Page 20 of This Divine Revelry

‘You’re freezing,’ I whisper, pushing his damp locks from his face.

‘Well, wife, we’ll have to find a way to fix that.’ I can see him smiling in the dark. The rain is stilling – stars peeking through clouds. Moonlight to see him by.

There is only this: the want, coiled and hot in my gut, the only fire within reach. And Theseus, guiding my hands, drawing me through the dark. The feeling that he is the only thing left worth clinging to.

So I fumble with the cords of his chiton, ready to hold him fast and perhaps never let go.

CHAPTER EIGHT

IWAKE TO THE FIRST glimmer of sunshine cutting a line across the mouth of the cave and I might believe the rain of last night a drunken exaggeration were I not waking upon hard rock rather than the swaying bed of Theseus’s cabin.

Theseus?

I look to where he had lain when I fell asleep, draped across his chest. But I’m alone. We’d used his cloak as a blanket and even that is gone.

Maybe he went to find the rest of his crew?

Oh gods, I hope none of them heard us last night.

Last night …

I stretch, my limbs languid, relaxed even for having slept on the ground. And I do not regret it, then, not as I think of each treasured kiss on my skin.

I don’t regret it until it feels like the last thing to care about, until it becomes a very minor point of regret in a wide sweeping sea that begins with me brushing oil on Theseus’s skin and ends with letting his lies land on my tongue and making them my own.

Regret, only a feeling when I have scoured every inch of the beach we washed up on, and found it empty.

There are signs – footsteps in the sand, burnt-out fires, paths through foliage only rushing bodies might have made. And, most damning of all: two clear streaks in the beach, where a moored boat might have been pushed back into the wake.

Which is when I turn my attention from the land to the sea – and catch sight of a ship on the horizon. Pitch-black sails against a still-rising sun.

A ship shrinking, as it sails away.

CHAPTER NINE

IWATCH THE BOAT UNTIL it disappears, remaining seated long after I last glimpse its sails. I never understood such descriptors: broken hearts and tragedy that fells others in its wake. But this betrayal stings so sharply I feel it everywhere, like my ribs are cracking, my chest caving open, leaving everything inside raw … exposed.

‘You are mine,’ he’d declared as he broke away from trailing his lips down my neck. ‘You will always be mine.’

He’d murmured declarations with every kiss, compliments with every touch, covered my body in lies and then pushed them inside me. And I wish I could make that pain real, wish that vulnerability could become reality because I want nothing more than to rip my skin off, long peeling strips to tear with my teeth. To replace that affection with savagery, because that would at least make sense.

Why, why, why?

The day burns sudden and hot – and though I never met my sun-god grandfather it feels like he’s trying to push some sense into me. My hurt does not so much fade but becomes secondary to all those far more urgent things: shelter, water, food.

Hopefully finding a semblance of civilization. In the best case, there’s a temple somewhere near here and I can claim I’m a priestess on a pilgrimage, seeking refuge and a new station.

The worst-case scenarios involve dying of exposure or being attacked by a wild beast, or my father’s ships racing in pursuit and finding me here. So I start walking, tracing the shoreline in the hope I can find a river that I can follow back to a town.

And, with nothing else to distract me, the roiling agony of my thoughts resumes. The outrage, I could move past. That Theseus is a bastard isn’t all that surprising. I’m hurt, sure, but it’s increasingly marginal against the growing frustration of allowing myself to be so reprehensibly stupid.

Churning through the memories, I find cracks. The spaces where he wanted the story of me more than the real thing. Where he countered my tragic tales with the exact sort of promises that might entice me – a court of love, a gentle father. The clear lies, even from the start. Brave and stupid stupid stupid.

But I trusted it because I wanted it so badly – every promise, everything I wanted to hear. Gods, he knew that – I was so obvious! Grief-stricken and isolated, and he’d pushed it to his full advantage, crafting a world where everything I wanted was within reach, but only through him.

And so I fucking slept with him – traded my one apparent value because I mistook the fragile net he’d woven for true safety. And Zeus above, it was in a cave! After quite a lot of wine! It was not exactly worth holding out for.

Why leave me? Why here? Why not push me back into my father’s arms in Crete if this was his plan? I can see now the very obvious escape in his vow: I swear on the River Styx, we will be wed the same day we arrive in Athens.