“Demeter…”
She looked up at him.
“Is this what you want?”
“I wouldn’t have started this if it wasn’t. If it’s too s—”
Her words were swallowed up in a kiss. They moved nervously, shaking in delight, in the sacred space he had built to honor her. She felt innocent and unsure with him, and it only took a short time for Demeter to understand that Triptolemus was not untried. He had probably been taken to the home of a hetaera by his father when he first became a man, as was tradition among the nobility. By his innate knowledge of her, she guessed that he had done this far more recently than she had. Demeter nearly laughed out loud at that idea. Civilizations had risen and fallen since she was last touched.
Wrapped in the warmth of the room, they slowly removed one piece of draped wool after another, her low-slung girdle, his leather sandals. Their heat outpaced the fires warming the room. Triptolemus spread his himation out on the fresh loam with her in the center, the soft tilled earth cradling their intertwining bodies.
Demeter could forget about Zeus, about Hades, about her grief, about the cold, hungry mortals milling around outside the Telesterion. She remembered when Iasion curled up behind her and kissed her neck, and when Zeus playfully swatted her rump each time she rose from their bed. Neither of them worshipped her in quite the same way as Triptolemus. He traced her ample curves reverently, watching her every reaction as his hands moved over her skin, followed by his lips.
Triptolemus drew it out, unsure if this intimacy would be allowed tomorrow. He wanted to drink her in— prolong this. She might not allow him this close to her ever again. The time finally came when he could hold back no longer. Triptolemus covered her body with his, slipping into her in ardent strokes while her legs and arms tangled around him, holding him closer, urging him onward. Demeter’s entire body tightened and shook when his hand came between them, firmly grasping the blonde thatch covering her mound, massaging her with his fingers and bringing her to the edge. He started to lose his rhythm. The jolt that coursed through her as he came with her arched her back and shuddered her entire body. Their locked lips muffled their ecstasy.
Demeter held his trembling, collapsed body to hers, twining her fingers through his damp hair. His breath landed hot on her neck. Triptolemus whispered to her that he loved her and only her, that he would never leave her side. She only nodded, believing him, tears streaking from the corners of her eyes and lost in the tangle of her copper curls.
The thrice plowed field. She’d lost one lover to the jealousy of another on a thrice plowed field.
She wouldn’t lose him again.
22.
Typhoeus was gone. Aidoneus rested on the southern face of Mount Aitne and watched the sunset bathe the shores of Sikelia and the sea beyond in brilliant gold. In this light, the island didn’t show the deep scars of their last battle. Beside him sat the sword he’d pushed into the earth. The salt and sea breezes whip past him and he closed his eyes, breathing in the clean air.
The war was finally over. All that was left was the final meeting with Lachesis tomorrow. She was the apportioner of lots, and what each of them drew would divide their father’s dominion between them. Poseidon had already told Zeus and Aidoneus that no matter how it went tomorrow, he wanted the seas. His allies were already there. The Oceanids, Tethys, even ancient Thalassa and her children had already sworn their fealty to him. Poseidon was drawing up plans for how he would organize the long-neglected waters and build his kingdom below the waves, and had confided in Aidon that he already knew whom among the nymphs he wished to take as his wife.
“Liberator,” he heard a familiar voice behind him.
Aidoneus stood up, then bowed to one knee. “Lady Nyx. I wasn’t expecting you above ground.”
“It’s been a long time since I was able to properly oversee the coming of night in the world above,” the goddess said. She was suspended in the air, as always, her husband’s protection and dark essence swirling about her. “Too long.”
“The war is over. You’re free now, my lady,” he said, standing and looking up at her.
“I heard from Hecate that the cosmos will be divided tomorrow. You were wise to suggest it to Zeus. Absolute power is dangerous. Gods have gone mad from it.”
“Gods like my father, you mean…”
“In ways you mercifully never witnessed, Liberator. Not directly at least.”
“I was aware the entire time,” he said with a shiver. “We all were.”
Now he would never need concern himself with his father again. Kronos was forever locked in Tartarus. Tomorrow, Aidoneus would be granted his birthright. The kingship of the gods, the mastery of the heavens. He would build a new home for the Children of Kronos. Olympus was a good fortress but seemed too lofty, too high above the mortals. Perhaps he would choose an island such as this for the home of the gods— somewhere between the earth, the sea and the sky. The sharp cliff sides of Thera stirred his imagination.
“When I am King, Lady Nyx, the Underworld will be yours to rule once more. I won’t allow anyone to take it from you. Lachesis will tell us tomorrow exactly how the lots will be divided, but the sky, the earth and the sea seem likely. That’s what Poseidon thinks, at least.”
“Do not make assumptions about the nature of the Fates, my lord. My family learned that lesson through hardship.”
“I will keep my word to you, regardless. Our victory would have been impossible without you and your children.”
“Ruling Chthonia,” she said, using her people’s name for the Underworld, “was only one of Erebus’s and my tasks. Now that my consort has become the darkness itself, we will leave that realm to younger gods. Whoever draws the lot for it will be its Lord.”
He smiled thinly. “I received word from Eleusis. The nymph Cyane left the side of her mistress to let me know that my betrothed was born yesterday.”
“So we heard. Congratulations, my lord.”
“I will not dishonor my oath to Demeter and Zeus. Zeus can do what he will, and he’s perfectly suited to draw the lot for the earth.” He narrowed his eyes and thought about poor, abandoned Deme. “His… lust for life is great, but his ways are not mine. I’ll take no other before my queen.”
Nyx smiled, though her next words were solemn. “Do not assume you know more than the Fates, Aidoneus. The more we attempt to control our destiny, the less it bends to our liking.” He acknowledged her call to humility with a polite nod. Nyx straightened, her smile spreading across her face. “But there are things destined, and there are things earned. You set my house free, Liberator. For that, I will give you what is yours by right: the Key.”
“The what?”
“No matter who draws which lot, I only trust one of the Olympians with the task of forever binding the Titans and demons of the old order to Tartarus. That one is you. The sigil of my house will be remade as yours— the Key of Hades.”
Her words made the corner of his mouth twist up. Aidoneus had long been under the impression that Nyx knew more about the will of the Fates than she ever let on. The Weavers were unmoved by the prayers or desires of any god or mortal. But they still lived in Nyx’s realm; she must know that the first lot, and with it rulership over all, would go to him. Why else would she give him something of such importance? He knelt again. “You honor me, my lady.”
Nyx leaned down weightlessly as if she were swimming through the air. The Goddess of Night placed her palms on his temples, her fingers wrapping around either side of his head. The darkness that was Erebus swirled about her then blocked out the last rays of the sun. He felt a burning cold, a shivering warmth seep into him, and shuddered. Nyx spoke. “And you honor us, Aidoneus…” she said. Beyond her fingers, her reach extended into him like molten fire and twisting vertigo. Aidon’s eyes grew wide. He spasmed and gasped before she leaned down to whisper into his ear. “…fated Consort of the Queen.”
He jerked forward and the ground rose up to meet him. All went white.
His vision went black.
When Aidoneus awoke the sun was rising. He lay prone, his cheek pressed against the cold ground, and the wind whipped across the mountainside, making him shiver. He opened his eyes. His blade stood where he had left it, its tip buried in the earth beside him. On his left hand sat three rings. The Key. His honor. His reward. Aidoneus smiled. He would be King of the Gods. This sign from Nyx proved it.
Voices began singularly and quietly, but grew in number. ‘Pater… Theos… Sotir… Pater… Anax…’ they said. He startled at what they called him. God. Savior. Father. King. The mortals spoke through the Key, praying, calling to him. They were quieter than he imagined they would be— soft whispers, one nearly indistinguishable from the other. He concentrated, trying to pick out individual voices above the din. They asked after the families they left behind, asked about when they would go back, asked after things that confused him. Did they fight in the war and were asking for a way home? Some were in pain, asking for forgiveness and cursing their fates, begging for a way out of where they were. Were they trapped? They sounded anguished and angry. Aidoneus shook the individual voices from his conscious mind, but they persisted in the background, growing fainter as he raised his head from where he lay.
Aidon would consult with Hecate later and sort out what all this meant. He had an eternity to figure out what the mortals wanted— forever to interpret their strange prayers. It was his birthright, and they were his responsibility now. The more immediate task at hand was meeting the others on Crete and deciding how everything else was to be divided. He stood slowly and dusted himself off.
“Hades…” his father’s voice growled at him.
Aidoneus sat up in bed abruptly, sweat beading on his forehead, his breathing heavy. Persephone laid next him, her eyes blinking open at his disturbance. He crashed back down onto his pillow, shaking, his skin prickling.
“Aidon?”
Her hand came to rest over his drumming heart and she laid her head in the crook of his outstretched arm. Aidoneus looked down at Persephone, disoriented, before pulling her tightly into his arms. He held her close and shut his eyes, his hand trembling and his fingers digging into her shoulder blade. She shivered, both from the caged strength he’d momentarily let slip from his control, and from the distress rolling through him that tightened his embrace.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said around a gulp of air, then relaxed his grip on her. “Nothing.”
“Are you alright?”
“Yes, my love.” They lay there for a long moment. She ran her hand over his chest, his heartbeat slowing, his breath lengthening as she did.
“Husband, you don’t have to worry about me,” she said quietly. “I’ll be safe and protected when we’re down there.”
Aidon wiped the sweat from his brow and leaned on his side, watching a flicker of light from a split in the curtain dance across her curves. He smiled and languidly traced a finger over the path it made on her skin. “I know you will, sweet one.”
She sighed and he felt her body rise to meet him when he doubled back with the palm of his hand, his caress intentional and insistent this time. Aidoneus leaned down to kiss Persephone before he moved over her, desperate to lose himself in her comfort. He’d lived here for millennia. Right now, he needed to feel like he was home.
Persephone awoke late, blinking as cool light filtered in through the open bedroom door, mingling with the warmth of the fire. During their training, she’d become accustomed to waking at dawn and was sad to have missed the first light of the Styx cascading in from their terrace. Merope must have seen the bedroom door closed this morning and decided not to disturb them. Persephone heard the rush of the falls outside, and looked around for Aidon, who was crouched in the corner of their room.
She heard him roughly scrubbing at his skin, the pumice turning it as raw as the little half moons her fingernails had dug into his back last night. He must have been up for at least an hour. Aidoneus stood and dropped the stone on the ebony table. He quickly splashed himself with warm water from the basin in front of him before drying off. Aidon exhaled and turned to her with a short smile, then grabbed a small ceramic jar of olive oil and his razor.
“So fastidious,” she giggled, lying on her side, her head propped up against a pillow.
“Well, I didn’t get much of a chance to do so the first half of my life,” he said. Upon being freed from Kronos, his beard hung down past his waist and his hair to the back of his knees, both matted and snarled. He’d looked more like a creature than a man. Disoriented and blind the day he was disgorged, he’d groped around for the first sharp blade he could lay his hands on and dispatched every bit of it. Hecate had found him not long after. He was shivering under the cover of a small outcropping of rocks a day’s walk from his father’s home, naked, bloody, and too weak to stand on his own. She’d fed him his first real taste of ambrosia, wrapped him in a heavy wool cloak, and led him away from Delphi.
“Doesn’t it hurt?”
“What? The razor?”
He saw her reflection in the mirror as she nodded back at him. The corner of his mouth lifted slightly, realizing that as Demeter’s sheltered daughter, seeing a man was rare, speaking to one nearly impossible. Her experience with their day-to-day lives was non-existent.
“Not unless I slip, and I haven’t in a long time. On the battlefield, I used the edge of a knife and did it without the luxury of a mirror.”
“Why? Wouldn’t it have been easier to just grow it out?”
“I would’ve looked too much like my father if I had.”
She caught his eye in the mirror looking back at her. The wide scar carved across his back was enough to stop her from teasing him further.
***
“Hypnos.” With a slight push of his hand, the door cracked open just a little further, swinging loudly on its bronze hinges. Two figures lay sound asleep on the wide cot. “Hypnos!”
“Mmmhuh?”
“Wake up! If we take much longer he’ll move on. And this time you will get to explain to them why he slipped through our fingers,” the winged shadow in the doorway whispered angrily.
Hypnos shifted under the thick layer of bedclothes and fleeces, his form shimmering silver and translucent as it always did in the world above. Next to him laid broad-shouldered Argyros, son of the magistrate of Chios— a hilly island on the far eastern side of the Aegean. The man’s thick arm was wrapped over one of Hypnos’s folded wings. Thanatos bit his cheek. His conquests in the world above would be so much easier if his shadowy self even remotely resembled his brother’s. Fates, he’d be buried in willing women. If he didn’t appear as a bony wraith, he could have a lady warm him all night the same way Hypnos slept entangled with this young man. Thanatos thought about that for a moment and grimaced at the idea of having to deal with her the morning after. No, he decided, it was better this way.
“Just give me a moment,” Hypnos whispered back and swung his legs over the bed.
“A moment might be all we have. Knowing him.” Thanatos heard his brother’s bedmate stir and gasp when he saw Death in the pale light of the oil lamp he carried.
“Peace, boy.” Thanatos said, “I’m not here for you.” As he moved the lamp closer to his face, he concentrated, shifting his form to angelic youth. The beautiful idiot might scream, otherwise, and ruin everything. “Where is he?”
“With the Canaanite woman, I’d imagine. That’s what he was going on about over dinner, at least. Something about the moon being right…” Argyros swallowed, then chewed on his lip, glancing from Sleep to Death and back again. “Gods! You two are twins.”
Death watched Argyros’s mouth twist up into a lustful half smile. It was a wonder this guileless youth got Hypnos this far. Thanatos looked him over thoroughly. “Tempting, but no. We’re here on business.”
Hypnos wrapped his himation around his shoulders. Death walked past his brother and grabbed the chains from the corner of the room, each link tightly
wound in strips of linen to muffle their sound. That had been done at Aidoneus’s suggestion. Quieting the chains, after all, was the way he had crept up on the Tyrant. Thanatos slung their cold weight over his shoulder.
“Well one of us is.”
Hypnos shook his head at him. “You know, this would be a whole lot easier if you could set aside this aeons-old nonsense and just talk to her.”
“Why? She has no desire to speak with me.”
“Hecate could have helped us find him! Or even denied him a path through the ether. Instead we’ve gone from Ephyra to Crete, Illyria, Libya—”
“Yes, yes. And if you don’t hurry, he’ll take us all the way to the damned Euphrates!” Death said impatiently. He turned to Argyros. “Take us to the home of the kedeshah.”
The magistrate’s son led them through the streets. The horns of the crescent moon lay on the horizon, shining pale gold and reflecting in the snow. Cold wind from the sea whipped past them as they walked. In the distance, they heard ice floes squeezing a trireme into splinters, its sailless mast groaning and crashing down on the frozen surface of the harbor as the remains of the mighty warship sank into the depths. It had become a daily occurrence on Chios. Thanatos extinguished the lamp in a snowdrift so they could move in perfect darkness. While his eyes adjusted, he let his other senses guide him. On the wind, he heard hushed voices. The scent of frankincense and female wafted from a doorway up ahead. How he loved that combination. He imagined that was what Merope’s hair must have smelled like when she lived in the world above.
Argyros motioned them into the courtyard, and then ran back the way they’d come, the cold too much for him. Thanatos suspected that betraying his father’s enigmatic guest was too much for him as well. Death didn’t blame him— Argyros had good cause to fear this man. Hypnos and Thanatos stood outside. Within, they heard the woman’s strange tongue as the kedeshah’s preparations for the ceremony reached their culmination. She implored her gods to guide the rites between her and her consort, to restore fertility and warmth to the earth. A male voice answered in her own language, his accent perfected by study, his words echoing hers.
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