Chapter 1 A Skull and a Crown #2
The table screeched against the floor as the guards doubled their efforts. She had moments.
Theseus stared at her, his mouth slack. She couldn’t believe this man had ever been called a hero. He was nothing like Heracles.
She pressed her knife against his jugular. The pressure of the blade biting into his skin brought clarity back to his stupefied face.
‘C-Cape Taenarum.’
She had her answer, but she didn’t let go.
‘What’s down there? Did you see the dead?’
‘I … didn’t get past the River Styx.’ The boundary of the Underworld, whose waters were said to be haunted by unburied souls. Danae’s heart sank. Theseus had never made it into Hades’ kingdom after all.
Beneath her blade, the king’s blood pulsed through his vein. It would be so easy just to flick her wrist. He would bleed out in a matter of moments. All those life-threads waiting to flee his body and be absorbed by hers. The memory of ecstasy shivered through her.
Do it, said the voice. He deserves it. Remember what he did to his son.
Danae recalled the sight of Hippolytus’ lifeless body, battered and mutilated by Theseus’ hounds. Retribution for the young man having an affair with his stepmother, Queen Phaedra. Danae bit the inside of her cheek so hard she tasted metal.
Another crash reverberated through the room.
She glanced at the window, then back at the quivering king.
She kicked him hard between the legs. ‘That’s for Ariadne.
’ Another of Theseus’ victims, Danae had met the Maenad woman on her home island of Naxos.
Many years earlier, Theseus had taken Ariadne from her home on Crete, lain with her under the false promise of marriage, then abandoned her on the island.
Theseus groaned like a wounded bull as Danae leapt from the bed. She was halfway across the room when the doors flew open, sending the table crashing onto its side, and blue-cloaked Athenian guards poured in. Three or four she could have taken, but there were eight, all of them armed.
She dived for the window, but one of the guards grabbed her leg, dragging her back into the room.
She twisted onto her back and, summoning her life-threads once more, slammed her hands into the floor.
The tiles shattered, shards flying up into the faces of the guards.
The man let go, and she lunged again for the window, scrabbled onto the ledge, then grabbed hold of the rope.
Her palms burned as she heaved herself upwards, muscles screaming with the effort.
Teeth clenched, she poured every drop of strength into reaching the roof.
The grapple hook glinted in the moonlight above her; she was almost there.
Then the rope jolted. Danae clung on as the cord swayed violently, tugged by a guard leaning out of the window below.
Then the hook gave way.
The rope slipped from her fingers, and she plummeted past the second-floor window, screaming into the darkness as the ground came rushing up to claim her.
But instead of bone-shattering stone, she landed with a thwack across Hylas’ back.
The horse dipped violently, whinnying as he beat his snowy wings towards the moon.
Winded, she clung on to the saddle, her legs dangling in the air.
When she’d regained her breath, she heaved herself to a sitting position and wrapped her arms around Hylas’ neck.
‘Take us to Cape Taenarum,’ she whispered.
Below, the palace blazed, braziers igniting from room to room as guards raced through the corridors, raising the alarm.
Danae cried out as an arrow grazed her leg. Glancing back, she saw several guards leaning from the upper windows, bows aimed at the sky.
‘Higher, Hylas, higher!’ she urged, as another flurry of arrows shot past them.
The winged horse surged up towards the moon, until finally they were out of range, no more than a shadow on the sphere’s pearly face.
Dawn seared the clouds, their underbellies glowing like hot coals.
Hours after they left Athens, Danae and Hylas soared over the waters of the Saronic Gulf, alighting in a forest in the Argolid region of the Peloponnese.
They were only halfway to Taenarum, but both she and her steed sorely needed rest.
Tiredness had become as familiar to Danae as breathing.
She barely registered the ache in her thighs and back as she slid from Hylas’ saddle.
She staggered towards the stream of silver she’d spotted snaking through the canopy as they flew over the forest. She fell to her knees, and both she and the winged horse lowered their heads to the river, the cold water numbing her mouth.
Once her thirst was quenched, she delved into Hylas’ saddle bag and hooked a small sack of barley grain on a tree nub for him to eat.
While Hylas chomped, Danae melted into the forest. She kept him in her sights, but ventured far enough that her companion would not witness what she must do.
Placing her hands on the trunk of a large oak, she reached for the tree’s life-threads.
She was met with the usual resistance – the tree was strong and healthy – but eventually it bent to her will, just as they always did.
A gasp slipped from her lips as the oak’s life-threads rushed into her, banishing the pain of her bruised ribs and healing the arrow wound on her leg.
Energy surged through her veins as all around her, brown wilted leaves fell like tarnished snow, and the first budding green acorns shrivelled and tumbled to the forest floor, never to become trees.
Danae turned from the dead oak, her body lighter, her heart heavier. She only did what she must to survive, yet the corpses of the trees and animals she left in her wake fed the knot of shame ever-writhing in her stomach. She was like a plague, bringing death wherever she went.
She returned to kneel at the bank of the little river, taking two waterskins, one from each of the saddle bags.
Her wavering reflection scattered as she pierced the surface of the water, refilling the vessels.
Warped and dirty as it was, her face had not changed since she left Naxos three years ago.
There are no gods. Her hands trembled as the voice repeated Prometheus’ words, spoken just before his death atop the Caucasus Mountains. There were only ever mortals, and those mortals chosen to become Titans … You are a Titan.
A familiar argument unfurled in her mind.
She, the gods and the Titans could not be the same, as Prometheus had claimed.
Yes, the Twelve had lied when they painted the Titans as monstrous giants – Prometheus had looked human, just like her.
And even if the gods were in fact Titans, like the foe they had defeated in battle for the dominion of the earth, she could not be.
Prometheus and the Olympians had lived for centuries, they were immortal.
No, whispered the voice. Not immortal.
The gods and the Titans might be ageless, but Prometheus’ death had proved that they could be killed.
She shook her head. Even so, she was not like them.
Her youthful reflection stared back, mocking her.
Both Phineus, the father of her loyal friend Manto whose sacrifice had saved her from the harpies, and the priestess of the oracle at Delphi had become wizened with their constant use of the prophetic omphalos stone.
But not her. She raised a wet hand to her face and traced the skin around her eyes, her mouth, her cheeks.
Smooth. Unchanged. No matter what she did or where she went, she was stilled in time.
She wondered what her sister would look like now.
Alea would be in her twenty-second year.
If she had lived would she have grown to further resemble their mother?
Or would their father’s likeness have been drawn out with each turn of the sun?
Then Danae’s thoughts crept to Arius, her little nephew, stolen from her sister’s bed on his first birthday.
Alea had been convinced he was Zeus’ son, her heart irreparably shattered when Arius was taken by a shade, and his all-powerful father did nothing to prevent it.
Danae had no idea what had become of him, if he was dead or alive.
The voice interrupted her thoughts, repeating more of Prometheus’ final words. Apollo does not drive the sun across the sky. Hades rules the Underworld, but there is no afterlife there.
‘Enough!’ She stood abruptly and stormed back to the saddle bags, roughly stowing away the swollen waterskins.
The voice was wrong, Prometheus was wrong. Alea must be in the Underworld. And she was going to prove it.
Hylas lifted his muzzle from his feed, nickered softly and trotted towards her. He lay his head over her shoulder. She wrapped her arms around his neck, breathing in the scent of his mane. Behind him, the sun gleamed through the trees, rippling golden light across the river.
She didn’t realize she was weeping until Hylas drew back his head and licked the salt from her cheeks.
‘I’m not crying. You just smell awful.’
Hylas snorted, and Danae smiled. He was the most intelligent beast she’d ever known.
He seemed to genuinely understand human speech, as well as having an ingrained knowledge of the land.
She hadn’t shared more than a passing sentence with another person since her encounter with Prometheus, let alone touched one without violence.
Without her realizing it, the horse had become her closest friend.
She liked to believe he too felt their bond, and that was why he hadn’t abandoned her and flown back to Olympus.
But whatever his reason for remaining at her side, she was grateful.
She didn’t know what she would have done without him.
She removed Hylas’ saddle to give him some respite from the chafing leather and sat down beside the river.
In her haste to escape Athens, she’d barely given herself time to revel in how close she was to finally finding a doorway to the Underworld. She’d known it was going to be difficult, but she hadn’t expected it would take this long.
She had not been able to divine the first two visions the omphalos shard had shown her when she asked it how to enter the kingdom of Hades.
The third vision it revealed to her, a twelve-pointed sun floating above a crowned skull, had led her to Athens.
It wasn’t common knowledge that King Theseus had ventured into the Underworld, the journey not being one of his heroic deeds immortalized in song or pottery.
But after lurking in enough kapeleia and asking the right questions, she’d teased out the tale.
She glanced at the saddle beside her. Hylas was now lying down in the shadow of the trees, his head tucked into his breast. Danae ran a hand over her face.
She should rest. Tomorrow they would continue on to Cape Taenarum, and she would need every crumb of strength for what awaited her there.
Even so, her fingers twitched towards the left-hand saddle bag.
Just once more.
She slipped her hand beneath the leather flap and drew out the wrapped omphalos shard.
There was another question she had asked of the stone, besides seeking the location of the entrance to the Underworld. It had not given her the answer she sought. Even now as she contemplated asking again, her pulse quickened and her palms grew clammy.
She unwrapped the obsidian rock and let it roll, naked, onto her hand. Immediately, her life-threads shot into the stone, her consciousness soon following.
As she floated, suspended in the void of nothingness, she asked, ‘Where is my sister’s soul?’
Her ephemeral self vibrated with the hope that this time it would give her a different answer.
She deflated as the tapestry of life-threads began to weave into the same vision she’d been shown the first time she asked the question.
Twisted branches laden with apples. A glowing, ever-moving sketch of the tree. It towered above her, shimmering as shining threads drew the outline of its trunk, its leaves, its branches and those ripe, golden orbs.
She was ripped from the vision as Hylas knocked her hand with his muzzle. The omphalos shard tumbled across the grass and she retched, her head spinning as she fought to orient herself. Hylas stood over her, wings splayed, whinnying and rearing onto his hind legs.
A moment later she realized why he’d dragged her back to the physical world.
Behind him in the ever-brightening sky, two dark shapes soared towards them.
In an instant, Danae was on her feet, a clutch of life-threads tingling in her hands. She’d known the risks of choosing to linger for five days in Athens, but she had been careful. She had been so careful.
Even so, the harpies had found her.