Page 2 of This Divine Revelry

Just like the number of deaths on the day of my birth. A chill drilled beneath my bones like one of those spectres had brushed against my skin and suddenly I knew, I just knew, that whatever horror had followed me into this world was about to strike again.

My father made a speech I could barely follow. He said words like tributes and sacrifice and he called them Athenian. These people were Athenians – our vicious enemies, the brutal thugs who had murdered my brother before I was born and sent our men to war. But these people didn’t look terrifying. They seemed weak and malnourished and like they wouldn’t have even been old enough to have fought in a war nine years ago.

They certainly weren’t the sort of criminals my father usually punished.

That chill burrowed deeper.

‘Let’s go,’ I said when it seemed as though it were all over – but I knew it wasn’t. Something was wrong, wrong, wrong. I took Phaedra’s elbow and guided her from the room. It was still my birthday, after all – which meant the servants evaded me. Only my mother seemed to notice our efforts to slip away, catching my eye as she frantically tried to soothe a screaming Glaucus. She nodded, which I took as encouragement for us to flee the crowd. In the hallway, I turned to Phaedra. ‘Will you play your aulos for me?’

‘Just because it’s your birthday doesn’t mean you can boss me around.’

‘Please,’ I said, because look after your sister was still ringing in my head and I needed to get her out of there before the horror revealed itself.

Phaedra bit her lip. She was a little more than a year younger than me but nine felt so old and seven felt so young and I needed her, just this once, to do as I said. She threw her hands up. ‘Fine. But if Father finds out, you’re taking the blame.’

‘Always,’ I agreed, and led her to the small, unused storeroom at the back of the kitchens where I often danced because it was far enough away from my father that he couldn’t punish me. Apparently, only whores begged attention with their bodies. It would be too distant to hear Phaedra’s aulos too – the noise gave him headaches – and it really would be a birthday treat to dance to music and not merely my own pounding heartbeat and the occasional sound of movement below.

It was the ground floor. But there were strange noises, sometimes: footsteps, scrapes, breaths that seemed to pant up through the floorboards. More of those spectres, I was certain. My aunt was a witch and my grandfather was the god of the sun and ghosts followed in my footsteps when I danced – it all seemed to fit.

Phaedra’s nose wrinkled at the dust but she leant against the far wall, plucked out her aulos and slipped the reed pipe between her lips. The tune was slow, melodic – and I let it take me over.

I stepped instinctively, a long winding circle of a dance, weaving forward and then outwards again but always, inevitably, drawing in.

Fourteen people. I knew they had died the moment I writhed into this world – but that was Father, wasn’t it? The same brutality that marked the entire palace.

I slid closer to the centre of the room, my footsteps lithe and languid.

Beneath me, I heard that breathing. Harried, almost excited. Footsteps echoed in tandem with mine and for a moment I let my eyes flutter closed and imagined that the spirit, whatever it was, delighted in the rhythm just as I did. Phaedra’s eyes were shut too, her fingers a dance of her own over the holes in the reed. All three of us lost in the music.

Athenians. My father had gone to war, won and now … there was a tribute from Athens. The servants said that sometimes, didn’t they – that in a few years the tributes would arrive? Had those fourteen people brought grain? Gold?

The aulos picked up speed and so did my feet and suddenly those twirling circles grew tighter and tighter until I was in the centre, spinning on my toes, and close – so close to understanding.

There was more, wasn’t there? Confusing things the adults said. The way they looked at my mother – the deviant queen, they called her. The way she never let Glaucus out of her sight. The way the walls bled in my dreams, sticky and red, and when I looked down it coated my palms, wouldn’t wipe off no matter how hard I tried …

Like the palace wasn’t haunted – we were.

A creak groaned below. I dived for Phaedra and clapped my hands over her ears, that instinct within burning. Wrong wrong wrong.

Beneath my feet, the ghosts screamed.

The door slammed open and I jolted, keeping my hands firmly over Phaedra’s ears though she could hear, of course she could – the screaming so blisteringly loud that Phaedra had dropped her aulos and was clinging to my wrists so tightly her nails carved into my skin.

In the doorway stood our tutor, Daedalus. His hair was starting to grey at the temples, his eyes lined at the corners – but within them shone something you didn’t see very often in the court of Knossos: sympathy.

‘Let’s get you out of here.’

We took Phaedra to bed. She was shaking and I lay with her, let her curl her fists into my chiton until her breathing deepened, and then I snuck out, determined to find my mother. But as I approached her quarters, I heard shouting. Arguing. I stilled to listen.

‘You have to tell her,’ Daedalus insisted.

‘I am protecting her,’ Mother shot back. ‘Like I couldn’t do him.’

‘Ignorance isn’t protection and it’s not going to save them.’

Mother sighed and I pressed closer, a floorboard creaking beneath me.

The next I remember, I was on my mother’s bed and she was pushing a plate into my hands. On it, in red clay, was the etched shape of a woman with a child sitting on her knee. A child with curling horns and the head of a bull.