Chapter 25 The Deer and the Daughter
THE DEER AND THE DAUGHTER
We will buy back our own harm with what is most dear to us.
Euripedes, Iphigenia at Aulis
The overture sets the tone for an ambiguous ending.
The Doric harmoniai is mysterious and suspenseful with teases of brightness at the end of each tetrachord.
As only the wind and strings play, the music takes on a mythic quality like a sea shanty or a folkloric ballad.
With the addition of percussion, it sinks deep into a seductive second movement that languishes in an ascending pentatonic, relentlessly building up to something that refuses to settle.
It’s a siren call underscored by a raging sea.
It keeps Claudia on edge until finally, mercifully, it descends into completion.
The last note is met with the first bang of the next movement—a warm feast of consonance culminating in one final, lonesome violin string calling out in D.
It is the most beautiful, evocative piece that Claudia has ever experienced in her life, and it has only just begun. She’s already so entranced that she doesn’t notice just how hard she’s holding Cassius’s hand. She doesn’t even remember reaching for it.
Once the song’s echo ceases, Agamemnon takes the stage. He’s wearing silver armor, made matte by white stage powder so as not to catch the glares of the lights. A quiver filled with arrows is strapped to his back, and a gold bow sits heavy in his hand.
Claudia recognizes him as Simon, a red-haired Musices student whom Marcherie has been berating and complaining about for days during their Alistair-mandated teatime in the Treaty.
“Too often, he’s sharp, and when we’re working with such tight harmonies, even the slightest curve of sharpness can destroy the sound. Perhaps I should break his nose to alter the placement of his falsetto. I think it would help,” she’d said a few days ago. Claudia could tell she meant it.
The first note explodes from his mouth, attended perfectly by a flute whistling one-third beneath him. Either Simon corrected his sharpness, or beneath his heavy stage makeup, there are black-and-purple bruises blooming across his nose.
A King cannot fear blood,
For fear will take his crown.
He earns his keep and keeps his kills
Of all that he strikes down.
Already, Claudia feels high on sound. It’s not like when she smokes with Alistair—this is a high for the heart. She feels all that Agamemnon feels. Kingly, fearless, powerful. Her pulse pounds like a war drum.
I have many daughters,
And thus have much to prove.
Chrysothemis, Electra, Iphigenia,
A weak and brittle brood.
Ballet dancers twirl out from the wings wearing tawny leotards and bone-white horns.
They dance around Agamemnon as if they do not notice him.
He eyes them with hunger, weaving in between them and taking his fill of their graceful bodies.
His eye snags on one stag in particular—a blond girl whose leotard catches more light than the others.
Approaching her, Agamemnon offers his hand.
The stag, wary, leans in, and Agamemnon leaps at the chance to touch her.
He holds his bow far from his form as his other hand roams down the dancer’s lithe frame.
Claudia wants to be touched like that. Her fingers tremble.
The dancer jumps in a series of jetés away from the cold hand of the king. He pulls a silver arrow from his back and readies it in his bow, crouching low and stalking his prey.
To mark the coming war,
I carry me’own flag
Alone to the forest of Artemis
And slay a sacred stag.
He fires the arrow at the glittering stag, and she catches it a hair away from her neck.
There, a red sash pours from the sharp, gleaming tip, and she falls to the ground.
The other dancers frantically flee the stage as Agamemnon carries his kill in an intricate lift; arms locked, he holds her above his head, and her weightless limbs fall like ribbons around his body.
When her head falls back from her loose neck, her horns adorn Agamemnon as if the two are sharing a crown of bones. The king looks to the audience.
A King will helm the warship
To claim the victory as his.
A King cannot fear blood,
For blood is all he is.
He carries her off, leaving the bright red sash lying on the stage, and the world goes black. Claudia can hardly breathe. Her limbs are tingling with the urge to run.
“How do you feel?” Cassius asks through the silence.
She nods toward the stage. “I want that.” Her voice is a whispered growl.
“You want what? Say it.” His breathing is heavy and bestial through his nose.
“To be chased. Hunted.”
Between them, Cassius’s knuckles blanch when he grips the edge of his seat. His hand trembles with tension, as if he wants to touch her but won’t let himself.
Not unless she asks. Not without her permission.
It all dawns on her at once: Beg. Use your words. Say it. He’s never simply teasing her—he’s giving her time to change her mind. He’s empowering her to take charge of their play so she gets exactly what she wants.
And he’s giving her space to say no.
Her chest presses hard into the neckline of her dress. “Cas, do you want to touch me?”
“Desperately,” he says, like the word has been on the tip of his tongue for centuries.
She reaches over and caresses his jaw, bringing his gaze to hers. “Do it.”
His lips part slightly before he captures her in a carnal, heated kiss.
He slides his hand down the length of her body and hooks it below her knees, picking up her legs and draping them across his lap.
To keep her balanced, his grip moves to the swell of her hip.
Squeezing hard, he speaks straight through their kiss.
“You want it to hurt, Claudia? Is that what you want?”
“Yes,” she says. “Please.”
At that, he presses himself back into their kiss and bites her bottom lip. A hint of her blood laces the taste of him in her mouth. Claudia shivers, arching her back for more.
Then the lights come back up, illuminating their entanglement and the rapid, syncopated rise and fall of their chests.
How are they going to get through a whole recital? Does Claudia even want to? Part of her wants to grab Cassius by his obsidian pendant and use it as a leash to lead him back to her room right now.
He could be a good boy for her.
She almost does it, but a new song begins just in time.
There is no melody—only drumbeats. Artemis steps onto the stage in a green-and-white chiton, crowned with gold laurels, holding a bow much grander than Agamemnon’s.
The drums beat in time with her careful steps across the stage.
She leans down and picks up the red sash.
Her eyes cut to the audience, and in them, there is nothing but wrath.
The goddess takes a breath so deep her belly swells.
Her song has no words. It is a series of guttural, melodic, sharp, and vengeful wails. The sound leaps between octaves, spearing through Aeolian cries.
Claudia slinks away from Cassius, overwhelmed by Artemis’s rage and sorrow. The lights shift from red to blue in rapid succession as the goddess is caught between the two extremes. The effect blurs her movements, as well as Claudia’s vision. It feels like watching a dream.
No—it feels like falling into a nightmare.
Suddenly, Claudia is no longer sitting in the opera house. She’s swallowed up by her own imagination, lost to horrors dancing across the dark front of her mind. Dorian’s face. Dorian’s eyes. His sharp teeth, his imminent threats, his forceful hand shaping Claudia into his weapon of choice.
Her heart feels like it’s cracked in two—half red, half blue.
Half rage, half sorrow, total agony. She feels Artemis’s rage, her grief, her all-consuming need for revenge.
It feels familiar. It’s the same emotion that drove that letter opener straight through her father’s heart.
She didn’t realize it was still there, but now she realizes that the willingness to kill is like a virus.
It lives in the body forever. Now that she’s killed once, she’ll always know that she could do it again.
Cassius drapes his arms around Claudia and pulls her out of her head, back into the moment.
A ship, helmed by Agamemnon, creeps across the stage and stalls in the middle as Artemis releases a final piercing shriek.
The goddess leaves the stage, and with her, the wind that would carry the ship to Troy.
The sails slacken, and the soldiers on the ship erupt in panicked whispers. Agamemnon quiets them with a wave of his hands as the seer Calchas—a lithe, white-winged man—descends on strings from above, floating across the stage.
A deer and a daughter,
King Agamemnon.
Artemis will wear her
Soft skin like silk,
The way you belt yourself
With her grief.
You will offer your own blood,
Else remain a stone in the sea.
The stage goes black. Claudia lays her head on Cassius’s shoulder. He tightens his arms around her, his protective hold promising a safe place to let go, to feel everything all at once.
When the lights return, the large ship is gone, but a smaller one drifts slowly across the stage.
Standing in the center of the small ship is Marcherie playing Iphigenia, clad in the dress Claudia tied at the shoulder.
It’s lighter, whiter, under the stage lights.
She looks every bit the star that Odette claimed her to be.
A soft, quiet string quartet sings beneath her gentle melody.
I have been good
And he, the why.
My Achilles, I never knew
It would be you,
Warrior that you would have been.
To him I say
Nothing.
Your temperament will be made lovely
By me’own hand.
Calchas returns to the stage like a cloud above Iphigenia. “A deer for a daughter, a daughter for a deer,” he sings. Enter the drums. The tone darkens. Her ship moves faster.
Carried on waves of centuries
Toward the fate of every maiden,
I heard the warning in the wind.
I knew.
Oh, how I knew,
My girlhood, a fulcrum
Offering me up to the world,
Countered by the weight
Of my want,
Heavier than instinct.
Iphigenia departs the ship. Far behind her stand Achilles, Agamemnon, and a sharpened silver sword. The daughter only looks up. She doesn’t let herself see her fate, though she knows just where it waits.
I kept my eyes above
On the stuttering blue between clouds.
No prophecy could be mine
For I am nothing
But a girl
Made for nothing
So grand as a difference.
Iphigenia walks toward her betrothed slowly, proudly. Even when she sees the sword, she carries on.
I knew.
I never knew
I knew.
A hunt, a war, a wedding night,
And here, my aisle,
All end in blood
For that is all a man can bestow.
When Iphigenia sings, Claudia wants to run up there and snatch her away. She wants to save her from a terrible fate and ask for nothing in return. No bargains, no soul-bites, no nightmares. Just a safe place to be and to rest.
The daughter drops to her knees. The sword hangs over her head. She looks into the audience. Her eyes seem to lock onto Claudia.
My goodness is a wound.
My prize is
Nothing
But a scar.
Agamemnon closes his eyes and drops the sword. The lights go out before it pierces Iphigenia’s neck. The entire audience gasps, sucking all air out of the room and leaving behind nothing but unmoving darkness.
When light returns, it is Artemis who holds the sword a breath away from Iphigenia’s neck.
“Stand,” she sings. “Give me your hands.”
Iphigenia obeys, and the goddess of the hunt slices the blade across Iphigenia’s skin. A red ribbon appears in her palms. Iphigenia wraps it around Agamemnon’s neck.
In unison, Artemis and Iphigenia sing.
A King cannot fear blood,
For blood is all he reaps.
To know you sold your daughter’s life,
No wound shall be as deep.
A King will rot with loss
And he will end in ash
A King cannot fear blood,
For blood is all he has.
Here is where the curtains close.