CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
MY MOTHER WALKS ME BACK to my room – and I do not even have to ask her to.
She knows as well as I do what danger might find me if I walk these halls alone.
It’s not breaking xenia if a rogue dissenter gets to me.
If one of those guards decides to avenge a fallen comrade.
If my father pays the right person at the right time …
Dionysus is there, waiting for me, and he thanks my mother with a quick bow.
My gaze falls to a small table pushed up against the window – normally littered with an array of cosmetics, now swept clear to make room for a loaf of bread and a bowl of herb-flecked cream cheese.
‘You didn’t eat anything,’ he says simply. ‘So I grabbed this from the kitchens.’
I nod, momentarily taken aback. It is clear there is nothing I can do that will escape this man’s notice.
‘Will you help me with this?’ I ask, gesturing to the solid band of metal still encasing my waist.
Dionysus grins, elated. ‘Are you asking for my help to undress you, dear wife?’
I meet his eye. ‘Yes.’
He holds the look a beat longer, before gesturing for me to spin. I turn, and he draws a finger along its back.
The band snaps open along the seam he has created.
It was not uncomfortably tight, but I can breathe a little deeper than before.
Without it, my chiton is loose and I take up a scrap of bread and push it into the flame of the candle.
Dionysus settles opposite me, a small smile playing at the corners of his lips. ‘My favourite thing about you might be that you still do that.’
‘It’s habit.’ Burning food in sacrifice to the gods is something I’ve never thought much about.
‘It feels tingly.’
‘Tingly?’
‘Tingly,’ he confirms. ‘And on the rare occasion someone thinks specifically of me when they do it? It’s like a flare – a flame in the dark.’
‘Hmmm,’ I say, shoving another crumb into the flame and thinking Dionysus.
He jolts, his eyes going wide. ‘Oh no. You are going to abuse that, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I say, reaching for another crumb.
‘Ariadne, could you please actually eat something? You’re a little old to still be playing with your food.
Speaking of, Glaucus is a natural at palming tricks.
Not a lick of actual magic but quick fingers – he’d make an excellent thief if Hermes got his hands on him.
Might have given him a little talk about respecting women too, though I don’t – Ariadne. ’
No, no, I had been fastidiously blinking back tears so that he wouldn’t notice. I know if I don’t contribute he’ll just keep talking and I’d been so hopeful that by the time he finally finished I’d have been successful in suppressing them.
He crosses to me – then hesitates, clearly not knowing what I’ll allow, and eventually his hand falls to my shoulder in clumsy pats.
I swat him away. ‘I’m not Sterope.’
‘I didn’t think you’d appreciate a hug.’
The tears are spilling over now but they don’t seem to be falling so much as surging. I swipe at them angrily and, distracted by my annoyance, they do seem to be slowing.
I push my plate away and stand, heading to the chest at the foot of the bed and digging through it for chitons.
I can’t believe I am back here. Returned to the mercy of my father’s rules and the tempered behaviour they expect of me. Disappointing everyone who once loved me with every word I speak.
‘What are you doing?’ Dionysus asks.
‘Getting ready for bed.’
‘What? No. Talk to me about whatever is wrong.’
‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ I snap. ‘It’s just a lot. Being back here and facing them all. I’m overwhelmed, not upset.’
He nods quickly but I can tell he doesn’t believe me. I’m not sure I believe me. I’ve spent so long focusing on revenge, but I hadn’t reckoned with the energy it would take to smile in the face of each dig, to brush off the shame they’re trying to place on me.
To pretend a part of me, a very small part, placed there by every doctrine ever drilled into me, doesn’t agree.
Dionysus offers a slight smile. ‘I’ve had fun with the donkey shtick but I’m very happy to move on to the “turning your enemies into dolphins” part of the plan, if you’d prefer.’
‘I don’t think Poseidon will allow you to do that just because his son slighted the slut he previously fucked and abandoned.’
‘Ariadne,’ Dionysus says, softer this time, and he moves back to my side. I fall to the bed and he’s right there with me, taking my hands in his. ‘You did nothing wrong. Absolutely nothing.’
‘I know, I know,’ I say. Because I do know that.
Logical Ariadne can see those rules and consequences as exactly what they are – a means to control.
To keep women marked as chattels. To determine our worth in a world where we’re nothing but tradable goods.
I know that we can want too, and we can yearn, and that the men in charge demanding our feelings become secondary to the laws they’ve created is just another way for them to exert their power over us and keep us all in line.
‘I know!’ I say, growing frustrated because what I feel is a different matter.
The guilt gnawing within is a twisting thing, its own sort of labyrinth, winding ever on.
‘I know that sex isn’t some moral test, just a thing.
A fun thing, a meaningful thing, for some a meaningless thing, even – whatever it is to you, it is just a thing like any other. Not an indictment or … or …’
I’m getting choked up and he holds my hands tighter.
‘It’s also a tool,’ Dionysus says. ‘Because they’ve made it one. What it is and what the world has made it are two very different things. And in Theseus’s hands it was a weapon he wielded against you. You are allowed to be upset. It’s not illogical to be wounded.’
‘Right. That’s right too, I just … I agreed to it,’ I say at last. ‘I wanted it. I should have known better.’
‘You slept with the man you were engaged to marry. A man you thought loved you or at the very least cared for you. Those were the circumstances you consented to. People who lie to get you into bed don’t then get to claim you agreed to anything.
And however you feel about that betrayal is justified. ’
His voice shakes with anger, his hands taut in mine. But he’s trying to be level, trying to soothe me when I know what he really wants is to march down the hall and incinerate Theseus.
‘This is why they tell us not to do this,’ I say, wiping away the falling teardrops and only realizing when I see the red smeared across my hand that I’ve taken half my make-up with me.
‘Not to have sex. Not to trust anyone until they’re bound by marriage vows.
Because they know men lie. And they know we’ll feel this way afterwards. ’
‘Men’s lies are not your responsibility,’ Dionysus says. ‘Don’t punish yourself for trusting. If someone takes that trust and obliterates it, they are the one at fault. And we’re going to make them regret it.’
His eyes light with the type of chaos that’s a peculiar sort of promise. And I don’t know what we’re doing here – what we truly are to each other beneath the ruse, but sometimes in moments like this I wonder if there’s anything he wouldn’t do for me.
He would unmake the world for me if he could.
I don’t know how to feel. How to reckon. Maybe this messiness is apt. Maybe all these many conflicting things at once is the only reasonable thing to feel.
‘I’m tired. We should go to bed.’
I wish Charis were here, or Myrto or Opora or Calybe – another woman who might understand the contradictions within myself.
I always saw the futility of those rules – the world a trap ready to catch any unsuspecting girl – but I did not realize it was so insidious as to lay its snares within my own mind.
Still, there is a reassurance to Dionysus’s words – that if he does not understand completely, he will at least listen, and be there for me too. That I am not alone in this labyrinth.
Dionysus stands with his back to me while I switch into softer fabric. I wipe the rest of my make-up away, brush my teeth with cleansing powders and sweep my hair into a messy braid.
He doesn’t turn until I’m beneath the sheets.
‘I can take the floor,’ he offers.
‘No,’ I say, quickly – and I don’t want to think why, don’t even want to parse it in my own thoughts in case they slip through. ‘You were wrong before. About me not appreciating hugs.’
It is not as though we have not slept in the same place.
There was the tent, on the deck of the ship.
But there we rolled to the furthest edges of the space, and now he climbs into bed with me, his arm reaching across my stomach and legs folding with mine, as he arches himself round me and draws me close.
I was wrong before too – when that belt came off and I felt I could finally breathe.
It’s this moment, in his arms, that allows it. Only realizing how tense I’d been when I finally relax, press against him and exhale.