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

There. Let Asterion find those, if he could. Amid all his grief and his anger Brutus found a dull satisfaction in knowing that Asterion would have nevei expected him to relinquish the kingship bands in order to hide them.

Gods, he’d never expected to voluntarily take those golden bands from his limbs, either.

When he was done, and the bands hidden away and protected as best he could manage, Brutus raised his head and looked about him as the first of dawn’s light stained the sky. His beautiful city, Troia Nova, would not last for many years beyond his death. Asterion would destroy it in his desperation for the bands… but better that than allow Asterion the bands themselves.

‘Damn you,” he whispered, thinking of Cornelia, rather than of Asterion.

Then he roused himself, and dampened both his grief and his anger, and went in search of his engineers, for there was one more thing he could do to ensure that when he and Genvissa were reborn, they would be able to complete the Game.

He needed to keep the labyrinth safe from Asterion.

WITHIN THE WEEK CONSTRUCTION BEGAN ON A MAG nificent temple on Og’s Hill. Its beautiful stone flooring completely covered the labyrinth, and to its walls Brutus tied the concealment magic of the kingship bands; once it was fully constructed then the magic of the labyrinth would combine with the magic of the bands (the labyrinth would continue to listen to the instructions of its Kingman) and would turn Asterion’s eye from the site. He would know the labyrinth existed, but he would never be able to find it. Not without the kingship bands. It was the best he could do to keep the labyrinth safe until he and Genvissa, returned, could retrieve the Kingman bands and once again raise the magic of the labyrinth.

He hoped.

Once the temple was completed, Brutus dedicated it to Artemis in honor of Genvissa.

He thought she would have laughed at that.

It was all he lived for now, to hear Genvissa’s laugh again… and to hear it, he would need to die.

Until then, there was only revenge.

TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS LATER coRnelia speaksE TOOK ME BACK TO WIFE, AS

UNBELIEVABLE AS that sounds, although it took more than three years (three ‘^^* years I spent in confinement, never allowed to see the sun, nor feel the soft breath of Llangarlia on my face), and even though in the rest of our lives together he never said a word to me. He ordered me to his empty palace from that cold prison, demanded my presence in his bed, and thought there to punish me with his coldness and hatred. He believed to torture me with his lack of love, with his constant remembrance of Genvissa, with his constant sure hope of meeting and loving her again in that future life to which she had damned us all.

When the dance and the Game would be completed.

Although we could wash the redness of her blood from our skin, its stain never left our souls. Brutus and I might have left Og’s Hill that dreadful day still breathing, but we were in many ways walking

corpses, waiting only for death, and the battle to be renewed in a later life.

The years passed, cold and lifeless. The city grew, as yet unsoured by the incompletion of the Game.

Brutus continued as its king (no longer Kingman, for his golden bands had mysteriously disappeared), apparently joyous and content in his power and the stunning beauty of Troia Nova, inwardly cold and dying, yearning and angry, using the years left to him in this life only to punish me.

We had two more sons. Two years after Brutus had commanded me back to his bed I discovered myself again with child. I could not believe it for several months, until the hard swelling of my belly left me in no doubt, for I thought my womb had been entirely destroyed when Genvissa had murdered my daughter.

But then I had Mag, didn’t I. I smiled, and put a hand over my womb.

She lived there still, sad, sorrowing as much as me, but with eyes for the future, and the struggles that lay before us.

Brutus considered my unexpected pregnancy a triumph, a further mark of his conquest of my spirit, and when another son followed two years after that, he could hardly contain his malicious glee.

I could not love either child very much. I did not hate them, nor resent them, but rather I regarded them with nothing but indifference. Besides, as sons, and as happened with Achates, they were absorbed completely into Brutus’ world, removed from mine almost as soon as they were born, for Brutus would not allow me to suckle them.

‘I shall not have them imbibe her hate and malevolence,” he remarked to the midwives who attended me. “Take them from her as soon as they leave the womb, for I will have my sons have no dealings with the witch that bore them.”

Oh, to call me a witch, when it was his sorceress lover who had set out on the path of destruction.

He had other children, daughters as well as sons, with women he took as concubines. Their laughter rang up and down the corridors of the palace, their every footstep and joyful shout a stab wound in my heart.

I missed my daughter, my beloved daughter, with every beat of my heart and with every breath I drew for so long as I lived. She had been my only hope for love.

The only hope… in this life, at least. Twenty-seven years after that dreadful day, Brutus lay dying on his bed as a cancer ate out his throat. He had lived out his time, and none were truly sad, save, I think, for me. I still loved him, in a sad, terrible way, and I sorrowed for him, and for me, and for Coel and Loth and all that might have been.

Achates would take Brutus’ place as king, his younger brothers supporting him. He knew nothing of the Game. Brutus had told him nothing, had taught him nothing, remarking to the air one morning as he rose from our cold, hateful bed (he would not speak to me, but he was much given to speaking to the air as if it were a beloved companion) that there was little point. There was no Mistress of the Labyrinth, no hope of completing the Game save when Gen-vissa’s magic (her malevolence, more like) could pull us all together again to finish what I had interrupted.

‘My son will be the lesser man,” he said, fastening his belt and striding from the chamber, “for the evil

that walks as his mother.”

And yet still I could not hate him. I cannot truly say why, given the cruelty with which he treated me, but still I could not find it in myself to revile him. I often recalled that day we’d stood above the hill behind the Altars of the Philistines, and the love that had almost blossomed then. I remember how he had bent his face to mine, his hair blowing about me like a swarm of wild bees, his mouth and tongue tracing lines of desire across my flesh… and yet never laying that warm, wonderful mouth to mine. Teasing me with its closeness, its wantonness, but never laying it against mine. Never had he laid his mouth against mine.

Apart from my daughter’s death, this was the greatest regret of my life—that I had been so filled with folly and pride to swear before him on our wedding night when all vows and words were binding that I would never allow his mouth to touch mine.

What would have changed had I allowed him that? What folly and murder and madness would have been avoided had I allowed him to kiss me? Would we have been real lovers before we ever set foot in Llangarlia, too close even for Genvissa’s ambition and magic to tear us apart… or was this only wishful thinking, had she sunk her claws into him long before we ever reached Llan-garlia’s shores? When I had wasted so much time in childish hatred of Brutus, had she been even then comforting him, tempting him, offering him a woman, where I had offered him only a girl?

When Brutus lay dying, he called out for Genvissa.

I knew she lurked just the other side of death’s door, waiting for him, I had no doubt whatsoever that my husband sank the quicker into death in his haste to meet her.

When he did die, drawing his last rattling breath, I cried for all that could have been. I bent down to him, saddened beyond reason, and laid my mouth on his.

But his lips were cold and stiff, and all that issued from his mouth was the stink of death.

And, as my sons (Brutus’ sons, really, they had never been mine) gathered about the bed, and the court pressed close, paying their final respects, I rose from the bed and backed away, walking from the room, walking to that small chamber where I spent my days sewing and listening to the gossip of Brutus’