Hades’ Daughter. Book One of the Troy Game by Sara Douglass

He should have put a stop to Brutus here in the heart of the Game. He sighed, and his entire form trembled.

Beside him, the all-but-dead white stag sighed also, and Silvius lay down so 1 cheek rested on the shoulder of the stag, and together they slept. Waiting.

BEHIND THEM, YET ANOTHER SHADE, BARELY VISIBL.

but also caught through murder into the twisting of the Game. Coel. Silent. Watching. Waiting.

CbAPGGR SIX coRneüa speaksADOR AND HOEL, ERITH’S SONS, CARRIED LOTH

from that bloodied hilltop, while Erith and her daughter Tuenna aided me. We stumbled our way to the ferry and then back to my lonely, deserted house in Llanbank.

I was out of immediate danger, Erith’s cloth belt having stanched the flow of blood, but Loth… Loth was alive, but only just, and existing in such a state of agony that I thought I would have to scream myself, if only to vent some of my own horror.

Was this my fault, too?

Erith took charge as soon as we’d reached the house. She set Tuenna to stitching my neck back together, while she directed her sons to lay Loth on what had once been Aethylla and Hicetaon’s bed.

Once Tuenna was done, I looked to Loth. Erith and her sons had been busy while her daughter had attended me. Loth was quieter now, and I saw that Erith had given him some frenzy wine that she’d caused to have brought from her house.

I stumbled forward, desperate to see.

Loth lay on his side, facing into the center of the house. A dribble of wine ran down his chin and his eyes lacked focus. Nevertheless, he saw enough to know I was there, and he held out a hand for me.

‘Cornelia,” he croaked.

His hand trembled.

I walked forward some more, close to the bed, feeling Erith’s and her children’s eyes on me, and slowly lifted my hand to take his.

‘I’m sorry,” I whispered.

‘Don’t be,” he said, and laughed a little.

It was a horrible guttural sound, and I must have flinched, because he cut it off midchortle as he regarded me.

‘Don’t be sorry,” he said. “There’s still you.”

‘No!”

‘There is still you,” he said again, and that thought apparently gave him some comfort, for he smiled very slightly, then lapsed into unconsciousness, so that Erith and her kin could work whatever aid they could on his body.

IN THE END IT WAS NOT MUCH. THEY SAVED LOTH’S life, but they could do little else.

What Brutus had done to Loth’s back would never heal. Not completely.

The sword had cut deep, severing Loth’s spine just above the swell of his buttocks. Bone, muscle, and tendon had been shattered, and no matter how carefully Erith and Tuenna picked and probed, they could not remove all the fragments of bone from Loth’s flesh.

Neither could they restore his spine. Loth lost all movement from his waist down, as well as control over his muscles. He became as a great baby, save with the bitterness and hatred of a man, soiling and wetting his bedclothes several times each day, needing either myself or Erith or one of her children to roll him over and clean and dry him and change his bedding.

Erith’s two sons, Cador and Hoel, became his constant companions. Loth was a dead weight, and it needed men to help shift him. And, as the weeks passed and his wound closed over—his physical wound, at least—then Hoel and Cador would lift him from the bed, wrap him well in blankets and furs, and carry him outside, and sometimes down as far as the river.

I think I existed in a state of constant misery as an accompaniment to Loth’s constant pain. My throat hardly troubled me, for Tuenna had done an excellent job, and I was left with barely a scar, but I was now completely isolated from the Trojan community, and most particularly from Brutus, and my son Achates. Brutus lived in the rapidly expanding palace in Troia Nova now, rarely leaving the just as rapidly growing city walls. Aethylla and Hicetaon lived with him, and Achates, my son.

And Genvissa.

I had lost my husband. I had lost my son. I had lost all to that witch-woman who was even now carrying Brutus’ child.

As was I, although Brutus refused to acknowledge her. My growing pregnancy was the only thing that kept me from throwing myself into the Llan. At night, listening to Loth muttering and twisting in his sleep, or to Hoel’s or Cador’s ever-present snores, I would wrap my hands about my small, hard round belly and feel my daughter inside.

I longed for the day when she would be born, when I could hold her in my arms, and feed her— no one would take this child from me!—and we could laugh at and love each other. Then perhaps the hurt at losing Brutus would dull.

Then I would cry, as silently as I could, and still always Loth would hear me, and he would sigh, and call my name softly.

Sometimes, not always, but sometimes I would rise from my bed and lie down beside him, careful of his injury.

He would put an arm about me, and hold me as I cried some more, and always he would say,

“Genvissa. Genvissa has done this to you, as she has ruined this land. What will you do about it, Cornelia? What will you do?”

Over and over, his voice a bitter repetition, until his words were as close to me as the child growing in my womb. Will you aid us now, Cornelia? Will you ?

sevejM WINTER LENGTHENED AND TURNED TO AJ equally hard spring, the frost growing thick and brigh on the ground each morning at dawn. It was cold, bu not overly wet, and work on the walls progressed apace. By the turn of the yea they had grown to the height of a man. The wall itself was composed almos of three walls. On the outer and inner faces heavy, pale dressed stone block rose smooth and unclimbable. Into the internal spaces of the wall, supportinj the outer and inner faces of stone, men poured rubble and clay and flint, press ing it down as hard as they could. At twenty-score-pace intervals semicircula bastions protruded from the wall like the swelling bellies of pregnant women Eventually these would be topped with guardhouses and filled with watchfu eyes and hands filled with lances and bows, human defenders standing atoj stone where once only the goodwill and care of Mag and Og had shielded th< land and its people.

The wall was broken in four places. The great gate, called Og’s Gate by Tro jan and Llangarlian alike, pierced the wall on its western aspect just beyond the foot of Og’s Hill itself. In the northern wall was a very low arch—barely rising from ground level—which allowed the Wai egress into the city, as well as a smal and heavily fortified gate that allowed the northern road exit from the city. Fi nally, on the southern aspect, which ran atop the cliffs along the northern ban! of the Llan, there were two openings: one very wide but equally low arch thai allowed the Wai exit into the Llan, and a small gate at the Llan ferry’s northerr dock where travelers would need to access the great northern road that would, for its first part, run through the growing city of Troia Nova itself.

Inside the walls the city of Troia Nova was emerging from what was once free meadowland. There were still great patches of open ground—their green often buried beneath the hoar—where gardens and orchards would prosper in G the spring and summers, but now graveled roads and streets crisscrossed the entire enclosed area, and to either side of these roads and streets rose the emerging skeletons of houses and public buildings.

Many of the public buildings were of stone, but most of the houses were built in the Llangarlian manner: circular configurations, their walls of ill-dressed stone or of wattle and daub, topped with conical roofs of thatch or, in a few cases, slate. The Llangarlian houses were easy and quick to build—by summer most of the Trojans hoped to be able to move themselves and their goods inside the walls.

Eventually the Trojans expected to replace the Llangarlian structures with the houses they remembered from their Aegean towns and cities, rectangular solid stone or brick houses. For now, however, the native style of building would suffice.

Brutus’ palace grew to cover the entire top of the White Mount. It was a beautiful structure, many towered and windowed, with deep eaves and balconies and airy rooms, hung currently with thick woolen tapestries and draperies against the Llangarlian winter and warmed with hot fires built in the huge central

hearths of the main chambers.

Genvissa moved herself and her three daughters into the palace: no one opposed her, no one thought to. Genvissa’s power was complete: the blight that had afflicted the land had lifted, women and livestock gave birth easily, plants and landscape recovered from the malaise that had afflicted them. It might still be winter, but the change for the better was noticeable.