Hades Daughter Read Free

to speak, but he hushed her. “I will, for there is one thing else that I shall demand of you, Ariadne, Mistress of the Labyrinth.”
    “Yes?”
    “That in return for teaching you the darkcraft, for opening to you completely the dark heart of the Labyrinth, you shall not only destroy the Game forever, but you will allow me to become your ruler. Your lord. Call it what you want, but know that if you ever attempt to betray me again, if you do not destroy the Game completely, I demand that you shall fall to the ground before me, and become my creature entirely.”
    “Of course!”
    His expression did not change. “‘Of course’? Taking not a breath to consider? How quickly you agree.”
    “I will not betray you again, Asterion. Teach me the darkcraft and I swear—on the life of my daughter!—that I will use it to destroy the Game utterly. It shall never entrap you again.”
    He nodded, very slowly, holding her eyes the entire time. On the life of her daughter? No Mistress of the Labyrinth ever used the name of her daughter lightly. Yes…yes, she was being honest with him.
    As honest as Ariadne could be.
    He smiled, tight and hard. “Your hatred of Theseus must be great indeed to arrange such dark bargains. First with the Crone, and then with me.”
    She inclined her head. “He thought to cast me aside,” she said. “No one does that to the Mistress of the Labyrinth.”
    “Very well,” he said. “I accept. The bargain is concluded.” His hand tightened once more in the waistband of her skirt, but this time far more cruelly. “You shall have the darkcraft, but I shall take my pleasure in it. Pain, for the pain you inflicted on me. Pain, to seal the bargain made between us.”
    He buried his other hand in her elaborately braided hair and, with all the strength of the bull that was his, he lifted her up and hurled her down to the bed.
    That night was agonisingly long, and she emerged from it barely alive, but at the end of it Ariadne had what she wanted.
    Two days later, stiff, sore, her badly damaged body protesting at every step, Ariadne made her way into the village’s herb garden. In her arms she carried the wicker basket, and in that basket rested her sleeping daughter.
    Two of the village midwives who had attended the birth of her daughter watched uneasily from the shadowed doorway of the house Ariadne had left.
    Since her daughter’s birth, the midwives—indeed, everyone in the village—had become aware that Ariadne was highly dangerous. Yet they could not clearly define the why of that awareness. Ariadne had not said or done anything which could have made the villagers so deeply afraid of her, and yet there seemed to hover about the mother and her newborn child a sense of danger so terrible, so imminent, that few people could bear to spend more than a moment or two in her company.
    The entire community wanted Ariadne gone. Gone from the village. Gone from the island. Gone so completely that all sense of danger vanished with her.
    Gone, taking her daughter and her hatred (and no one knew which one Ariadne loved and nurtured the more) with her.
    Ariadne, although aware of the women and their nervous watchfulness behind her, paid them no heed. She moved step by careful step along the gravelled path between the raised beds of fragrant herbs and flowers. The basket which contained her daughter she carried with infinite care, and as she walked, she rocked the basket gently to and fro, singing to her child in a slow, rhythmic, almost hypnotic voice.
    She sang no lullaby, but the secret whisperings of the exotic darkcraft that she had so recently learned, twisting it together with her own power as Mistress of the Labyrinth.
    Most infants would have woken screaming in nightmare at her dark and twisted song, but Ariadne’s daughter slept soundly to its meanderings.
    Eventually Ariadne’s singing drew to a close, and she halted, gazing on her daughter with great tenderness.
    “Your father will die,” she