Please watch over my sister, Lord Poseidon. Help my father and brothers bring her home.
Her lungs started to ache. Reluctantly, she left the ruins and kicked up toward the surface. She broke the water and gasped in a deep breath of cool, salty air. Lying on her back, she stared at the brightening sky through beaded lashes.
Her father used to call her his little Nereid, his sea nymph. Even as a babe she had loved the water. As a young child she would splash after lightning-quick shoals of red tunny, desperately wishing she had fins to match theirs.
Things were simpler in the water. The ocean could be a dangerous beast, but it had always held her and never let her fall.
Danae ran back along the beach, the pail sloshing in one hand, her sandals clacking together in the other. The blush of dawn had already fled the sky. She’d stayed too long.
As she ran up the track to her hut, she almost collided with Carissa hurrying in the opposite direction.
Her pulse quickened. “Any news?”
Carissa shook her head, pursing her lips at Danae’s sodden hair and sand-splattered legs. She carried on her way without a word.
Her body heavy as stone, Danae dragged her feet through the yard gate.
Her mother looked up from where she sat in the goat pen, a bucket of milk beneath Mopsus’s belly.
“Was Carissa here about Alea?”
Eleni shook her head. Her cheeks were pale. “It’s Melia’s daughters. The temple hands dragged them from the blacksmith’s hut and sacrificed them before dawn.”
Danae almost dropped the water. After the commotion of the Maenads’ invasion and Alea’s disappearance she had forgotten that Demeter had demanded blood at the Thesmophoria.
“Both of them?”
Her mother’s hands shook as she smoothed the flyaway hairs that had escaped the cloth tied around her head.
“Demeter, in her wisdom, desired an additional life to amend for the desecration of her festival.”
Her legs suddenly weak, Danae set down the pail and leaned against the goat fence.
“The goddess chose two daughters from the same family?”
Her mother held up a hand. “It’s not for us to question the will of the gods.”
“No, of course,” Danae said quietly.
Eleni let out a shuddering breath. “Gods, I am not fond of Melia, but I would never wish this on anyone...” she trailed off and wiped her face. “They’ll be reunited in the Asphodel Meadows. As will we all one day.”
There were three realms of the Underworld, all presided over by the god Hades. The Asphodel Meadows were the plain where all the souls who’d lived a devout and honest life passed to after their death. Danae’s grandparents and her uncle Taron were already there. It was a blissful land of sunlit fields and undulating hills, carpeted with eternally blooming flowers. A place of endless peace and joy, always spring and never winter.
The paradise of Elysium, where souls were sent to be anointed with immortality, then raised up to the heavens in the sky, was reserved for great warriors and heroes who died in battle. Danae always thought it sad that those brave people didn’t get to spend eternity with their loved ones. No matter how splendid it was, heaven would feel empty without her family.
Last of the three realms was Tartarus, a place of torment and everlasting pain for those souls deemed to have led an unworthy life. Imprisoned in this deepest, darkest level of the Underworld were the Titans. An evil race of giants who had sought to destroy the world before the Twelve defeated them in a great battle known as the Titanomachy. Danae owed the ground beneath her feet to the courageous Olympians. All mortals did.
Eleni’s hands fidgeted in her lap. A drop of blood dripped onto the skirt of her tunic from where she’d absentmindedly torn the nail bed. She didn’t seem to notice.
“Ma?” said Danae.
Her mother blinked. “Come on,” she said gruffly, hefting the milk toward the hut. “The cheese won’t make itself.”
Danae watched her for a moment, then followed her inside.
Her mother tipped the milk she’d collected into an iron cooking pot, set on the blazing hearth. “She’s not producing as much these days. Poor girl’s getting old.”
Steam billowed into Danae’s face as she added a splash of brine, then reached for a small clay jug beside the hearth, pouring a dash of vinegar into the milk.
