“Maeve!” Diana gasped. Maeve crumpled to her knees. Diana curled an arm around her waist, supporting her. Her friend’s skin felt wrong. It was too hot to the touch. “What’s the matter? What is it?”
“I don’t know,” Maeve panted, then bent double, releasing a low howl of pain. Diana felt it a second later, the echo of Maeve’s anguish. All Amazons were connected by blood, even Diana through her mother. When one felt pain, they all shared it.
Women were already running toward them, Tek at the lead.
“What happened?” Tek asked, helping Diana raise Maeve to her feet.
“Nothing,” said Diana, her panic spiking. “We were just talking and she—”
“Hell’s hounds,” swore Tek. “She’s burning up with fever.”
“An infection?” asked Thyra.
Diana shook her head. “She has no wounds.”
“Could it be something she ate?” Otrera suggested.
Tek scoffed. “At the feast? Don’t be absurd. Maeve, were you foraging today? Did you eat anything in the woods? Mushrooms? Berries?”
Maeve shook her head. Her body convulsed on a thready sob.
“Let’s get her to bed and try to cool her body down,” said Tek. “Fetch water, ice from the kitchens. Thyra, go get Yijun. She has experience as a field medic. We’ll take Maeve to the palace dormitory.”
“Maeve lives in the Caminus now,” said Diana. New Amazons spent their first few years in the dormitory connected to the palace before they chose which part of the city they wanted to live in. Diana had visited Maeve’s new lodgings just the other day.
“If this is a contagion, I want it isolated. The dormitory is empty and easy to quarantine.”
“A contagion?” said Otrera in horror.
“Go,” commanded Tek.
Thyra ran toward town to find the medic, and Diana bolted down to the palace kitchens to fetch a pitcher of ice. When she found Maeve and Tek in the dormitory, Maeve was huddled beneath a thin sheet, quivering. Diana set the pitcher beside the bed and stared helplessly at her friend.
“What is this?”
“It’s a fever,” Tek said grimly. “She’s sick.”
This couldn’t be happening. It wasn’t possible. “Amazons don’t get sick.”
“Well, she is,” snapped Tek.
Thyra raced into the room, her golden hair flying. “The medic is coming, but two more alarms were raised in town.”
“Fevers? Were they at the feast?”
“I don’t know, but—”
Suddenly, the whole room seemed to shift. The walls shook, and the floor heaved like a beast waking from a deep sleep. The pitcher of ice tipped and shattered on the tiles. Thyra slammed into the wall, and Diana had to grab the doorjamb to keep from falling.
The shaking stopped as quickly as it had started. The only signs that anything had happened were the broken pitcher and the lanterns that continued to sway on their hooks.
“Freyja’s braids!” said Thyra. “What was that?”
Tek’s expression was bleak. “An earthquake.”
“Here?” said Thyra disbelievingly.
“I need to find the queen,” said Tek. “Wait for the medic.” She strode from the room, boots crunching over shards of pitcher and ice.
Diana unfolded a blanket and tucked it around Maeve. She brushed the red hair back from her friend’s face. Maeve’s skin was too white beneath her freckles, and her eyes moved restlessly beneath her pale lids. Contagion. Quarantine. Earthquake. These words did not belong on Themyscira. What if they’d come with Alia? What if Diana had brought this language of affliction to her people?
No mortal was to set foot on Themyscira. The law was clear. In Amazon history, only two women had dared to violate it. Kahina had brought a mortal child back from a mission, desperate to save her from death on the battlefield. She’d begged to be allowed to raise the girl on the island, but in the end they’d both been exiled to the World of Man. The second was Nessa, who had tried to secret her mortal lover aboard a ship when she returned to Themyscira.
As a child, Diana had asked to hear Nessa’s story again and again, wriggling in her bed, anticipating the horrible ending, the image of Nessa standing on the shore, stripped of her armor, as the earth shook and the winds howled, so angered was the island, so angered were the gods. Diana always remembered the final words of the story as told by the poet Evandre:
One by one, her sisters turned their backs as they must, and though they wept, their salt tears were as nothing to the sea. So Nessa passed from mercy into the mists, and to the lands beyond, where men breathe war as air, and life is as the wingbeat of a moth, barely seen, barely understood before it is gone. What can we say of her suffering, except that it was brief?
Diana had shuddered at the shrug in those words. She had watched the moths that gathered around the lanterns of her mother’s terrace and tried to fasten her gaze on the blur of their wings. There and gone. That fast. But now it was Evandre’s other words that she recalled with a terrible feeling of recognition: The earth shook and the winds howled, so angered was the island, so angered were the gods. When Diana had rescued Alia, she’d believed the risk she was taking was for herself alone, not for her sisters, not for Maeve.
Diana squeezed Maeve’s hand. “I’ll be back,” she whispered.
She hurried out the door and ran across the columned court that connected the dormitory to the palace.
“Tek!” she called, jogging to catch up with her.
As Tek turned, another tremor struck. Diana careened into a column, her shoulder striking the stone painfully. Tek barely checked her stride.
“Go back to your friend,” she said as Diana trailed her up the palace stairs to the queen’s quarters.
“Tek, what’s causing this?”
“I don’t know. Something is out of balance.”
Tek strode into the upper rooms of the royal quarters without hesitation. Hippolyta was at the long table, consulting with one of her runners, a fleet-footed girl named Sabaa.
Hippolyta looked up as they entered. “I know, Tek,” she said. “I sent for a runner as soon as the first earthquake hit.” She folded the message she’d penned, then sealed it with red wax, marking it with her ring. “Get to Bana-Mighdall as fast as you can, but be cautious. Something is wrong on the island.”
The runner vanished down the stairs.
“There have been at least three reports of illness,” said Tek.
“Are you sure that’s what it is?” Hippolyta asked.
“I saw one of the victims myself.”
“Maeve,” Diana added.
“It may be striking the younger Amazons first,” said Hippolyta.
“Not all of them,” muttered Tek, casting a sidelong look at Diana.
But Hippolyta’s gaze was focused on the western sea. She sighed and said, “We’ll have to consult the Oracle.”
Diana’s stomach clenched. The Oracle. There would be no hiding then.
Tek nodded, a look of resignation on her face. Visiting the Oracle was no small decision. It required a sacrifice, and if the Oracle found an Amazon’s tribute wanting, she could inflict any number of punishments.
“I’ll light the signal fires to gather the Council,” Tek said, and was gone without another word.
It was all happening too quickly. Diana followed Hippolyta into her chambers. “Mother—”
“If they ride hard, the Council should be here within the hour,” said Hippolyta. Some members of the Council lived at the Epheseum or Bana-Mighdall, but others preferred the more isolated parts of the island and would have to be summoned by the fires.
Hippolyta shucked off the comfortable riding clothes and silver circlet she’d worn at the arena, and emerged from her dressing room a moment later in silks the deep purple of late plums, her right shoulder covered by a golden spaulder and scales of gleaming mail. The armor was purely ornamental, the type of thing worn for affairs of state. Or emergency Council meetings.
“Help me bind my hair?” Hippolyta said. She seated herself before the large looking glass and selected a golden circlet studded with heavy chunks of raw amethyst from a velvet-lined case.