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

Hicetaon roared with laughter, then sobered as he looked back to where another group of black-hulled ships were drawing up one by one to the landing beach. “All these years I traveled and fought with you, Brutus, I have never doubted that you were a capable and great man. But to see this, to see our fellow Trojans—so many thousands of them—brought out of misery and slavery and to a new land to rebuild their pride… well… I have never realized how great you truly were.”

‘The fighting is not yet done, my friend. If the Llangarlians refuse to accept us, then the worst battle of all may yet be before us.”

Yet even as he said the words, Brutus was certain they were not true. She would have prepared the ground for their arrival.

BY THE TIME FIRES WERE LIT AND HAD ROARED BACK TO cooking coals, and bands of hunters had returned with carcass after carcass of plump deer from the woods, it was near midnight, and people had only enough energy left to huddle by the nearest fire and eat what was handed out to them.

Brutus made sure that the ring of surrounding warriors were fed, and that others would relieve them after a few hours, before he sank down beside Cornelia, Aethylla—nursing both her own son and Brutus’

on different breasts—and Corineus who sat among a group of some thirty people about one of the fires.

Everyone looked exhausted, and much of the food lay uneaten. Already over half of the people about the fire were asleep.

Cornelia reached out a hand and briefly touched Achates’ soft downy cheek, then looked to her husband who was finally managing to eat some food.

‘What do we do?” she said, then waved a hand vaguely about. “Is this where we stay?”

‘For the time being,” Brutus said about a mouthful of barely cooked venison, “but not permanently.

We stay here, we rest, we regain our strength, and while we do that I seek out this MagaLlan, and negotiate with her our permanent settlement.”

‘And the Gormagog,” Corineus said, yawning. “Don’t forget Blangan said that the various Houses of Llangarlia deferred to two people, the Gormagog and the MagaLlan.”

‘Where is Blangan?” Brutus said, suddenly realizing she wasn’t in the group of people about this fire, nor about any of the nearby fires.

Corineus nodded at the hill. “She said she wanted to see more of her homeland than just the nearby trees.”

Brutus put down what remained of his hunk of venison, and sighed. “I need to speak with her,” he said, and rose, his tired muscles and joints audibly creaking.

‘You’re exhausted!” Cornelia said, seizing his hand. “Rest first, surely!” He gave her hand a squeeze, then let it go. “No. Blangan knows more than anyone the inherent dangers of this land. I need to speak with her before I sleep… or else I shall not sleep.”

SHE TURNED AS HE APPROACHED, AND HE SAW THAT she had been weeping.

‘We need to speak candidly, Blangan,” Brutus said as he came to a halt by her side. “I have twelve thousand people to protect, and I have known since I first saw you that you are terrified of returning to

Llangarlia. What is wrong? Why are you not overjoyed at coming back to your homeland?”

He dropped down to sit at her side. “Blangan, no more evasions. Answer my question. Should I fear, too?”

She turned her face away from him, back to the rolling forested hills. “Not as much as I.” She paused, thinking, then came to a decision. “I have been brought home to be killed, Brutus.”

“What?”

‘Let me tell you in my own way, and to fill in some of the gaps in my story. What did Corineus tell you about me… that I left this land when I was fourteen, then married to a merchant who died within six months, leaving me stranded in Locrinia where Corineus, the beloved man, offered me marriage?”

‘Aye. And you told me later that you were forced into leaving this land. Why, Blangan? Why did they force you to leave?”

She sighed. “Because it suited them—”

‘Who are these’them’?”

‘My mother, Herron, who was the MagaLlan twenty-five years ago, and my father Aerne, who was the Gormagog. Maybe just my mother… I am not sure.

‘I come from the most powerful House within Llangarlia, Brutus. The House of Mag. My mother was the MagaLlan, and I was conceived as her eldest daughter during the midsummer fertility rites. My father was the Gormagog. I was not my mother’s heir, for that role would belong to my youngest sister…” She glanced at Brutus, wondering if he would remember what she’d told him of Llangarlian society during his time staying in her house in Locrinia.

‘I understand. The heir of the Mother of any house is her youngest daughter, born of the wisdom of her maturity rather than the naivety and thoughtlessness of her youth. The younger is always considered the more capable and powerful child.” He paused. “Your youngest sister, your mother Herron’s heir, is Genvissa.”

‘Ah, yes, Genvissa. She was only some eight or nine years old when my son was born, and while I can accuse her of much, I cannot accuse her of any complicity in my downfall. No, wait, Brutus, do not interrupt just here. I will talk more on Genvissa later.”

Blangan paused to take a deep breath, then continued.

‘When I reached womanhood at thirteen I already had two younger sisters, so I knew I would never be my mother’s heir. But as her first daughter to reach womanhood, I nevertheless had certain responsibilities. The most important of those was to conceive a child within my thirteenth year. This did not trouble me, I longed for my own child, and as I had been bleeding at the change of the moon for the previous eight moons, I knew I was physically capable of conceiving. It was just that… it was just that my mother, Herron, the MagaLlan, overrode my own choice of father for that child. She determined that I should conceive of a child by the Gormagog himself.” “Your own father ? That is allowed?”

‘Under normal circumstances, no. But between the Gormagog and a daughter of the MagaLlan’s?”

She shrugged again. “I protested, but my protests were ignored. Both MagaLlan and Gormagog were

insistent. They said my child would be special. Powerful.” She hesitated. “The Gormagog came to my bed one night, and there, despite my protests, he lay with me.”

She closed her eyes for a moment at the memory, and her shoulders stiffened. “I tried to fight him off, and then to close my womb to his seed, but whatever power I had was useless that night. Brutus… I don’t know, but there was something there that night that was so powerful that nothing could have stopped my father getting a child on me. “And, oh, how tragic that was.” “How so?”

Blangan told him of how, at that moment when she’d felt her father’s seed spill into her womb, the Gormagog’s Og power had split in two, divided between the Gormagog himself and the son he had just conceived on his own daughter.

‘This land depends on the combined power of Og and Mag, the union of the male and female, to remain in health. At that moment when Gormagog’s power split in twain, Og’s power was virtually destroyed. This land might look rich and green to you, Brutus, coming as you do from an area less endowed, but it has been touched by blight.”

Brutus remembered what he’d seen earlier in the day, the patches within the forest where diseased trees had fallen.

‘I understand,” he said. “With the union disrupted, the land dies?” “It sickens, certainly. And I was, and shall always be, blamed for it. Og’s power had split, and even as my father lifted himself off my body, my mother the MagaLlan rushed into the chamber moaning and shrieking and tearing at her hair”—Siangan’s face twisted bitterly—”and shouting that I had cast a spell of darkcraft over both Og and this land. It was a disaster. There I was, weeping in pain and humiliation, there was my mother, shrieking that I’d laid a dark enchantment on the land, and there was my father, jiggling naked up and down beside the bed and wringing his hands and staring open- and dribble-mouthed at me as if I were darkness incarnate.”

Her voice softened into a whisper. “And all I was, Brutus, was a terrified thirteen-year-old girl, having just been raped by her father and with no more

ability to weave darkcraft than I could command the tide to retreat. Someone had cast that darkcraft, but it was not me.”

‘Who?” Brutus said, very softly.

‘My mother, I think. No one else would have had the power.”

‘Why?”

‘I don’t know, Brutus. In the end, I can’t think why a MagaLlan, dedicated to the care of the land and to maintaining the union between Mag and Og so that the land would prosper, would do something so horrific.