Sun kissed - Apollo.

11: I become Katara.

The next few days I settled into a routine that felt almost normal, if you don't count the fact that I was getting lessons from satyrs, nymphs, and a centaur.

Which i absolutely loved.

Each morning Percy and I took Ancient Greek from Annabeth, and we talked about the gods and goddesses in the present tense, which was kind of weird. I discovered Annabeth was right about our dyslexia: Ancient Greek wasn't that hard for me to read. But i pretty much already knew that. At least, no harder than English. After a couple of mornings, I could stumble through a few lines of Homer without too much headache.

The rest of the day, I'd rotate through outdoor activities, looking for something I was good at. Chiron tried to teach me archery, but we found out pretty quick I wasn't any good with a bow and arrow. Apollo had to make a comment about it in my head. Chiron didn't complain, even when he had to desnag a stray arrow out of his tail. Which Percy had shot, he was even worse than me.

Foot racing? No good either. The wood-nymph instructors left me in the dust. They told me not to worry about it. They'd had centuries of practice running away from lovesick gods. I ended up asking more questions about that than really running.

And wrestling? Forget it. I couldn't even do more than five pushups and that was with Clarisse encouraging me. She had me pinned to the mat within a second. And she went even easy on me. But she didn't think that wad my talent, she called me cute and adorable like a bunny. Percy however, every time he got on the mat, Clarisse would pulverize him. Without much mercy, I didn't think she would learn that in the next century.

"There's more where that came from, punk," she'd mumble in his ear, i wasn't too far from them. Unfortunately i picked that comment up.

The only thing Percy really excelled at was canoeing, and that wasn't the kind of heroic skill people expected to see from the kid who had beaten the Minotaur.

While i could canoe like my life depended on it, i didn't think that was a good talent. At some point, i had lost myself in thought while staring at the nymphs in the water. I didn't realise that i had stopped peddling but my boat still went around the lake like i had wanted it to.

The other kids didn't seem to understand how i did that and wasn't wet when i jumped out of the canoe when the time came to stop.

I knew the senior campers and counselors were watching us, trying to decide who our dad was, but they weren't having an easy time of it. I wasn't as strong as the Ares kids, or as good at archery as the Apollo kids. I didn't have Hephaestus's skill with metalwork or-gods forbid- Dionysus's way with vine plants. Luke told me I might be a child of Hermes, a kind of jack-of-all-trades, master of none. But I got the feeling he was just trying to make me feel better. He really didn't know what to make of me either.

Despite all that, I liked camp. I got used to the morning fog over the beach, the smell of hot strawberry fields in the afternoon, even the weird noises of monsters in the woods at night. I would eat dinner with cabin eleven, scrape part of my meal into the fire, and try to feel some connection to my real dad and give as much of my prayers to all the other gods. Nothing came. I tried not to think too much about my mom, but I kept wondering: if gods and monsters were real, if all this magical stuff was possible, surely there was some way to save her, to bring her back...

I started to understand Luke's bitterness and how he seemed to resent his father, Hermes. So okay, maybe gods had important things to do. But couldn't they call once in a while, or thunder, or something? Dionysus could make Diet Coke appear out of thin air. Why couldn't my dad, whoever he was, make a phone appear?

Thursday afternoon, three days after I'd arrived at Camp Half-Blood, I had my first sword-fighting lesson. Everybody from cabin eleven gathered in the big circular arena, where Luke would be our instructor.