Chapter 1

Prologue

Jun 23

2 July, 1937 CE

Pacific Ocean

This was like no cloud cover, fog or mist she’d ever flown through before. The needles on every gauge juttered, wouldn’t settle on a reading. She wondered how low they really were, wondered if the rush across her belly was a mirror response to the rush of (air? water?) across the belly of the plane. It had happened before . . . one skin riveted together out of flesh and aluminum. Hitting the face of the ocean at this speed, without eyes on to angle her in . . . iron wall to starling blinded by the sun. Nothing left but pinfeathers. She cracked a smile toward Noonan and focused back on the radio, listening for the dispatch from the Itasca that would fly them home.

Wailupe, Hawaii

Billy Courtright stopped snoring as he moved deeper into sleep. His freshly shaved head, courtesy of the U.S. Navy barber in Shed 47, rested in the crook of his left arm. His right arm remained outstretched, his fingers gripping the knobs of the radio. He was to monitor for signs of the civilian plane that had last transmitted two days before. The pilot was famous, they'd said, though he hadn't heard of her. (That the pilot was a she had raised his right eyebrow a shade, a reaction he had practiced for hours in front of a mirror back home, trying to cultivate a persona that would get any one of the three Hansen sisters to notice him.) Billy's eyes began to twitch under their nearly translucent lids and he drifted back home in the afternoon lull.

Back in Freedom, Billy sat in the cave of the fifty-seat theatre. He stretched his bare arms in front of him, clenching his fists as he fake-yawned big, hoping the new tattoo on his otherwise undistinguished bicep would catch Alicia Hansen's eye. He glanced at her sideways. Those eyes. A color nobody had ever seen. Aqua, like his pop’s aftershave in the glass bottle he kept for special. Even as the sweat of anticipation and hope soaked his thin cotton shirt (slicking the brown vinyl upholstery of the theatre seat—his bolted to hers as if at this moment their destiny was assured) his brain pummeled him like waves chopping against the bow of a ship: stupid -- stupid -- stupid -- stupid. The newsreel crackled across the movie screen, the same he had seen twice already; the movie and newsreel only changed over every three weeks. The whole town existed as if a thick wall of dust hovered just outside the borders the residents rarely breached, clogging up the airways that might have brought them news every day had they cared to listen. Instead the radios in their kitchens stayed tuned to the one station out of Dubuque that had the muscle to force the voices of the Boswell Sisters, Bing Crosby and Cab Calloway through the wall like hard cheese through a grater. The Hansen girls—Angela, Agnes and the oldest, Alicia—practiced being the Boswell Sisters using hairbrushes as microphones, trying various methods to get the same sweet and gravelly sound.

The movie theatre was the only place anything happened in Freedom, Iowa, and mostly to the stars on the screen. The boys Billy grew up with were mostly farmers, and mostly not much more. Everything outside this house of salvation was pre-scripted by birth. Billy was to take over the back acres of his grandpap's land when he got out of high school, marry the prettiest girl he could catch, and have a passel of kids who'd do the same all over again. It had never occurred to him or his pals to want anything more. The last picture he'd seen made its way to Freedom nearly a year after its release. Billy saw My Man Godfrey six times because Carole Lombard, who played the audacious Irene, was a dead ringer for Alicia.

Alicia was the oldest of the three Hansen sisters, eleven months and twelve days older than Agnes and only two years older than Angela. Alicia was the prettiest and nearest his age. On many nights Billy stared at his cracked bedroom ceiling cocking his eyebrow just like Godfrey when Irene told him he'd marry her and like it! Sometimes Billy/Godfrey/Powell sneered and put her off. Made her wait until he'd properly proposed and tell her she'd like it! Most times he took Alicia/Irene/Lombard straight into his arms, the faster route to the wedding night—the sweaty details of which occupied his imagination until he fell asleep.

By the time Follow the Fleet reached the big screen in Freedom (preceded by seven minutes of cartoons featuring young soldiers racing on boats in the tropics or racing camels past the Egyptian pyramids, "Join the Adventure" they said), Alicia had up and married his pal, Jerry. Five months later she had a baby boy she named Jerome—a name Alicia thought would make her son a more worldly version of his father, a fact she repeated all over town until it rang in Billy's ears like a gong.

Heartbroken and determined to be the first worldly anyone Freedom had ever seen up close, Billy dropped out of high school, lied about his age and enlisted in the United States Navy.

Alicia looked at him with those Aqua Velva eyes and traced his tattoo with one pink-painted nail. Stupid -- stupid -- stupid -- kiss me.

Billy’s eyes flew open as a message tatted through the static on the set in front of him. Sweat soaked the back of his thin uniform shirt as he pulled the dashes and dots out of the dust, the one thing his life in Freedom had prepared him for outside of the farm.

Using his Morse code manual for the first time on the job, Billy made the sounds into words, which he wrote on his pad: two eight one north Howland call KHAQQ beyond north don't hold with us much longer above water shut off.

Oxford, England

Helge Guldbrandsen leaned in to better hear the voices scratching through the speaker of his tabletop radio set: --elia Earhart--Lady Lin--disappear--Pacif--Electra--last trans--no trace.

He set down his mug and watched the steam swirl off the surface of the black coffee. His gaze softened and the rim of the cup disappeared. The blackness spread out in every direction becoming an ocean that covered the kitchen linoleum.

The static from the speaker buzzed in his head as if he'd entered an electrified field. He skimmed over the ocean on the back of a horse, his chest flat against the mare's straining neck. Below him, flying in his draft, he saw three small planes (or were they birds?) with their arrow-shaped heads and widespread wings.

Slowly, the ocean below and the night sky above rotated, creaking like a huge, rusty crank being turned by invisible hands. His steed and the three flyers below stayed their course as the world turned upside down.

Helge hung on with wiry thighs, thrusting both arms ahead, each hand wielding a sword. The sky slammed into place where the ocean had been with a boom that echoed like iron on iron. The mare flared its nostrils and dipped its nose, carrying Helge straight at the endless black firmament shot through in the patterns of the north constellations.

Helge slashed with both swords at the on-coming wall, the blades caught on a current of wind and starting to spin like a propeller, ripping the swords from his hands. A high-pitched whine, a terrible clatter, and then silence as the man and the horse and the three flyers slipped through a rent in the constellation Ara.

Somewhere in the Arctic Circle

“Where did she go? Where could she have gone?” The loop in Athena’s head wouldn’t shut up. She’d been flying all night. Ice crusted the tips of her wings and she flicked them in frustration. Returning to base camp she maneuvered carefully around the unseen edge of the aurora that snaked through the thin atmosphere. She felt its pull, even at this safe distance. Until now the auroras were the only thing in the universe that terrified her. Unfathomable. Out of her control. “Where did she go?”

Never before had one born to her line simply disappeared! And Amelia. She had been the most important part. The seed of this latest war between the humans had already split; vines, creeping and violent, insinuating themselves into the arms and legs of men. This one would be different from the last. She’d learned some things and of course the goddesses’ war was in full fledge too. Amelia was to have been her very own secret weapon on both fronts. The throne would have been secured.

“GODDAMMIT, SHIEZE, _________, Athena cursed in twenty-two languages, pacing the floor of the Commander’s tent. The goddess shook her feathers into the thick pelt of an arctic wolf. A high-pitched ringing rose in the room as ice crystals hit the frozen floor like a chandelier exploding in a granite-lined cathedral. The cacophony brought Mielia running.

“What is it, Your Grace?” Mielia slunk forward, reaching out to brush snow out of Athena’s white coat.

Feeling the deference that she deserved calmed her some, but not enough to keep the sarcasm from her voice. “What is it? What is IT! Where did Amelia go? What did Hestia say? The Oracles? ANYONE?”

Mielia shrugged. “Nobody knows.”

“FUCK!”

Athena paced on four legs, shaking her furred head, throwing spittle, which froze mid-air. Every possible future now screamed past, none of them the one she had planned. None of them acceptable, even to her. None of them viable for more than another thousand years. Amelia had been her most powerful chess piece and someone, or something, had swept her clean off the board. The One didn’t play this game. Not at this level. What then? Who?

“Isn’t there someone else?” Mielia mumbled.

Athena stopped in her tracks. “What? Speak up you little idiot!”

“Isn’t there someone else? Another girl? You know, who could fly like her? You could train or something?”

“No! It’s not that simple!” She wished that it was. Goddammit. It was something born into them, or not. And if it was, almost all of them forgot. Like the girl, Frieda. She hadn’t painted those cards yet, and she was sixty years old! It’s all Hestia could Goddamn talk about. The cards. The cards! “It ain’t gonna happen,” she barked, scaring Mielia off into the frigid night.

Alone, always when she was alone, Athena’s thoughts turned to Artemis, curled up like a fetus, turning to stone. “I’m so sorry.” Athena wept, slipping into the form of woman again.

Maidenhead, England

The coverlet of Charlotte's bed bunched up between her tanned naked legs—the one she and her mother had shopped for on her fourteenth birthday in May. White eyelet and lace to replace the yellow cotton damask sprinkled with a riot of flowers. More fitting a young lady, her mother had said and the lady at the shop had agreed. Charlotte had been sleeping so much this summer that her mother was worried. It's a rare sunny day, she'd chirp through the door and Charlotte would say she was feeling ill and to please leave her alone.

In fact, she was feeling ill or at least not at all like herself, though not in a way she could explain to a doctor. There was a low aching pull in her groin, which sometimes made her feel nauseous and curl up in a ball, sorry for herself. “Cramps” her mother had said, a bother but nothing to worry about. At other times though, like now, the ache pulsed and grew hot, drawing her hand down between her legs—searching fingers gave temporary, blissful relief. Nothing she dared take up with her mother.

The spasms waned and Charlotte's breath steadied again. She stretched in this moment between release and the re-building tension, this strange cycle that had occupied her whole summer, and reached under her bed for her graphite sticks and vellum. While the sun shone on her back through the sheer curtains at her window, she began sketching the same arc of night sky she'd been drawing since she was nine.

This time, once every star was in place, Charlotte drew herself in the picture, flying a white airplane. With the heel of her hand she smeared the field of stars in a circle, over and over around the small plane until the girl and the aircraft were lost in the funnel.

Charlotte climbed out of bed and slid the picture into the cedar chest where she kept all of her drawings. She closed the lid and locked the box with the small brass key it had come with. She pulled the white coverlet off in a heap on the floor, then balled up the stained sheets, preparing to wash away the gray smears where she'd cleaned the lead from her hands and the scattered red-brown drops of blood.

Without putting on clothes or even her robe, Charlotte raised the sash of her window and stepped onto the roof of their porch. She slept in the rare England sun until her mother called her for supper.

Chipping Campden, England

Frieda plucked at the bits of rind in the marmalade, making a sticky pile at the edge of her plate. Percy peered at the mess over his reading glasses. This was among the least of his wife's peculiarities. He dropped his eyes back to the page when Frieda urged him on with her knife.

“Go on,” she said, waving the utensil in the air. A dollop of orange glopped on the tablecloth.

“Says here she disappeared a week ago. Somewhere in the Pacific.”

The knife struck the edge of the plate, then fell to the floor. One thin crack spread from the lip of the dish beneath Frieda's scone and she watched to see if the fissure would come out the other side of the pastry. Percy's voice grew thick and distant.

“Amelia,” she whispered.

They had met five years before, at a reception in London honoring Miss Earhart for her solo Transatlantic flight. Lady Fettiplace and her hens had surrounded the young woman, clucking about the modern style of her hair, while the men, clustered around the perimeter of the room raised their glasses to one another, crying “Lady Lindy.” Frieda thought how the men had so easily taken on the young woman's achievement as if it had been theirs, even subsuming Miss Earhart's own name to that of Charles Lindbergh.

Frieda watched Amelia from the edge of the room, noting her rising discomfort in the swell of the perfumed and be-jeweled gargoyles clawing at her smartly-cut suit.

Amelia slipped from the crowd and Frieda followed her to the foyer. Amelia kept walking, out the front door of the house and down the curved drive. Frieda trailed a short distance behind. She watched Amelia cross the street into a park and lay down on the grass, flat on her back, looking up at the sky. Frieda approached the young woman and gestured to the ground beside her.

“May I?”

“Be my guest.”

“What is it like . . . flying?”

“It's like . . . finding yourself in a strange new world where everything has turned upside down. And yet you are home.”

“I’d like to fly someday, but I'm afraid of falling out of the sky.”

“So am I.”

“Why do you do it then?”

“Because when my feet are on the ground I'm homesick for up there.”

“The women in there, they call you the Princess of Air, you know.”

“Do they?”

“Better than Lady Lindy, I should think. It’s their way of paying you a compliment. A rare gesture in this crowd, I assure you.”

“They're wrong. Princesses are born to rule their subjects, I think, and I am a bit of cloud ruled by the wind and the moon.”

Frieda recalled they were both quiet after that. They had been inseparable for the next two days, much of it spent in comfortable silence. Though the afternoon Amelia took Frieda up in her Vega, rolling over the farmland outside the city, Frieda's silence was filled with a mix of awe and homesickness for the ground. The two women forged a bond out of their shared yearning for freedom, Amelia in the air and Frieda in her studio with her oils and canvas.

They had kept up a sporadic correspondence—each reading all that went unsaid.

Frieda left the table, walking quickly as she neared the cottage at the east edge of their property, which served as her private parlor and studio. She sat at her writing desk and penned a response to an inquiry she'd received several weeks before.

Dear Master Crowley,

I accept your invitation to paint the cards of your tarot deck. You've said I might start with any card about which I'm inspired. Please send me in haste your notes on the Princess of Air.

- Cordially, Lady Frieda Harris

"I said China requested the League of Nations intervene against the Japanese invasion,” Percy repeated, glancing up from the paper. “Are you listening?"

She hadn't been. Frieda was away already in her mind to the cottage where she lived the life he couldn't understand. Where he believed she spent her days dabbling in watercolors and dreaming, a life his title and modest fortune afforded her.

Three weeks had passed before Crowley’s reply found its way to the Harris breakfast table, wedged between the morning report and the dollop of marmalade escaping Frieda’s knife.

“A letter came for you in the post,” Percival offered in a tone sure to get her attention. “More from that Crowley fellow. Frieda, I thought we had discussed his . . .”

“Yes, yes, I know. Unsavory and all that. He’s simply commissioned some work, darling. It will be over in a minute.” She and Percy both knew with a client like Aleister Crowley, she wouldn’t be paid. In fact, the work would cost them for canvas and paints and the postage, shipping sketches and letters back and forth. She’d considered this carefully, along with the man’s growing reputation in the Order as more trouble than his evident genius in the occult was worth. She would do well to distance herself from her teacher—Percy was a patient man, but she knew what she did in the curtained-off parlors and attics across London would lose him his position or land her on the streets (or worse). Their circle would demand it. Yet, she was pulled to this work.

She had been making her own studies while she waited for Crowley’s reply. As the Princess of Air took shape on her sketchpad, heat rose up inside her, her heart beat in her ears, and she found herself talking to the girl in the picture as if she could hear. The girl wasn’t Amelia, Frieda knew this, and she was someone. More than the archetype Crowley described in his book. Frieda took the envelope from her husband, giving him a peck on the forehead as she moved toward the door.

“Where are you going?” he asked, nose already back in his paper.

Today, Prince Naruhiko would order the Japanese Army Air Service to begin a renewed offensive against the Chinese capital of Nanjing. Today, Frieda would paint a vision that Aleister (whom most people thought was a loon) had in the North African desert.

The path to the cottage wound through a grove of cypress trees imported a century ago from the Fertile Crescent. Left unpruned they had twisted into wild shapes and tangled their branches overhead forming a riotous promenade of arches that dripped wild roses from their peaks. It had been a wet summer and the fragrance from the trees and flowers was heady and clean and sweet.

Frieda breathed into her belly as she walked, each step away from the house a tiny ritual repeated over and over in a rhythm building in pace and strength like the movements of a symphony. She breathed in first through the soles of her feet as if mining the elements from the core of the earth. Mingled with the cypress she smelled metallic glints of wet shale and gold. She held the breath in her belly, pooching her stomach round like a Buddha, then let the air out in a slow stream through the top of her head. She pictured her breath skimming along the arc of Nut's bridge—she loved the Egyptian glyphs of the Goddess of the Nile doing a backbend over the planet, her body made of the sky and the stars—then diving back through the core of the earth and up through her own feet again. In and out, over and over. By the time she reached her cottage, the war, England, her house, and her husband were misty and distant.

Frieda drew the key from its hiding place beneath a warped floorboard of the porch. She had found the key, an ancient iron thing, in the ruins of a medieval fortress on the banks of the Rhine. She and Percy were on one of their holidays. An hour into the guided tour she spotted a passage she couldn't resist.

“I’ll be back before I am missed,” she whispered to Percy, nodding toward their guide. She smiled and squeezed his hand in response to his sigh; she was always sneaking off in search of forbidden dungeons and cellars.

Soon Frieda came to a set of crumbling stairs. She steadied herself as she descended, palms pressed to the walls. The walls grew colder and narrowed in on her as the passage twisted and turned.

Suddenly the steps gave way to a torrent of stones and she was swept to the bottom, landing hard on her back. When she recovered her breath, and had moved her fingers and toes enough to determine she had no more than bruises, she thought to herself the smart thing to do would be to turn back. Percy wouldn't worry, he was used to her wandering off, but when she opened her eyes she saw only black and a few faint drifting orbs of red and yellow; remnants, she guessed, from the knock to her head.

Frieda had decided to go back to the group when a stream of light broke through a rift in the stones, high on the wall across from the stairwell. The thin beam played at her feet and began to dance across the floor revealing columns bent to their knees and piles of rubble disrupted as if the place had been bombed from beneath.

She was so entranced with the vision of violence and ruin it didn't occur to her to wonder how the fortress above her was standing at all or to consider what conflagration of time, clouds, and the fates could turn a shaft of sunlight into a lantern that moved as if carried by an invisible hand.

Frieda rose with some effort, bruised and still out of breath from her fall, and followed the lantern across the devastated room. Picking her way over beams that lay rotting like fallen trees, she reached what she thought must be the outermost foundation wall, yet here was a door, or rather a doorway whose door had been torn from its hinges and cast aside as if by a giant or a cyclone or dynamite.

She stepped inside.

The landscape changed from that of a dark forest felled by an earthquake to a room the size of a large parlor or kitchen in which someone had gone mad with a hatchet. All around looked to be the remains of once massive tables and once towering cabinets, their ornately carved legs amputated and their backs broken. The wood corpses lay in a field of shattered mirror and glass.

When the light hit the sharp edges it instantly refracted into a geometric array of gilt angles and planes that hung in the air an arm's reach from Frieda. The effect was astonishing. Frieda blinked and reached out with her fingers, surprised when her hand passed through the image.

A mirage, she thought. Then it disappeared.

All light was gone, and she realized that the light must have also carried a sound, for the silence was as black as the room. She began to feel dizzy, as if she couldn't hold her body in space. Frieda lowered herself to the floor. She didn't feel the glass cutting her knees because somewhere in front of her she could sense a vibration, a pulse. Heard something hard and small scrape toward her across the floor.

Without thought or decision, almost helpless against it, she reached for the object. The shaft felt cold and rough on her palm, about as big around as one of her fingers and long enough to span both of her fists as she gripped it in two hands like a staff. Metal. Iron most likely. At the top, (although she wasn't entirely sure which way was up) she traced three interlaced circles with the tip of one finger. Strangely, impossibly, not one ring was attached to another, yet they didn't move freely either.

She couldn't make her brain take on how this might work, yet the weight of this relic in her hand was wholly satisfying. The thing radiated a warm throbbing pulse as if it too had a heart. She could no longer tell where her skin ended and air, glass and iron began.

When she reappeared next to Percy, disheveled with smudges of what looked like blood on her knees, she shrugged, kissed his clean-shaven cheek, and slipped her find (quite against the rules as you can imagine) into the shoulder bag he was holding for her.

Later, in their hotel room, when Percy had gone out in an attempt to locate a recent edition of the London Times, Frieda took the object out of the bag. An old metal key of the size and sort that might be used to open the huge iron gates to an estate or public garden or cemetery. Nothing more.

When Frieda and Percy arrived home later that month, she claimed the old cottage for her own and had a smith forge a lock to fit the key she had found.

The key maker she asked to reverse his usual method, building a lock for a key, took on the task with more curiosity than trepidation. Well after midnight, in the deep shadows of his workbench, surrounded by grinders and files and pegboard walls filled with straight-toothed masters to houses and vehicles and padlocks, the corroded relic moved in his hand as if a live thing.

Frieda opened the door to the cottage and locked it behind her in a gesture that had become more ritual than habit. (The key seemed content now that it had a purpose again.) She closed the curtains and stripped off her clothes. The room was large as cottages go with bare wood floors, gone soft and wavy under her feet. Two overstuffed sofas, upholstered in soft cotton muslin, flanked a large fieldstone fireplace.

She lit a fire to warm her naked body and feed her soul. Frieda pulled down on a thick braided cord, which appeared to be part of the nearby draperies, prompting a ladder to unfold from above.

The outline of the trap door was well-hidden in the ceiling. One spring she had hired a traveling tinker to cut this port to the attic and build the contraption when she had heard what sounded like birds overhead, fluttering madly, and she could find no way birds could have flown in or out. When the tinker opened the ceiling there was no trace of birds, not one feather.

Frieda first climbed the ladder and emerged in to a room the size of the whole cottage below. Twin skylights set deep into the steep thatch roof washed the room in wavering light; these windows a strange architectural detail given no door to the space existed before. The glass was so old it had begun to pool in undulating dunes at the bottom of the panes, perhaps recalling its previous existence as sand.

The door in the floor banged shut. Have to have that hinge fixed, she thought. In the center of the room stood a large wooden easel holding a rather small, rectangular canvas. A table beside it was strewn with a selection of red sable brushes, a squat canning jar filled with clear water, and curled tubes of pigment nested in a terrycloth towel that might have been white (now stained every color Windsor Newton offered). In a corner, near the door in the floor, another small table was covered in pure beeswax candles molded into all manner of cunning shapes.

Frieda laid the key and the letter from Aleister among the candles and selected several of her favorites to light. She placed the candles around the room on the floor. She stooped and lit the tip of a yellow wax pinecone, then the wick between the shoulder blades of a howling wolf. As the flame caught and burrowed itself into the space between the molded bones, a small golden river spilled down its back and onto the wood plank. Frieda began to dance.

At first she turned on the balls of her feet in little half arcs and hummed a tune her sister had sung to her when she woke up from nightmares about their dead parents. She closed her eyes and lost track of her body. The song became something ancient that Frieda inhabited as if she were the composer.

She sang and whirled—chanting and dancing herself into a trance—seeking unity with the forces she could sense like pure light throbbing in the air. All that you would call her ‘mind’ flew away on a journey, leaving her body behind.

She was gone for some time.

Frieda woke up to the last of the afternoon sun falling through the skylights onto her back. She stretched and smiled, thinking of all the times before when she had felt inadequate, unchosen, a fraud in the hidden parlors where the members of the secret occult order, the OTO, met to skry.

Nine of them typically met two evenings a month, making excuses to spouses and nosy landladies, to leave their bodies and travel to another plane—to skim through the veil between worlds. They stepped through the doorway of the apartment one of the gentlemen kept for these occasions and the transformation began. Eight members of the order paired off and swept to the sides of the room in carefully choreographed moved, pinning back the curtains that lined the four walls, revealing the murals hidden behind. The ninth member opened a trunk and passed out costumes, the garb of the gods. A seamstress they hired for her discretion had patterned the pieces after pictures the Egyptians left behind. The room had become an ancient Egyptian temple.

That last time, Frieda had stripped, piling her street clothes beside the trunk, donning the wig and the ankle-length linen sheath of Maat, Goddess of Wisdom. As the ritual began, Frieda followed the group—chanting and dancing around the room, yet once the others had entered the expected ecstatic state, Frieda sat in a corner and waited for their return. She lied to the exhausted, ecstatic men and women when they asked about her trip. She lied to herself that she was serving the order by guarding the door.

Now, like a dream but not, she had walked in the world of Maat whose headdress of divine scales and feathered cape still occupied a space Frieda could trace with a finger, recalling the tiniest details. But Matt was no princess of air and that was where she needed to start.

Frieda rose from the floor to retrieve Aleister’s letter. Read through the instructions on symbols and themes and color palette, and see what she could conjure. The canvas stopped her.

The canvas that had been blank when she started her dance.

Finished! How? She looked at her hands flecked with blue-green and yellow paint then stared back at the completed painting. It looked nothing like she had planned for this card. Curious and a little concerned, she tore open the letter and read. Frowned.

Then she stood back and softened her eyes. Let the painting speak for itself.

“Just so,” Frieda murmured. The Princess of Air glowed in the early evening light, exactly who she was meant to be. Frieda felt a connection to the girl’s plight. She herself had stood on that mountaintop, sword drawn, facing those clouds laden with fear and the expectations of fathers and sisters and lovers and those whose ill intentions paraded as friendship. The princess leans forward, ready to fight, to claim the intelligence and curiosity granted her in this life for . . . something. She can’t see beyond the clouds but she can sense something vital, necessary to her survival, so close.

Frieda whispered to the girl on the mountain, whose back was to Frieda and the attic room, “Don’t look back, keep going!”

Athena alit on the thatch roof and craned her white-ruffed neck to see the canvas through the skylight. She was sure the girl in the painting was the one she was searching for, the one she needed to wage her own war. “Turn around!” she squawked at the glass. Helpless, furious, Athena watched Frieda pick up a brush. Watched her trace a name on the side of the canvas.

As Frieda cleaned the brushes and tidied the attic studio she stopped. Smelling the air, feeling it on her skin. Was it her imagination or had the air . . . changed?

Before returning to the main house she sat at her desk and wrote.

21, September 1937

Dear Master Crowley,

The Princess of Air is stubborn, they all will be in their own fashion, on this I know you agree. She won’t show me her face and I would suggest we move on to the minor arcana, surely an easier task. The swords have nearly started themselves, all of this war in the air. Forty canvases will run us into months, at least, perhaps she will change her mind by then and allow me to paint her as you envision. You may be pleased, however rocky our beginnings on your cards, to know I am finally ready for initiation into the OTO and thought of my new name. Just as you said, it came to me as if I had always known it and simply forgotten.

Your humble servant,

Soror Tzaba

Tending the fire at basecamp, Hestia felt it too. The flames tilted at the sudden shift. Hestia smiled at the sign she had been expecting, though hadn’t been sure what form it would take. Frieda had finally started to paint the new story. Remembered her true name. Gave herself over to her gifts completely.

“It’s begun!” Hestia announced to the handful of goddesses gathered in the main tent. The news spread quickly across camp. The tent filled with goddesses from every tradition and culture, awaiting word of what to do next from Athena, their commander. Surely this was the moment that would change the trajectory of the goddesses’ war to rebalance the world. The slow loss of Artemis was already having devastating consequences all over the globe. Women and girls raped and beaten, left for dead in piles. Animals mutilated for prizes. Whole species driven from Earth. No one and nothing died without pain.