Page 17 of This Divine Revelry

‘You called the monster something else, back in Crete,’ Theseus says.

‘Asterion.’

‘So the rumours are true? It was your brother?’

‘Some of the rumours are true,’ I snap – because I’ve heard abhorrent whispers in the palace. Some people say my mother seduced that sacred bull because Poseidon struck her with lust for it. ‘Most are decidedly not.’

‘But it was Minos’s own son?’

‘Yes.’ My voice is so quiet I can scarcely hear it.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I knew of your father’s cruelty – fourteen of our young every nine years hardly suggests anything else. But I didn’t realize it extended to his own kin. I can’t imagine what it was like to grow up in that palace. And what it took for you to move against him.’

He keeps saying this – how brave it was. But it only ever felt desperate.

‘And my brother died for it.’

‘Ariadne …’

‘I know. I don’t blame you, I just …’

‘Blame yourself.’ He sighs, and reaches to push my hair from my face. My shoulder throbs, and the scab on my hand itches and every inch of me feels like it is trembling, pulling apart. ‘Your plan was admirable. But it wasn’t enough. Say you got the tributes out and no one noticed. In nine years’ time, when you were married in a distant land, fourteen people would die once more.’

True, I suppose.

Theseus throws that dice again and I see it land on two, but he shifts it to a three. As though I have confessed enough for a moment. As though, even in this, he is protecting me. ‘Poseidon is my father but so too is Aegeus, the King of Athens. They both came to my mother in the same night. But I grew up without either of them and then when I finally met Aegeus … He is a great father and a better king. The palace is ruled with love, not terror. So as those years dwindled and fear had us once more within its sights, I knew I had to stop it. Aegeus was so worried about me doing this – he even made me promise I’d take the black sails down and replace them with white if I lived, so he would know the outcome at the first glimpse of our ship on the horizon.’

A father who cares so desperately about his child? A palace ruled by happiness?

Theseus hooks his fingers through mine, clearly knowing where my thoughts have run. ‘You’re going to love Athens, Ariadne. You’re going to have everything you ever dreamt of by my side.’

The next day he foregoes the dice and lays his head against my shoulder instead, sighing in contentment. ‘I do not think we need such a tool,’ he says. ‘You are so very easy to talk to – to tell things I’ve never told anyone else. You make it all feel so safe.’

And so he runs through anecdotes, tales of beasts he has fought and of the heroics he has performed – with anxieties nestled in their core. That it will never be enough. That he will ultimately be found unworthy.

His fears trouble me. Him feeling close enough to me to share them? A reassurance. But I am not so detached as to be unmoved myself – to spend the day in this dark, shifting room brightened only by his lips on mine, his hands upon my waist, his words sinking deep into my heart. I want to reassure him, to alleviate his worries, to care for him.

I hope you know what you’re doing – it is Charis’s voice in my head, and suddenly that newfound thrill of budding love feels like the very ache in my heart for all I have left behind. Is Charis alright? Is my mother? Losing two children in one night?

The loneliness carves something deep from me, but, steadily, Theseus begins to fill it.

I may, possibly and certainly foolishly, be falling for him.

‘I almost died when I met my father,’ he tells me, days later. ‘When I arrived in my father’s court, the witch Medea was standing by his side. She tried to have me executed before he could claim me as his own. She was exiled soon after.’

Medea.

My cousin. Daughter of my mother’s brother. A witch just like my aunt Circe.

And, more importantly for my own existence: a woman who betrayed her family, who murdered her own brother, for the sake of Jason, the hero she fell in love with.

It is what they will say of me. And here I am, as she was, fleeing to Athens for refuge.

And what happens if, like my cousin, safety in Athens only lasts a while?

‘It will be nice,’ Theseus says, burying his face in my hair and inhaling deeply. And I think it won’t be like that. I am safe. ‘To have someone steadfast by my side. To not have to consider betrayal a mere matter of time.’

One evening the echoing sounds of a lyre float beneath the crack of his door and despite the risks Theseus has warned me of, after days of this stifling cabin, I finally crumble. I reach for that handle and burst on to the deck.