2. A Market of Meat
A Market of Meat
Ianthe & Skaros
I could no longer remember Fera’s face.
I’d noticed it that morning when I tried to recall one of her many lessons. She was frowning over her mortar and pestle with her sleeves rolled past her elbows. “Ianthe, this is how you grind the herbs, right?” she said.
The kitchen was there. The pestle was there. The stained apron, the smell of chamomile, her ancient, steady hands. All of it remained, vivid and sharp. But where her face should have been, there was nothing. A smooth, empty absence, like a painting someone had wiped clean.
Charon had warned me the price would be real. I hadn’t understood what he meant until now. And it was too late to turn back.
I sat on the stone bench in the waiting room behind the Agora of Echoes.
My body felt better than it had in months.
The death energy that hummed through every stone in Asphodelia had pressed the Sickness flat.
The vines were still there beneath my skin, but they had gone so quiet I could almost forget them.
My lungs worked. My legs held. I had slept through the night without waking once, which hadn’t happened since before the thorns first appeared.
The rest of me felt like someone had scooped out my chest and left the shell standing.
“You’re quiet this morning,” Medea said.
She was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the bench, her back against the wall.
She’d been with me since the crossing, even insisting on giving me her old room in the quarters she shared with someone she called Aion.
When Charon had leaned over me and taken one of my memories as a price, she’d been by my side.
And now she was here, keeping me company while I waited for the bride market. She hadn’t asked what the lake took. I was grateful for that.
“So much in Asphodelia is silent,” I said. “I thought I should be too.”
Medea hummed under her breath. She didn’t believe me, but she didn’t question my lie either. “It helps, sometimes, to keep to yourself. Just as long as you’re all right with it.”
I wasn’t. But she already knew that. “I will be. Once this is over.”
Beyond the stone archway at the far end of the room, the Agora of Echoes was filling up. The sound filtered back to where we sat, a low rumble of movement and conversation that grew louder by the minute. Through the opening, I caught glimpses of the gathering itself.
Hundreds of creatures filled the tiered stone seating, packed shoulder to shoulder.
Winged things perched on the upper tiers.
Enormous horned figures sat hunched in the middle rows.
A creature with a serpent’s body was coiled around an entire section of bench, and its neighbor didn’t seem to mind.
The central stage was a perfect circle of polished black obsidian, and the torchlight from above slid across its surface like oil on water.
“Is it always this busy here?” I asked.
“The bride market is the biggest event in Asphodelia,” Medea replied. “Every monster in the city shows up. Most of them aren’t even bidding. They just come to watch.”
“Wonderful. An audience.”
“An audience that wants you to succeed,” she insisted.
“The women who enter the bride market are rare. Death-touched women don’t come along every day.
When one does, the whole city pays attention.
For most of the monsters in that amphitheater, this is the closest they’ll ever get to finding a mate. ”
For all her encouragement, there was a strange tension in her voice. She wasn’t fully comfortable in the Agora, not really. A part of me wanted to ask her why, to ask her what she’d given up to be here. But I didn’t get the chance.
The sound of claws on stone drew my attention to the archway. A figure emerged from the corridor beyond, and I forgot about the amphitheater entirely.
She had the regal face of a woman, sharp-featured and imperious, with eyes like obsidian. Faint golden patterns adorned her skin. From the shoulders down, she was a lion, sleek and powerful. Her wings, made of dark, overlapping shards, were folded tight against her flanks.
“This is the one?” she asked, and her gaze found me on the bench.
“Yes, this is Ianthe,” Medea confirmed. Her already pale skin lost what little color it had left.
The Sphinx lazily padded into the room, ignoring Medea’s discomfort. “I know what brought you here, what you paid, and what you carry in your blood. I am Phix, the Sphinx auctioneer of Asphodelia. I preside over the market you are about to enter.”
A pale asphodel crept past her front paw as she spoke, its stem winding along the crack between two floor stones.
Another followed, and then a third, curling around the base of the archway.
One of them wrapped itself around Phix’s paw, and its petals clamped down on her toe.
Phix looked down at it and let it stay there, her expression unreadable.
“Beautiful, aren’t they?” she said. “But don’t get too close. They bite.”
“Does everything here bite?” I couldn’t help but ask. “Even the prize for your bride market?”
“Everything worth having has teeth,” Phix replied, as calm and emotionless as the Acheron. “But a woman who has already paid Charon’s price should know that better than most.”
She settled onto her haunches in front of me. Even seated, she was taller than me standing. “Tell me, Ianthe. Do you know how the market works?”
“Monsters bid. I choose.” It was the way the bride market worked all throughout Alia Terra.
“The bones of it, yes.” Her tail swept slowly across the stone floor.
“The bidders will offer death crystals. They will try to outdo one another because that is what bidders do. Some will bid out of desire. Some out of loneliness. Some because they can smell what runs through your veins, and the scent of it will make them foolish.”
“But I’ll pick whomever I wish.”
“Tradition favors the highest bid, but tradition is a suggestion, not a law,” Phix answered. “The only law in my market is this: the choice belongs to the bride. The Moirae themselves do not overrule it. Do you understand what that means?”
I shook my head. I had no idea where she was going with this.
“It means you are the only person in that amphitheater with any real power,” she finished. “The bidders offer what they have. You decide what it’s worth. Remember that when the noise gets loud and the crystals start piling up.”
Medea touched my arm. “She’s right. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all their enthusiasm. But remember, you’re perfectly safe. And you’re the one who walks off that stage with someone. Make sure it’s someone you actually want.”
I looked at both of them: the ancient Sphinx with her riddles and the silver-haired woman who had pulled me off a shore and into a new world.
Neither of them seemed worried about me.
Phix was assessing me like a puzzle, while Medea wore the expression of someone remembering her own arrival, finding something familiar in mine.
“All right,” I said. “I’m ready.”
“No one is ever ready,” Phix replied. “But that has never stopped anyone.” She rose to her full height, and her lion’s body uncoiled with the easy power of a born predator. “Come with me.”
As I followed her through the archway, the asphodels trailed me down the corridor.
They clustered at the threshold where the stone floor met the obsidian stage, their pale blooms pressing close together.
I looked down at them. They swayed toward me, gentle and insistent, so different from the one that had latched onto Phix’s paw.
I stepped onto the stage and left the flowers behind.
The meat was taunting me again.
By now, I was used to it. The silver death-woman always laughed when I bit her fingers, and the lion-woman only let out a low rumble.
A part of me wanted to rip their throats open, to feast on their flesh.
But the lion-woman never failed to say, “It’s all right, Skaros,” and it felt like more than a taunt.
Skaros. That name sat somewhere deep in whatever I had instead of a mind.
The lion-woman said it often, usually when my roots wrapped too tightly around her paw.
She said it with the sharp reprimand reserved for a misbehaving child.
I didn’t understand why it mattered. I only knew that, when she said it, the hunger eased, and I stopped biting.
But the lion-woman was talking to the rest of the meat today. And all of it—everything that was happening—was a taunt.
There was someone else among the meat. Not blood. Not just a meal. Something that made my roots strain through the cracks in the stone.
I had always been hungry. Since the first moment I’d become aware of myself in the ground, the hunger had been constant, a gnawing emptiness that only eased when I tasted flesh.
Every creature that walked above me smelled like a meal.
Every footstep on the stone above felt like a weight I wanted to drag down and consume.
It was the only thing I knew about myself with any certainty. I was hungry.
This was different. This new creature’s energy poured through the stone like something warm and liquid. The hunger rose to meet it, but it wasn’t like before. It was quiet and raw.
I didn’t understand it. All I knew was that I wanted to be closer to the creature, and all the meat was in my way.
The lion-woman’s weight shifted on the bone rostrum at the head of the stage. Her scent sharpened, the way it always did when the amphitheater was full. She was settling into a commanding stillness.
“People of Asphodelia,” she projected, her voice booming across the tiers.
“Blessed children of Thanatos. A woman who has paid the ferryman’s price and earned her place on this stage walks among you.
She carries death in her blood and has crossed the Acheron to find what the bride market offers.
I present to you the death-touched bride, Ianthe. ”
Ianthe. The new creature’s name was Ianthe. It suited her.