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“There are some people,” she says, sun-kissed and grey-haired, “that are never free.”
The days have muddled together by then. When the sap did not turn me mortal, when Telemachus died at thirty and one with his last words hanging from the sails like the women, feet twitching. When the witchery kept Penelope alive. When I have no more children to survive me, and neither does she.
The weariness ages me, and her skin is wrinkle-free. A decade lasts a day for her, and I am glad for it.
“I suppose so.”
She turns to me then, fingers as clever as her tongue, working the loom even though her attention strays. She hasn’t asked permission to use it in a long time. How long, I do not know, because the moons slip away from us the way my hand slips from her grasp, slippery like a snake. Through the decades, we have grown used to each other’s presence the way water weaves around a rock, the way a sapling finds its way towards the light through the mud. And perhaps, it was meant to be this way in the end.
“Fate is a tricky thing,” Penelope says, eyes all-knowing. “Circe.”
She would not have dared to call me by my name in the days we first met, even after our tentative truce. Maybe she would have tried if she were a different person, when she was combing my hair after Telegonus deserted us. But she is her sweet self, soft-spoken and perceptive. And so things turn out the way they do. Some days my fingers are stained green with herbs, and some days they are tangled in her hair as she watches me the same way I used to look at her son, and her husband before her.
I look at her. “I only wish I had known sooner.”
She laughs. “You would have grown impatient. You would have hated your immortality even more, you would have made things harder for yourself.”
I shake my head. “It would not have made a difference.” She’s learnt all the tales Telemachus had known by now, and more. She has made some of her own. The two white scars by my heart, the two men I had truly loved. Or boys, one of them had been. In the tales, I am yellow-eyed, eagle-voiced, hated by the world. In the tales, I do not have anything. She would understand. She saw me before she made me who I am now, before she gave me a family of my own. “The Fates like watching people suffer.”
Or perhaps, I was just unlucky. I don’t voice the thought.
She seems to know, however. The yarn drops between her fingers, and she reaches over for my hand. This time, I let her.
(Perhaps, in the future, they forget our names. Perhaps, they will sail to an abandoned island and find the urn containing Telemachus’ ashes, marked with tear stains of grief. Perhaps they will not.
But for now, two witches grow old beside each other on an island no man goes near, and perhaps, they will find peace in their hearts someday.