The Girl in the Green Silk Gown

by Seanan McGuire

  Three thick pink tongues loll. Cerberus sits down, snakes tangling together in what I can only interpret as amusement, tail—which is naturally another snake, this one as big around as my thigh—waving merrily. I am being laughed at by a dog the size of a bear.

  “Didn’t think so,” I say, and grin. “Thank you.”

  I step forward. I’m immediately stopped as a dog head the size of a boulder slams into my chest. The impact is enough to knock me back a few feet, but it isn’t bruising, isn’t painful; this isn’t an attack. This is . . .

  Understanding dawns. “You want me to scratch behind your ears, don’t you?”

  Cerberus pants agreement.

  “I guess every road has its toll,” I say, and start scratching.

  Three dog heads means three sets of ears, and each of them is larger than my palm. The smell of the beast is overwhelming, like the biggest mastiff in the world crossed with some sort of ridiculously filthy hog. The snakes get in on the action, hissing and twining around my wrists, making me cringe even as I keep on scratching. They don’t bite, don’t even open their mouths, and their tongues tickle as they brush against my skin, testing me, tasting me.

  If I ever wind up in this Underworld for real, one of the dead this great dog guards against, I won’t be sneaking out through this gate. The snakes are too aware of what I taste like, the dog is too aware of my scent. I am locking this door forever in order to get through it now. I don’t care. I have no intention of winding up in this particular afterlife ever again.

  Cerberus allows his tongues to loll, finally flopping onto his side and exposing the vast expanse of his belly. He can’t roll onto his back, not without crushing the snakes. I start scratching.

  “Laura, come on,” I call, as loudly as I dare. I don’t want to hurt Cerberus’s ears. Not considering the potential consequences. “We need to keep moving.”

  “What are you doing?” she asks.

  “Paying our toll.” The fur isn’t as rough as I would have expected. I scratch, and the dog’s back leg kicks in canine ecstasy, and I can almost forget how bizarre this all is. Only almost. Nothing will take the scent of asphodel out of the air, or stop the sound of hissing.

  Footsteps mark Laura’s approach, until she’s standing somewhere behind me. Still, I don’t turn. This is not where I lose everything. I refuse to let this be where I lose everything.

  “Keep walking,” I say. “Get through the door. I’ll be right behind you.” Cerberus’s back leg is kicking lazily, in the way of utterly contented dogs.

  “What if he attacks you?”

  “Then he attacks me.” I keep scratching. “Go, Laura. This isn’t going to last forever.”

  Softly, so softly that I’m barely sure I hear what I hear, she mutters, “Damn you, Rose Marshall.” Her footsteps move away. One of the big dog’s heads lifts, ears cocked, and looks after her. He doesn’t otherwise move.

  “Did she go through?” I ask. “Can I follow her?”

  Cerberus whines, and another head lifts, this one running its vast pink tongue along my cheek. Drool drips down the line of my neck. I want to wipe it off, possibly taking a layer or two of skin with it. I also don’t want to offend the giant guardian dog. So I force a smile and pat Cerberus on each of his heads in turn.

  “Good dog,” I say. “Here’s hoping we never meet again, because I don’t think we’ll be friends when I’m a ghost.”

  Cerberus whines soft agreement. I push to my feet and follow Laura through the archway.

  She grabs me as soon as I’m past the threshold, digging her fingers into my arms and giving me a short, sharp shake. It feels like my teeth rattle in their sockets, shifting like bones in an earthquake.

  “Hey!” I pull away, glaring at her as I finally wipe the drool from my cheek. “What’s the big deal?”

  “You’re asking me that? You’re the one who decided to run off and pet the dog from Hell! Literally!” The fury in her eyes could ignite paper.

  “This isn’t Hell,” I say. “This is the Grecian Underworld. You know that better than I do. And while we’re slinging blame, you’re the one who told me he was here to stop ghosts from getting out, but didn’t stop to ask whether that also meant he would stop the living from getting in. I did what you said was safe.”

  “I didn’t know I was saying that.”

  “Now you do. Hooray for knowledge.” I glare for a moment more before I let it go and look around our new surroundings.

  We are in a cavern, even bigger than the one where Cerberus stands eternal guard, and the floor is carpeted entirely in asphodel flowers, so that every time we move, we crush them and fill the air with their perfume. New flowers sprout to replace the crushed ones, an eternally self-renewing ecosystem of impossible beauty. I feel like Dorothy standing in the poppy fields of Oz, except that I’m not falling asleep.

  There are three doors on the far side of the cavern. I frown.

  “Which one?” I ask.

  “Where do you want to go?” Laura sounds weary beyond all words. “The left will take us to the Asphodel Meadows, the land of the peaceful, unremarkable dead. We’d never truly join them if we stayed here—wouldn’t age, wouldn’t die—but we could be happy there for as long as we wanted to be. It’s not where the heroes go. It’s not where the villains go, either. It’s just peace, forever, peace and flowers and the kind comforts Hades can offer to his subjects.”

  “But it’s not home,” I say.

  “The right will take us to the River Lethe,” says Laura, as if I hadn’t spoken. “That’s where you get the waters of forgetfulness. I always thought they were a metaphor, but we just met the actual Cerberus, so I guess they’re probably real. You could forget it all, if you wanted to. You could be an ordinary teenage girl. You could start over, completely clean, and see who you grew up to be.”

  It would be another form of suicide if I did that. I know it, and she knows it, and she’s suggesting it anyway, because apparently killing everything I’ve ever been—killing my heart, killing my memories, killing the pieces of the story that no one knows except for me—is less terrible to her than killing one fragile little body that was supposed to have died more than sixty years ago. It’s such a predictable, pedestrian, living way of looking at things that I laugh before I can think better of it, a short, sharp bark of a sound that hangs in the air like an accusation.

  “I don’t think so,” I say. “That leaves us with the middle.” And I start walking.

  The asphodel flowers slow me down. It’s like wading through the wheat in spring, back when I had to walk from our house to school every morning. We weren’t supposed to cut across the fields, since none of us could afford to pay for any crops we might happen to spoil, but we all did it anyway. The sun on our backs and the wheat tangling around our knees, and that was the smell of summer coming on, that was the feeling of the world set right.

  The asphodel smells nothing like wheat. It comforts me all the same. I am setting the world right, one step at a time. I am going to find my way home. I am going to beat this.

  The door looms large in front of me.

  I step through.

  Chapter 20

  Everything Changes

  ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ARCH is a garden Morticia Addams would be proud to call her own. Twisting magnolia and olive trees provide a canopy, branches draped with glittering moss that seems to hold every star in the sky. The ground is covered with a thousand types of night-blooming flower, some burning red, others glowing the palest blue, and everywhere there is asphodel. Everywhere.

  Pomegranate and fig and almond trees dot the glade, their branches putting forth fruit in sweet profusion. It makes my mouth water. I know a single bite of a single fig would be so delicious that it would put everything else I have ever tasted to shame. I know it, and my hand is halfway raised to pluck one before I remember Apple’s warning. />
  Eat nothing. Drink nothing. Break either of those rules, and I may not make it home.

  “Half these plants aren’t native to Greece,” says Laura, stepping up next to me. “I don’t think half of them are native to anywhere. These flowers shouldn’t exist.”

  “When your mother is the Goddess of the Harvest, you can plant whatever you like,” says a voice. It is sweet as honey. It is bitter as cyanide. It is both those things, and it is everything in-between, the whiskey burn, the soothing wine. I would die for that voice. I would kill for that voice. It’s very likely I would do anything that voice asked me to, no matter how terrible, and think myself lucky to be allowed to serve her.

  I don’t need to turn, don’t need to see her to know that I am in the presence of Persephone, bringer of the spring, Queen of the Underworld, whose grace is spread across my back in ink and incantation. She’s so close that I can smell her perfume. She smells of sun-ripened wheat, of pomegranate molasses, of asphodel. Always asphodel.

  Closing my eyes would feel like an insult. Looking at her would feel like a betrayal. I stay where I am, frozen, and say the only thing I can think of.

  “Hi.”

  Her laughter is church bells for a funeral and silver bells for a wedding at the same time. “Hello to you as well, Rose Marshall.”

  Why does everyone know my full name? It’s a mystery I may never see solved, and I don’t like it.

  Lightly, she touches my shoulder. I shiver. “I heard you were faithless. That you tried to wash your bonds to me away. I don’t care for being dismissed, Rose. Not even by so fair a flower as you present yourself to be. Why have you come here, and in company of a living woman who has always been such? Don’t you have what you wanted, back in flesh and bone and free to roam the world until you meet your reckoning again?”

  “I wasn’t faithless, ma’am.” I wince a little as the last word leaves my lips. If Persephone doesn’t like it, I’m in trouble.

  She laughs again. “Weren’t you? An innocent bled to bar you from me.”

  “She was talked into her own death by Bobby Cross, to take your protection away from me. He hates that you have the power to keep me safe. He wanted to prevent it. So he did.”

  “How, exactly, does that lead us here? To you in skin and standing in my garden?”

  “I went to the Halloween rites to wash the blood away. Somehow, he knew I’d have to do that, and he arranged to have me removed from the normal progression of time.”

  “Midnight came and midnight went, and you were left among the living.” Persephone sounds thoughtful. I hear her move behind me, coming closer to Laura, and I ache for her proximity, even as I allow myself to breathe in relief that she isn’t touching me anymore.

  To be a mortal among the gods is to walk in constant contradiction. I much prefer the Ocean Lady. At least she has the decency to spend most of her time inanimate.

  “And you, living woman, what brings you to my garden? Why have you chosen to escort one of my lost seeds back to her grove? Rose is sworn to me. You aren’t. You don’t have to be here.”

  “Rose asked.” Laura’s voice is strained and squeaky. I feel a pang of sympathy. She has even less experience with this sort of thing than I do.

  “Do you always do what Rose asks?”

  “I felt . . . it happened so fast. First she needed a ride, and then she needed help, and then I was standing on a highway that doesn’t exist anymore, promising a little girl who ran away from an internment camp that I would help Rose rejoin the dead without dying. This seemed like the only way. I just got swept up.”

  Hands clamp down on my shoulders, too big to belong to Persephone, the fingers finding their place in the hollows of my collarbones. I squeak. I do not pull away.

  Tone mild, voice the same collage of contradictions as his wife’s, Hades asks, “What, then, brings you here, to us, so far from the world in which you walk? Our mysteries are old and tired. We have no great gifts to offer you, nor monsters for a hero to slay.” He pauses, sniffs, and adds with some amusement, “Although I can tell from the scent of you that you’ve already met my dog.”

  “He’s a very good dog,” I say, and my voice only shakes a little. The God of the Dead himself is holding my shoulders, and I’m not running screaming into the grove. “We’re here because we want you to agree to let us go.”

  “Why would we—ah.” Hades tightens his hands, holding me fast. His skin is so cold. It’s like being held by a statue. I shiver, swallowing a wave of nausea as he says, “You want to play Eurydice. Little girl who is and is not of the dead, why would you want this? You have skin. You have bone. You have the freedom of all the wide world.”

  “But I don’t have the twilight. I don’t have the ghostroads. I don’t have my home. I’m not going to lie and say dying was the best thing that ever happened to me, or that I wouldn’t have been thrilled by a resurrection—once. If it had happened in the first ten years, maybe. Now? I’ve been dead for so long that I don’t know what it means to be alive, and I don’t particularly want to learn. I have people in the twilight who need me, and people in the daylight who’ve spent their whole lives being told that if they get in a bad enough accident, if they get lost enough, I’ll come and find them and help them make it to where they need to go. I can’t do that when I’m like this.” I look at my hands. My pale, physical, human hands. “I didn’t ask for this. I wasn’t faithless. I don’t want to live a mortal life and lose everything, again, because of Bobby Cross. This is the second time he’s yanked me out of the world I know and thrown me into something I’m not equipped for, but this time there’s a chance I can make things right, and I’m going to take it.”

  “Look at me,” says Persephone softly.

  I raise my head. I look.

  She is beautiful. That’s all I can really say about her, because her face is like her voice, shifting constantly, refusing to allow my eyes the luxury of focus. It’s exhausting to look upon a god. I never want to do it again. I never want it to stop.

  “You have been given a gift that few in this time enjoy, that the original Eurydice still weeps for,” says Persephone. I do my best to focus on her words, to shut out the painful shifting of her face. “Are you sure you wish to discard it so quickly?”

  “Life and death aren’t gifts unless you want them,” I say. “Both times my world has changed, it’s been because Bobby Cross thought he had the right to decide what I was going to be. Being alive here and now, in this time, doesn’t give me back the life I lost. It just isolates me from my friends and alienates me from my allies, and makes me even more of a target for Bobby than I already was, because now I can’t get away from him if he comes after me. Laura has her own life to get back to. She’s not going to be able to babysit me forever. Please forgive me if I’m offending you in some way by rejecting this thing I never asked for, but any gift that makes me and the people I love so miserable is no gift at all. It’s a burden. I want to put it down.”

  “Tell me, then, exactly why you are here.”

  There’s a command in her voice that I couldn’t ignore if I tried, and so I don’t try. It’s almost a relief to let myself speak the complete truth, with no concern that I’ll be judged for it. “I know a beán sidhe. Her name is Emma. She reminded me of what Orpheus did, how he went into the Underworld to lead his lost lover out, and how the agreement was that if he could wait until they were both on living ground before he looked at her, she would be saved, alive and his for all her mortal days, but if he looked back too soon, she would be lost to the dead forever.”

  “Simplistic, but close enough to true,” says Hades, his hands still resting on my shoulders.

  I suppress another shudder. The last thing I want to do right now is insult them. “Laura is willing to be my Orpheus. We’ve come to you to ask you to let us go. To let us walk the road Orpheus and Eurydice walked.”

  “Al
l so she can look back too soon?”

  There’s a trap there. I hesitate. “Orpheus looked back when he was in the world of the living and she was still in the land of the dead,” I say. “That’s what we’re going to do, too.”

  Persephone smiles. Some of the terrible shifting slides away from her face. I still couldn’t tell you what she looks like if I tried, but I can see now that she is kind as well as beautiful. We live in a world where the gods can still be kind.

  I never thought about what a relief that would be.

  “It was a good bargain for Orpheus, who loved her, who was trying to bring her back to his side, but not, I think, for you; not when you seek to shed your skin like a snake and slither back into the den that sheltered you.” She touches my cheek, lightly, with fingers like flower petals. “You want the first death you enjoyed, the one that set you on the roads, not whatever second death might wait for you ahead. That’s the real reason you’ve come to us, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I whisper.

  “Dear?” She raises her eyes to Hades. “What say you?”

  There is a long pause, long as a winter, long as a lie, before Hades says, “There are secrets here you do not know, and still I say I’ll let you go. I will let you walk the long, cold road between here and the surface. The woman Laura Moorhead will walk in front, and the girl Rose Marshall will walk behind. If the woman can make it to the world of the living before she looks back, she’ll be free of our domain. But if she looks back while still in the lands of the dead, the woman’s life will be forfeit, while the girl’s will continue.”

  Laura gasps. I can’t blame her. If she looks back too soon, we both lose. She, her life; me, my death.

  “If the woman waits too long, allows the girl to follow her back to the world of the living, both will live. But if she pauses as Orpheus did, at the entryway, when she is among the living and the girl is among the dead, then the girl will be restored to what she was before her resurrection, and none shall carry claim against her that she has not accepted of her own free will.” Hades pauses. “Do you agree?”