CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
PERSEUS LEADS US TO A nearby tower within the city’s fortifications – a small, sparsely furnished room with a staircase tucked in its corner.
It is dark, lit only by slits carved into the walls, and the shadows are long, the air stale.
Guards position themselves beside him, their hands on their sword hilts.
Perseus places his bag down and leans against the edge of a table.
‘Let’s get to it, shall we? Surrender and I’ll only imprison your followers rather than kill them. Behave and I’ll have them serving the nobility rather than thrown to the fighting pits.’
Dionysus scoffs. ‘Counter: we host our revelry as we planned. Allow the people of Argos to decide how they would like to live and how their leader can best serve them.’ He flashes a grin. ‘In return, I’ll let you keep your throne rather than turning you into a panther to drive my chariot.’
Perseus adjusts a golden cuff about his wrist as though we are wasting his time.
‘You’ve made a point of your power, certainly.
But you also made it quite clear you aren’t strong enough to take on my entire army.
The men out there would give their lives for me readily.
So don’t think I won’t spend that which I am rightfully owed as king. ’
‘Your own people are down there,’ I spit.
‘Don’t be foolish. My people were quite clearly warned against following this barbarous god. If they wish to die to prove my point, I’ll allow it.’
‘Not fighting yourself?’ I ask. ‘If you’re so worthy of godhood, why aren’t you on that field with a sword in hand?’
Perseus’s jaw twitches but he doesn’t so much as look in my direction. ‘My best offer: take your people and go. But leave her. A mouth like that? I’d be doing you a favour.’
Dionysus steps in front of me. ‘I’d stop now,’ he says darkly, ‘before I decide there’s no use wasting words with you.’
‘No,’ I say, drawing Dionysus back. ‘I think words are exactly what he needs.’ I look up at the man who held me captive.
Who slapped me when I dared to speak back.
Who locked me up until I played his game.
‘I think there’s a reason you’d rather silence the women you meet than have us ask why you think we’re so unworthy. ’
‘It’s nature. I don’t care to debate reality.’ He turns back to Dionysus. ‘Now –’
‘Like the reality where you’re not a god?’ I push, and delight as his eye twitches. He might dismiss us as emotional, but boys like him seem so very quick to anger.
‘Not yet.’ He runs his gaze across Dionysus, lip curling with all he sees.
The furs and garlands and staff that mark him as a god.
‘But it’s going to happen. You know that.
You can run from here but I will come. I’ll pick your followers off one by one.
I’ll kill this little slut first. And if the loss of all that power doesn’t destroy you, it will have you begging for death.
Or you could end it here. Give your immortality to me, and I’ll let her and your whole retinue go. ’
Instead of refuting him, Dionysus begins pacing as though this were a casual discussion – or perhaps like he’s really considering it.
‘Enlighten me, Perseus. Godhood is fine, I’m a pretty big fan – but clearly I’m missing something because I don’t see how it’s worth all this.
What exactly do you have in mind for your divinity? What would you do with all that power?’
Perseus’s answering smile is cold. ‘I’d enjoy it.’
I snort. ‘How profound.’
He finally – finally – looks to me and his rage is a burning, cloying thing and he is choking on it.
‘Power is its own justification, you ignorant little whore.’ I laugh – because that seems to get to him most. A whole army at his fingertips and he cannot stand a woman laughing at him.
‘Doing something with power is a delusion the weak tell themselves,’ he snarls, ‘right as they convince one another that all the riches and authority and women throwing themselves at your feet doesn’t make you happy. It does. And I will take it all.’
‘All?’ Dionysus asks. ‘You’d go on to challenge Zeus, then? Once you’re made a god?’
Perseus falters. ‘What? No, of course not –’
‘No?’ Dionysus smiles. ‘So you admit, then, there are men better and stronger than you. Who would remain so? You would use your godhood to worship his?’
Perseus looks as though Dionysus has struck him.
Oh. That’s it. Why the heroes constantly chase power despite all the freedom offered by their crowns and their armies and the very fact of their masculinity in a world that caters to it: because even when the odds are in their favour, it is still a game they are trapped within.
There will always be someone with more.
And each step, every tier, from the very bottom to those near the top is nothing more than a way to keep the man at its peak in power.
Which means there is no winning – only a refusal to play. And a need to tear the walls down entirely.
A single, world-splitting scream shatters the air – followed by a cacophony of them.
Perseus dives – rolling behind the table and emerging with a shield no mortal could craft. Fibres of woven bronze strung together, then hammered into place to an almost pure reflective shine. A disc at the centre, binding it all together.
Perseus borrowed sandals and a sword from Hermes. The helm of darkness from Hades.
And a shield from Athena.
Evidently not all his gifts have found their way back.
‘What have you done?’ Dionysus demands.
‘What do you think? Have you not heard the tale of Dionysus? He slaughters those who do not believe in him. He turns their minds and has them kill their own children. And now, apparently, he abandons his own people to save himself.’
Olympus above, he meant this all along – to separate us from the thiasus so he might issue a final blow to Dionysus’s legend. Even if Dionysus could quell this battle, would he have any power left? Or would he save them all just to have Perseus bleed him at the end?
‘Why not kill you first?’ Dionysus demands – even as the guards draw their swords. There is not an ounce of doubt or hesitation. ‘Call your soldiers off, now.’
The air cracks with the echo of his threat but Perseus just raises the shield higher.
‘No curse of yours could get past this,’ he snaps. ‘You’re wasting time. Go wear yourself out, little godling. Face me when you’re done.’
‘You’ll face me now,’ Dionysus snarls, slamming his thyrsus into the floor so that the whole building shudders.
The stick doesn’t glow this time – but he does.
The barest shimmer across his skin before it races up, coalescing in his eyes, which blaze so much brighter than mine ever did.
Shining with the sort of divinity that burns.
I feel the heat peeling off him and look sharply away before his burning gaze can strip me of my mortality.
And in that sharp, sudden turn, I catch Perseus as he shifts, his hand fumbling for the bag at his side, a long tendril spilling from its opening. Green and dark – a snake, limp and dead.
A sword. The sandals. The helm of darkness. A shield.
And a bag. A knapsack that might safely contain the head of the gorgon …
I throw myself at Dionysus, clasping his arms, spinning him so that he no longer looks at Perseus – no longer fixes him with that eradicating power – but turns it at me. Radiance swirls in his eyes and he’s right: it is agony.
‘No,’ he gasps, desperately blinking to clear the power forming there.
A god’s immortal form. Concentrated, weaponized … decidedly fatal.
The pain – the heat – shoots through my mind like a lance, right to the back of my skull and then down, seeping into every fibre of my being – alight, searing and excruciating.
The smell of my own charred flesh catches in my throat, and I can’t move, cannot even release him because each nerve, tissue and strand of me is screaming.
‘Ariadne.’ Dionysus clutches me desperately.
My vision darkens at the edges, the rest clouded by smoke. I just catch sight of Perseus’s own men hardening to stone.
And I’m envious of that cold quick end, because this is so very painful, it is agony, and I would do anything for it to stop.
‘Don’t look at him … Medusa’s head …’ I mutter, my voice a rasp as my vocal cords smoulder too. Is this it? Devoured piece by piece with this brief glimpse, where his full being would have consumed me whole? A slow, painful death instead of an instant inferno?
‘No, no.’ Dionysus’s voice cracks.
I do not look away from Dionysus, not for an instant, but I’m still grasping him and so I watch as my fingers begin to blacken.
As the tips crumble.
‘Please don’t leave me,’ he begs.
I’m not leaving him. This is no escape – this is the final entombment, the walls caving in, burying me, except …
Except a quiet whisper. Not a full way out, just the next step. A way to halt the pain.
A way to leave something behind other than ash.
It is not forcing Dionysus to watch as I die the same way his mother did. It is not adding to the agony of all this.
I want parting words, something he might cling to, but all I can manage is his name. It is the shape I need my last, ragged breath to take.
His eyes well with tears, cooling the fires back to their usual, hopeful green, fresh and bright and never in need of any godly power. He is radiant without any of it.
‘Dionysus,’ I gasp before my lungs give out entirely.
I look away, past his shoulder, to the decapitated head of the last woman to vex Perseus.
Medusa.
A spill of snakes, dark grey flesh and pale eyes.
The heat sputters out and suddenly I am tremendously, excruciatingly cold.