Page 13 of This Divine Revelry

Then he turns and hurries back the way he came.

Theseus steps forward, blade still clutched. ‘He could alert someone.’

I grab his arm and pull him back. ‘He won’t.’

Theseus moves again and I snap, ‘We don’t have time!’ and push him towards our exit.

He doesn’t put the blade down, but he steps towards the door. ‘If you’re sure, princess.’

And then we are out of the palace and into its surrounding complex, pausing only as a guard walks along a path ahead and Theseus pushes me to the wall, his body close, and as my eyes meet his he lets a slow smile unfurl.

Five. That’s how many breaths pass as the guard walks, as Theseus holds me there, his chest falling with mine, his fathomless eyes holding me captive every bit as much as his hand pushing my hip to the wall.

Then he lets me go, and we rush on.

I guide us towards the shrine for Asclepius, the god of medicine, and find the key Daedalus alluded to. The servants’ gate unlocks with a slight screech, and then we are out into the city.

‘This way,’ I say with a confidence I don’t altogether feel. When Father has allowed us out of the palace it has normally been with such a suffocating retinue of guards I couldn’t see much. But I’ve spent plenty of time perched in the palace’s hidden corners – legs swinging from the eaves or nestled in the shade of turrets – and somehow all that time watching the city is enough to drag us through Knossos’s winding streets.

The night is cold and worryingly clear, every shining star a watching eye to our deceit. And in the dark every house looms tall and close.

But finally masts rise beyond distant rooftops, then spill into focus. We run, a veritable pack moving through the night. The docks are eerie in the dark, where the rough-hewn stone edges of the harbour drop suddenly into ocean, the slightest movement, the barest whisper of the waves.

‘This one,’ Theseus says, tugging me towards a vessel, the only one with sailors rushing about, untying ropes, preparing for our escape.

‘Stop them!’

The voice is the creaking bolts, the slammed-shut door and every bit the tearing horns and snarling teeth he forced my brother to become. I look up at the dark sails looming above me, black so pitch they melt into the sky above, and jolt as a plank slams down beside me.

‘Go,’ Theseus says to the other Athenians, already drawing his sword.

I turn, expecting my father and a handful of hastily assembled guards.

Instead, I find half the Cretan army, my father at their helm.

And my sister standing beside him.

There is no conversation, just charging men with swords, and I flinch back to find myself against one.

Theseus’s hand curls into the cloak he had so carefully draped around me.

‘We have your daughter hostage!’ he calls, shifting the blade from my spine to the dip of my waist. My dress is sliced, the fabric snagging on my hip, and my skin prickles at the touch of the icy ocean air.

The blade is colder still.

‘Another step and she dies.’

Fool. Well, no – admittedly a decent idea if we were dealing with anyone other than my father, and if there were anything else on the line but his ego, for which he would happily throw his wife to the mercy of the gods, lock away his son and spill his daughter’s blood.

One of the guards barks something and the charging men halt.

My father’s eyes cut to me – lingering on the sword at my gut and the hand clutching my cloak. The threat so clear anyone would think I had been attacked – that maybe an Athenian snuck into the palace and drew my blood with force. That I never betrayed him, never opened that door of my own volition and have been a hostage this entire time.

That I am innocent.

But Father has never had a problem slaughtering people who are.

‘My orders have not changed,’ he snarls, and he doesn’t even finish before I hurl myself to the ground, leaving that cloak clasped in Theseus’s hand. Just as his sword jolts, and I’m not sure it was ever a bluff. Maybe. I cannot say for certain that he had been reaching to thrust it forward, but gods, I would in his situation and that’s a worse thing to realize – that it would make sense for him to kill me.