CHAPTER NINETEEN
LIGHT FILTERS THROUGH CRACKS IN brickwork above, but it is swallowed almost immediately by the dark rock encasing me. I reach a fumbling hand out, brushing at the walls.
My first thought is that I have been entombed.
But no, the rock lies only either side of me. The way before me is empty – but so too is the way behind.
To my right, beyond that wall, there are snarls. A low rumbling growl that sets the whole structure shaking.
I pivot and head back. Forward would be the sensible choice. Pushing ahead, discovering something new. But back calls to me – something to rectify. Something to lay to rest.
So I turn.
The path twists, spiralling in. It’s no longer clear which way is forward and which is back, only that my feet are moving onwards so if this is backwards it is forwards of a sort. Reality made unreality and unreality made threat.
I remember Hera, her fingers to my forehead.
The labyrinth she has trapped me in.
Madness. Just as she cursed upon Heracles.
There are no branches. It’s not a maze, it’s a labyrinth – a long, winding, singular path. A road within and without.
Unless the danger finds you – and as I round the corner, it does.
My brother. But not as I saw him last, small and bleeding on the floor.
He towers, the bull’s head huge and casting shadows down the hallway.
He pants ragged breaths, saliva dripping from teeth sharpened on cartilage and bone.
His lips curl as he snarls at me, his human body broad and curling inwards, not human at all in the way he stands as though ready to charge.
His nails are grimy with blood, his neck a mass of scar tissue, scabbed and matted.
One of his horns is broken, the other dripping a crimson stain.
His bull nostrils flare and he thunders towards me and I think if I had a blade I’d use it too.
I’d be sorry. But I would.
‘I wish I could have saved you like I saved them.’
I wish I could have saved us all. But I don’t really know what else I could have done.
Released Asterion to run rampant in the streets?
Thrown my father inside the labyrinth instead?
My brother deserved kindness and love and received only torment.
The labyrinth could have been a gilded cage or he could have been let loose on a barren mountainside somewhere, but could doesn’t matter when it is backwards regardless and when the only choice was the quantity of blood.
I understand it now: that I am not to blame for the consequences of the world my father built. Sometimes a tragedy is told from its first breath.
Asterion crashes into me and fades like smoke.
I walk on, and slowly the path must be widening because each length takes longer than the one before it.
Finally, I reach the door – it must be, because the path ends.
But it’s only wall and it is indistinguishable from the stones around it.
‘I am not bleeding for you again,’ I say, with all the confident command I’ve heard in my father’s voice these last eighteen years.
No longer the girl with no name or the girl with a dozen wrong ones.
I am Princess Ariadne, House of Minos, descendant of the sun god, Helios.
Circe, Medea, me. Women of my family turn men to pigs and brew potions that can put full-grown dragons to sleep.
I am so very tired of believing I am powerless.
‘Release me.’
As the world swam out of view, now it returns to me, oak wood and copper, swirling fabrics – red and blue – and then, a pair of jewel-green eyes.
‘Dionysus,’ I say, blinking.
‘You’re alright, new girl,’ he says, his voice a gentle, soothing murmur.
The scene before me clears – a wooden cabin, a gentle sway beneath, Dionysus, crouched before me, and another man too: Hermes, perched on a table in the corner.
‘Are we on the boat?’ I ask. ‘What happened? Where’s Hera?’
Hermes and Dionysus exchange a look and Hermes just shrugs. ‘Fine, so we know it was Hera.’
‘It was,’ I say, shuffling up. I seem to be sitting upright on the low and narrow bed.
Dionysus’s long and narrow bed. My husband’s long and narrow bed.
I force that thought away and continue. ‘She disguised herself as Artemis. She said she couldn’t curse you any more so she’d take me. How long has it been?’
Dionysus is staring at me. ‘You’re lucid. Entirely so.’
‘Yes?’
‘Ariadne, you haven’t been well. You’ve been talking about labyrinths and monsters and pathways to follow. She …’ Dionysus turns to Hermes. ‘Would you mind leaving us to speak alone, for a moment?’
Hermes nods, rising to his feet, but he’s looking at me peculiarly. ‘This isn’t normal. You know that, right?’
‘Very well aware,’ Dionysus answers, voice taut.
‘I mean she shouldn’t … It was Hera. Mortals don’t just snap themselves out of a curse from the queen of the gods in a day.’
‘It took me two years so, yes, Hermes, that was on my mind. Please, would you let me talk to my wife alone?’
Hermes nods and retreats, the door falling shut behind him.
I take Dionysus’s hands before he loses the excuse of not needing to perform love in front of someone else. I want him close. I need to feel … tethered. To something.
‘Hera came, she cursed me, imprisoned me in my own mind and I found a way out,’ I say. ‘That I understand. But what’s happening now? Where are we going?’
Dionysus sighs and moves to sit down beside me. I try to focus on him and not the cabin pressing around me. It might be bigger than Theseus’s but that doesn’t reassure me. If I look closely enough, those low sloping walls might be moving even closer in.
‘To Crete. I … I didn’t know how long it would take to find a remedy to Hera’s curse and I knew you were worried about your sister so I thought that ought to be the priority. Stop that wedding and then negotiate with my stepmother.’
He … he was going to help Phaedra? My stomach flutters, and as I breathe I feel myself relax a little – not only because the plan is still on track but also it was clearly left with the right man.
‘Thank you. Gods, thank you.’
Perhaps it is not all on me – if I fail, he might take up the cause.
‘You don’t need to thank me. If it’s important to you, it’s important to me.’ In sitting down, he’d released one of my hands, but he still holds the other and now he squeezes it. ‘So …’
‘So …’
Dionysus looks around the room, pointedly avoiding my gaze.
‘Hera’s cursed me with madness before,’ he admits.
‘Well, it was definitely her sometimes. Other times I believe it was my own mind turning against me without her prompting. All very difficult to unpack which nightmares live in your own head and which are placed there, especially when exuberance and chaos are sort of your thing. But when it was her, it would take months – years – for the horrors she inflicted to fade. And I’m a god – mortals?
Even demigods? I’m not sure it ever would, naturally.
Heracles had to get a potion from Medea to –’
‘Medea?’
‘Yes, the witch from Colchis – she brewed him a potion to clear his madness. Or, rather, to lift Hera’s curse.’
‘Medea is my cousin,’ I say, and we regard each other.
‘Helios,’ Dionysus says, as my own mind takes me there too. ‘You’re not a full demigod but you have immortal blood in your veins. Maybe immortal powers too.’
‘Powers?’ The thought is ludicrous. If I had any sort of power, surely it would have manifested long before now.
This is hardly my first time of need, after all.
But I think of every story my mother ever told me.
Medea specializes in potions, which I’ve never exactly tried brewing myself.
She became a priestess of Hecate, the goddess of magic, whereas I’ve never had any sort of training.
Would I have been capable of it if I had?
Witch, my mind whispers.
And then: The only sort of woman powerful men fear.
‘What happened?’ Dionysus asks. ‘From your side?’
‘I was in a labyrinth.’
‘It wasn’t interspersed with reality?’
‘No, I don’t think so. And I knew it wasn’t real.’
‘You knew?’
‘Yes. I remembered Hera cursing me. I assumed she’d locked me in the labyrinth of my own mind. I knew I just had to find the way out.’
Dionysus shuffles back on the bed so that he can lean against the wall, drawing his legs up with him to prop his chin on a knee.
‘That’s not how it was for me. So maybe it’s different. But … yes, I think you had some sort of resistance. Maybe some sort of power.’
‘Power over what?’
‘A kind of immunity to the curses of gods? Or something more specific – mind-altering curses, perhaps? Or illusory magic? Do the details matter? Is it not enough to know Hera can’t hurt you like that again?’
No, it is not enough. It’s reassuring, I suppose, to know Hera might not be such a problem going forward. But I have a number of enemies.
So if I have power, how could I use it again?
‘Hera was gone when we found you,’ Dionysus says.
‘It was just you, staring at something we couldn’t see.
Hermes found Artemis hunting in Lesbos. She claimed she knew nothing about it – nearly stuck an arrow through him for even suggesting it.
But she knows our stepmother as well as the rest of us. Hera was her first suspect.’
‘She said at a wedding her dominion superseded xenia. I don’t think she’d have been able to get to me on another night.’
‘Let us hope you’re right.’ Dionysus nods.
‘At any rate, Hermes has determined to stay with us for a while. He claims he’s invested in the drama but really he’s just concerned.
He … he always was, when it was me. When I was a child, he was the one tasked with hiding me.
He saw it as his own failure whenever she found me anyway.
Ludicrous, of course, but if he’s feeling a degree of responsibility I certainly won’t shoot down the protection of another god. But it does mean this ruse of ours …’
‘Right.’ I nod. ‘I’ll be all over you.’
He flashes a grin. ‘Careful, dear wife – give yourself free rein and you may never wish to stop.’
I glower. ‘Are we going to talk about the other aspect of all this? What Hera did to you.’
‘What, in taking you from me?’
‘No, in the years she cursed you.’
Dionysus swallows. ‘Not much to discuss there, I’m afraid.’
‘Really? It sounds horrific. Traumatizing. You can –’
‘Oh yes, all of those things. If I don’t increase my following, my powers will dwindle and Hera will be free to so afflict me again.
And if she doesn’t, I’m sure my own mind will take over.
At some point. Me getting bad again is something of an inevitability, so let’s have as much fun and wreak as much havoc as we can in the interim, hm? ’
‘Dionysus,’ I say carefully. ‘We can –’
He’s already swinging his legs off the bed. ‘I shouldn’t have married you. I got so swept up in the plots of mortal men I hadn’t considered the far superior threat of Olympus. I promised to protect you and it is clear there are things I can’t protect you from.’
I scoff. ‘I think we made it perfectly clear I can protect myself.’
‘And the next threat? Being close to me is dangerous, that’s always been perfectly clear and here I was ignoring it for …’
‘For?’
He takes a step back before turning to look at me. ‘We’ll prevent Theseus from marrying your sister and I’ll leverage the Minotaur myth against the threat of Perseus. Then we can divorce. Go our separate ways and never think of one another again.’
My fists curl in the sheets. ‘What happened to whatever you do, we’re not leaving your side? Or am I only allowed to join the thiasus when I’m the girl you flirt with rather than the girl you’re clearly growing to care for?’
Dionysus blinks, and that fluttering is enough to make his eyes cold.
‘The things I’m attached to don’t just break, Ariadne, they shatter.
They are obliterated. And the last person I ever grew to care for was dead by the time Hera’s haze lifted.
So as you so succinctly once put it: I will not bury you with me. ’