The orchid garden was empty at this hour.
Wei Liang sat on the outer wall with his back against the stone and his eyes on the sky, which was darkening toward the first stars. The Exhibition had been suspended for the day — officially due to arena damage; unofficially because Headmaster Fang needed to send four separate reports to four separate ministries and could not do that while students were actively fighting in his courtyard.
He opened the soul-space.
The beach. The ship. The sourceless light that was neither day nor night. Achilles was sitting on his rock with his elbows on his knees, watching the sea the way a man watches something that holds his complete attention without moving.
"Tell me about Troy," Wei Liang said.
A long pause. The sea moved in its slow deep swells.
"Why?"
"Because today a stranger walked into an arena and told me my father was betrayed by the people he served. And I want to understand what that feels like from someone who has been on the other side of it."
Achilles was quiet for a long time. Long enough that Wei Liang thought he might not answer.
"I was the best warrior in the world. I knew it. Everyone knew it. My mother was a sea-goddess — Thetis, who moved between the world of men and the world of things older than men. She knew I would die young. She had seen it. She told me, more than once, and I understood it the way you understand a thing that is true and distant: fully, and without letting it touch you."
"And then it stopped being distant."
"And then it stopped being distant." He picked up a stone from the beach and turned it in his fingers. "I had a friend. His name was Patroclus. He was not the best warrior in the world. He was kind, which is rarer. When I withdrew from the war — because Agamemnon, who led us, had insulted me and taken what was mine — Patroclus went into battle wearing my armor."
Wei Liang was still.
"He thought wearing my armor would protect him. Everyone feared me. Everyone would retreat from my image." Achilles set the stone down carefully. "He was wrong. Hector — the Trojan prince, a great warrior and a good man — killed him. Killed him thinking he was killing me, which means my armor did not protect Patroclus. My armor killed him."
"You blamed yourself."
"I blamed everyone. Myself. Agamemnon, whose insult drove me to withdraw. The gods, who arranged it. Hector, who struck the blow." A pause. "I went back to the war and I killed Hector. And then I desecrated his body, which was the act of a man who has lost himself entirely. Dragged it behind my chariot. Refused to return it to his family."
The sea moved. Something large and dark passed beneath the surface and was gone.
"His father came to me," Achilles continued. "Old Priam. King of Troy. He came alone, at night, to the camp of the enemy, to beg for his son's body. And he said: Think of your own father. Think of what it is to lose a child." He was quiet. "I returned the body."
"Why?"
"Because he was right." The grey eyes moved to Wei Liang. "I had been so consumed with my own grief and my own rage that I had forgotten Hector was also someone's son. Someone's brother. That the body I was defiling was a person, not a symbol of my anger."
Wei Liang said nothing.
"I died shortly after. Arrow through the heel — the one point where I was mortal, where the divine protection my mother had given me failed. It was Paris who shot the arrow, guided by the god Apollo. They had waited until my grief had made me careless."
"The rage made you vulnerable."
"The rage had always made me vulnerable. I had simply always been strong enough that it had not mattered yet." He looked at the sea. "The time in this space — however long it was, I cannot measure it — I thought about Patroclus. About Priam. About every choice that led from one to the other. About what I would have done differently."
"And?"
"I would have gone to Agamemnon. Swallowed the insult. Gone back to the war before Patroclus grew desperate enough to wear my armor."
"That is not the answer I expected."
"No one expects the answer to be: I should have been less proud." Achilles almost smiled. "The great warriors of any age are rarely humble. It is the first thing they carve away when they build you into a legend."
Wei Liang looked at his hands for a moment. Then: "The people who killed my father — they used him. They used his reputation and his strength and his loyalty to the empire, and they put him in a position where the only honorable choice was the one that killed him."
"Yes."
"I am angry."
"I know. I can feel it from here."
"Tell me not to let it make me careless."
Achilles was quiet for a moment.
"Let it make you precise," he said. "There is a difference. Anger as fuel, not as direction. You aim it. It does not aim you."
Wei Liang sat with that for a while. The stars were out now, mirrored faintly in the soul-space sea.
"Did you love him? Patroclus."
A long silence.
"More than I knew how to say. Which was the problem, perhaps. The things I valued most — I held them at a distance, as if saying them aloud would make them fragile." He turned the stone in his fingers again. "Do not do that."
"What?"
"Hold the things you value at a distance. It does not protect them. It only ensures you will have regrets."