“To tell Ares, certainly.” Nikeros strode across their small cell and took a nonchalant seat on one of the flatter rocks. He folded his hands behind his head and leaned back.
It wasn’t until he crossed his ankles and closed his eyes that Korinna really lost it. “Are you mad?” She turned on him, and his eyes went wide as she strode across the cell in his direction. “How is this—any of this—good luck?”
Nikeros stammered, sitting up. As his face shifted to be on the verge of panic, she felt herself relax, but only enough to stop advancing on him. He swallowed. “Can you not see? You have been brought here as bait—er, as enticement—for Andreas. He will travel to the ends of Gaia to retrieve you from the god of war himself. It is terribly romantic.” The demigod sighed with another of his stupid grins.
Korinna wanted to slap that stupid grin right off his stupid face. “Romantic?” The word felt like sand in her mouth. “I’ve been kidnapped here!”
“Well, yes, but also you have the most capable warrior of his age to come after you, so…”
“So what? I’m just supposed to wait around here til he shows up?”
Nikeros glanced about at the stone walls then back to her. “Yes.”
“I cannot—” She took a breath, holding back her outburst. Closing her eyes, she remembered the images in Andreas’s room, men risking life and limb for what exactly she couldn’t tell, but this was, at his core, what Andreas was all about. Korinna knew fuck-all about love—this she wholeheartedly could admit—and so perhaps this was exactly how it was meant to go.
When she opened her eyes again, Nikeros was looking at her like a puppy waiting to see if it were getting a treat or a sandal. “Fine.” Korinna sat herself down on the dusty floor of the cell and crossed her arms. “But I’m not going to enjoy it.”
CHAPTER X
Do you have to do that?
Do what?
I think you know what. The humming. I’m trying to concentrate here.
Hey, you asked for inspiration, and I’m trying to inspire you!
Nikeros had been humming. Korinna didn’t recognize the tune, and it wasn’t necessarily unpleasant or poorly-pitched, it had just gone on for a bit too long (which was essentially any time at all), and she decided to break her self-imposed silent treatment on the demigod. He wasn’t acting much like he was being punished by it anyway.
“Niko,” she said up toward the ceiling of the cave from her spot on her back. She heard him shift against the rocks on the far side, the humming coming to a blissful stop. “How long have you been an Erote?”
It was probably a stupid question to ask any non-mortal being, what with their completely different understanding of Time, but Korinna couldn’t have known that demigods were much more similar to mortals than she’d convinced herself already. That and she had to get him to shut up, even if it meant making him talk.
“Oh, uh, well,”—his voice wavered—“It has been a fair few of your mortal years, I reckon.”
“Like a couple hundred?” she asked wistfully.
He chuckled, “No, of course not.”
Korinna propped herself up on one arm. He was sitting up straight and looking at her with a furrowed brow. “So do you go to love academy first or something?”
He tilted his head as if she should have known. “Absolutely.”
Korinna laughed, “Well, why didn’t you just send me there instead?”
“Admission is solely for demigods, and though a mortal has—” He stopped abruptly. “Ah, a joke!”
“Right.” She nodded. “A joke.”
“And you,” he said, leaning back again, “How long have you been a…”
“Servant?” She smirked. “Pretty much my whole life.”
“No.” He shook his head. “An artist.”
Korinna felt her face go a bit red, and she quickly slid onto her back again to stare at the ceiling instead of him. “I’m not an artist.”
Nikeros made a confused noise in the back of his throat. “But I saw the pieces of pottery in your loft, and I listened to you describe how to make paint, and I—”
“I like to paint.” She stopped him with a raised hand. “But what I do is serve drinks and clean floors and deliver urns. Sometimes I throw a pot when Alanis lets me.”
“Yes, with that temper, I can imagine.”
“No, Niko, like,”—she leaned up on her elbow again and mimicked the movement with her hands—“on a wheel, I mold the clay, and—” He was grinning stupidly at her again only this time it was at least a little less stupid. “You made a joke?”
He nodded enthusiastically.
“Well, at least one of us is learning.” Korinna wished Andreas would hurry up and get there because she wanted to leave, of course, but also she thought seeing him in action might help convince her if he was the one. Athena had presented a warrior, and she supposed executing a rescue mission would be a good show of his abilities. Better than watching him slaughter a forest creature anyway.
“Niko,” she began hesitantly, “Seeing as I’ve never been in love before, how am I supposed to know when I am?”
“Oh, you will know.” She could hear the smile in his voice.
She grunted, “That’s not helpful. I need an example.”
“What do you feel when you think about Andreas?”
“Feel?” Korinna put a finger to her lips. She didn’t really feel very much, but she thought quite a few things. “He seems like a nice person. Daphne would say he is strong and dedicated, and those are good values, I guess.”
“That sounds like admiration.”
“And, I mean, he is hot.”
“And lust.”
Korinna sighed, “But love?”
“Love is a many splendored thing, love li—”
“Not this again!”
Nikeros stood and took a breath. She watched him clasp his hands in front of himself. Oh no, he was going to start saying something. A lot of something. “Love will make you see the world differently. It is transformative. It will convince you to make the right decisions, the hard decisions, and they will not even feel hard at all. Love will free you.” When Korinna did not respond, he sat back down. “Do not fret, Mortal. If you cannot tell, I will be able to tell for you. Remember, the aura.”
“Oh, right! So you can just pick the right suitor for me!” She sat up with a grin.
“No,” he was quick to say, “I will not know for whom you glow, but I will know when you exude the feeling of true, romantic love.”
“Ugh, useless,” she mumbled, laying back down.
Korinna lay in silence for a long time thinking about his words but got absolutely nowhere. Time moved at a pace she couldn’t be sure of without one god or another’s chariot crossing the sky, but her stomach seemed to tell her that quite a bit of it had passed.
What Korinna could not have known was that here, in caverns that Ares had decided to occupy, time was even more wishy washy than up on Gaia. Since Chronos, like most of the Titans, were locked away so that the Olympians could rule, Time itself didn’t have the stewardship it needed, so the god of war, like most gods, could play around with it and sometimes even forgot it was in flux. It’s not possible to say exactly how much time passed in the caverns, but neither Korinna nor Nikeros felt its full effects.
Instead, the two took to pacing and trading quips. Korinna asked him vague questions about his job and received even vaguer answers always followed with a question in return that she equally attempted to dodge. Eventually one of Nikeros’s brothers, though Korinna could not say if it were Phobos or Deimos, appeared within their cell and thrust a tray covered in grapes and cheese at her. She took it hungrily, and the demigod disappeared before she could question him again. She stuffed a handful of grapes in her mouth, then paused, turning to Nikeros and offering it to him, but he declined.
“Suit yourself.” She shrugged and moved onto the cheese. As she sated her hunger, she groaned at the thought of other human necessities taking he
r. Plus she was exceedingly bored. “So, Niko, how long do you reckon it’s going to take Andreas to get here?”
“Well, one’s typical heroic journey has quite the range. We may be just off the coast of Theopopolis, or we may be deep in the heart of the ocean.”
Korinna bit the inside of her lip; all of that meant very little to someone experiencing their first day off of Zafolas’s tiny isle. “Okay?”
“I doubt Ares would want to wait too terribly long for Andreas to meet whatever fate he has set up for him, so I do not think we are in for a decade-long wait.”
Korinna froze and glared at him. “And how long did you say those arrows last?”
“They are meant to give you a sufficient opportunity to authentically draw the affection of each suitor and make an educated decision.”
“Which is?”
“A moon? Maybe two?”
Korinna hung her head. “And if it takes Andreas longer than that to get here?”
Nikeros blinked back at her.
“Or if he gets killed on the way?”
The demigod looked like someone had just stabbed him, but only a little.
“Or if he makes it, but Ares gets his way?”
The Erote dropped his voice to a whisper, “Those are a lot of ifs.”
Korinna threw up her hands. “I mean, where on Gaia are we really? Is this a real place Andreas can even get to? And how will he know where to go? Were your idiot brothers supposed to tell him?”
“I appreciate those questions.” Nikeros put up his hand to stop her, and she looked at him expectantly. He seemed to be getting it as he stood and took a few paces, scratching his smooth chin in thought. Finally he looked at her again. “But the romance.”
“Absolutely not!” She marched up to him and poked a finger into his hard chest. “We tried it your way, now it’s my turn.” Korinna marched back to the bars and inspected them before turning back to Nikeros and pointing to a lock. “You can turn into animals, right?”
He nodded, quiet fear on his face.
“Okay, well pick something small like a bug or whatever, slip through these bars, and go find the damn key.”
“May I suggest something?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Maybe.”
“Will you give your word that you will not be angry?”
She felt her eyes narrow even more than she thought possible. “No.”
He crossed his arms.
“Fine, I won’t get mad.”
“Your word?”
“I promise! Just do something!”
Nikeros walked up to the bars and laid a hand on them. He gave them a little push, and the door swung open.
Korinna’s face fell, she looked from the demigod to the no-longer-encapsulating-her door then back again, “I—”
“You gave your word!” He pointed at her, reading the redness she could feel rising in her face.
Korinna squeezed her fists, shook her head, and walked past him and out the door. “Un-fucking-believable.”
Nikeros looked utterly pleased with himself. “Thank you.”
CHAPTER XI
“The god of all the wars in all of Gaia, and he can’t spring for a slightly nicer cave to try and kill off his rival?” Korinna’s foot, still bare, slipped down a rock and splashed into a pool of green, brackish water.
“It is not ambiance Ares is concerned with, but danger.” Nikeros helped her steady herself. “Theatrics come during battle, not before. Consider yourself backstage.”
The place was a mess of darkened tunnels that all looked exactly the same. The two had been walking a long time with no destination and no idea from where they’d come, but they happened upon enough incidentals (a skeleton in dented armor, a pool of glowing crustaceans, a ransacked chest from which Korinna shrewdly swiped the last two coins) to know they weren’t going in complete circles. Though the cave was very dark and there seemed to be no immediate way up and out, they could hear water crashing from somewhere beyond the walls, and the pathways had become damp with broad puddles forming in the deeper wells of the ground. It smelled of must and seawater and didn’t seem like the sort of place that Korinna thought any god would hang out.
But Korinna had yet to meet a true god.
“When do you think Dumb-os and Phuck-up will notice we’re gone?”
Nikeros snorted, “Oh, it will likely be some time. They are not particularly bright.”
Korinna watched him step up to a fork in the tunnel system. He seemed to be contemplating which way, but she simply walked past him, following her gut to the right. “So, I have to ask, how’d you get out of the cell?”
“It was designed to hold a mortal, not a demigod, and Deimos, Phobos, and I are all of fairly equal power thanks to our shared mother.”
“You mean to tell me those guys are Aphrodite’s kids too?” When he nodded, she screwed up her face, and he asked why she seemed so surprised.
She looked at him like he was an idiot, which he clearly was. Here he stood before her, handsome, strapping, and clearly taking after the goddess of love and beauty, and those other two were, well, not. But the thought alone of saying that to him made her start to sweat. “They must just have a lot of Ares in them.”
“They do take after their father, but the marriage of war and love would produce fear and dread.”
Korinna thought on this as they continued on. The demigods who had brought her here, though she was angry at them, were only doing as they were told, and their existence seemed less than desirable (she certainly wouldn’t have picked it over her own, and she was actively trying to not be thrown in a pit). An odd feeling came over her then, swimming heavily in her belly and making her feel like her nicknames for them weren’t so clever after all. “Hey, so there are other Erotes, right?”
“Of course,” he told her without looking away from the corner they were coming upon, “We are many-numbered, as I have said.”
“So who’s your dad then? Because if—”
“Shh!” Nikeros suddenly threw his arm out, covering her mouth. She smacked his hand away, but then she heard it too, the padding of feet somewhere within the labyrinth. The steps were quick and wet, difficult to place, and didn’t sound like Phobos or Deimos approaching.
“What is it?” she asked, sidling closer to the demigod.
“I do not know.” He took a few steps forward, and she followed closely. The sounds fell away from around them. “We should continue on.”
Quickly and quietly, the two scurried down the tunnels until they spilled out into a larger chamber. The room was rounded on its sides, carved with a more purposeful hand, and lit by a pit of fire in its center. Many tunnels led off of it, and this gave them pause, listening hard, though the steps could not be heard again.
“Which one?” Korinna asked.
He shrugged. “This is your escape plan, is it not?”
She grunted then stood tall. “Fine.” As she took another step into the room’s center, the sounds began again, only this time, it was apparent from where they came.
From behind them, there was a great scuffling, splashing through the puddles that the two had avoided in their quiet attempt to escape. They turned to see an enormous shape barreling down the tunnel on all fours from the shadows, and though she couldn’t make out exactly what it was, Korinna fled in the opposite direction.
Nikeros was on her heels as they rounded the massive fire pit, but they were again stopped by the shape of something animalistic coming at them from another tunnel. Before they could change course, the things burst into the chamber, though their smell, swampy and pungent, proceeded them. With maws the size of a horse’s, but teeth as sharp as any predator, the dogs would have stood above Korinna if their backs were not arched and heads dipped in preparation to pounce. One at their front and another at their back, both Korinna and Nikeros froze, fear that any movement would call them to attack.
“I have never seen a dog that looks like that,” Korinna whispered out the side
of her mouth so that she even kept her lips still. They were black of coat entirely, smooth and shimmering like onyx, their jaws crimson and slick with saliva. Emanating from two hollows on each side of their skulls was a thick black smoke where their eyes should have been but instead were only black caverns. The cave reverberated with resonant growls.
“War hounds,”—Nikeros swallowed hard—“Loyal servants of Ares.”
One of the hounds took careful paces toward them until it was inches away. Its head was leveled at the two, the vibration in the back of its throat sending shivers through Korinna’s body. She watched it dip its nose toward her and sniff twice, hot breath blowing her hair off her shoulders.
She held perfectly still as it blinked and shifted to Nikeros. It sniffled him as well, and he began to chuckle. The hound’s growl caught in its throat, and its ears pointed forward sharply. Oh, gods, this idiot is going to get us eaten, Korinna thought, as she silently watched him raise a hand toward the hound’s snout.
And then, he was petting it, slowly at first, gentle strokes up his muzzle, and then more aggressive scritches behind its ear. The dog’s tongue lolled out of its mouth, and it dropped down onto the ground and nuzzled the demigod as he took up both of its ears and jostled its head. “What an excellent hound!” he proclaimed, “Is that what you are? Are you just an excellent hound? Yes! You are!”
Korinna’s jaw hung open, her mind a daze of fear and exhaustion, and then a warm, wet, stickiness trailed up the back of her arm, and she turned to see the second war hound towering over her with something like a grin, waiting to be pet.
“There they are!” Either Deimos or Phobos’s quavering voice came from the far side of the chamber, and a heavily armed guard stomped out of a tunnel and toward the two, barking orders at the dogs who whimpered and stepped back.
In no place to resist, Korinna and Nikeros were led at spear point down one of the tunnels and into another chamber, a wholly different place from the rest of the cave. Golden swaths of fabric layered over scarlet and black sheets cascaded down from the chamber’s center, lining the stone walls. A set of guards stood at the entrance and stopped them with their own weapons. Sandwiched between two sets of spears, they looked from one to the other. Finally, the entrance guard snarled, “Stand here, say nothing, and wait your turn.”
The Korinniad Page 6