Page 52 of This Divine Revelry

My brother. But not as I saw him last, small and bleeding on the floor. He towers, the bull’s head huge and casting shadows down the hallway. He pants ragged breaths, saliva dripping from teeth sharpened on cartilage and bone. His lips curl as he snarls at me, his human body broad and curling inwards, not human at all in the way he stands as though ready to charge. His nails are grimy with blood, his neck a mass of scar tissue, scabbed and matted. One of his horns is broken, the other dripping a crimson stain. His bull nostrils flare and he thunders towards me and I think if I had a blade I’d use it too.

I’d be sorry. But I would.

‘I wish I could have saved you like I saved them.’

I wish I could have saved us all. But I don’t really know what else I could have done. Released Asterion to run rampant in the streets? Thrown my father inside the labyrinth instead? My brother deserved kindness and love and received only torment. The labyrinth could have been a gilded cage or he could have been let loose on a barren mountainside somewhere, but could doesn’t matter when it is backwards regardless and when the only choice was the quantity of blood.

I understand it now: that I am not to blame for the consequences of the world my father built. Sometimes a tragedy is told from its first breath.

Asterion crashes into me and fades like smoke.

I walk on, and slowly the path must be widening because each length takes longer than the one before it.

Finally, I reach the door – it must be, because the path ends.

But it’s only wall and it is indistinguishable from the stones around it.

‘I am not bleeding for you again,’ I say, with all the confident command I’ve heard in my father’s voice these last eighteen years. No longer the girl with no name or the girl with a dozen wrong ones. I am Princess Ariadne, House of Minos, descendant of the sun god, Helios. Circe, Medea, me. Women of my family turn men to pigs and brew potions that can put full-grown dragons to sleep.

I am so very tired of believing I am powerless.

‘Release me.’

As the world swam out of view, now it returns to me, oak wood and copper, swirling fabrics – red and blue – and then, a pair of jewel-green eyes.

‘Dionysus,’ I say, blinking.

‘You’re alright, new girl,’ he says, his voice a gentle, soothing murmur.

The scene before me clears – a wooden cabin, a gentle sway beneath, Dionysus, crouched before me, and another man too: Hermes, perched on a table in the corner.

‘Are we on the boat?’ I ask. ‘What happened? Where’s Hera?’

Hermes and Dionysus exchange a look and Hermes just shrugs. ‘Fine, so we know it was Hera.’

‘It was,’ I say, shuffling up. I seem to be sitting upright on the low and narrow bed. Dionysus’s long and narrow bed. My husband’s long and narrow bed. I force that thought away and continue. ‘She disguised herself as Artemis. She said she couldn’t curse you any more so she’d take me. How long has it been?’

Dionysus is staring at me. ‘You’re lucid. Entirely so.’

‘Yes?’

‘Ariadne, you haven’t been well. You’ve been talking about labyrinths and monsters and pathways to follow. She …’ Dionysus turns to Hermes. ‘Would you mind leaving us to speak alone, for a moment?’

Hermes nods, rising to his feet, but he’s looking at me peculiarly. ‘This isn’t normal. You know that, right?’

‘Very well aware,’ Dionysus answers, voice taut.

‘I mean she shouldn’t … It was Hera. Mortals don’t just snap themselves out of a curse from the queen of the gods in a day.’

‘It took me two years so, yes, Hermes, that was on my mind. Please, would you let me talk to my wife alone?’

Hermes nods and retreats, the door falling shut behind him.

I take Dionysus’s hands before he loses the excuse of not needing to perform love in front of someone else. I want him close. I need to feel … tethered. To something.

‘Hera came, she cursed me, imprisoned me in my own mind and I found a way out,’ I say. ‘That I understand. But what’s happening now? Where are we going?’

Dionysus sighs and moves to sit down beside me. I try to focus on him and not the cabin pressing around me. It might be bigger than Theseus’s but that doesn’t reassure me. If I look closely enough, those low sloping walls might be moving even closer in.