CHAPTER SEVEN
WE KISS A WHILE MORE until my fear abates and it begins to sink in that this is truly it: the start of the rest of my life. Theseus. My soon-to-be husband.
Soon – but not yet. So our hands are fumbling and halting, our kisses broken with snatches of conversation. But the desire sparks at his every look and is stoked by his every touch and each kiss lingers a little longer than the last.
My childhood was accompanied by lectures on chastity and virginity.
By the time any yearning hit – watching the blacksmith’s bulging muscles every time he raised a hammer, or the maids wringing wet bedsheets as the specks dripped down their chitons – desire felt like an enemy.
And then there was Charis. And she was beautiful, yes, but she was safe – safe to explore everything I wanted because no one who mattered would consider any kind of sex that didn’t involve a penis the sort that counted.
Women could not claim or conquer; they did not threaten the men who would come after.
And suddenly all that lust had an outlet, even as the other aspects of our briefly attempted relationship faltered.
But now it seems that lust is a difficult thing to force back into its cage, and Theseus … oh, Theseus.
There is time, I tell myself. I do not need him believing I’d be a better mistress than a wife. None of my escape plans featured as glorious a life as one as a princess and eventual Queen of Athens.
I cannot let this slip through my fingers.
‘Theseus, this is your bed, isn’t it?’ I ask as the day fades. He’s adjusting his chiton – which I might not have wrestled off but have decidedly crumpled a fair bit.
‘This boat has only two rooms,’ he says. ‘This seemed a better solution than you sharing with those who would accept your blood as a tithe for the sins of your father. But I appreciate it’s far from ideal.’
He might have shared with them! Olympus above, no one will believe we waited until marriage if we share a room.
‘You’re worried,’ he says. ‘Please, don’t be. No one will think anything of it once we’re married, and I swear on the River Styx, we will be wed the same day we arrive in Athens.’
I still. An oath upon the River Styx is unbreakable – more binding than the wedding vows themselves.
He grins, snaking an arm around my waist and kissing my bandaged shoulder. ‘What, did you think me some treacherous cad?’
‘No, I just …’ I can’t be too careful. Easing into his hold, I admit, ‘I’m just scared.’
‘Don’t be. You are mine now. And there is nothing I would not protect you from.’
The next day, Theseus comes with a singular dice clutched in his unfurling palm.
‘I thought you might need entertaining. It was the most I could scavenge from the sailors.’
I arch a brow. ‘I could just join them – rather than have you stealing trinkets.’
His gaze darkens. ‘I wouldn’t recommend that, Ariadne. There’s considerable resentment towards Crete and … well, you, on that deck. You’re safe in here.’
Oh. That makes sense, I suppose. I force a smile in an effort to alleviate this tension. ‘I imagine rolling a single dice will grow dull quickly.’
‘I shall endeavour to make it interesting.’ He tosses the dice, catching it seamlessly and holding it out for me to see the characters marked into the bone.
‘You do not trust me. And we have very little time to get to know one another before we will be wed. So on an even number, you will reveal one of those anxieties churning through your mind so that I can alleviate them. On an odd, I will do the same so that you might know me as the man I am, and not as the man you fear.’
I bite my lip. There is so much running through my mind I would struggle to pluck just one from its depths.
The pain of my past: my sister’s betrayal, my father’s order to attack, my brother lying dead beneath the palace …
Or the fear of my future and the court of Athens.
The very people I saved apparently abhor me, so why would the people of Athens accept Theseus marrying the daughter of the man who has terrorized them for the last eighteen years?
But then that dice is flying through the air and caught once more in his outstretched hand. Four. Even. And nothing feels safe to confess.
So, in panic, I admit: ‘I keep thinking about the people who died. The guard. The Minotaur.’
This isn’t the worst, is it? It lends credence to the idea I am harmless, so desperate to avoid pain and misery I might betray my family desperately and accidentally.
Certainly no intense hatred of my father and schemes that took a year to pull together.
Collecting the medicinal herbs alone took so many feigned headaches I’m surprised anyone let me out of bed.
‘You called the monster something else, back in Crete,’ Theseus says.
‘Asterion.’
‘So the rumours are true? It was your brother?’
‘Some of the rumours are true,’ I snap – because I’ve heard abhorrent whispers in the palace. Some people say my mother seduced that sacred bull because Poseidon struck her with lust for it. ‘Most are decidedly not.’
‘But it was Minos’s own son?’
‘Yes.’ My voice is so quiet I can scarcely hear it.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I knew of your father’s cruelty – fourteen of our young every nine years hardly suggests anything else. But I didn’t realize it extended to his own kin. I can’t imagine what it was like to grow up in that palace. And what it took for you to move against him.’
He keeps saying this – how brave it was. But it only ever felt desperate.
‘And my brother died for it.’
‘Ariadne …’
‘I know. I don’t blame you, I just …’
‘Blame yourself.’ He sighs, and reaches to push my hair from my face.
My shoulder throbs, and the scab on my hand itches and every inch of me feels like it is trembling, pulling apart.
‘Your plan was admirable. But it wasn’t enough.
Say you got the tributes out and no one noticed.
In nine years’ time, when you were married in a distant land, fourteen people would die once more. ’
True, I suppose.
Theseus throws that dice again and I see it land on two, but he shifts it to a three.
As though I have confessed enough for a moment.
As though, even in this, he is protecting me.
‘Poseidon is my father but so too is Aegeus, the King of Athens. They both came to my mother in the same night. But I grew up without either of them and then when I finally met Aegeus … He is a great father and a better king. The palace is ruled with love, not terror. So as those years dwindled and fear had us once more within its sights, I knew I had to stop it. Aegeus was so worried about me doing this – he even made me promise I’d take the black sails down and replace them with white if I lived, so he would know the outcome at the first glimpse of our ship on the horizon. ’
A father who cares so desperately about his child? A palace ruled by happiness?
Theseus hooks his fingers through mine, clearly knowing where my thoughts have run. ‘You’re going to love Athens, Ariadne. You’re going to have everything you ever dreamt of by my side.’
The next day he foregoes the dice and lays his head against my shoulder instead, sighing in contentment. ‘I do not think we need such a tool,’ he says. ‘You are so very easy to talk to – to tell things I’ve never told anyone else. You make it all feel so safe.’
And so he runs through anecdotes, tales of beasts he has fought and of the heroics he has performed – with anxieties nestled in their core. That it will never be enough. That he will ultimately be found unworthy.
His fears trouble me. Him feeling close enough to me to share them?
A reassurance. But I am not so detached as to be unmoved myself – to spend the day in this dark, shifting room brightened only by his lips on mine, his hands upon my waist, his words sinking deep into my heart.
I want to reassure him, to alleviate his worries, to care for him.
I hope you know what you’re doing – it is Charis’s voice in my head, and suddenly that newfound thrill of budding love feels like the very ache in my heart for all I have left behind. Is Charis alright? Is my mother? Losing two children in one night?
The loneliness carves something deep from me, but, steadily, Theseus begins to fill it.
I may, possibly and certainly foolishly, be falling for him.
‘I almost died when I met my father,’ he tells me, days later. ‘When I arrived in my father’s court, the witch Medea was standing by his side. She tried to have me executed before he could claim me as his own. She was exiled soon after.’
Medea.
My cousin. Daughter of my mother’s brother. A witch just like my aunt Circe.
And, more importantly for my own existence: a woman who betrayed her family, who murdered her own brother, for the sake of Jason, the hero she fell in love with.
It is what they will say of me. And here I am, as she was, fleeing to Athens for refuge.
And what happens if, like my cousin, safety in Athens only lasts a while?
‘It will be nice,’ Theseus says, burying his face in my hair and inhaling deeply. And I think it won’t be like that. I am safe. ‘To have someone steadfast by my side. To not have to consider betrayal a mere matter of time.’
One evening the echoing sounds of a lyre float beneath the crack of his door and despite the risks Theseus has warned me of, after days of this stifling cabin, I finally crumble. I reach for that handle and burst on to the deck.
The crew is a light team, half the men sitting in clusters on the deck. They drink and sing, some of them dance to the lilting tune, clapping their hands and chanting as they go. Even those working, manning the ropes and shifting tools, do so to that same rhythm.
‘Ariadne!’
The tributes are gathered in their own circle – Theseus at the head. But it’s Zosime calling my name and waving me over. ‘Come join us!’
She raises a jug of wine and begins pouring a new cup before I can politely decline.