Page 55 of This Divine Revelry

No! I could have avoided quite a lot of this if I’d had my own private space rather than having to steal Dionysus’s.

But I’m not going to say that to Myrto right now.

‘Well,’ I allow, ‘that’s good.’

Calybe and Opora must have finished their most recent bickering – Opora finally kissed Silen, Calybe only just found out about it – and now they join us.

‘Dionysus says we’re going to Crete to stop Theseus marrying your sister,’ Opora says.

I nod, not looking away from the islands on the horizon, wondering what might have happened if I’d been washed up anywhere else but Naxos.

‘Are you close?’ Calybe asks.

‘No.’

As though that matters. I would save anyone from Theseus. He is mine to stop, my responsibility. I’m the one who freed him from that labyrinth and set him loose upon the world.

‘You still love her, though?’ Opora asks.

‘Yes.’

But what is there to say on that? That I don’t know what love is, not really. That there is the kind of my whole heart, like for Charis. Love built of choice and circumstance and sacrifice. And there is love like I feel for my family, wrought in iron. Steadfast and dutiful. The sort that never seems to bring me much joy, but whose alternative is so much sorrow.

Love as an obligation.

So here I am, racing across the waves.

‘She wouldn’t do this for me,’ I admit. Maybe Dionysus is not the only one with feelings that do not fold to logic. Phaedra put my life at risk to gain our father’s favour. She would have sold me out for the slightest weighting of her own happiness. I know that with rigid surety.

And yet it seems her feelings do not change my own. I will protect her, even as she wishes I didn’t.

I will save her even if she hates me for it.

As the sky begins to darken, I make my way down into the ship.

Dionysus isn’t in our room, which is a relief. I don’t need another lecture warning me to keep my distance or, worse, him forcefully pushing me away because he fears … what, exactly? My love? He seems to believe me falling for him is an inevitability. But I can’t even sit still in this room swaying with each wave. The memory of Theseus’s ship encroaches too forcefully. Those closing walls. The descending darkness. His lips, crushing my own.

Dionysus may believe himself a lost cause, but he is not the only one.

I really thought I was going to die on that island. That the food would run out or I’d freeze in the winter or meet any number of other deaths. Alone, an infected scratch might have been my end. An insect bite. A bad cold. My simply giving up.

I loved the wrong man and it nearly killed me.

If I am even capable of love once more, I don’t want it. If I felt anything like it again, I’d hurl myself into the waves before the slow creeping end could smother me.

Just like these closing walls, and before I can think better of it, I am snatching up linens and racing back to the deck.

There are thousands of stars in the sky – the gods’ battleground for dominion, and there in the distance, the only seven I care about. The gentle arch of a diadem whose weight I can still feel.

I set up camp beneath them, draping sheets across two unused masts and tying them down with rope.

It is easier to breathe here than below deck.

‘Ariadne?’ Dionysus calls. ‘Can I come in?’

There is not exactly much room here, so I draw one of the sheets back and sit in the entrance, looking up at him.

‘What do you want?’