These days, Leto is a wolf more often than not. On silent paws, she runs from Kastro to Kynthos and back, searching for something to howl at. Delos is a tiny tile in the Aegean’s mosaic and its inhabitants have learnt to flee her moods, dark as her fur. But today, they hardly pay her any attention. Their frantic steps raise clouds of dust as they prepare the fishing boat. It’s always the same when they must row the pregnant and the seriously ill to Rineia.

 

They have named the boat after her, to beg her favour, she suspects. She doesn’t wonder if it’s an apt name. Some days the sunrays are too bright, stifling against her fur, and she can’t bring herself to care about the islander’s short-lived sorrows. She is immortal. Her skin stitched itself back together not long after Apollo’s birth, her scars faded. Memory is a different matter.

 

Eileithea is standing on the bow. The goddess of labour and newborns is not allowed on Delos’ grounds, but for the islanders, the boat is an isle in its own right. Since they’re banned from having their children on Delos, a handful of them have been born or given birth on its decks. More than a handful have a loved-one who died on its deck, halfway to Rineia. Eileithea is aware of the loophole. She always approaches as closely as she can, almost touching the borders of Leto’s wild rage.

 

Pressing her stomach against the sun-boiled ground, Leto watches wolf-formed, as Anthea, a weaver from Kynthos, heavily pregnant, trudges toward the boat, supported by her two sisters. No husband in sight and no friends either. Leto has heard rumours at the entrance of her temple, that the father is some Cycladean lord who does not visit anymore. Only now that Anthea’s belly is up to her mouth, did he pause to consider his wife’s anger. A coward, then. Like Zeus.

 

The goddess of labour and newborns presses a sea-soaked cloth against Anthea’s sweaty brow. “This one won’t make it,” Eilethea calls from the bow in a voice only Leto can hear. “The voyage will kill her.”

 

“I don’t see why it should,” Leto says dryly. It is not that she wishes to be cruel to the people who made a home out of this sacred island, her children’s birthplace. She is well-aware that only her immortality preserved her in her own labour. The women of Delos, rowed to Rineia to give birth on the rocks, have no such safety net. It’s simply that, these days, she can’t bring herself to care. Not about the decadent scent of sacrifices made in Apollo’s name or the temples these people built in her honour, nor about her two children, prospering without her.

 

Anthea’s scream tears Leto in two. She clatches her belly as if it were still bursting with two gods, she looks down, half-expecting to see fluid mingled with blood between her own legs. She’s a goddess, titan-born, she’s a wolf, a killer—

 

And yet.

 

~ * ~

 

When no land and no sea would accept Leto during her pregnancy, empty, floating Delos became her refuge. She had lain on the rocks to bring forth her daughter. An easy birth. Not painless, but the baby’s skin against her chest made her forget everything: the seasons of Hera’s persecution, the shut doors, the aimless wandering. Her Artemis was perfect in every way, with forest night in her hair and moonlight in her eyes, looking unafraid at the goddesses gathered around her, all but Hera who was probably sulking on her throne.

 

When Leto wrapped her arms around her daughter, she was a wolf in everything but form. She had never meant for Artemis to be the one protecting her moments after her first breath. All she can remember after the first too-brief embrace is the dull ache of her back, the grinding, tearing pain in her belly, her son, bigger than any mortal child had the right to be, struggling to escape. She blinked from the surprise of it and by the time she opened her eyes, one more goddess was missing.

 

~ * ~

 

“You left me,” Leto tells Eileithea. “You knew I had another child in me, and yet you let Hera snatch you away. I become the laughingstock of every goddess, lying on this damn rock for so long.” Nine days. Nine ceaseless nights. It’s all a blur now, of pain and blood, so much of it that only a god could survive it. Too much pain for the humiliation, the indignity of it to settle in until much later.

 

In the end, Artemis, who had only felt her mother’s embrace for a brief, stolen moment, had to help bring her twin brother forth. She had cooled her mother’s brow with sea sponges she’d cut with her own hands, she had eased her pain, and pulled her brother out just before the dawn of the tenth day. Seeing his perfect hands and feet, his golden curls and his light,

Leto tried to summon the same love she’d found for Artemis, but that felt hollow after nearly a fortnight of drowning in her pain, blood, and sweat. It was the exhaustion, she told herself. She only had to press his little body against her chest and the world would be right again.

 

She didn’t know which goddess snatched him from her arms. To her blurry, bloodshot eyes, their tunics made them look like all-consuming gulls, each grabbing the baby from the other’s arms. What did it take for them to verify he was Zeus’ son, Olympian through and through? Was her endless persecution and cursed labour not enough? By the time they laid him down on her body, any familiar scent was gone, and Leto could barely recognize him as her own. She searched and clawed into her insides for love, but she could only find exhaustion, rage.

 

Perhaps he’d never been truly hers, this son who the father of gods had planted in her. And if he were hers, well, little good it did to either of them. He’d fought to claw his way out of her womb, each scratch a sunray, a scorch inside her. Nine days she had suffered the pain of labour for him. By the time he was out, his mouth, needy and all-consuming against her breasts, displaced everything; his sister, who had brought him into the world with her own hands; the island that settled on the surface of the sea, having fulfilled its purpose; and Leto herself. At least her daughter had been hers alone for a moment.

 

“I escaped Hera,” Eileithea tells Leto now. “Else that sun-boy of yours would still be in your belly.”

 

“My daughter brought him out before you stepped on the island. Do you dare look at me and ask to set foot on it now?” Banning Eileithea from Delos, preventing anyone from giving birth on its hallowed rocks, had been Leto’s only way to maintain a shred of dignity. If that decree put any of Zeus or Hera’s favoured mortals in danger, let them come and get them out. So far, they haven’t come, not even for their most devoted. They wouldn’t dare, not when Leto waits for them, fangs bared.

 

A sliver of blood is running down Anthea’s thighs. Leto can feel the barren island hurting with the woman, hungering for new life. The goddess of labour is trying to reason with her. “The child’s father has left her to her own devices like Zeus did to you. You will abandon her too?” she demands. “You want another mortal’s blood on your hands? I did return for you, as

fast as I could.”

 

Not fast enough. And by then, word of Leto’s nine-day labour had reached far and wide, from Olympus to Hyperborea, from Athens to the land of wolves. Her turmoil hadn’t quenched Hera’s jealously. No one dared cross the goddess of marriage by harbouring those she persecuted. Not even Leto’s own people.

 

~ * ~

 

Leto did not take her children to Olympus, not at first. Though she never managed to work up the tenderness she’d felt during Artemis’ first breath, she didn’t trust Zeus enough to leave them to him while they were young. Nor was she going to let other gods and goddesses raise them in her stead.

 

Before Zeus’s smooth lies, before the island, before her night-haired daughter and sun-haired son, Leto had sought Lycia, the land of wolves. With Artemis and Apollo’s fledgeling, complimenting powers lighting the way, she sailed for twelve days and nights, reached the southernmost area of Greece, and crossed over to the mountainous land she’d dreamed of so often. Before departing, she had looked back to Delos’ mountaintops, its oleasters shaking at the wind’s whims. Her eyes had been dripping hatred. She’d told herself she wasn’t going back, not ever. She had yet to find out her exile was just beginning.

 

In all her long life, Leto had been told of Lycia’s temples, of the sacrificial blood that ran like water in her name. But, as it turned out, there was no shore where Hera’s rage hadn’t reached. Leto had half-expected that everyone in Lycia would recognize her as their own. It was hard to mistake a black wolf carrying two god children on her back. When she assumed her woman form, that should have convinced them: she saw three or more statues of herself from the moment she passed the city gates. Yet they pretended not to know her. Doors were pulled shut the moment they heard her footsteps.

 

Her throat was parched, and she longed to wash off the road dust. At nightfall, she discovered a spring. The whispering leaves of the oleasters surrounding it reminded her of the island she had left behind. It was perhaps the first time she’d thought of Delos in any terms other than hatred. She stepped in. The water was cool and mirror-clear. Its depths soothed her weary limbs. With the last piece of the sea sponge Artemis had picked up for her brother’s birth, she scrubbed her skin, lightly first, then harshly, obsessively, as if to wash away the labour pains, the shame and rage. As if to wash the touch of Zeus, who’d filled her with two children she hadn’t asked for, only to abandon her.

 

When she squeezed the sponge dry and soaked it a second time to bathe the children, it came back brown. All of a sudden, she was standing waist-deep in blurry, muddy waters. Her tunic was caked with filth. Finally, she noticed the men at the other edge of the spring with sticks in their hands, forcing mud upwards like witches stirring an oversized pot of herbs. She turned and ran into the forest, but not before making sure they regretted their offense.

 

It was not humans, but wolves who offered her shelter that night, licking the mud off her legs, tucking her children safely amidst their thick furs, giving them the warmth Leto could not.

 

~ * ~

 

“You ran with the wolves once,” Eileithea says, reading her. “You think the people of Delos will observe this useless rule of yours if you leave again? They may keep obeying for a time, keep rowing the pregnant and the dying away from your children’s birthplace. They remember Lycia. They remember Niovi’s children. But how long until someone refuses to let go of their sick child? When Poseidon’s rage makes it dangerous to row to Rineia, do you think they’ll drown their loved ones so as not to spite you? Of course, they’ll regret it later when you come back and turn them into toads.” Leto can almost see the poison dripping from Eileithea’s tongue. No one else has dared mention what she did to those men in Lycia.

 

What is going to happen if she turns her back to Delos? What corner of the world is left for her?

 

She did try to go away one more time after Lycia. To Olympus, to get drunk on Ambrosia and forgetfulness. Even if Hera hadn’t been there, though, looking down on her from her golden throne, even if Zeus still cared for her, Leto would still be restless. All she could remember about the goddesses she saw every day was how they had stood, watching her bleed and groan on the rocks, and how they’d snatched her son from her arms. Why did she go, then? Perhaps she’d gone after some vision of herself that had dissolved long ago. Of her sitting by Zeus’ side, admiring her son as he practiced his archery from afar, and her daughter as she ran with her deer. But this was another woman’s life. Those days, Leto had only found solace as a wolf in Artemis’ forests. She was glad the trees kept her child removed from the palace of marble and gold, from Zeus’ eyes.

 

Anthea’s scream brings Leto back to the present. To this dry rock of the Aegean that shines with Apollo’s light, so bright it is practically a star, visible even from the top of Olympus, reminding Leto she was always meant to return. The woman’s pain pierces Leto with memories of her back being shredded by sharp rocks, her insides being torn, scorched, unwoven. Eileithea’s pleas and excuses are nothing but the buzz of distant bees: “The woman’s poor mother was right; she should have become a maiden priestess for a goddess, perhaps for your Artemis. But she got blinded by the prospect of Hera’s favour, of marriage.”

 

This gives Leto pause for she is well-familiar with the sentiment. “Let me tell you, daughter,” she’d told Artemis when her daughter first received her entourage of nymphs. “If you take one piece of advice from me, let it be this: never take a man, never give birth to children. There are other ways to be a mother if you want to.”

 

Leto likes to think her daughter listened to her counsel. Although, truth be told, Leto’s own blood on Artemis’s hands, her hair, her tunic, everywhere, as she helped bring her brother forth, was probably a better deterrent than words would ever be.

 

But her daughter hasn’t needed her in a long time. Now, in this island, in this boat, another woman needs her—a woman for whom Hera will do nothing. Perhaps the goddess of marriage should turn her vengeance against her husband instead of the women who suffer from him, from ones like him. Perhaps Leto should tell her. Until then, this island is Leto’s turf alone, and she is the only one who gets to choose what happens in it—the only one who can help.

 

With a raised hand, she stalls the boat. Let this place bear some blood other than her own. Let new labour pains wash it clean. Perhaps it’s time for her to leave again, confront Zeus and Hera instead of whoever winds up her way with labour pains like her own. Nothing grows in the barren island other than the dry grass that clawed at her back as she gave birth and the sparse oleanders stirring like spectres in the wind. Let it get its wish for new blood. If she’s to take her rage to Olympus, where it belongs, she needs a place and a people that won’t turn her away.  

 

In the form of the wolves that housed her amidst their warm bodies when no one did, Leto locks eyes with Eileithea and gives her a single nod. Come in.