, before we part ways, if you let me. As for all the rest… if you don’t want me to ask so many questions, perhaps you might ask some of your own. It is the way of the night air tonight, there is something in this air, the slightest chill that needs questions to warm it, and so questions shall be asked. They will be mine, or they will be yours, I will leave that choice to you.”

  The woman frowned. “…fine, then.”— she caught herself, that she was being a little harsh to him. He was a man. He had hair upon his face and his arms. His shoulders were broad and sturdy. After everything that had happened today and almost happened, there wasn’t a man in all the world to whom she would have been instinctively kind. But he had done nothing to harm her— not yet. There was no way of knowing, never, really. “How long have you been traveling, Meleager? And where are you traveling to?”

  The man smiled a small smile to himself— perhaps to her, too, though his face was turned mostly away. “I have been traveling for many months. Some of the time, I have traveled alone, and some of the time I have traveled with friends. I have gone South and I have gone North, I have gone West, and now I am going back East, towards Calydonia, my birth-home. Interesting news has reached me from there.”

  He stopped right there. He was going to make her ask. Again and again, he was going to make her ask, he was going to pull her questions out of her, one by one. “…what news is that?”

  Meleager waited some time before answering. He finished washing out Leto’s wounds, and carefully rewrapped them in the hide-bandages he’d carved. He held out his hand without looking towards the woman, waiting to be given the herbs she’d gathered, and only once she’d given them to him did he start talking again. “I have heard news of a great monstrous boar terrorizing the whole kingdom. They say it is as tall as three horses, and as wide as five. They say that its tusks are each longer than my spear, here, and sharper, too.”

  His spear was well over nine feet long, tip-to-end. It lay like an exhausted lover beside him as he worked, reclining satisfied in the Moonlight. Its honed blade-point glimmered and gleamed. He had cleaned it thoroughly in the river as well. The woman reached down to lift it, and she could, but not so easily as she’d expected herself to. The shaft of it was thick wood, dense and heavy, and while the weapon was perfectly balanced, the heft had it swinging awkwardly in her hands, more like a sloshing bowl of water than a fine tool. It was embarrassing, undignified, the way she was moving with it, and she quickly put it down again. It made her feel like a fool.

  Meleager had watched her doing all this. He smiled another little smile to himself— and to her, too, definitely this time to her, as well. “I am returning home now to participate in a great hunt that has been declared by the king— a hunt to slay the beast and return peace and safety to the people of the kingdom.”

  The woman had never seen a boar anything close to what Meleager had described in size, and when she carried on asking questions, he carried on giving her details— that it’s hide was so black it was nearly violet, and so were its eyes, its horrible eyes shone forth with cursed violet light much like the woman’s own eyes shone with the dead starlight of her dead-star parents. He told her that its hooves were coated in steel, and that its mad rage was uncontainable, that everywhere it went throughout the kingdom there was nothing left untrammeled. Every last field was left as ruined tatters. Houses were shattered down to their stones, their stones were shattered down to dust. Anyone who had tried to stop the boar so far had been killed, left as a bloody pulp beneath those same trampling hooves, or gored upon its tusks. Even those who had not stood in its way had been mercilessly slaughtered. Anything that fell within the boar’s sight was doomed to be demolished. By the end of all of Meleager’s telling and telling and telling, Atalanta was certain that she was learning of a menace nearly as awful as the shadows that had come to scar her mountaintop— only nearly, of course; nothing could truly be so awful. But this boar was clearly a terrible force of destruction. This boar was clearly a problem needing to be solved, and Meleager wanted to solve it.

  And as much as the woman hated to admit it, to him or to herself, the man had saved her life. She should have killed those centaurs, she should have just killed them, like he had killed them, overpowered them like he had overpowered them— she should have just killed them, simple as that, like they were helpless, like they were nothing, as practice for what she was going to do to the shadow. But she hadn’t. And she would have died. She would have had worse things happen to her than that. And anyways…

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  “East is where we are going, Leto and I,” said the woman, and it was true. East, into the Sunrise, that was the last direction Leto’s sharpest nose had been leading them on the trail of those shadows. “If our path continues as far as your ‘Caledonia’, I shall happily join your hunt and assist you in taking down this boar.”

  The woman found herself drawn to it, the idea of figuring out how to stalk and defeat such a terrifying creature. She had hunted boars before, but only the smaller, normal sort— dangerous, to be sure, but certainly not capable of demolishing houses. It would be a fantastic challenge. It would be a fantastic way to learn herself. That was the greatest gift of the hunt, of all such challenges, to learn yourself.

  She was not sure yet what she had learned today. She was not sure yet how it would be a gift for her. But it would be. That was the nature of the world, and of the tree of death inside her, always sharpening its shape.

  Meleager smiled yet another one of his smiles, and told the woman that he would be happy to have her along. Traveling was always better with companions, when one could find them. It was almost exactly what the centaurs had said. But the woman wasn’t so bothered to hear him say it. He had shown her by now that he was a better sort of companion to have.

  So the two of them traveled together. Leto was not nearly well enough to walk on her own, and she would not be for quite some while, but it was no matter; Meleager was glad to carry her upon his strong back as he went, kindly and gently, in a harness that he and the woman fashioned from more spare hide. It was comfortable for what it was, and Leto gave no scowls or sore whines of complaint except for while she was being put into or taken out of it, or when Meleager’s foot caught on a root and his body jerked to catch itself. But even so, the she-wolf showed no discomfort at all about him. She had a good nose for souls, and she knew he was nothing to fear— and so the woman did not fear him either. She found him quite pleasant, actually, though she still felt that he asked too many questions. She was not used to anyone being quite so interested in her life. Before now, the only voice she’d had to speak to was the hateful Half Moon above, and her first mother had never needed to ask such questions, about how the woman had grown up, how she had learned to hunt so well, why she was traveling East with such determination. The Half Moon had always seen everything exactly as it had happened. But Meleager, he was fascinated by the woman— he wanted to know everything. He had never met anyone with dead starlight for hair before. He thought it was fantastically clever, using that fawn-pelt to cover it up for stealthier hunting. He was shocked by the sheer mastery of the bow the woman showed whenever it was her turn to find breakfast or dinner. Her sharpest eyes always seemed to be able to catch something moving, or even holding stone-still, hoping she wouldn’t notice it— and as soon as she’d noticed it, it was always as good as dead. There was nothing she couldn’t hit, however hard it might have been trying to zig this way or zag that way, darting all about. It was as simple as breathing for her. He had never seen anyone run so fast, or with such sure footing. He supposed, though, that it shouldn’t have been so much of a surprise— she was the child of the stars, after all, and that was more or less the same as being descended from one of the Gods. “I was born solely of humans,” he told her, and he didn’t seem to be so upset about it. “My mother and my father loved me dearly and they raised me well. I am strong because they poured their own strength into me, and I think I wouldn’t want it to be different.”

  In all her time on the mountainside, the woman had never heard of any Gods. The Moon had never spoken of them, and hearing Meleager speak of them now, so distantly, disinterested, she supposed that they must have been the rulers of someplace else, somewhere other than the forests and the mountainsides. The Gods were the overseers of where the people lived, she decided, and so it didn’t matter much about them, any more than glory or trophies. “I was not born of the stars directly,” she admitted. “I was left instead on the mountainside by my born mother and father. I was very sick, and sure to die, and so better off dying where no one would see— but the stars, they saw me, and they saved me.”

  Meleager nodded. “And they did well. You are strong and soulful, brave and good. These are not easy things to become, and not easy things either to always remain once you have become them. Even so…” he sighed. “It breaks the heart to imagine you left alone as just an infant to die like that. It must have been so hard for your parents, for your mother to have you gone from her so soon after bringing you into the world. It must have torn away all the vessels of your heart. But perhaps it was better for her to leave you there than to watch you wither away and die with her own eyes. Or perhaps not. I cannot even begin to say one way or the other. I cannot even begin to imagine such a choice. I hope I am never given the chance to make it myself.”

  He told the woman a little more about his own family. He was the only child born to his parents, but both his mother and father had many siblings of their own, and so he had many cousins whom he had grown up alongside, hunting and playing and learning and failing. The woman was as transfixed as this as he was with her, as she was with him and his different way of killing; this was a different way of living, among other people, with a human mother, with a father, with a human family. It seemed like a life filled with so many happy things. And so much sadness, as well. In that way, at least, it was not so different.

  “My father’s sister, once, she was with child,” told Meleager. “I was young, I couldn’t have been more than five or six years of age, but I remember it so well, how excited I was. I was the youngest, then, of all my cousins, and I had never known how a new person entered the world, and here I was, ready to discover it— and gain a new playmate, as well, I thought. But when she was finally born…”— he paused for a time, breathing slowly, lingering in his own memory before at last letting it out into the air— “They brought her to the mountainside and left her there to die. There were so many things, then, that I just could not understand. That I still cannot understand.”

  It was nighttime now, the Full Moon was well above, and who could say what She was thinking or how She was, really? But even She was better to the woman than the Half Moon— even She who had never, not even just once, spoken to her, not for any of her trying. Even She was better, She and the New Moon. At least the Full Moon had never done her any harm. At least the New Moon had provided a few words of guidance, however coldly.

  “A baby was brought once to my mountainside,” told the woman, and she told the man how it had happened, how the father had dragged away the mother, sobbing, how she had taken up the baby herself and tried to find help for it, but that in the end there had been nothing anyone could do. She wondered, a little bitterly, what was the point of the Earth opening up mothers to bring out sick children that would just as quickly die again. It seemed so meaningless, it seemed nothing but just cruel, to that mother on the mountainside, to Meleager’s aunt, to have a baby born so ill. But Meleager shook his head.

  “A misunderstanding, I am sorry. You are right, of course, that it is cruel and pointless, probably, for the world to work in that way, to have infants born sick and ready to die. But my aunt’s baby was born perfectly healthy.”

  “…then why—“

  “She was born a daughter. And my aunt’s husband wanted a son. So he had her gotten rid of. He took the child from my aunt’s breast as she was sleeping and carried her out to a nearby mountainside and he left her there to die, or else to be taken by Artemis, the Goddess of the Half Moon, watching down upon it all.”

  There was nothing quite like hearing this. It was the ground crumbling out from beneath the woman’s feet, all at once. It was all the trees of the forest around her toppling together down onto her head, crushing her flat and dead. It was being torn apart by wild animals, helpless. It was being forced upon by a pair of centaurs and nothing to rescue her. She ended the conversation then and there with Meleager. She rose to her feet, and she stormed off into the darkness, away from the firelight, her whole body as cold lightning. She ran until she was out of earshot, and then she turned to the Full Moon and she howled upwards, in a rage.

  “Tell me! Tell me, other part of my most despised first mother— tell me if it is true!”

  The Full Moon was silent, as She was always silent, just watching. Judging the dirty world against her own pure light. But the woman did not relent. She howled upwards and upwards and upwards, demands and threats and sobbing questions until her voice was exhausted, her throat nearly bleeding with strain, and the whole while the Full Moon was silent. The woman stomped back to the fire and went straight to bed, she was silent and bitter to Meleager and Leto and the very air itself throughout the next day, and then the very next night, as soon as the Moon had risen, the Half Moon now, again, she stomped away once more, out of earshot, and she resumed her howling right where she had left off.

  “I hardly know where to start!” she screamed into the sky, and it was true— the ground had not even begun to return to her feet, the trees crashing trunks had not even begun to lift from her fragile head. “How much is there to possibly keep from me, most hated mother mine, most ugly half-formed Half Moon— or I suppose I should call you ‘Artemis’, should I not?”

  “It was always enough for Me that you just called Me your mother,” the Half Moon softly answered. It was the first She had spoken to Her daughter in more than two months, now. More than three months. It was the first that Her daughter had spoken to Her. “Just as it was always enough for Me to call you My daughter, never mind the name that I had given to you.”

  “I have no name given to me by You.”

  “So have I heard and seen,” said the Half Moon. “You are ‘Starchild’, you are the daughter of the dead stars above.”

  “I am,” answered the woman. “I am more their daughter than I am Yours. Indeed, I am less Your daughter than I am the daughter of the mother and father who left me upon your mountaintop to die— at least they loved me enough that they could not bear to watch me suffer in my illness, yes? Though I have begun to wonder if perhaps that is not a lie as well— just another one of your little lies or mere half-truths from a mere Half Moon, deciding over and over again that I don’t need to know this or know that, that you know always what is better for me, what is best for me, what I must and mustn’t do.”

  “You would have died, had I let you face the shadow-hunter. He would have overpowered and slaughtered you, simple as that. You would have died right before My eyes, and I could not have beared to watch it. I love you enough for that as well.”

  “I would have killed him. I would have made him die begging for death.”

  “He would have put you up in the sky as dead stars, right alongside Callisto,” murmured the Moon.

  The woman snarled up into the sky, “‘Callisto’? So that was her name?— just another name, just another thing that wasn’t for me to know about, is that it?”

  “It was always enough for her, too,” answered the Moon, “that you just called her your mother.”

  “At least if I was dead stars up there I’d be alongside someone I truly care about— and she would be alongside someone who truly cared about her, instead of just being alongside You. You never cared for her. You never loved her. She never would have stopped me avenging You if it was You that shadow had slaughtered. She loved You so dearly, she would have done anything for You, but You never loved her— not at all.”

  “If you were to face the shadow, force upon force, you would have had no chance,” said the Moon— they were talking past each other, now, She and Her once-was daughter. “That is his way of killing, and he is the master of it. He would have killed you in that way as though you were nothing. But…”— a twinkle— “you have the power to always be different.”

  There it was again, that boon, that gift from the night after her first mensis— those words like bile, now, that was all they were, bile from the Half Moon that had let the woman’s mother die without a care or a thought for righteous vengeance— the Half Moon who had never loved the woman’s mother, not at all. “Even if the other thing is true…” breathed the woman, with reeking poison, “…even if it just another lie, what you told me, even I was left on the mountainside by parents who just didn’t want me, even if I was just not good enough as a daughter for those who wanted a son, even if I was just a thing for them to throw away… even to them I am more of a daughter than I am to You. Never allow Yourself to forget it, how much of nothing there is between us. The cord between us is broken, forever and always. You are no mother to me. Never allow Yourself to forget it,” she said. “I cannot have been the only girl abandoned on a mountainside just for being what I am. There must have been other girls on other mountainsides— every day there must be more and more and more. Let them be Your daughters instead.”

  And that was that. The woman turned and walked— didn’t run, but walked, slow as she liked, back to the clearing, back to the firelight where Leto slept and Meleager sat awake, waiting for her to return. The Moon said nothing to her as she went. There was nothing to say, nothing to be heard by her. This was how things were, and anything else would have been all just pretend.

  Meleager didn’t ask where she had gone, only if she had found what she’d been looking for, there. She answered that he was still asking too many questions, and tonight’s air was not the same as that night before, so everything would be fine, surely, if no one asked any questions at all.

  Then she apologized. She told him that no, she hadn’t found what she’d been looking for, and she wasn’t going to.

  “I am sorry to hear that, Starchild,” said Meleager.

  “I am sorry to say it,” she said back. “How far is it from here to your Caledonia?”— she was yearning now for the hunt. She was yearning to test herself, challenge herself— she was yearning to learn herself anew. There was so much of herself that she’d thought she’d known before, as the daughter of the Moon— but who was she now? She was ‘Starchild’, she was the child of the dead stars above, but who was she now?

  “It is a few days, still,” answered Meleager.

  “Fine, then.”

  They carried on the next morning, and the morning after that, taking turns to sit up in the night and keep watch— but even on the nights when it was the woman’s turn to stay awake by the firelight, she did not glance upwards, not even once. Not even to look at the old she-bear as she passed above.