CHAPTER TWENTY
IRUN TO THE DECK as soon as I have a chance, unable to stand being in those close confines a moment longer.
As I race through the maze of sheets in the living quarters below, my name follows, and then I am swarmed by my friends, checking I’m alright and stressing how worried Dionysus was, like that might be something I care to hear.
I do not doubt that he was concerned. That his guilt choked him. That he also feared losing me for my own sake. That my specificity is the very feeling he is running from.
It makes little sense. Dionysus would be destroyed if the gods harmed anyone in the thiasus.
He feels responsible for them all. So why is my friendship so specifically abhorrent to him?
I hardly want more than that. There might be some attraction here, but I imagine there’s attraction between him and half the maenads and satyrs following him around.
On my own behalf, I could probably throw a stone and hit someone horny Ariadne would deem suitable. Dionysus is hardly special in that.
We are nothing special in that.
The simple explanation is that his reaction is not rational at all but driven by the stress of last night, his own fear of Hera’s power and the similarity of my affliction to his own tortured past, but recognizing all that does not make it any easier to bear.
He is an infuriatingly unreasonable person.
I glance down at the ocean below, fins cresting periodically above. Dolphins. Of course.
Myrto comes to join me at the edge of the boat.
‘Are you alright?’ I ask. So much focus on me and the chaos of my life and nowhere near enough on the people making it bearable.
She nods. Then shakes her head. ‘Yes. No. I … moving us all on takes a lot of effort. A lot of organizing. It’s very fun but it’s exhausting. Which is normally fine, but it can make the compulsions worse. Which is equally exhausting.’
Myrto always has dark shadows beneath her eyes. She’s always up, moving, alert and running to the next job. But they do seem more pronounced.
‘You can use our room if you want somewhere quiet to rest. It’s absurd Dionysus has his own quarters anyway when everyone else shares.’
‘Oh, we’re all invited to set up our own tents if we want. Everyone just prefers sharing – did I not mention that?’
No! I could have avoided quite a lot of this if I’d had my own private space rather than having to steal Dionysus’s.
But I’m not going to say that to Myrto right now.
‘Well,’ I allow, ‘that’s good.’
Calybe and Opora must have finished their most recent bickering – Opora finally kissed Silen, Calybe only just found out about it – and now they join us.
‘Dionysus says we’re going to Crete to stop Theseus marrying your sister,’ Opora says.
I nod, not looking away from the islands on the horizon, wondering what might have happened if I’d been washed up anywhere else but Naxos.
‘Are you close?’ Calybe asks.
‘No.’
As though that matters. I would save anyone from Theseus. He is mine to stop, my responsibility. I’m the one who freed him from that labyrinth and set him loose upon the world.
‘You still love her, though?’ Opora asks.
‘Yes.’
But what is there to say on that? That I don’t know what love is, not really.
That there is the kind of my whole heart, like for Charis.
Love built of choice and circumstance and sacrifice.
And there is love like I feel for my family, wrought in iron.
Steadfast and dutiful. The sort that never seems to bring me much joy, but whose alternative is so much sorrow.
Love as an obligation.
So here I am, racing across the waves.
‘She wouldn’t do this for me,’ I admit. Maybe Dionysus is not the only one with feelings that do not fold to logic. Phaedra put my life at risk to gain our father’s favour. She would have sold me out for the slightest weighting of her own happiness. I know that with rigid surety.
And yet it seems her feelings do not change my own. I will protect her, even as she wishes I didn’t.
I will save her even if she hates me for it.
As the sky begins to darken, I make my way down into the ship.
Dionysus isn’t in our room, which is a relief.
I don’t need another lecture warning me to keep my distance or, worse, him forcefully pushing me away because he fears …
what, exactly? My love? He seems to believe me falling for him is an inevitability.
But I can’t even sit still in this room swaying with each wave.
The memory of Theseus’s ship encroaches too forcefully.
Those closing walls. The descending darkness. His lips, crushing my own.
Dionysus may believe himself a lost cause, but he is not the only one.
I really thought I was going to die on that island. That the food would run out or I’d freeze in the winter or meet any number of other deaths. Alone, an infected scratch might have been my end. An insect bite. A bad cold. My simply giving up.
I loved the wrong man and it nearly killed me.
If I am even capable of love once more, I don’t want it. If I felt anything like it again, I’d hurl myself into the waves before the slow creeping end could smother me.
Just like these closing walls, and before I can think better of it, I am snatching up linens and racing back to the deck.
There are thousands of stars in the sky – the gods’ battleground for dominion, and there in the distance, the only seven I care about. The gentle arch of a diadem whose weight I can still feel.
I set up camp beneath them, draping sheets across two unused masts and tying them down with rope.
It is easier to breathe here than below deck.
‘Ariadne?’ Dionysus calls. ‘Can I come in?’
There is not exactly much room here, so I draw one of the sheets back and sit in the entrance, looking up at him.
‘What do you want?’
He arches a brow. ‘My wife? What are you doing out here?’
Right, we’re supposed to be happily married.
I shuffle back. ‘Come in, then.’
‘Why, thank you, what a beautiful home you’ve built.’
He doesn’t sound at all sarcastic, and that’s almost more worrying.
‘This works well anyway; Hermes can take the cabin.’
‘Great.’ I throw myself back on to the pile of sheets and draw one up over my head, hoping that might be the end of our conversation.
‘Hmm, I can still see the outline of you. You might want to try Hades’ helm of darkness if you wish to truly disappear.’
‘Only when you speak to me,’ I mutter.
‘Marital turmoil already, I really thought –’
I sit bolt upright to face him. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Joining you in a poorly rigged tent on the deck of a moving ship. I was hoping you might explain beyond that.’
‘Stop it. You don’t get to draw me in then push me back the moment you decide I’m too close. It’s not fair.’
‘I’m trying to protect you.’
‘Do that, then. If you want to force me away because you foolishly believe it will keep me safe, then commit. Stop coming crawling after me the moment you decide you miss me enough to justify it.’
He scowls, affronted. ‘I don’t miss you. The only thing I care about is seeing this farce through and if you’re not going to pretend to love me, I have a right to know why.’
‘I love you; you are every bit the light of my life as those seven stars shining in the Heavens; I only know one truth of my soul and it is that it calls your name. Better?’
‘Infinitely.’
I lie back down and curl away from him.
‘Ariadne,’ he says, softly now.
‘Theseus kept me in the cabin of his ship,’ I say, just as quietly. Like if I’m not looking at him and not speaking loudly, I don’t have to acknowledge I’m saying it at all. ‘A prisoner he didn’t even have to bind, because he did it with lies and promises instead.’
Told me to stay there because the others might hurt me. Isolated and on my own, with only him to turn to.
He made himself my entire world, then stole it from me.
I am beginning to understand that this is so much more than him reneging on his promises and abandoning me on Naxos. He wanted to take my supposed purity, but instead thieved some good, kind, trusting part of myself instead. His cruelty was many-layered and I just want it to stop hurting.
Dionysus is, for once, quiet.
Then he lies down beside me.
‘It’s nice out here. The wind, the waves … I’d much rather be here than down there, personally.’
I curl my fingers into the blanket. Impossible to believe, really, that I woke to this man’s panic. To him crouched before me, whispering gentle words, hoping I might be lucid enough to understand them.
‘I don’t want a lover, Dionysus. One day, maybe, when I avenge myself on Theseus and heal whatever it was he broke.
Right now I think if love found me I’d only hurt it in turn.
So all I want from you is the same friendship you seem to have no problem giving anyone else on this boat.
And if you can’t do that, then …’ I pause, swallowing around the words that will not come.
But then I look at him, toying with a loose thread like he’s not quite sure why he’s here either.
Not really – and that infuriating uncertainty forces them out.
‘Then I really wish you’d have told me before I married you. ’