Page 130 of This Divine Revelry

Hermes lowers his gaze. ‘Not as many as I feared. But a few.’

‘Who?’

My heart is pounding – and what does it matter, really? If other people have died, do I mourn them, or do I mourn the living I am separated from?

‘Only one you’d know, I think,’ he says gently. ‘Opora.’

I’m not sure what my soul is made of – but it lurches. No body with which to cry, and so my grief is physical, and I stumble right into Hermes’s outstretched arms.

‘I don’t want to leave you like this,’ he says. ‘But this is as far as I can take you. You’ll need Charon to ferry you across the Acheron. Find him once your coin appears – and on the other side you’ll be whole and … assigned your realm. You’ll find paradise. Fates only know, you deserve it.’

Paradise? That is the lilting beat of the thiasus, the heat of the campfire flames, dancing until the sun rises.

And it is Dionysus – his arms, his lips, his laugh …

Hermes clutches me tight – and faces turn our way as people must wonder who this girl is, inspiring such a response from a god. But when he says his final farewell they turn their attention back to one another and the bartering picks up once more.

‘I have a spare. What will you offer me on the other side?’

‘Does anyone know the rate? Will copper do?’

‘I was buried with jewellery – is there a place I could exchange it?’

Oh. Of course.

They’re trying to get hold of coins to pay the ferryman.

‘Ariadne!’

When Opora collides with me, I’m taken aback by how solid she feels. How solid we both feel. Around us, the other spirits appear hazy and insubstantial. Pale imitations of how they were in life. But we still seem flesh and blood.

‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ she says, drawing back but not letting go. She startles, eyes wide. ‘Oh gods, I didn’t mean it like that. I meant I’m glad I’m not here alone – although, not that I wanted anyone else to die either, I –’

I squeeze her hand. ‘I don’t think either of us is getting a coin any time soon. Let’s go find somewhere quiet.’

We trek away from the crowds to where the river branches into the Cocytus.

Out here, people have set up makeshift camps. They lie on the banks, chat in small huddles, and there’s even a woman leading a group in some sort of dance.

‘Come on!’ she laughs. ‘We can make our own paradise.’

But it all reminds me far too much of the thiasus and the world we left behind, and for perhaps the first time in my life, I do not feel like dancing. Opora and I continue past them, to where the ground is solid and dry enough that we can lie down upon it and maybe, if we screw our eyes shut tightly enough, we could pretend we are back in one of those tents, the thin sheets of fabric separating us as we whisper through the night.

‘So what happened?’ I ask.

And she tells me that it was only the disorganization of Perseus’s own men that saved the thiasus. That when the archers began stringing bows once more, they clearly hadn’t conferred with the soldiers on the ground. That when they began shooting they hit more of their own army, charging into the fray, than people trying to flee.

She doesn’t remember being hit, only that she was shielding Apollonia, the young villager she had given her drum to.

She saw Silen take an arrow to the thigh right before Hermes appeared in front of her.

‘They’re a satyr,’ she says, choked. ‘They’ll probably heal but … but if they don’t … if they died too then they won’t go to an afterlife. Immortals have one life and if it ends, it’s just over. Calybe will join me one day. The others too. But I’ll never see Silen again.’

‘I know.’

Opora looks up at my answer, the mirrored despair, and realizes I am in a similar predicament.

She reaches her hand out and entwines her fingers with my own. ‘We really didn’t think this through, did we? Falling in love with immortals …’