“Are you hard of hearing? I just told you—”
“You certainly did,” she said, looking at the vast room and the indigo cloth draped from the rafters. “You’ve dyed your crimson darkly, I see. No. Abandoned it, I should say.”
“You abandoned me! You told me to make my choice and—”
“And I ask that of you again. To make a choice.”
“To acquiesce,” she spat out. “To acquiesce to my daughter’s rape!”
Hecate shook her head patiently. “She is Kore no more, but Persephone would not color it thus, nor do I.”
“Get out!”
Hecate ignored Demeter and slowly strolled around the room, pausing at the tapestries of the House of Celeus, as though she were admiring their handiwork. “Your roots have taken a firm hold here. The Queen of the Earth, they call you. It would be a shame, Demeter Anesidora,” Hecate said, raising her voice almost imperceptibly, “if you were to find the pathway to the rest of the earth choked with thorny brambles. How sad and limited is the existence of the local, rustic god. How long, do you think, before the Eleusinians realize that?”
“You wouldn’t dare…”
Hecate stood still, staring placidly at Demeter. Both knew that it could be done. The white witch held dominion over the ether, and could bar Demeter from traveling that path if she willed it. She smiled at her former student and offered the torch again. “Walk with me.”
It was more command than request. Demeter roughly grabbed the torch from Hecate’s hand. The goddesses made their way to the back of the palace and stepped through the doorway onto the portico. The small garden below was alive, the last place outdoors that grew any food, mercifully shielded from the wind by the amphitheatre of the hills above and shielded from Demeter’s wrath by her protection of this village. But the fertile rows of wheat, barley and millet were not Hecate’s destination.
“Do you feel it? The cold?”
Demeter didn’t answer.
“I thought not. Propitiations come to you now like ants to spilled honey. I would be surprised if any sensation could touch you.”
“Why have you come here, Hecate? Why pull me out into the snow?”
“To show you your daughter.”
“Kore…” She stiffened. “Did you bring—”
Hecate’s silent glare stopped her. She motioned for Demeter to follow her. The hillside was steep, the northern wind growing stronger the higher they climbed. The torches smoldered orange, the barest blue flame flickering at Hecate’s bidding.
Demeter recalled the last time Hecate had led her uphill by the light of a long torch, both of them stumbling up a rocky path at twilight to the heights of Olympus. She remembered the low fire Hestia had created with pine, cypress, and oak, shielding any light that might alert their enemies on Mount Othrys of their presence. Hera had nervously looked about and braided a peacock feather into her rich brown tresses. Poseidon had argued tactics with Zeus by the fire. Aidoneus had sat apart from the rest, looking out over Thessaly, blood dried onto the sword he always wore strapped to his back. Some of the rebelling Titans came as well— Tethys, with the split nautilus she would always wear around her neck, and Metis, who had dutifully recorded all with her stylus on the clay tablet that never left her arms. The clever trickster Prometheus and his hot-tempered brother Epimetheus were there that night.
The night she conceived Kore.
Demeter followed Hecate up the hill, the waxing moon lighting the wide bay and mountains. She heard a groan coming from the south, and for the first time saw blocks of ice scattered across the water, cracking and grinding against each other, the sea rolling beneath them. She pursed her lips. It served Poseidon right for how cruelly he’d mocked her.
“What do you see?”
“Eleusis and the sea,” Demeter said, frustrated, the wind biting through her clothes.
“Look again. Northward.”
“Hills. You said you would show me my daughter! Where is she?”
“You glance with you eyes. Look. As I taught you how to look.”
Demeter scowled, then acceded, closing her eyes and facing north, the wind whipping the veil back from her diadem. North, across the hills and beyond. And further still, until the north abruptly stopped, replaced by a great blanket of ice, fathoms higher than mountaintops, crushing all in its path.
“Now do you see? How it crawls closer? The wall of ice descends from Hyperborea. It’s not far; it has advanced even further from its icy den than when your father wore his crown.”
“What has this to do with me?”
“Everything.”
“None of this is my—”
“Everything,” Hecate repeated. “The world dies beneath the ice, and the mortals will die before then, and the gods themselves end if you don’t stop this, Demeter. The frozen maw that swallows mountains will not spare your worshippers. More ice rises from below the Heliades, a southern beast no less ravenous. And when they meet, it will end us all. But we will not see that day, for before it dawns, the chains of the new order that bind the Titans to Tartarus will be broken, and all we have made will be undone. Worse than undone. Every tree we grew from a seed will be uprooted, shattered, burned, the ashes scattered and the ground salted. What they will do to your daughter, the Queen—”
“This is Hades’s fault!” she snapped. “If he hadn’t stolen Kore—”
“You swore on the Styx, Demeter. Long ago. There was no theft, no violation, and they are husband and wife now. Children separate from their mothers. They find their mates. It is the way it has always been done. So will it always be.”
“Oh yes, Hecate, her mate, surely,” Demeter scoffed. “Which is why he had to burst out of the earth and drag her screaming into the depths. I spoke to Helios! He saw it happen.”
Hecate’s serene, placid gaze jarred for a moment, her lips set firmly. “You know better than I what inspired that haste. You know what bitter fruits his complacency would have borne.”
Demeter paled, preparing to deny it, then realized it would be futile. “I… I could have never gone through with it. I would have found something temporary. Something—” Her eyes stung.
“Something that would still allow you to break the sacred oath you swore on the Mother River?”
She turned away from her former priestess, tears blurring her vision, freezing on her cheek in the wind. “It was different, then. I made that oath when I thought my daughter would grow up to at least be the queen of the earth or the seas, if not Queen of Heaven. I didn’t make it to condemn her to the grave!”
“That was never for you to decide; the Fates wove that pattern. And now your whim is to heave us into peril once again.”
“You told me to make a choice, and I made it.”
“Careless planting delivers a poor harvest.”
“What do you mean? We won the war. I did my duty. You didn’t approve of my choices and you abandoned me to utter powerlessness and ruin after that night.”
“We took the field that day. But we lost the war. Our king who now sits Olympus follows his father’s crooked road more closely than most would admit, and he allows those same scales that tipped during the rule of the Tyrant to lean further askew. You remember my lessons: its imbalance will one day finish us all. Now little more than an aeon remains.”
“The future is not fixed. You, Gaia, Nyx… none of you know that for certain.”
“Look around you, Goddess of the Fruitful Earth. Look and see. Many more women than men make their new homes on Other Side. Though wars end many young men, more and yet more women die at their husband’s hands, and are met by infant girls left to the elements, while those still alive are kept in ignorance and slavery. Worse awaits those who choose otherwise. Half a century ago, an Athenian woman practiced my ways, as mortals may: she midwifed and used herbs. First came the ugly rumors, then they called her a witch, and then they stoned her. Then they stoned her friends, and they stoned her young sister. Then the mob turned on her sickly mother
, and drove her into the wilderness.”
“So what if a few of your worshippers died? You’re not alone in this. All mortals die.”
“Is it to be that every woman who refuses to marry, or who wishes to learn, who has the sight, who has a free spirit and a free heart should be put to death? That is where our guiding star leads. The hieros gamos that night on Olympus was bound to the decision of the Fates. Your tyrant father threw the cosmos into peril, and you were one of the instruments by which the balance could be restored. You knew your duties and knew how the Fates had called upon you.”
“I chose the man I loved! The right man to rule the gods.”
“Bad planting, bad fruits. I say now as then, you chose poorly. Ruled only by passion. And see where you lie now. Hmm? Is he yours still?”
“So you disowned me, abandoned me, because I chose differently? I did everything you asked of me! Your words to me that night were to ‘listen to my heart and let it make my choice for me.’”
“Would that I could have spoken more carefully.”
“You once called me daughter and yet you left me alone in this world— wholly reliant on Zeus while I grew with child. You would not speak with me, Gaia would not help me, what would you have had me do?!”
“If you had made the choice I laid out for you…”
Demeter looked away in disgust.
“…You would be Queen of Heaven even now. And he, according to his birthright—”
“I could just as soon have fallen in love with a stone!” Demeter yelled over the wind. It howled past them, the sea shimmering with new ice.
“Love was not my request. I offered you a way to sway the will of the Fates, asked you to do that for all of us. Love would have come in time.”
“Why him? Why has he been your obsession all these aeons?” Tears clouded her eyes and for a moment she was back on Olympus the morning after the hieros gamos. Hecate’s voice filled Demeter with guilt; the new and pleasant ache between her legs turning painful, shameful at her words. “What is your sick fascination with him, Hecate? Aidon was always, always your favorite! I sacrificed everything to be your acolyte and you still loved him more! I wonder sometimes, priestess, why you never broke your vows of chastity to have him for yourself!”
“Because he is my son.” Hecate glared at her, her voice trembling. “We share no blood, certainly, but our spirits are true kin.”
Demeter rolled her eyes. “Why did you even take a vow of chastity to begin with? You have tried in vain your whole life to create your own twisted version of a real family. To mother children you can’t possibly have…”
She ignored the slight. It was a different time at the beginning of Kronos’s reign: take the vow or be forced into a marriage— or worse— to one of the Titans. “Though you see Aidoneus as a crude and ugly statue, your daughter has found warmth behind his stony visage.” Demeter looked up at this, her eyes wide. Hecate smiled knowingly. “Is it impossible for you to believe that she has fallen in love with him?”
“You lie,” Demeter said quietly. “I know my own daughter. In all the cosmos there is no one more opposite her than Hades.”
“Perhaps that is their greatest strength.” Hecate smiled for a moment. “I told you I would show her to you, did I not?”
Demeter clenched her jaw shut. “Where is she?”
Hecate pulled a single bead of selenite from her hair and held it up. It shone in the light of the waxing moon, taking on a glow of its own as Hecate took her hand away. The bead sat suspended in mid air, then flattened and expanded. A perfect reflection of the two goddesses appeared on either side of it before their visages faded in ripples of silver and crimson. A window through the ether was created in their wake. A scrying mirror.
“Ask of it,” Hecate said. “In the way I taught you. Tell it what you desire to see, so you may have no doubt of what it has to show you. So you know this is not one of my witch’s tricks.”
Demeter closed her eyes and thought about her lost daughter. When she opened them, she saw her Kore’s face up close, a large male hand covering her eyes. Kore’s lips were parted. She hadn’t seen her daughter in almost two months. Demeter sputtered a short cry, her eyes burning. She wished she could reach through the mirror and pull her girl back into the land of the living, or let her know that it was all right, that she was doing all she could to rescue her from the grave, even if it took letting Zeus’s worshippers die of starvation until the King of the Gods acted.
Hades’s fingers wrapped around Kore’s eyes, blinding her, pinioning her back against him. Demeter took a sharp breath as she saw the Dark Lord’s lips whispering close to her daughter’s ear, words she couldn’t distinguish, the mirror silent. Hesitantly, she willed the scene to pull back so she could see more. Black marble and malachite. Though she’d never visited, she guessed that they were in his dreary palace. Kore was clothed in a long white peplos, its borders burgundy. Heavy jewels adorned her neck and the fibulae that held up her dress.
His other hand gripped her arm, leading her forward, blind. What was he doing with her? She felt angry bile well up in her throat as two of his fingers unwound from Persephone’s arm and deliberately brushed against the side of her breast. They walked forward together. Her daughter said something that looked like ‘where are we?’, but the image wavered, and Demeter couldn’t be sure. Hades’s mouth twisted upward unnaturally and he lifted his hands, taking a step back. Kore blinked a few times before her eyes grew wide and she drew in a sharp breath, startling Demeter.
She watched her daughter run from his side and bound up the stairs of a dais. Hades stood back and admired her, watching her reaction. Was he smiling? Her daughter ran her hands along the arm of a wrought iron throne, airy filigree in the shape of hundreds of hateful asphodel, equal in height and stature to the austere ebony throne beside it. She sat down and looked back at Hades, kicking her feet underneath her like a child on a swing. Persephone stood up and ran back toward him, then jumped from the second step, throwing her arms and legs around Aidoneus and nearly knocking him off his feet. His face was almost as shocked as Demeter’s, but while she fumed, Aidon’s mouth turned up into a surprised smile and his hands came up to hold her.
She watched her daughter kiss him, and saw his eyes close as he brought her deeper into their kiss. He pulled back and wrapped his arms around her shoulders, twirling her around, her legs flying out away from where he spun her. Was he laughing? Aidon was laughing. Kore was laughing with him. Hades carried her back up the steps; her limbs still awkwardly wrapped around him, and plunked her down on her throne. He took his seat beside her, and they both leaned over to kiss once more. Persephone whispered something in his ear that made his eyes widen before he turned toward her with a surprised, then lascivious grin. He slowly rose, and she rose with him. He pulled her into his embrace, both standing on the wide dais holding each other, their mouths heatedly locked together, his hands everywhere on her, her hands trailing down his chest and stomach, reaching for…
“Enough!” Demeter cried. The scrying mirror broke into thousands of pieces, showering down between her and Hecate, the glittering fragments lost in the snow.
“Your own eyes tell you—”
“Lies!” Demeter shouted. “That was no Aidoneus I have ever seen!”
“No, indeed,” Hecate said with a smile. “A rather good thing, wouldn’t you agree?”
“You conjured that vision. I knew him better than any of the other Olympians. That was not him!”
“I no more conjured it than you conjured the walls of ice. You know this.”
“If the sorcery isn’t yours, then it’s his! He has trapped her down there so long that the smallest kindness, the tiniest grain of affection would draw her into his arms. He abducted and raped her; he convinced her that she is bound to him as wife and that he loves her. Once she finally gave in and accepted his prison fantasy, even the tiniest grain of tenderness he could muster would convince her to do anything he wanted!”
&nbs
p; Hecate stood silently and listened. Please let this be the end of your grief, she prayed. Please, kindly Fates, great Chaos, lead her into acceptance. Please…
“And maybe, just maybe, the pure goodness that radiates from Kore was enough to soften him ever so slightly. But if you expect me to believe that he has become smiling and gentle after such a short time, you must think me the greatest of fools. We’re the deathless ones. We’re aeons old, teacher, and we don’t change for anything. I know Aidoneus. I know him far better than you do— than you ever will. You forget, priestess, that I was imprisoned with him inside Kronos for aeons, and Aidon is, through and through, his father’s son!”
“He loves her and she loves him. Please see what is so plainly in front of your eyes, Demeter.”
“Hades isn’t capable of love; he never has been, he never will be. He only knows violence and death! He’s a blood-soaked murderer who reveled in exacting his vengeance on anyone in the way of his sword. Don’t you remember? He came back every night covered in gore, invigorated by the killing. Zeus and Poseidon didn’t!”
“He bloodied his sword so that we might survive. He did it for all of us. And for you in particular.”
“No. He enjoyed it. During the war, Hestia and I were cornered by a demon of Echidna, and Hades came to our aid. He appeared out of the ether before us and skewered its head on his blade, killing it instantly. But oh no, that wasn’t enough for him. He hacked away at it even after it was dead, yelling as he did, stroke after stroke, spattering us with fetid blood, with this look in his eyes. And when the Keres came and wrested the demon’s spirit away to Tartarus, Aidoneus smiled. It was the one time I ever saw him do so. And thanks to you, Hecate, he has… has corrupted… and destroyed my daughter,” she said, shaking. Demeter turned away, her last words sputtered through tears.
She wouldn’t let Hecate see them. But the Goddess of the Crossroads felt them. Anyone could. She let Demeter cry, then took a step forward and placed a hand on her back. “Child…”
Demeter turned to her, tears wet on her reddened cheeks.
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