Hades Daughter Read Free Page A

said, “as all that he touches will die, as all that declares its love for him will die, and as all that surrounds him will die. Everything. Everything. Everything. ”
    Ariadne raised her head, and looked before her. She had come to a halt before a large shrub that delineated the carefully tended herb garden from the wilds beyond it. The shrub’s dense grey-green foliage was broken here and there by large, white, open-petalled flowers.
    Ariadne reached out a hand and touched very gently one of the flowers.
    They trembled at her contact.
    Around the Aegean, in their hidden, mysterious places, so also trembled the flower gate sorceries that guarded the entrances to the founding labyrinths of several score of cities.
    “Such dear flowers,” said Ariadne. Then, with an abrupt, savage movement, she twisted the flower free from the shrub.
    “Thera,” she said, “shall be the first.”
    She held the flower in the palm of her hand for a moment, smiling at it with almost as much tenderness as she bestowed on her daughter, and then, resuming her strange, low singing, she wound the flower into the wickerwork of her daughter’s basket.
    So Ariadne continued, her voice growing stronger, the words she sang darker. Flower after flower she snapped, pausing in her singing only long enough to bestow upon each flower the name of a city in which she knew lurked a labyrinth, a city which depended for its wellbeing on the labyrinth within its foundations. Eventually, as Ariadne plucked flower after flower from the shrub, her child was surrounded by a ribbon of woven flowers about the top of the basket.
    Ariadne’s thread. The filament that either saves, or destroys.
    When she had finished, and her darkcraft was woven, Ariadne cradled the flowered basket in her arms and smiled at her daughter.
    “Soon,” she whispered. “Soon, my darling.”
    She looked back to the shrub. It was denuded of all flowers save one, and at the sight of that remaining flower Ariadne’s mouth curled in secret delight.
    That labyrinth was particularly well-hidden in a city extraordinarily undistinguished, and she doubted Asterion knew of its existence. If it survived, its influence would be minimal. Her brother would never sense its presence, and it would not serve to hold him.
    But it would be enough for her purpose, when it was time.
    When she was safe.
    When she was strong enough to dare.

T HREE
    I rrelevance. Decay. Death. Catastrophe. Every place that Theseus lay foot; everything he touched; every part of his world. This was Ariadne’s curse.
    And with it, in gratitude to Asterion for teaching her the darkcraft, Ariadne did what only she had the power to do.
    She unwound the Game—that great and ancient sorcery which underpinned and protected the entire Aegean world.
    It began nine days after Ariadne twined the flowers into the basket that cradled her daughter. Meriam, the midwife who had thought to cut Ariadne open to save her child, was standing in the village’s central open space, the beach where Theseus had abandoned Ariadne a bare two weeks previously some sixty paces distant to the south. It was dawn, the air chill, only the faintest of pink staining the eastern sky, the birds in their trees chirping quietly to start the day.
    Meriam had no thought for the beauty of the beach, the dawn light or even for the sweet melodies of the birds.
    Instead, she stared frowning at the empty wicker basket lying at her feet; flowers, withered and colourless, still wound about its rim.
    “Why didn’t she take it with her?” Meriam muttered, then bent to pick up the basket.
    In the instant before her fingers touched the basket, one of the flowers slid free from the wickerwork and fell to the earth.
    The instant it hit, the chorus of the birds turned from melody to a frightful, fractured screaming.
    Instinctively, Meriam straightened and looked about her, her heart thudding. Birds rose in chaotic clouds from the trees surrounding the village and milled