They stood close enough now for Apollo to notice the old sword scar running diagonal across the man's brow, and the yellowing whorls of tattoos at his throat.
The man's aura was that of someone forever standing at the edge of firelight, unsure if the world within or without was the more dangerous.
"Come," said the man, as if deciding. "If you mean harm, you'll do it wet and shivering beside our fire, not skulking in the brush. What's your name?"
'My name?'
Apollo flinched, for in the celestial tongue names had weight, names bound things, unmade them, or sealed fate in iron. Yet here, among mortals, a name was just a password, a price of passage.
"Apollo," he said, the syllables a foreignness on his tongue he could not quite swallow.
The man's face betrayed only the faintest tic of surprise, then reset into blankness. "Folk around here favor simple names. I'll call you Lio for now."
He gestured with the cord. Apollo realized with a small, sick amusement that the offer had never really been to accompany, only to submit or die.
He walked, and the man walked beside him; not the way heroes march into legend, but the hesitant dance of two animals unsure which is predator and which is prey.
The palisade loomed taller as they approached, its gate a crude affair of crossed timbers and scavenged chain.
Three men guarded it, each in varying states of drunken alertness, their eyes skimming over Apollo and finding greater threat in the mud on his boots than the man himself.
'I assume my current looks differ from my usual demeanor.'
The man with the spear nodded to the guards, muttered something lost to Apollo's ringing ears, and steered him through the gates with a grip that seemed almost an afterthought.
Inside the palisade, the air changed. It was thicker with humanity, with the sour of smoke and sweat, the sweetness of browning onions, the iron note of slaughter.
A handful of huts pressed together like guilty conspirators.
At their margins, children. Some were naked, but all of them were loud, they gambled with colored stones.
A fanged dog, scarred and balding, sidled up and licked at Apollo's leg with such abject hope that for a moment he almost missed the monsters of Olympus.
They came to a fire, broad and blue as a festival bonfire, ringed with stones and ringed again with men. Women, too, and old ones so shriveled they looked birthed from the wood itself.
All conversation turned at their approach, all eyes, bright and pitiless, swept over Apollo and found nothing sufficient.
He knew this attention, remembered it from countless banquets and massed armies, but here it stung in a new way, as if he had not earned it and never would.
The man with the spear thrust Apollo before the fire. A silence of expectation fell.
Not for the first time, Apollo considered the long list of things he'd done to get here. The arrogance, the misjudgments, the final offense that had sent him tumbling from that marble threshold and into the rawness of the world.
'I deserve this. However—'
But unlike the gods, he found no glory in recitation. Instead, he shivered, and the marshy earth squelched beneath his foot, and the people gathered, cresting with skepticism, as if waiting for a punchline.
'—I will push through this as well.'
The man with the spear adjusted his grip and raised his voice. "He was in the brush. His name's Lio. Might be a spotted wolf, or just a lost fool. Either way, he's cold as a stone and leaking bad."
The villagers regarded the bleeding newcomer with unconcealed suspicion, as if by mere proximity he might infect the fire with misfortune.
A woman detached herself from the ring. She had gray plaits, slate eyes, a face scored deeper than the ruined fortifications behind her.
She moved like someone long past the vanity of youth, but who knew precisely the reach of her strength.
'Is she perhaps a shaman or a priest of some sort?'
Her gaze sliced Apollo from face to gut and back up, pausing at the ribs as if she could see the break's canker from outside.
She approached, spat into her palm, and reached for his shoulder, turning him with a force at odds with her age.
"Strip," she commanded. "If you're lying about the wound, it'll be clear soon."
'Lie about a wound? Why would I do such—'
The pain interrupted him before he could finish the prideful thought.
He faltered, stung by the indignity, but the cold had already begun peeling him layer by layer. With clumsy reluctance, Apollo shed the sodden tunic.
Underneath, his torso was marbled with bruises, one purpling deeper than the others, rimmed by dried blood. The crowd made a sound. A communal exhale, neither quite pity nor disgust.
'I must look pitiful.'
The woman's fingers found their way to the wound, probing with a brisk intimacy that left no room for modesty. Apollo winced but did not draw away. She nodded once, mouth thin as thread.
"Not dead yet," she pronounced. "Could be lung." She licked her thumb and pressed it against the deepest part of the bruise, gauging the yield, the way one tests bread for readiness. Blood welled, sluggishly, and she grunted approval.
"You'll want the white root tea and the fox drake's bitter," she said to no one in particular. "Heat some cloth. This one's lucky, pain keeps him here."
'Pain…?'
The man with the spear surrendered Apollo into her custody with visible relief. For a moment, he lingered, then knelt to the fire, hands splayed as if in prayer or benediction.
His eyes, when they glanced up, were hollowed of threat but not of wariness.
The woman, satisfied with her diagnosis, guided Apollo to a stump beside the fire.
He lowered himself carefully; every nerve seemed to report back to Olympus of the humiliation.
'I have to endure.'
A child darted forward. He was freckled, hollow-cheeked, one front tooth missing, and presented him with a rag that might once have been linen.
'For me?'
Apollo took it, feeling the sting of trivial kindness as harshly as the stab of cold.
The villagers circled, a slow centrifugal dance. Some returned to their stews, their dice, the carving of bones.
Others, sensing spectacle, lingered to see if he would cry out during the cleaning of the wound.