Page 14 of This Divine Revelry

You cannot make empty threats to a man like my father.

You cannot keep your enemy’s daughter alive when backed into a corner.

You cannot marry her in the hope of bartering for peace when the tyrant king makes clear he’d rather she were dead than allow you even a moment of it.

But you also cannot kill someone owed your hospitality without incurring the wrath of the gods. If that boat is Theseus’s, my best chance is to make myself a guest of it.

I push against the rough wooden boardwalk and scramble up the plank. Theseus races behind me, as an arrow snips the ocean below.

I shriek as another whistles through the air, a breath from my face, and only years’ worth of light footwork grant me balance.

Archers? Soldiers?

We left when the party still raged. And even if Daedalus alerted the guards, how could Father assemble an army to get here just as we did? No, you’d have to know it was going to happen ahead of time. You’d have to piece things together.

My gaze falls to Phaedra – her jaw set.

My sister betrayed us.

There’s only one reason she would even be here right now – and it is treachery. Or, rather, loyalty to the man who ordered so much bloodshed.

Pain sears across my shoulder. I scream, stumble – nearly fall into the ocean but Theseus’s hands clasp about my waist, holding me firmly in place.

He leaps to overtake me, clinging to the edge of the boat and reaching for my hand once more. ‘Come,’ he says. ‘Do not die while I owe you a life debt.’

I don’t even think; I clasp his forearm as he clutches at mine, then his other hand grasps my waist once more – right where the fabric is cut, his skin against my own – and he lifts, hauling me on to the deck.

He kicks the plank away just as the first guards reach it.

‘Father!’ Theseus calls. ‘A little help?’

The boat beneath me surges. I’m flung back, wheezing as I collide with the edge of the ship. The wind snaps, and I clamber up enough to see Knossos shrinking – that wave hurling us quicker than I can comprehend.

Father.

I look to Theseus, standing at the edge of the boat, silhouetted by the angry lights of my home.

‘You’re …’

‘A son of Poseidon,’ he says, cocky grin falling into place. ‘Turns out, he’s still rather resentful of the King of Crete.’

CHAPTER SIX

IHALF EXPECT THE ATHENIANS to clap me in irons the moment they remember I’m here.

Theseus launches into command, calling for sailors to row and hoist ropes and whatever it is that makes this boat move when praying to his father is out of the question. The tributes huddle close – one crying boy buries his face into the shoulder of another. A shaking girl clings to the edge of the boat, staring out without seeing. Zosime glares at me, as she apparently so loves to do, but otherwise I am largely ignored.

And with nothing else to do, I sit against the edge of the boat, trying to stay out of the way and not further provoke anyone around me.

I always thought of the ocean as peaceful, but it is a deafening roar engulfing us, the crashing waves and churning currents below a little too apt – or they should be – for all the chaos I have enacted.

But I think a deathless, unnerving quiet might suit me better. Every time I think about any of this – the deaths on my conscience, the sight of my brother’s corpse, that I am fleeing my home, that my father tried to have me killed, that my sister told him what I’d done even knowing what that would risk, that Theseus may or may not have been trying to plunge that blade through me and now I’m surrounded by enemies – a cold calm cracks over me, pushing the thoughts down, a stark and barren void in their place.

I am so very tired.

It takes a while for me to realize I’m bleeding, as the fear and haste racing in my veins subside and pain takes over. When I look at my shoulder, I’m glad I’m sitting so that I do not faint.

Flesh has been gouged out. The width of an arrow shaft but the bladed tip carved deep enough to see shredded muscle and sinew and, for a moment, I let my eyes flutter shut. Could I just let myself bleed?