“And Ares didn’t take that edict very seriously even then. As I recall, neither did you.”

Athena could not be so easily diverted. “Will you allow the God of Slaughter to defy your expressed will?”

“My will?” Zeus’s laugh echoed throughout the audience chamber and across Mount Olympus. “I think you have developed a personal fondness for this mortal of yours. What’s his name? Oh, yes. Kratos. Can it be you are… developing sympathy for him? A mortal?”

Athena was not so easily baited. “I listen to the supplications of my worshippers. Kratos is no different.”

“But you do care more for him than others. I see it in your eyes.”

“He is… entertaining. Nothing more.”

“I’ve enjoyed his exploits myself. Especially while he was still Ares’s tool-conquering all of Greece? His exploits were the stuff of legends. Then he had to go and ruin it all with that business in your little village temple…”

“We don’t have to dwell on that particular crime, do we, Father?”

Zeus stroked his long beard of braided clouds. “I considered stopping Kratos myself more than once, but I…” His rumbling voice died as he gazed into some invisible distance, lost in contemplation. “It never quite seemed the right time.”

“He’s not the one who needs stopping, Father. And you know it.” As Zeus’s favorite daughter, Athena dared speak with irreverence that might have earned any other god exile from Olympus and a fiery tumble to the earth to dodge thunderbolts for a century or two. But even for his favorite, the Skyfather’s tolerance was limited.

A hint of frown darkened his brow and brought a gray-purple tinge to the clouds of his beard and hair. Distant thunder crackled over Olympus. “Don’t presume to lecture your betters, child.”

Athena took this without so much as a flicker in her level gaze. “Would you crush a puppet because its dance offends?”