CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
BY THE TIME HE’S DRAGGING me on to his ship, I don’t have the energy to protest. He hasn’t answered a single one of my questions and has only spoken to bark orders. He’s getting awfully careless with that sword too, and my back is marked by shallow scrapes.
I’m below the boards again, in a cabin – forced on to a chair – and there are other men too, one binding my feebly resisting hands behind my back. That man is before me, his palms slamming on to a table, questions spat, demands made.
‘Tell me … Dionysus.’
‘Where is … power?’
‘You think … Medusa … can’t kill you too?’
Medusa?
Oh. Perseus.
Perseus, of course.
I pass out right there, collapse forward, my face bashing into the wood while Perseus continues snarling his threats.
I jolt awake with a sudden need to vomit, stumbling to my knees and spitting bile across the floorboards. My head pounds but the world is no longer spiralling. It’s … swaying.
If I wake up on a boat one more time, I’m going to scream.
My thoughts feel choppy, like they aren’t connecting to one another properly.
Perseus kidnapped me, he must be –
He wanted to know where Dionysus was, which means he’s not here, so where is –
Whatever power I wielded saved me, and overwhelmed me, I can’t –
The world comes to me in fragments too – my hands bound behind me, the flicker of a lantern, the itch of the scab at my throat and the distant murmur of a crew moving through the ship.
I lie back down, the weight of my own head too much. It all hurts.
It hurts so much that I surrender once more to the darkness.
I wake somewhere between the holding cell and the room Perseus interrogated me in – know only that I’m being roughly dragged by men holding my arms, thrown into that latter room, and seconds later Perseus’s boots are in my eyeline.
I haul myself to my knees – which is difficult with my hands bound – and manage to clamber on to the stool beside me. The world feels calmer, the pain in my head less of a thumping ache than a slight pulse.
I glance around for something I might use as a weapon but there’s nothing – another tiny windowless room lit by a single lantern.
‘Let’s try this again, shall we?’ Perseus moves opposite me but doesn’t sit down, just plants a hand on the table and leans across to me. ‘You know who I am. I assume you know what I want.’
To make a space for yourself among the Olympians by taking Dionysus’s.
His features are darker in this dim room – the hollows of his eyes practically gaunt, his face half shadow.
‘I don’t know where Dionysus is,’ I say – and every word is a scratch in my throat.
I am never using magic again.
‘I think that’s been well established. So let’s move on to what you do know.’
‘I’m not telling you anything.’ I scoff. ‘Another self-entitled man with a hero complex? I left two of those in Crete, why would I bow down to another?’
He steps round the table to be a little closer, then perches upon it, towering above me, and with my hands bound I feel vulnerable enough for a chill to creep across me.
‘Oh no, Ariadne. I’m not like Minos. The barbarous king who fears the fleeting nature of his own power so entirely he resorts to grotesque displays of violence to feel it within his grasp.
Or Theseus, the man who genuinely believes he is a hero and that everyone else is just a tool to his own greatness.
They’re fighting for scraps. I have everything a man could want.
A crown. Married to the most beautiful woman in the world.
More women lined up at my door, men who bow before me and a legend that rings across oceans.
I’m not fighting for anything. I’m claiming it. ’
‘Claiming immortality?’
‘Not just immortality.’ His tongue is a lash, the words harsh and sudden.
‘Godhood. Some men expect the power of our forebears to just trickle down. They think that if they prove themselves good little boys, our father above will reach down to pat their heads and hand over their rewards. I have nothing to prove, no approval to earn – I know who I am. And I am going to take what I am owed.’
I arch a brow. ‘Didn’t you need three different gods to lend you artefacts just to kill one woman?’
He slaps me so suddenly I don’t realize what has happened until my chin collides with my collar.
‘Too many men let you run your mouth.’
Is that it? My way out? To play along and let him think he’s broken me. Perhaps even garner his trust. And then run?
I settle for lowering my gaze, only so he cannot see the hatred there.
He chortles. ‘Better. That god of yours is a scourge – women out in the streets. Leaving their husbands, their homes, their families … undoing the carefully constructed rules that keep society functioning. Rules that say men lead and women follow.’ He grasps my chin, forcing me to face him.
‘You think you’re happier like this but it is a lie.
You’ve been – what? Left for dead, shot, imprisoned.
’ At this he smirks. ‘Because you refuted your nature. Because you denied the role carved out for you by millennia of generations before you – do you hate those women, Ariadne? Think their femininity something shameful?’
I swallow down a retort – easy only because I do not know what retort to make.
It is all so ludicrous and evidently so firmly believed that I’m not even sure where to begin.
How do you explain your personhood to someone?
To show them proof of your capabilities when they will only dismiss it entirely as unnatural?
So I stay silent, as that is evidently the sort of woman he wants.
‘Where is Dionysus’s sacred land?’
I stay silent to that too.
‘Foolish girl, I came close to tracking him in Cabarnis. Close enough to know it’s somewhere on Naxos.
He’s not powerful enough to claim the entirety of the largest island in the Cyclades – so it must be an inlet, a mountain, a small, barren corner.
’ He lays a map out on the table – and I see Cabarnis, Delos, Naxos … ‘Tell me where.’
I look away, in case he sees something in my gaze.
‘He’s going to die. He’s going to lose.’ Perseus slams his hand on to the map. ‘And when he does, what exactly do you imagine I’m going to do to his widow? I can’t see another man rising up against me when I’ve got his bitch pouring my wine. So I’d really start begging for kindness now.’
‘I thought you didn’t like wine,’ I snap. ‘Not very masculine, is it, clinging to a sweet little drink like mead.’
But if I’m hoping to rile him again, it doesn’t work. He ignores me and pushes the parchment towards me. ‘The map. Now.’
I keep my mouth closed – but this time I don’t look down. I glare right at him.
‘His symbols, then,’ he says. ‘Pine cones, you said. Ivy? What else?’
Still, I say nothing.
‘Wine? Vineyards? That damn panther that follows him around? What’s actually sacred and what’s extraneous?’
Nothing.
And so he goes on, demanding, and I stay quiet, until finally he sighs and rolls that map back up.
‘We all saw how weak he was in Cabarnis. He couldn’t even put out a fire, couldn’t sail his ship.
The only thing that’s changed between then and now is you.
So I’d start talking. Because he’s weak, and he’s going to get weaker – weak enough to bleed.
I’m going to destroy those symbols one by one.
And until you give us something better, the easiest thing to eradicate is you. ’
He starts towards the door, but pauses before he reaches the threshold. ‘You want to live? You’ll tell me everything. Every person he’s ever cherished, every trauma he’s ever suffered, every wish he’s ever made. But let’s start small. You want to be fed; you’ll locate his sanctuary on that map.’