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honestly don’t know what view she’d take, whether it was better for me not to know, or better for me to know and fight what I don’t want this ‘Tradition’ to do to me.” She heard a splashing—it sounded deliberate—and looked up to see something out there on the water. “Oh, look, there’s Charon.”
    A dark shape loomed out of the mist, resolving into the boat and the ferryman. “Well,” Charon said, sounding a tad less lugubrious, “that was interesting.” He toed the plank over the side, and it slid onto the gravel.
    â€œGood interesting, or bad interesting?” Hades asked, handing Persephone into the boat, which was surprisingly stable.
    â€œGood, I think. Minos is going to have his hands full for a little.” Charon chuckled. “I confess I am rathersurprised that I carried over quite a few who are neither destined for Tartarus nor the Fields of Asphodel. The friendless and poor on earth may not be such paltry stuff after all. In fact,” he added thoughtfully, “a good many of them are, in their own way, heroes. Leaving them on the bank is doing them a grave—” he chuckled again at his own pun “—disservice, perhaps.”
    Hades looked to Persephone. “We might be able to think of something,” she said, in answer to his unspoken query, as he handed her into the boat. “We were just talking about that, in fact.” Hades got into the boat beside her, which rocked not at all under his weight.
    Charon poled them through the mist to the opposite shore. It wasn’t as far as Persephone had thought, and yet it was very difficult to tell just how much time actually had passed; Hades remained silent, and Charon wasn’t very chatty.
    On the other side…if Persephone had thought that the banks of the river were crowded with souls, here there were shades in uncounted thousands.
    As far as she could see in either direction, a thinner mist hung over endless fields of pale blossoms. The shades wandered among them. They seemed particularly joyless as they gathered the white flowers of the asphodel, marked with a blood-red stripe down the center of each petal. They did not seem sad, just…not happy.
    Until the fields themselves hazed off into the mist, the asphodel blossoms waved, pallid lilies standing about knee-high to the shades. They seemed to have no other occupation than to pick and eat the blossoms, showing neither enjoyment nor distaste.
    This apparently infinite stretch of ground, flowers and mist, she knew already, was the part of Hades’srealm called the Fields of Asphodel, where the souls of those who were neither good nor evil went. In a way, the penalty for being ordinary was to be condemned to continue to be ordinary. Every day was like every other day; the only change was in the comings and goings of new souls, and the Lords of the Underworld.
    Charon pushed off once they had gotten out of the boat; there were always new souls to ferry across, it seemed.
    The mist still persisted everywhere, making it impossible to judge distance properly, or to make out much that wasn’t near. She and Hades made their way on a road that passed between the two Fields, and the shades gathering and eating flowers paid no particular attention to them. But as they traveled, hand in hand, she saw that there actually was a boundary, a place where the Fields ended. The asphodel gave way to short, mosslike purple turf, and like two mirrors set into the turf, she saw two pools, one on the left of the road, and one on the right. The one on the right was thronged with more shades; only a few were kneeling to scoop water from the one on the left.
    â€œLethe is on the right,” Hades said, and sighed. “The ordinary choose to forget.”
    She nodded, and the two of them stepped a little off the road, which now passed through a long span of the dark purple mosslike growth. It actually felt quite nice