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

‘I will!”

He gazed at her, unsure, unwilling to believe her. “If I give to you the darkcraft,” he said, “and you misuse it in any manner—to trick me or trap me—then I will destroy you .”

She started to speak, but he hushed her. “I will, for there is one thing else that I shall demand of you, Ariadne, Mistress of the Labyrinth.”

‘Yes?”

‘That in return for teaching you the darkcraft, for opening to you completely the dark heart of the labyrinth, you shall not only destroy the Game forever, but you will allow me to become your ruler. Your lord. Call it what you want, but know that if you ever attempt to betray me again, if you do not destroy the Game completely, I demand that you shall fall to the ground before me, and become my creature entirely.”

‘Of course!”

His expression did not change. ” ‘Of course!’? With not even a breath to consider? How quickly you agree.”

‘I will not betray you again, Asterion. Teach me the darkcraft and I swear—on the life of my daughter!—that I will use it to destroy the Game utterly. It shall never entrap you again.”

He nodded, very slowly, holding her eyes the entire time. On the life of her daughter? No Mistress of the Labyrinth ever used the name of her daughter lightly. Yes… yes, she was being honest with him.

As honest as Ariadne could be.

He smiled, tight and hard. “Your hatred of Theseus must be great indeed to arrange such dark bargains with first the Crone, and then with me.”

She inclined her head. “He thought to cast me aside,” she said. “No one does that to the Mistress of the Labyrinth.”

‘Very well,” he said. “I accept. The bargain is concluded.” His hand tightened once more in the waistband of her skirt, but this time far more cruelly. “You shall have the darkcraft, but I shall take my pleasure in it. Pain, for the pain you inflicted on me. Pain, to seal the bargain made between us.”

He buried his other hand in her elaborately braided hair, and with all the strength of the bull that was his, he lifted her up and hurled her down to the bed.

THAT NIGHT WAS AGONIZINGLY LONG, AND SHE emerged from it barely alive, but at the end of it Ariadne had what she wanted.

TWO DAYS LATER, STIFF, SORE, HER BADLY DAMAGED body protesting at every step, Ariadne made her way into the village’s herb garden. In her arms she carried the wicker basket, and in

that basket rested her sleeping daughter.

Behind Ariadne two of the village midwives who had attended the birth of her daughter watched uneasily from the shadowed doorway of the house Ariadne had left.

Since her daughter’s birth, the midwives—indeed, everyone in the village—had become aware that Ariadne was highly dangerous. Yet they could not clearly define the why of that awareness. Ariadne had not said or done anything that could have made the villagers so deeply afraid of her, and yet there seemed to hover about the mother and her newborn child a sense of danger so terrible, so imminent , that few people could bear to spend more than a moment or two in her company.

The entire community wanted Ariadne gone. Gone from the village. Gone from the island. Gone so completely that all sense of danger vanished with her. Gone, taking her daughter and her hatred (and neither woman knew which one Ariadne loved and nurtured the more) with her.

Ariadne, although aware of the women and their nervous watchfulness behind her, paid them no heed.

She moved step by careful step along the graveled path between the raised beds of fragrant herbs and flowers. The basket that contained her daughter she carried with infinite care, and as she walked, she rocked the basket gently to and fro, singing to her child in a slow, rhythmic, almost hypnotic voice.

She sang no lullaby, but the secret whisperings of the exotic darkcraft that she had so recently learned, twisting it together with her own power as Mistress of the Labyrinth.

Most infants would have woken screaming in nightmare at her dark and twisted song, but Ariadne’s daughter slept soundly to its meanderings.

Eventually Ariadne’s singing drew to a close, and she halted, gazing on her daughter with great tenderness.

‘Your father will die,” she said, “as all that he touches will die, and as all that declares its love for him will die, and as all that surrounds him will die. Everything. Everything. Everything .”

Ariadne raised her head, and looked before her. She had come to a halt before a large shrub that delineated the carefully tended herb garden from the wilds beyond it. The shrub’s dense gray-green foliage was broken here and there by large white, open-petaled flowers.

Ariadne reached out a hand and touched very gently one of the flowers.

They trembled at her contact.

AROUND THE AEGEAN, IN THEIR HIDDEN, MYSTERIOUS places, so also trembled the flower gate sorceries that guarded the entrances to the founding labyrinths of several score of cities.

‘SUCH DEAR FLOWERS,” SAID ARIADNE. THEN, WITH AN abrupt, savage movement, she twisted the flower free from the shrub.

‘Thera,” she said, “who shall be the first.”

She held the flower in the palm of her hand for a moment, smiling at it with almost as much tenderness as she bestowed on her daughter, and then, resuming her strange, low singing, she wound the flower into

the wickerwork of her daughter’s basket.

So Ariadne continued, her voice growing stronger, the words she sang darker. Flower after flower she snapped, pausing in her singing only long enough to bestow upon each flower the name of a city in which she knew lurked a labyrinth, a city that depended for its well-being on the labyrinth within its foundations. Eventually, as Ariadne plucked flower after flower from the shrub, her child was surrounded by a ribbon of woven flowers about the top of the basket.

Ariadne’s thread. The filament that either saves, or destroys.

WHEN SHE HAD FINISHED, AND HER DARKCRAFT WAS woven, Ariadne cradled the flowered basket in her arms and smiled at her daughter.

‘Soon,” she whispered. “Soon, my darling.”

She looked back to the shrub. It was denuded of all flowers save one, and at the sight of that remaining flower Ariadne’s mouth curled in secret delight.

That labyrinth was particularly well hidden in a city extraordinarily undistinguished, and she doubted Asterion knew of its existence. If it survived its influence would be minimal, her brother would never sense its presence, and it would not serve to hold him.

But it would be enough for her purpose, when it was time.

When she was safe.

When she was strong enough to dare.

THREE m Irrelevance. Decay. Death. Catastrophe. Every place that Theseus lay foot, everything he touched, every part of his world. This was Ariadne’s curse.

And with it, in gratitude to Asterion for teaching her the darkcraft, Ariadne did what only she had the power to do.

She unwound the Game—that great and ancient sorcery that underpinned and protected the entire Aegean world.

IT BEGAN NINE DAYS AFTER ARIADNE TWINED THE flowers into the basket that cradled her daughter. Meriam, the midwife who had thought to cut Ariadne open to save her child, was standing in the central village open space, the beach where Theseus had abandoned Ariadne a bare two weeks previously some sixty paces distant to the south. It was dawn, the air chill, only the faintest of pink staining the eastern sky, the birds in their trees chirping quietly to start the day.

Meriam had no thought for the beauty of the beach, the dawn light, or even for the sweet melodies of the birds.

Instead, she stared frowning at the empty wicker basket lying at her feet. Flowers, withered and colorless, still wound about its rim.

‘Why didn’t she take it with her?” Meriam muttered, then bent to pick up the basket.

In the instant before her fingers touched the basket, one of the flowers slid free from the wickerwork and fell to the earth.

The instant it hit, the chorus of the birds turned from melody to a frightful, fractured screaming.

Instinctively Meriam straightened and looked about her, her heart thudding. Birds rose in chaotic clouds from the trees surrounding the village, milled briefly in the air, then turned to fly north.

Their screams sounded like the shriek of a blade on a whetstone.

Meriam put her hands over her ears and half crouched, panicked, but not knowing what to do.

She wanted to run, but she did not know what to run from, or where to run to.

About her, men, women, and children were stumbling from doorways, pulling clothes about them, shouting in confusion.

Something terrible was about to happen, Meriam knew it, just as certainly as she knew that whatever was going to happen was a result of Ariadne.