A 1

All eyes turned to Piper.
She tried to avoid screaming and jumping over the side. A bad premonition gnawed at her gut.
But if Jason was going ashore, she wanted to be with him. Maybe this hugely powerful god would turn
out to be helpful. They had to have good luck once in a while, didn’t they?
“Fine,” she said. “Just let me change my clothes.”
Once Leo had anchored the Argo II between the pillars, Jason summoned the wind to carry him and
Piper ashore.
The man in purple was waiting for them.
Piper had heard tons of stories about Hercules. She’d seen several cheesy movies and cartoons.
Before today, if she had thought about him at all, she’d just roll her eyes and imagine some stupid
hairy dude in his thirties with a barrel chest and a gross hippie beard, with a lion skin over his head
and a big club, like a caveman. She imagined he would smell bad, belch, and scratch himself a lot, and
speak mostly in grunts.
She was not expecting this.
His feet were bare, covered in white sand. His robes made him look like a priest, though Piper
couldn’t remember which rank of priest wore purple. Was that cardinals? Bishops? And did the purple
color mean he was the Roman version of Hercules rather than the Greek? His beard was fashionably
scruffy, like Piper’s dad and his actor friends wore theirs—the sort of I just happened not to shave for two
days and I still look awesome look.
He was well built, but not too stocky. His ebony hair was close-cropped, Roman style. He had
startling blue eyes like Jason’s, but his skin was coppery, as if he’d spent his entire life on a tanning
bed. The most surprising thing: he looked about twenty. Definitely no older. He was handsome in a
rugged but not-at-all-caveman way.