Divine Revelry of Revenge

CHAPTER ONE

IWAS BORN TO A torrent of blood and an earth-rending scream.

Well, I suppose most of us are.

But mine ran a river beneath the palace. Mine echoed in its every nook and cranny. Mine, legend would hold, painted the very columns of the palace of Knossos red.

The halls never stopped shrieking with it. Figures flitted through the courtyard at night, spectral breathing floated from beneath the floorboards and wails echoed through the halls.

I never queried the haunting. In Knossos, my father sliced off the hands of thieves and plucked out the eyes of adulterers.

Any perceived grievance could lead to a man’s throat slit before dinner.

Their bodies were strung up at the palace walls, denied the burial rites that would guide their souls to the Underworld and so, of course, the shades wandered the corridors in search of a peace they would never find.

I assumed everyone sensed the unease within our walls but the servants behaved as though I were the ghost flitting through.

They kept a wide berth, muttering things like peculiar creature and she’s been here before and there’s something not quite right with that girl.

Those were the kinder sentiments, of course – but people didn’t tend to risk cursed child, a bad omen, daughter of a tyrant king and a deviant queen all that often or all that loudly.

I understood. I was a kind of haunting too – I’d taken my first breath as fourteen people took their last. That sort of thing sticks.

We honoured name days rather than birthdays in Knossos, but I – and all that blood – was the exception.

Each year, its anniversary was rung in with silence.

My usual maids would not come to dress me, meals would be left soundlessly outside my door and my mother would snatch me up with songs and stories like they might drown out the echoing quiet.

And then, on my ninth birthday, suddenly there was so much noise.

Courtiers pounded through the corridors as they flocked to the throne hall.

Amphorae clattered as they were rolled across the tiles.

And bards – actual bards! – plucked on lyre strings and trilled to warm their voices.

A feast? A party? We never hosted celebrations.

The palace was a quiet, solemn place where we kept even our footsteps light, lest they set off one of my father’s tirades.

My mother came as she usually did, and just as she’d once harried me from the silence, now she drew my sister and I from the noise, bribing us with promises of honey cakes and stories of our aunt Circe and our cousin Medea.

Mother said they were witches. Father said they were perverse and not to be spoken of in his palace – but he wasn’t here now and he didn’t have to know.

The cakes were piled on a table beneath a window overlooking the harbour of Knossos and the neighbouring beaches of Crete.

Sometimes, when I climbed on to the palace roof, I could catch the edges of other islands on the horizon.

But my mother’s stories spanned even beyond those – to Colchis where Medea lived, or to Thrinacia where her own father, Helios, the sun god, reared his cattle and, apparently, his children.

She regaled us with tales of a childhood spent with a sister who could turn men to pigs and conjure illusions and – as my mother gleefully declared while waving a cake through the air – summon sweet treats at will.

‘It’s not fair.’ I pouted – which I didn’t do often but it was my birthday so I felt I was allowed.

‘Why does Circe get to be a witch and we have to be stupid princesses?’ I tugged at the metal circlet digging into my wrist as though to prove a point – why was I supposed to be thankful for jewellery when it was cold and uncomfortable and not dissimilar to the cuffs latched to the prisoners hauled before my father’s throne?

My sister, Phaedra, glowered. ‘I don’t want to be a witch. Circe has to live on an island all by herself because everybody’s so scared of her!’

‘I wish I were alone on an island – then I could dance and eat cake and be as loud as I want when I want.’

‘My sister’s life isn’t one you should covet, Ariadne,’ my mother said gently.

‘Divine lineage makes you a target of the Fates. Circe received power from our father but my brothers received the usual sort of destiny that is bestowed upon a demigod: an insistence they make a legacy. That often leads to bloodshed. To misery. Such things follow power – and they’ve certainly followed Circe to that island.

I would happily choose this life instead.

’ She took my sister’s hand and likely would have reached for mine too if she hadn’t been cradling my baby brother, Glaucus, in her other arm.

Instead she looked at me, a warm smile on her face. ‘This life and this family.’

Glaucus selected that moment to begin crying. Mother didn’t like to let him out of her sight, even going as far as to never leave him with one of the nurses my father employed.

I looked to Phaedra. ‘Come on, we should –’

‘No!’ my mother said. ‘Just let me feed him and we can play a game of pretend – it’s your birthday, Ariadne. If you want to be a powerful witch, let’s imagine it.’

This was a step beyond stories. If male demigods had powers, they were celebrated as heroes.

But girls? For us to even pretend it was sacrilege.

If my father found out, he’d punish us all.

He’d see it as dismissing his power in search of something beyond, something that reached right back to our immortal grandfather and made a mockery of all he had built in Crete.

So being given permission ought to have excited me – but Mother’s no had been sudden and quick, clearly intended to keep us from something.

I did not like being on the outside of secrets.

But I caught the wary glance she shot at my sister and swallowed my suspicions. She was trying to protect Phaedra, so I ought to protect her too and then I could figure these things out.

So I leapt on to a chair and mimed turning my sister into a pig. She did not oblige by pretending back.

After a few more bouts of make-believe magic, we were interrupted by horns blaring through the castle – the same that had sounded last night at some approaching ships.

Mother paled. ‘Time to join everyone. Ariadne, look after your sister. I want you both on your best behaviour.’

I’d never seen so many people gathered in the throne hall – and the usually hostile atmosphere was replaced with one of jubilation. I didn’t know what to expect. Perhaps a toast to the armies of Crete who had vanquished the Athenians nine years ago, or an ode to my father’s greatness.

Instead, we positioned ourselves around my father’s throne and watched as fourteen people were led in.

Fourteen.

Just like the number of deaths on the day of my birth. A chill drilled beneath my bones like one of those spectres had brushed against my skin and suddenly I knew, I just knew, that whatever horror had followed me into this world was about to strike again.

My father made a speech I could barely follow.

He said words like tributes and sacrifice and he called them Athenian.

These people were Athenians – our vicious enemies, the brutal thugs who had murdered my brother before I was born and sent our men to war.

But these people didn’t look terrifying.

They seemed weak and malnourished and like they wouldn’t have even been old enough to have fought in a war nine years ago.

They certainly weren’t the sort of criminals my father usually punished.

That chill burrowed deeper.

‘Let’s go,’ I said when it seemed as though it were all over – but I knew it wasn’t.

Something was wrong, wrong, wrong. I took Phaedra’s elbow and guided her from the room.

It was still my birthday, after all – which meant the servants evaded me.

Only my mother seemed to notice our efforts to slip away, catching my eye as she frantically tried to soothe a screaming Glaucus.

She nodded, which I took as encouragement for us to flee the crowd.

In the hallway, I turned to Phaedra. ‘Will you play your aulos for me?’

‘Just because it’s your birthday doesn’t mean you can boss me around.’

‘Please,’ I said, because look after your sister was still ringing in my head and I needed to get her out of there before the horror revealed itself.

Phaedra bit her lip. She was a little more than a year younger than me but nine felt so old and seven felt so young and I needed her, just this once, to do as I said. She threw her hands up. ‘Fine. But if Father finds out, you’re taking the blame.’

‘Always,’ I agreed, and led her to the small, unused storeroom at the back of the kitchens where I often danced because it was far enough away from my father that he couldn’t punish me.

Apparently, only whores begged attention with their bodies.

It would be too distant to hear Phaedra’s aulos too – the noise gave him headaches – and it really would be a birthday treat to dance to music and not merely my own pounding heartbeat and the occasional sound of movement below.

It was the ground floor. But there were strange noises, sometimes: footsteps, scrapes, breaths that seemed to pant up through the floorboards.

More of those spectres, I was certain. My aunt was a witch and my grandfather was the god of the sun and ghosts followed in my footsteps when I danced – it all seemed to fit.

Phaedra’s nose wrinkled at the dust but she leant against the far wall, plucked out her aulos and slipped the reed pipe between her lips. The tune was slow, melodic – and I let it take me over.

I stepped instinctively, a long winding circle of a dance, weaving forward and then outwards again but always, inevitably, drawing in.

Fourteen people. I knew they had died the moment I writhed into this world – but that was Father, wasn’t it? The same brutality that marked the entire palace.