CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
IN THE MORNING, I FEEL less vulnerable and far too aware of Dionysus and the body arched around me. His breathing is deep, his arm across my waist, and I yearn to linger there. To pretend I am not fully awake and to enjoy it.
But that feels a slippery slope – allowing myself to revel in the feelings I have growing for him rather than distancing myself from them.
Too broken for more than that – that’s the line we’re using. But that’s not quite it. I’m injured, yes. Unhealed to the point I worry it would only damage him in turn. I need time. I need to feel right with myself again before I volley my heart at someone else. But I am not broken. Not defeated.
Losing Dionysus, though? That might do it.
My heart is fragile, and I need to forge it strong before it can take another blow.
So I slip away from him, and begin readying myself for the day ahead – and whatever that will entail.
By the time he wakes, I’m dressed in a soft pink chiton, bound with a corded leather belt and layered with long strands of gold about my throat.
I’ve added the suns to my cheeks once more because I cannot afford for a moment to let anyone here forget that I am a part of this royal family, and because the reminder of whose blood runs in my veins and – more importantly – what power that gives me fuels me too.
Strange, though – it never quite feels like Helios.
There are so many daughters of gods – and none like my aunt, my cousin, my mother.
As though each girl has reached through our lineage and snatched at the divinity to form something distinctly our own.
‘So, this is Princess Ariadne?’ Dionysus asks, sliding from the bed and crossing the short space to run a finger along the gold I’ve layered around my neck. ‘The Lady of the Labyrinth.’
My pulse stills at the words – ludicrous, yes, but within these halls, in a kingdom built on a labyrinth, such a title feels laden with power.
There is a sharp knock at the door and I cross to answer it, revealing a servant with a tray of food.
‘Your Highness.’ She nods. ‘Your father has invited you both to a banquet this evening. He is occupied with his discussions with Prince Deucalion today but has said you are free to roam the palace and to find a stationed guard if you need anything.’
She places the tray on the table, and I wait until she leaves to speak.
‘A banquet,’ I repeat.
‘Delightful.’
‘My father doesn’t do banquets.’ My mother wanted them. Pleaded for them. Any form of joy and celebration. There were only the parties on the night of the Minotaur’s feast … and the banquets the night before. ‘He only celebrates slaughter.’
Dionysus pokes at the loaf of bread, eying it suspiciously. ‘Let me try this first. If it’s poisoned, it won’t kill me, just make me sick.’
While we eat, we discuss any possibility of spying on my father’s conversation with my brother but we’re being so closely watched I doubt we could get near – and at least it means that, for today, he’s not negotiating with Theseus.
‘We’ll just have to wait for tonight,’ Dionysus says.
He looks round my room once more, tracing every inch of art I’ve scrawled horns on, the woven pattern of stars across my bedsheets – clumsy, I never was very good with a loom – and the scattered trinkets and gems: jewellery sent by potential suitors, a poorly whittled wooden bull that once belonged to Androgeus and a dried bunch of flowers in a clay vase, gathered by Charis in those brief weeks when she insisted she was in love with me.
When Dionysus turns back to me, his expression is almost wistful.
‘So if we have the day … show me everything. Who you are, who you were. Come on, new girl – show me Princess Ariadne.’
I begin with the tiny room at the back of the palace that, for years, I danced in.
Two large amphorae of olive oil sit in the corner, yet to gather dust. How long have I been gone?
A month or two? Enough to reshape this space into a storeroom.
But not enough to buff out the chips in the tiles – the worn grooves I felt in my bones, leaping over cracks and bumps before they could trip me.
It is dark and dreary and, for a time, it was not only mine but ours – the lonely creature beneath stepping with me.
‘Here?’ Dionysus asks, a scowl forming between his brows. ‘You danced … here?’
I shrug. ‘Father doesn’t approve of dancing. It’s a demand for attention, meant for whores, harlots, sluts – but I’m not sure I can blame my descent on spending hours spinning in a storeroom.’
‘Ariadne,’ he scolds. But I’m shaking my head – I don’t want to get into this. Besides, it’s not the point.
‘So I came here. Out of sight. I have to assume he knew – nothing stayed secret in this palace – but I suppose it was always something he could have taken from me. And as long as no one else knew, I couldn’t bring the family into disrepute.
’ I crack a smile I certainly don’t feel.
‘He’ll string bodies up on the walls but gods forbid his daughter dances.
But he was wrong, because it was never about the attention – quite the opposite.
It was a way to disappear. To not feel like a person at all but an extension of a beat, a movement, to merge into it all.
Occasionally my friend Charis would bring her chelys and I’d dance to the lyre’s strings but mostly I just …
imagined it all. And vanished into it all the same. ’
‘You can’t dance without music,’ Dionysus says.
I just shake my head, push him to stand next to the doorframe and, in my mind, a beat begins to sound.
I move, stretching out my limbs like I have not moved freely in all that time.
I’ve danced – on a beach, under the stars, to music chirped by my friends.
A dozen times more thrilling, but this is the homecoming I’ve waited for.
I arch my back, stretch my arms up or else twist towards my toes, crouching on the cold tiles before springing up once more. Always moving in spiralling steps towards a centre, then circling back out.
When I finish, a sheen of sweat coats my forehead, and I am panting fast, desperate breaths.
Dionysus comes to me, a hand clasping mine, his other falling to the side of my back, and he doesn’t look away from me the entire time, not even as he begins leading me in our own slow circle. I pull him back, and draw him into steps of my own. I lead here. He follows.
I pull our bodies so close our steps have us brushing against one another – hips, thighs, chests – until each breath is mirrored, each rise and fall ours.
‘I can hear the music now,’ he says, voice low like he doesn’t want to disturb the echoing beats.
I don’t want to stop moving. I don’t want to let go, to step away, to pretend I don’t ache when I look at him, like it truly, physically hurts. My ribs are too tight, my heart too frantic.
When we finish, I lean closer, my forehead against his – and he’s breathing just as deeply.
How easy it would be to tilt my face, to catch his lips with mine.
‘Ariadne.’ He says my name like it is a plea, laden and desperate.
When he told me to seduce him it was a game, a tease – one I thought I’d rise to with glee. But here I am instead, like my ribs have finally given way, cracked open and offered up my heart, beating and raw.
Too raw. I know that. But it doesn’t stop it pulsing. Doesn’t stop me hoping that seduction might be enough to sedate it.
‘Is it working?’ I ask quietly.
He swallows, his hand tensing in mine, like if he holds me tighter he can cope with releasing me. He clearly knows what I mean, like the words are reverberating round his head too, replacing the beat we just danced to: Seduce me, then.
I feel his soft exhale against my own lips – close, so close. ‘Yes.’
I nod, slowly, carefully, as I draw away. My eyes flutter shut, knowing if I see that want shining in his I’ll close the distance between us myself. And then …
I can’t do this, not while I feel this vulnerable.
I could give way to the fire crackling between us.
I could have drawn him closer to me on that bed, or spun to pin him beneath my own hips.
But this isn’t that third option I’d contemplated – friends who kiss, who touch, who moan each other’s names between panting breaths.
These are the halls of a home that splits me open, peels me back piece by piece, would reassemble the bones of me if it could and leaves me altogether … unstable.
I can’t let that stability become him. I cannot shift the dynamics of us solely to give myself something to cling on to.
So we let go and I step back.
‘If we were anywhere else …’ I say. Somewhere I trusted myself more, perhaps …
‘I know,’ he says, nodding too. ‘I know.’
Does he want that too?
Or is that sadness lacing his words because if we were elsewhere, he’d have to break us apart entirely to stop the fall?
There is not all that much else to show him.
The places, yes. I take him to my classroom, to the courtyard with its huge, sprawling olive tree and to the room where the women weave.
Men aren’t supposed to go there, but it doesn’t even occur to me that might be a problem – Dionysus is not a man, so clearly something without such easily containable definitions – but he presents himself as one and for a moment I’m baffled when the guard holds an arm out to stop him entering.
‘Can you weave?’ I ask as we walk the smaller courtyards instead. Dionysus blurs all the lines I was taught to draw in the world and it would not surprise me if weaving illicit scenes into tapestries were a favoured pastime.
‘I know the basics. I’m more help adjusting the stone weights for someone more skilled.’
‘Hmm, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard you imply you aren’t the best at everything.’
‘I’m the best stone-weight adjuster a weaver could ask for.’
I shake my head, but it’s not as irksome a response as I might have expected, and that small smile on his face as he says it makes something in my chest feel warm. That keen ache once more.