A TANGLED WEB

It was the usual perfect day in Demeter’s gardens in the Kingdom of Olympia. Birds, multicolored and with exquisite voices, sang in every tree. Flowers of every sort bloomed and breathed delicate perfumes into a balmy breeze that wandered through the glossy green foliage. It would rain a little after sundown, a gentle, warm rain that would be just enough to nourish, but not enough to interfere with anyone’s plans. The only insects were the beneficial sort. Troublesome creatures were not permitted here. When a goddess makes that sort of decision, you can be sure She Will Be Obeyed.

Now and again a dramatic thunderstorm would roar through the mountains, reminding everyone—everyone not a god, that is—that Nature was not to be trifled with. But it stormed only when Demeter and Hera scheduled it. Everyone had plenty of warning—in fact, some of the nymphs and fauns scheduled dances just for the erotic thrill of it. Zeus enjoyed those days as well, it gave him a chance to lob thunderbolts about; and the other gods on Olympus would be drinking vats of ambrosia and wine and encouraging him.

Meanwhile, on this perfect afternoon of this perfect day, in this most perfect of homes in the center of the most perfect of gardens, Demeter’s only daughter, Persephone, stood barefoot on the cool marble floor of the weaving room and stared at the loom in front of her, fuming with rebellion.

There was nothing in the little weaving room except the warp-weighted loom, and since you had to get the light on it properly to see what you were doing, you had to have your back to the open door and window, thus being deprived of even a glimpse of the outdoors. It was maddening. Persephone could hear the birdsong, smell the flowers, and had to stand there weaving plain dyed linen in the dullest of patterns.

Small as the room was, however, Persephone was not alone in it. There was a tumble of baby hedgehogs asleep in a rush-woven basket, and a young faun sitting on the doorstep, watching her from time to time with his strange goat-eyes. There were doves cooing in a cornice, a tumble of fuzzy red fox-kits playing with a battered pinecone behind her. Anything Persephone muttered to herself would be heard, and in the case of the faun, very probably prattled back to her mother. Demeter would sigh and give her The Look of Maternal Reproach. After all, it was a very small thing she had been tasked with. It wasn’t as if she was being asked to sow a field or harvest grapes. It wasn’t even as if she was weaving every day. Just now and again. Yes, this was all very reasonable. There was no cause for Persephone to be irritated.

Of course there was, but it was a cause she really did not want her mother to know about.

Persephone wanted to scream.

She had the shuttle loaded with thread in one hand, the beater-stick in the other, and stared daggers at the half-finished swath of ochre linen before her. Oh, how she loathed each. Not for itself, but for what it represented.

I love my mother. I really do. I just wish right now she was at the bottom of a well.

Persephone took the beater-stick and whacked upward at the weft she had created. Of all the times for her mother to decide that the weaving of her new cloak had to be done…this was the worst. In fact, the timing could not possibly have been worse. She had spent weeks on this plan, days setting it up, gotten everything carefully in place, managed to find a way to get rid of the nymphs constantly trailing her, and now it was ruined. Stupid Thanatos would probably drive the chariot around and around a few dozen times, forget what he was supposed to do and head back to the Underworld; he was a nice fellow, but not the sharpest knife in the kitchen. Well, really, how smart did you have to be to do the job of the god of death? Just turn up at the right time, escort the soul down to the Underworld, and leave him at the riverbank for Charon. Not something that took a lot of deep thinking.

And poor Hades—oh, wait, Eubeleus, she wasn’t supposed to know it was Hades—would spend half the day questioning him until he finally figured out what had happened. It had to be Thanatos, though, that was the only way this would work. Otherwise, things got horribly complicated.

She wasn’t supposed to know she was going to be carried off to the Underworld, just as she wasn’t supposed to know her darling wasn’t a simple shepherd. She was supposed to be “abducted” by “a friend with a chariot.” But she had known Hades for who he was almost from the beginning, and given that her darling was Hades, who else would drive his chariot? Not Hypnos, that would be incredibly foolhardy. Certainly not Charon. Minos, Rhadamanthus or Aeacus? Not likely. First of all, Persephone had the feeling that the former kings and current judges intimidated Hades quite a bit, and he wasn’t likely to ask them to do him that sort of favor, never mind that he was technically their overlord. And second, she had the feeling that he was afraid if one of them did agree, he might be tempted to keep her for himself. Poor Hades had none of the bluster and bravado of his other “brothers,” Poseidon and Zeus. He second-guessed himself more than anyone she knew. That was probably another reason why she loved him.

Of course, Hades didn’t realize she knew the other reason why the abductor had to be Thanatos, because he didn’t know she knew—well, everything.

We can set it up again, she promised herself. It wasn’t the end of the world. She was clever, and “Eubeleus” was smitten. Even if she hadn’t met all that many men—thanks to Mother—she could see that. His feelings went a lot deeper than the lust the nymphs and fauns and satyrs had for each other too; the way he had been so patient, so careful in his courtship, spoke volumes. He was willing to be patient because he loved her.

And she was smitten in return. She didn’t know why no one seemed to like the Lord of the Underworld. It wasn’t as if he was the one who decided how long your life would be—that could be blamed on the Fates—and he wasn’t the one who carried you off; that was Thanatos. He was kind—it was hard being Lord of the Dead, and if he covered his kindness with a cold face, well, she certainly understood why. No one wanted to die. No one wanted to have everything they’d said and done and ever thought judged. No one wanted to leave the earth where things were lively and interesting when you might end up punished, or wandering the Fields of Asphodel because you were ordinary. And everyone, everyone, blamed Hades for the fact that they would all one day end up down there.

The Underworld was not the most pleasant place to live, unless you were remarkable in some way. From what she understood, on the rare occasions when she’d listened to anyone talking about it, Hades didn’t often get a chance to spend time in the Elysian Fields where things were pleasant—he mostly got stuck watching over the punishment parts. If he was very sober, well, no wonder! He needed a spot of brightness in his life. And she would very much like to be that spot of brightness.

Besides being kind, and patient, and considerate, he never seemed to lose his temper like so many of the other gods did. He was also quite funny, in the dry, witty sense, rather than the hearty practical joking sense like his brother-god Zeus.

She had started out liking him when they first met and he was pretending to be a shepherd. And as she revisited the meadow where he kept up his masquerade many times, she found “liking” turning into something much more substantial rather quickly. They’d done a lot of talking, some dreaming, and a fair amount of kissing and cuddling, and she had decided that she would very much like things to go straight from the “cuddling” to the “wild carrying-on in the long grass” that the nymphs and satyrs were known for. But he had been unbelievably restrained. He wanted her to be sure. Not like Zeus, oh, no! Not like Poseidon, either! They’d been seeing each other for more than a year now, and the more time she spent with him, the more time she wanted to spend with him. Finally he had hesitantly asked if she would be willing to defy her mother and run away with him, and she had told him yes, in no uncertain terms whatsoever.

He never seemed to have even half an eye for anyone else, either. And not many males paid attention to little Persephone—though it was true she didn’t get a chance to see many, the few times she had been up to Mount Olympus with her mother, she might just as well not have been there.

It would have been hard to compete for the attention of the gods anyway. She wasn’t full-bodied like her mother—face it, no one was as full-bodied as her mother except Aphrodite. She didn’t make men’s heads turn when she passed. By all the powers, men’s heads turned when just a whiff of Demeter’s perfume drifted by them! Aphrodite might be the patron of Love, but Demeter was noticed and sought after just as much. Zeus even gave her that sort of Look, when he thought Hera wasn’t watching; Poseidon would always drop leaden hints about “renewing the acquaintance.” Not that she noticed. She was too busy being the mother of everything that wandered by and needed a mother. Demeter, goddess of fertility, was far more of a “mother” than Great Hera was. Hera couldn’t be bothered. Demeter yearned to mother everything.

Oh, yes, everything. As Persephone grew up, she had resigned herself to being part of a household filled to bursting with babies of all species. Fawns and fauns, nests full of birds, wolf-cubs and wild-kits, calves and lambs, froglets and snakelets, mere sprouts of dryads; if a species could produce a baby and the baby was orphaned, Demeter would take it in. Very fine and generous of her, but it meant that even an Olympian villa was filled to the bursting, and Persephone shared her room with whatever part of the menagerie didn’t fit in anywhere else. She might have a great many playmates, but she never had any privacy.

Or, for that matter, silence.

Demeter sailed through it all with Olympian serenity. After all, she was a goddess—granted, a goddess of a tiny Kingdom, one you could probably walk across in three days—but still, she was a goddess, and a goddess was not troubled by such things.

Her daughter, however…

Her daughter would like a place and a space all her very own, thank you, into which nothing could come unless she invites it. Is that so much to ask?

The fox-kits had gone looking for more adventures, but there were still four of the foundlings here in the weaving room, ensuring she didn’t have any privacy. Not counting the hedgehogs, the faun was still in here, now there was a nymph sorting through the yarn to find something to use to weave flower crowns with, and there were a couple of sylphs chatting in the windowsill, for no other reason but that the windowsill was convenient. Unless, of course, Demeter had sent them to keep an eye on her. Persephone threw the shuttle through the weft again, trying not to wince at the noises the little faun by the door was making, trying to master his panpipes for the first time.

If Demeter had her way, Persephone would be the “little daughter” forever. Though nearly twenty, she’d aged so slowly that her mother was used to thinking of her as too young for any separate life. She’d never be alone with a male, never have an identity of her own. There was no doubt that Zeus himself was infatuated with Demeter, though he would never say so to his wife, nor probably even to Demeter herself. After all, Demeter was in charge of marriage vows, so she would take a dim view of that. But that was why it was no use complaining to Zeus. He would just pat her on the head, call her “Little Kore” (Oh, how she hated that childhood nickname!) and tell her that her mother knew best.

And Hera would take Demeter’s side too, as would Hestia. Aphrodite would probably take Persephone’s part, if only for the sake of mischief, but having Aphrodite on your side was almost worse than having her as your enemy. Whatever Aphrodite wanted, Athena would oppose. And any god who wasn’t infatuated with Demeter would still side with her, because she controlled the very fertility of this Kingdom. No god wanted to risk her deciding that nothing would grow in his garden…or that his “plow” would fail to work the “furrow” properly…

Bah!

The loom rocked a little with the vigor of her weaving, the warp-weights knocking against each other as she pulled the heddle rod up and dropped it back again and beat the weft into place with her stick. She hated the loom, she hated standing at it, she hated the monotonous toil of it, and hated that although her mother considered it to be a proper “womanly” task, she was not considered to actually be a woman.

She luxuriated in her grievances for a good long time, until she had actually woven a full handbreadth of cloth. But she could never hold a temper, and once she started losing the anger, what Hades called her “clever” self came to the fore, and she found herself thinking… But on the other hand…

Oh, the curse of being able to see, clearly, both sides of everything! That was why she could never stay angry, no matter what, no matter how aggrieved she felt. And no one knew Demeter better than her own daughter did.

Could she really blame her mother for wanting her to stay a baby forever? Every single baby creature that left this household, Demeter watched go with sorrowful eyes. Sometimes she even wept over them. She hated losing them, hated seeing them go out into the dangerous world, even though their places were immediately taken by yet more foundlings. After all, the dangerous world was why they were foundlings in the first place.

Demeter’s heart was as tender as it was large. It was impossible, when she looked at you with those enormous, loving eyes, not to love her back. Persephone knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that her mother loved her. Not as a little image of herself, not as a shadow, and not as a possession. Loved her. And wanted to keep her protected and safe forever.

But…being manipulated by love was still being manipulated. How long would it take before her mother allowed her to grow up and leave, as she did everything else in this household?

Or was she a special case who would never be allowed to grow? Her temper flared as frustration took over from understanding.

Persephone threw the shuttle again, beat at the weft with angry upward strokes, and the warp-weights clacked together.

 

Demeter glanced in at her daughter at the loom and sighed. There was no doubt that she was angry, probably at being sent to work when what she really wanted to do was be with her playmates, lazing about in the meadow. But the nymphs had tasks of their own to do today, and Demeter was not going to allow her darling to wander about unescorted. She had tried to explain that, but Persephone was hardly in the mood to listen. There were times when Demeter wondered if she would ever grow up.

But more times when she dreaded the day when she did. That would mean losing her, and things would change between them forever. Little Kore would vanish, and someone else would take her place, a stranger that Demeter might not recognize, someone who would have ideas of her own, and no longer have to listen to her mother’s wise words. Demeter absolutely hated the idea that one day she would lose her little girl…if only there was a way to keep her little forever! But there was no doubt, given Kore’s budding body, that even if it were possible to do so, the time to do so was long, long past.

She wished, sometimes, that she had the instincts of a mother animal. Animals knew that there is only room for one adult in the territory—and eventually even the most devoted mother animal drives her own children away. It would be easier to feel her love turning into irritation—easier than the pain of knowing that one day Kore would grow into her given name and no longer depend on her mother for anything.

There were other issues at hand; this was not a good time for Kore to assert her growing womanhood. There simply was no one suitable for her to assert it with. It troubled Demeter deeply that there was no one among the Olympians that she thought was a decent match for her daughter, and a mortal—well, that was just out of the question…the loves of gods and mortals were inevitably tragic. Zeus was out of the question, Poseidon was her father…maybe. There was some confusion over those things. Apollo never even gave her a second glance. Hephaestus never looked past Aphrodite. Hermes? Never! Other, lesser gods? Not one of them was a fit husband for the daughter of Two of the Six. Perhaps a new Olympian will join us, one that is worthy of being her consort. One with real power, but even more important, one that won’t treat her as Zeus treats Hera. One who will be devoted to her and not wander off to the bed of any female that catches his eye. With an effort of will, she reminded herself of what the Olympian gods truly were. Their numbers were added to—albeit slowly—all the time. And even though the tales of the mortals made them all out to be brothers and sisters, or at the least, closely related—that wasn’t actually true.

Which was just as well, considering how Zeus hopped beds. On the other hand, perhaps one day that bed hopping might produce a male that was as unlike his father in that way as possible. Demeter would be willing to welcome the right sort of part-mortal for her girl. Someone faithful, intelligent, and able to think beyond the urges of the moment.

If there was a drawback to being a god, it was that so much power seemed coupled with so little forethought. Forethought…. Prometheus? No, she had to dismiss that, though with regret. The Titan was currently in Zeus’s bad graces, and she wouldn’t subject Persephone to the results of that. Besides, Prometheus, unlike his brother, had never shown much of an interest in women.

Then, again, finding a man in Olympus was never easy.

Demeter reflected back to the early days of her existence. Kore was the result of one of those early indiscretions on the part of Poseidon (although now they said her father was Zeus), though truth to be told, Demeter had quite enjoyed herself once she realized what the sea-patron was proposing. It wasn’t as if she’d had a husband or he a wife in those days.

Things would be different for Kore. There would be no flitting off to some other light of love. Kore would never know the ache in her heart of watching the male she adored losing interest in her. Not if Demeter had anything to say about it.

Perhaps, Demeter reflected, she had sheltered the girl too much. She just seemed so utterly unprepared for life. There was nothing about her that said “woman,” from her short, slender figure, to her mild blue eyes that seemed to hold no deeper thoughts than what color of flower she should pick or what dinner would be. And Demeter despaired of her ever attracting the attention of a man; charitably one could describe her hair as straw-colored, but really, it was just a yellow so pale it looked as if it had faded in the sun, her eyes were not so much light-colored as washed out, and no amount of sun would bring a blush to her cheek. And one had only to walk with her to see how the eyes of men slid over her as if they did not see her. Poor child. It was utterly unfair. Demeter could not for the life of her imagine how two gods as robust as she and Poseidon had managed to produce this slender shaft of nothing.

No, she was not ready for life. Demeter sighed and resigned herself to that fact. Kore needed nurturing and cultivation still. There was no one, god nor mortal, who was more adept at both than Demeter. Perhaps in another year, perhaps in two, she would finally begin to bloom, those pale cheeks would develop roses, and she’d ripen into a proper woman by Demeter’s standards. Then Demeter could educate her in the ways of man and woman, give her all the hard-won wisdom she had garnered over the years, and (yes, reluctantly, but then at least the child would be a woman and would be ready) let her go.

Until then, she was safest here, at her mother’s side.

 

Brunnhilde stretched in the sun like a cat, all her muscles rippling, and those gorgeous breasts pressing against the thin fabric that left nothing at all to the imagination. Leopold reflected happily that she looked absolutely fantastic without all the armor.

She looked good in it; in fact, she would look good in anything, of course, but Leopold was a man, after all, and he preferred his wife without all the hardware about her. In the gowns of his home, in the more elaborate gowns of Eltaria—the Kingdom where they’d met—in a feed sack, even. He had to admit, though, he liked her best of all in the costume of this country, which seemed to consist of a couple of flaps of thin cloth, a couple of brooches and a bit of cord. Marvelous! Her golden hair spilled in waves down to the ground, actually hiding more than the clothing did; her chiseled features seemed impossibly feminine when framed by the flowing hair. Her blue eyes had softened under the influence of this peaceful place, and her movements had taken on a grace that he hadn’t expected.

Maybe it was being without armor. The armor made you walk stiffly, no matter how comfortable it was. And the gowns of his homeland and of Eltaria seemed to involve some female underpinnings that were almost as formidable as armor.

She had the most wonderful legs he had ever seen, and it was nice to see them without greaves, boots, or skirts getting in the way of the view.

“So what is this place again, and why are we here?” he asked, lazing on his side with his hand propping up his head and a couple bunches of luscious grapes near at hand. Oh, what a woman! One moment, she was right at his side, joyfully hacking away at whatever monster it was they had been summoned to get rid of—the next she was gamboling about in a meadow as if she had never seen a sword. This was the life. It was fantastic to be doing heroic deeds together, but it was equally fantastic to have this moment of absolute indolence too.

Brunnhilde finished her stretching and began combing her hair, which, as there was rather a lot of it, was a time-consuming process. “Olympia. They don’t have a Godmother because they have gods instead.” She frowned. “Which is not altogether a good idea. I mean, look at Vallahalia.”

Leo picked a grape and ate it, still admiring the view. The sweet juice ran down his throat and at this moment, tasted better than wine. “I have to admit I am rather confused about that. If Godmothers are so good at keeping things from getting out of hand, why are gods so bad at it?”

“I’m not sure.” Brunnhilde paused, and put the brush down on her very shapely knee to regard him with a very serious and earnest gaze. “The ravens told me once that gods are nothing more than another kind of Fae, who get power and shape from worship and the mortals who worship them. So I suppose it’s because we are made in mortal image? Formed the way that mortals would choose to be themselves, if they had godlike powers?”

“Hmm, awkward,” Leo acknowledged. “Given that every man I know would think he was in paradise if he could carry on with women the way the gods do. And given that gods don’t seem to suffer the sorts of consequences from that sort of carrying-on the way mortals do.”

“And other things. Mortals, given the choice, would rather not think too far ahead, or even think at all. So—the gods they worship don’t, either.” Brunnhilde nodded, and took up the brush again. “Then, of course, because awful things happen, the logical question becomes Why didn’t they see this coming? and then the mortals make up all sorts of excuses for why infallible gods end up being very fallible indeed. Like Siegfried’s Doom. Then they make us live through it. Ridiculous, really. I wish that there were no such things as gods. I’d rather be a nice half-Fae Godmother, and be on the side of making The Tradition work for us, instead of on us.”

“But if you had been, I would never have met you, and that would be a tragedy.” Leo grinned at her. She twinkled back at him.

“I don’t think Wotan likes the idea of the others knowing about our true nature,” she observed. “He’d rather we all believed the creation stories, which, even before the ravens told me about being Fae, I didn’t entirely believe. My mother, Erda, told me there was no nonsense of me springing forth fully formed from Wotan’s side, or his head, or any other part of him. I was born like any of the others, I was just first.” She sighed. “Poor Mother. The shape and fate The Tradition forced her into was rather…awkward.”

“Your mother is very…practical, and she seems to have done the best she can with her situation,” Leo said, doing his best to restrain a shudder at the thought of that half woman, half hillside, who had done her awkward best to make polite talk with her new son-in-law without lapsing into fortune-telling cries of doom. “I was going to say ‘down-to-earth,’ but that is a bit redundant.”

Brunnhilde barked a laugh. “Since she is the Earth, I would say so. It’s a shame that the northlanders are so wretchedly literal minded.”

Her nephew Siegfried’s escape from his fate had seriously disturbed the northlanders’ unswerving view of The Way Things Were, and had shaken them all up a good deal. Having Brunnhilde take up with a mortal, and an outsider, had shaken them up even more.

That just might be all for the best. If it shakes them up enough to start changing how The Tradition works up there, everyone will be better off.

Once they had left Siegfried and Rosa, Queen of Eltaria and his new bride, Leo and Brunnhilde had worked their way up to the northlands to break the news of their marriage to Brunnhilde’s mother in person—in no small part because they weren’t sure Wotan had done so. It had been an interesting meeting, if a bit unnerving. He’d sensed that Erda hadn’t really known whether to manifest as a full woman and offer mead and cakes, or manifest as a hill and leave them to their own devices. She’d opted for a middle course, which made for a peculiar meeting at the least. He’d ignored the beetle and moss in his mead and brushed the leaves from his cake without a comment, and tried to act like a responsible son-in-law.

“My mother is delusional, as they all are,” Brunnhilde responded dryly. “I’d come to that conclusion once I saw what life was like outside of Vallahalia, long before you woke me up, you ravisher.”

Leo raised an eyebrow and smirked a little, since the “ravishing” had gone both ways. “You promised me you were going to explain why you seemed to know all about everything when I woke you.”

She laughed. “You see, while Father was planting me in meadows and on rocks across half a dozen Kingdoms, he forgot that I would see what was going on around me in my dreams. It’s something the Valkyria can do—we get it from Mother. She sees everything going on around her, no matter what state she’s in. I might not have been trudging through all those places afoot the way Siegfried was, but I learned a lot. Probably more than he did, because I wasn’t having to do anything but watch and learn, while he was trying to keep from starving to death or being hacked up.”

Leo blinked. He tried to imagine what that must have been like, and failed. “Well, that must have been useful.”

“Useful enough to know when you came marching across my ring of fire I had a good idea of exactly what I wanted.” She winked at him. He grinned. He hadn’t awakened her with just a kiss, and they had very nearly reignited the fire ring all by themselves.

“At any rate, unless the mortals of our land manage to actually learn to think, now that my sisters have told Wotan what he can do with his magic spear and flown off, what will probably happen is that he’ll seduce Erda all over again. She’ll have another litter of daughters, Wotan will create another swarm of Valkyrias. Then, not having learned his lesson the first time, he’ll philander with another mortal, produce another set of twins-separated-at-birth, another dwarf will steal that damned Ring from the River Maidens, and it will begin all over again.” She sighed. “Stupid Tradition.”

He echoed her sigh. Godmother Elena, Godmother Lily, Queen Rosa and King Siegfried had carefully explained The Tradition to both of them before they left Eltaria. It seemed prudent to all of them, given that Leo was a tale just waiting to happen and Brunnhilde was a goddess. It had left Brunnhilde nodding, and Leopold outraged, but with no target to be outraged with. Just some nebulous force that was going to make him dance to the tune it piped unless he learned how to avoid it or manipulate it himself.

“Well, maybe we can find it a whole new path,” he replied. “We’ve got time to think and plan. Well, you do.” He felt a moment of melancholy. That was the one fly in their soup of happiness. He was mortal. She wasn’t.

“Well—it just might be that we do,” she replied, her blue eyes going very serious indeed as her brush stopped moving. “I asked Godmother Elena’s dragons about other places with gods, and they knew all about this one, and what is more, they had some interesting things to tell me about The Traditions here. This Olympia is just stiff with ways for mortals to become immortal. That’s why I brought us here.”

He sat straight up, grapes and melancholy forgotten. He was hard put to say whether he was more shocked, delighted or terrified. Probably all three at once. “You—what?” he gasped. “You mean—”

She nodded. “We’ll have to be really careful, though. Some of the ways for mortals to become immortal are not pleasant. For instance, becoming immortal but continuing to age. Or becoming immortal as a spring or a rock. Or a constellation of stars. Not the sort of thing I want to see happen to you.”

He thought about the first, and shuddered. A bit of waterworks or a rock would be far preferable, and still not something he wanted to think about.

“So how do you go about it without nasty consequences?” he asked. “Or have you found that out yet?”

“Nothing that will work yet, but I expect to. Either we’ll find a god-tale, or we’ll go introduce ourselves to the gods here and ask. Right now, all I know are the things that come to me in my sleep—when you let me sleep—” she began with a grin.

And that was when the ground opened up behind her with an ominous rumble.

It really did open up; there was a sound like thunder, the earth trembled, a crack appeared and the ground rolled back as if two giant hands had pulled it apart. Steam issued from the opening. Leo nearly jumped out of his skin, and both of them leapt to their feet, seizing the swords that were never far from their hands.

A chariot pulled by four magnificent black horses rumbled up out of the chasm; the chariot was black without a lot of ornamentation; the horses were huge things, very powerful; snorting and tossing their heads as they plunged up the slant of raw earth. The chariot was driven by a man in a long black cloak with a deep hood, who reached up with one hand and threw back the hood of his garment on seeing the two of them there. Leo hesitated; the man was unarmed, and looked absurdly young, barely more than a stripling.

“Well, there you are!” the fellow said crossly as his eyes lit on Brunnhilde. “You went to the wrong meadow, just like a girl. I’ve been looking all over for you!”

“I—what?” Brunnhilde stammered, for once speechless. “I think you must have mistak—”

Too late. The man jumped from the chariot, seized Brunnhilde and tossed her into the chariot as if she weighed nothing. She shrieked with outrage and tried to scramble to her feet, but he leapt back in, grabbed her around the waist with one hand to keep her from jumping out, and wheeled the horses with the other hand. Before Leo could do more than take two steps and Brunnhilde start to fight back, the chariot plunged down into the chasm, which promptly closed up behind them, leaving Leo to claw frantically at the earth, shouting Brunnhilde’s name.

 

When Persephone finally had woven enough to satisfy her mother, the sun was going down and she practically flew to the meadow on the chance that Eubeleus would be there. Her mother, thank all the powers, had gone off to round up some of her foundlings and had not given Persephone any orders. Persephone didn’t wait for her to change her mind. She didn’t even stop to snatch something from the kitchen for supper, afraid that her mother would invent some reason to keep her indoors until nightfall. And by nightfall, her beloved would certainly have left the meadow.

She’d forgotten her sandals, but that hardly mattered, this was Olympia and the paths were thick with soft moss wherever her feet touched them. Neither Persephone nor Demeter would ever suffer a bruised foot within her walls. Like the magic that kept the carnivorous foundlings from snacking on the rest, Demeter’s magic kept all harm at bay.

Wonder of wonders, her love was still in the meadow, looking altogether forlorn as he perched on a rock with his hands clasped between his knees.

She whistled like a boy, and he looked up, startled, to push off the rock and race toward her. He was quite tall, but it would be difficult to tell how tall he was, since he habitually slouched, as if he carried all of the troubles Pandora had allegedly let out of the box on his own back. His hair was as black as Zeus’s but fell about his face in unconfined ringlets, since he never wore the royal diadem of the gods in her presence. People forgot that he was as much a warrior as his brother-god Zeus, but the simple, one-shouldered garment of linen he wore showed off his muscles rather nicely, she thought, especially when he was running. Of the three original male gods, he was really the cleverest, too, though she suspected if she told him so he would just mumble a little and blush.

It’s just as well he got the Underworld, I suppose. Zeus would have made a dreadful mess governing it.

Only someone who actually knew him would see the Lord of the Underworld in this sad-faced shepherd, who looked gratifyingly lovelorn, and whose face lit up in a way that was even more gratifying as she ran toward him. Oh, how she loved seeing his dark eyes shine when they met hers!

They met in an embrace that threatened to become very heated indeed.

He broke it off, not she, but kept his arms around her as he looked into her upturned face. “I was afraid you had changed your mind.”

Persephone snorted. “No, it was Mother. She decided that today I needed to weave. I’m sorry I was too late to be abducted. I hope your friend didn’t get too bored. Where is he?”

Hades frowned. “Actually, he drove off, saying he was going to look for you, but he’s never seen you, has he?”

“I don’t think so.” She shrugged. “There can’t be that many blond-haired, blue-eyed immortal maidens hanging about in meadows on the slopes of Mount Olympus. Not that there aren’t a lot of maidens, or at least young females, and if they are nymphs or dryads or sylphs, they might very well be hanging about in meadows, but there are not many blondes. Most of them are brown-or raven-haired. I hope he comes back here instead of going back to the stables. We could still go through with this if he does.”

“I suppose you are right. You generally are. But hoping that Tha—my friend does something practical is hoping for a lot. He doesn’t think much past his job, which isn’t exactly hard.” Hades’s brow creased with thought. “Is there any real need for us to go through that entire abduction business?”

She looked at him quizzically. “What do you mean? I thought it was Traditional, and it would make it harder for Mother to demand me back.” She did not mention the other part, which she was not supposed to know but had deduced.

“Well, yes, but—” Hades waved his hands helplessly. “Why not? You were ready to go, why not just come with me? We might not get another chance. Especially if Demeter finds out about me.” He looked at her with pleading eyes. “We’ve been tempting the Fates, dodging anything that could tell her. We can’t have good luck forever. And I don’t want to lose you.”

She didn’t have to think about it very long. A solid afternoon at that loom, while Demeter kept popping in “just to see how you are doing,” while that wretched little faun-baby made the most appalling sounds on his flute, was more than enough to convince her that if she didn’t get out of that house soon, she would probably be a candidate for the Maenads.

And she didn’t want to lose him. Not ever.

“It’s a wonderful idea,” she said warmly. “Let’s go.”

 

Obviously, Persephone had never been to Hades’s Realm before. The passage in proved to be surprisingly uncomplicated, since she was with the Ruler. The most complicated part was when Hades decided it was time to Reveal His True Self.

Hades found a cave, and led her inside, that was when he held up his hand and made a ghost-light. The little ball of light drifted just over his palm, and reflected off his face. She could tell he was working his way up to the Revelation. “Um,” he said awkwardly. “I—uh—I’m not really a shepherd…”

She stood on tiptoe and kissed the corner of his mouth. “I know you aren’t, silly. You’re Hades. And the friend who was supposed to abduct me is Thanatos.”

His jaw dropped. He stared at her for a moment.

Now in this position, Zeus would have spluttered, and Poseidon just stared dumbly. But Hades was made of better stuff. After a moment, he began to chuckle.

“How long have you known?” he asked.

“Since about a month after we first met,” she replied, holding tight to his hand. “I knew you weren’t mortal. And I knew there were only a limited number of gods you could be. Eros is in love with Psyche, Zeus wouldn’t dare come near me for fear of Mother, Poseidon smells of fish no matter how much he washes, Apollo is too arrogant to disguise himself, Hermes could never control his need to pull pranks, Ares is…” She rolled her eyes, and he nodded. “And besides, he’s besotted with Aphrodite. Hephaestus is besotted with Aphrodite too. Who did that leave? You or Dionysus. And you always left part of the wine in the jar when we picnicked.”

“And you don’t mind? I mean…I’m old…” But the eyes he looked at her with were not old. They were as young as any shepherd lad with his first girl. That look only made her love him the more. “Old enough to be your father, surely. And my kingdom isn’t the loveliest place in the cosmos, either. Well, with you in it, it would be, but…” He stammered to a halt.

“We’re immortal,” she reminded him. “It doesn’t matter how old you are, you’ll still look like you do now in a hundred years, and then the difference between us will be insignificant. And anyway, it’s not as if you were like Zeus, chasing after…well….”

“What do you—oh,” he replied, and a flush crept up his dark cheek. She giggled.

“Maybe I’m not old,” she said, “but I am fairly sure that I love you, whatever you call yourself. And I think you are certainly old enough to be sure you love me.”

“Oh, yes,” he said fervently, and if it hadn’t been that this was a cave, the floor was cold and not very pleasant, and neither of them wanted Demeter to somehow find them before they got into his realm safely, they might just have torn the chitons off each other and consummated things then and there.

But Hades was not Zeus, and after breaking off the fevered kiss in which tongues and hands and bodies played a very great part, he stroked the hair off her damp brow, smiled and turned toward the back of the cave. With Hades holding her hand, a door appeared in the rock wall, as clear and solid a door as any in her mother’s villa. It swung open as they approached, then swung shut behind them.

“Are we there yet?” she teased.

He laughed. “Almost. But Demeter can’t follow us now.”

There was a long, rough-hewn passage with bright light at the end of it, which brought them out on the banks of a mist-shrouded river.

It was a sad, gray river, with a sluggish current, and had more of a beach of varying shades of gray pebbles than a “bank.” Mist not only covered its surface, it extended in every direction; you couldn’t see more than a few feet into it. Tiny wavelets lapped at Persephone’s bare feet. The water was quite cold, with a chill that was somehow more than mere temperature could account for.

“The Styx!” Persephone exclaimed, but Hades made a face.

“Everyone makes that mistake. It’s the Acheron. The river of woe. The Styx, the river of hate, is the one that makes you invulnerable. When you see it, you won’t ever mistake the one for the other. Look out—”

The warning came aptly, as a flood of wispy things, like mortals, but mortals made of fog, thronged them.

Spirits! Persephone had never actually seen a spirit, and she shrank back against Hades instinctively. There must have been thousands of them. They couldn’t actually do anything to either her or Hades, but their touch was cold, and Persephone clutched Hades’s comfortingly solid bicep. “What are they?” she asked, her voice dropping to a whisper—but still loud enough to sound like a shout over the faint susurrus of the voices of the spirits, too faint for her to make out anything of what they were saying. They tried, fruitlessly, to pluck at her hem, at her sleeves, to get her attention. “Why are they here?”

“They’re the poor, the friendless. They’re stuck on this side of the Acheron. Charon charges a fee to take them over, everyone knows that. You’re supposed to put a coin in the mouth of the dead person when you bury him so the dead can pay the ferryman’s fee. It’s not much, but if they don’t have it…” Hades’s voice trailed off as she gave him a stricken look. She glanced at the poor wispy things, and their forlorn look practically broke her heart.

“I have my standards, you know.” The sepulchral voice coming out of the mist made her jump and yelp, and the poor ghosts shrank back from the river’s edge. Hades turned toward the river in irritation.

“I’ve asked you not to do that, damn it!” Hades snapped. “Don’t just sneak up on people, do something to announce yourself when you know they can’t see you!”

A boat’s prow appeared, poking through the mist, and soon both the boat and its occupant were visible. The ferryman plunged his pole into the river and drove the boat up on the bank with a crunch of pebbles against wood. He had swathed his head in a fold of his robe, and bowed without uncovering it.

“As you say,” the ferryman intoned, pushing his boat closer to the bank, so that it lay parallel to the beach. With his foot he pushed a plank over the side to the dry beach. “Do you need my services, oh, Lord?”

“No, we’ll just walk across,” Hades replied with irritation. “Of course we need your services!”

“Wait a moment.” Persephone was pulling off her rings, her necklace, her bracelets, even the diadem in her hair. Gold all of it, and pearls, which Demeter thought proper for a maiden. She’d put them on this morning on a whim, thinking it would be nice to be married in them. She offered all of them now to Charon. “How many will these pay for? To go across?”

The hooded head swung in her direction. Slowly Charon removed the covering, revealing his real face. He was exceptionally ugly, with grayish skin, a crooked nose and very sad eyes. “I—uh—” The dread ferryman appeared unaccountably flustered. “I mean—”

Hades brightened. “Give her a discount rate,” he said with a low chuckle. “After all, she’s buying in bulk. It’s the least you can do.”

The ferryman swiveled his head ponderously, from Persephone’s face, to her hands full of gold, to the suddenly silent throng of spirits, and back again. “I—uh—I am not accustomed to—uh—” The ferryman gave up. “All of them,” he said, sounding frustrated, and a bony hand plucked the jewelry from Persephone’s hands.

With an almost-silent cheer, the spirits flooded into the boat. Although, as far as Persephone could tell, they were insubstantial and weighed nothing, the boat sank lower and lower into the water as they continued to pour across the little gangplank. Finally the last one squeezed aboard—or at least, there were no more wisps of anything on the shore—and with a sigh of resignation, Charon pushed off.

“Don’t blame me when Minos gets testy about all the extra work—my Lord,” Charon called over his shoulder as he vanished into the mist, poling the boat to the farther shore.

“And that is why I love you,” Hades said, pulling her into his arms for an exuberant kiss that was all out of keeping with the gloom of the place. “You see what needs doing, know I can’t do anything about it, and deal with it yourself. What a woman you are!”

His arms about her felt warm and supportive, a bulwark against the dank chill of the mist that surrounded them.

She flushed with pleasure. “I know they’ll only start piling up again,” she said apologetically when he let her go. “But I just couldn’t stand here and do nothing about them.”

He considered this. “Perhaps something can be worked out,” he suggested. “Put a definite end to their time of waiting. Shorten it if the living will do something for them. Sacrifices or…something. Maybe even pay ahead of time when they are still alive.” He pondered that a moment. “I shall put that into the minds of the priests and see what they come up with.”

They watched the mist for a while, listened to the wavelets lapping against the stones at their feet. This was a curiously private, if chilly, space—the most private time they had ever had together. When they had met in the meadows it was always possible that someone would stumble upon them, or her Otherfolk friends would come looking for her. And it occurred to her at that moment that this was as good a time and place as any to ask some rather troubling questions. The most pressing of which was—

“Are you really my uncle?” Persephone asked suddenly, to catch him by surprise.

“Wait—what? No!” He looked and sounded genuinely shocked. Persephone sighed with relief. That was one hurdle out of the way, at least.

“Then why do all the stories say you are?” she asked with an air that should tell him she was not going to accept being put off, the way Demeter always tried to put off her questions.

He groaned, and shook his head. “Mortals. And that damn Tradition. And—it’s a long story.”

“We have time,” she pointed out. “Mother never tells me anything. She always says she will, later, but she never does.”

He looked a little aggrieved, but then visibly gave in. “All right, I’ll start at the beginning.” He pondered a bit. “The truth is, gods are just—immortals that mortals say are gods, or at least, that’s what we are. We’re half-Fae, the offspring of Fae and mortals. I don’t know how it came about, but there happened to be a concentration of us here in Olympia. Some of us eventually became the gods, and some became the Titans.”

Persephone nodded, and waited for him to continue. She had never actually seen any Fae, only Otherfolk, but she knew they existed, if only because the Otherfolk talked about them a great deal. She had the impression that the Fae were, more or less, keeping a watchful eye on Olympia to see that the gods didn’t get themselves into something they couldn’t get out of.

“The original six of us—me, Zeus, Poseidon, Demeter, Hera and Hestia—fought and confined what the mortals decided to call the Titans, which were also half-Fae, but were mostly from Dark parents…” He paused. “They were making life pretty hideous for the mortals here. Rounding them up and using them for slaves, and even eating them, like cattle, for one thing. You do know that not all Fae are particularly pleasant, right?”

She nodded at that as well.

“Well, someone had to put a stop to that, and we decided that we would. Besides, it was only a matter of time before they ran out of mortals and came after us.” He gave her a wry smile. “Not all of the Titans were bad, of course, and the ones that sided with us as allies didn’t get imprisoned. In fact, Zeus—”

He stopped, flushing. She squeezed his hand. “No surprise that the ones that sided with you were mostly female?” she suggested. “The only ones I can think of that are male are Prometheus and Epimetheus.”

“Uh—er. Yes. Zeus can be very—persuasive.” He hastily continued. “We built ourselves a nice little complex of palaces and villas up on Mount Olympus, flung a wall around it to keep mortals from straying up there uninvited and thought that was the end of that. Then—the first of the Godmothers, the fully Fae ones, had started turning up, and Zeus suggested we study them and see if we wanted to do what they were doing, you know, steering The Tradition and all that. It seemed like a good idea.”

“Well, I don’t know what else you could have done, really,” she replied as an eddy of mist wrapped around them. “Someone had to, right?”

“We all thought so. The thing is…we were used to thinking in Olympian time.” He laughed ruefully. “We thought we had plenty of time to figure things out, what to do, who would deal with what, you see. But the mortals here have particularly strong wills and good imaginations, and before you know it, I literally woke up down here as Lord of the Underworld, Poseidon found himself in a sea cave and Zeus woke up alone except for the women, and there was an entire Traditional mythos built up around us and compelling us to do what it wanted.” He sighed. “Which ended up with poor Prometheus on that damned rock. How fair is that? Bloody-minded mortals. And, of course, every time another half-Fae turned up, the mortals dreamed up some role for him that fit into the mythos and the family.”

“Or not,” Persephone said sourly.

“Or not,” Hades agreed. “There are some wretched bad fits. I wouldn’t be poor Prometheus under any circumstances. So no, the long and the short of it is, I am not your uncle. Poseidon is your father, not Zeus, no matter what the mortals say. And none of us are Demeter’s brothers by blood. Not even half brothers.”

“That’s good, because I wouldn’t want our children to have one eye or three heads,” Persephone replied, hugging his arm and patting his bicep admiringly. He flushed. “There are more than enough Cyclopses about, and your dog is the only three-headed creature I would care to meet.”

“Oh, he’s a good puppy.” Hades softened. “I suppose since you guessed who I was, you’ve already figured out why I wanted Thanatos to abduct you, right?”

She nodded with enthusiasm. “And it’s horribly clever. Thanatos is the god of death, and if he takes me, I’m dead and belong here, right?”

“Exactly.” He actually grinned. “Well, you’ll have to help me figure out some other way to keep you here. I’m sure that between us we can do it.”

“I wonder, why doesn’t every one of the Olympians know that they’re really only half-Fae? The ‘gods,’ I mean, not the Otherfolk and the mortals.” To her mind that was a very good question. Of course, she knew very well why Demeter wouldn’t have told her—Demeter always assumed she “wasn’t ready” anytime she asked a tricky question, and this was certainly the trickiest of all.

“Ah, good question. Two reasons, really. Well…. two and a half.” He nodded gravely. “The first is the mortals and their Tradition, as I said, it is very strong, and once a role has been picked out for you, it becomes harder and harder to remember that this role wasn’t always what you were. You really have to work at it. Some of the Olympians aren’t comfortable working at it and would really rather just fall into the role.”

“Like Zeus?” she prompted.

“Ah, that is where the half part of the two and a half reasons comes in. Over there—” he waved his hand vaguely at the mist “—I have two fountains. Lethe and Mnemosyne.”

“Forgetfulness and Memory?”

He nodded. “I, for one, take great care to have a drink of Mnemosyne whenever I feel my memories of what I really am start to slip. Zeus, on the other hand…” He paused. “In fact, one of these days we’ll be going to one of Zeus’s feasts, and when we do, at some point Hebe will ask you if you want the ‘special cup.’ That’s ambrosia mixed with Lethe water. Drink that, and all you’ll remember about yourself is what The Tradition says you are.”

She shuddered. “No, thank you. Do the others know this?”

Hades nodded. “Or—well, they know it before they take the first drink. After, it hardly matters, does it? I’ll say this much for Zeus, he will generally explain it all to the newcomers before they are offered the option. I’m just not sure he’ll explain it to you, especially not if your mother—” He broke off what he was going to say.

“That’s a good point.” Persephone scuffed her bare toe into the pebbles. “I can’t always predict what Mother will think, and I honestly don’t know what view she’d take, whether it was better for me not to know, or better for me to know and fight what I don’t want this ‘Tradition’ to do to me.” She heard a splashing—it sounded deliberate—and looked up to see something out there on the water. “Oh, look, there’s Charon.”

A dark shape loomed out of the mist, resolving into the boat and the ferryman. “Well,” Charon said, sounding a tad less lugubrious, “that was interesting.” He toed the plank over the side, and it slid onto the gravel.

“Good interesting, or bad interesting?” Hades asked, handing Persephone into the boat, which was surprisingly stable.

“Good, I think. Minos is going to have his hands full for a little.” Charon chuckled. “I confess I am rather surprised that I carried over quite a few who are neither destined for Tartarus nor the Fields of Asphodel. The friendless and poor on earth may not be such paltry stuff after all. In fact,” he added thoughtfully, “a good many of them are, in their own way, heroes. Leaving them on the bank is doing them a grave—” he chuckled again at his own pun “—disservice, perhaps.”

Hades looked to Persephone. “We might be able to think of something,” she said, in answer to his unspoken query, as he handed her into the boat. “We were just talking about that, in fact.” Hades got into the boat beside her, which rocked not at all under his weight.

Charon poled them through the mist to the opposite shore. It wasn’t as far as Persephone had thought, and yet it was very difficult to tell just how much time actually had passed; Hades remained silent, and Charon wasn’t very chatty.

On the other side…if Persephone had thought that the banks of the river were crowded with souls, here there were shades in uncounted thousands.

As far as she could see in either direction, a thinner mist hung over endless fields of pale blossoms. The shades wandered among them. They seemed particularly joyless as they gathered the white flowers of the asphodel, marked with a blood-red stripe down the center of each petal. They did not seem sad, just…not happy.

Until the fields themselves hazed off into the mist, the asphodel blossoms waved, pallid lilies standing about knee-high to the shades. They seemed to have no other occupation than to pick and eat the blossoms, showing neither enjoyment nor distaste.

This apparently infinite stretch of ground, flowers and mist, she knew already, was the part of Hades’s realm called the Fields of Asphodel, where the souls of those who were neither good nor evil went. In a way, the penalty for being ordinary was to be condemned to continue to be ordinary. Every day was like every other day; the only change was in the comings and goings of new souls, and the Lords of the Underworld.

Charon pushed off once they had gotten out of the boat; there were always new souls to ferry across, it seemed.

The mist still persisted everywhere, making it impossible to judge distance properly, or to make out much that wasn’t near. She and Hades made their way on a road that passed between the two Fields, and the shades gathering and eating flowers paid no particular attention to them. But as they traveled, hand in hand, she saw that there actually was a boundary, a place where the Fields ended. The asphodel gave way to short, mosslike purple turf, and like two mirrors set into the turf, she saw two pools, one on the left of the road, and one on the right. The one on the right was thronged with more shades; only a few were kneeling to scoop water from the one on the left.

“Lethe is on the right,” Hades said, and sighed. “The ordinary choose to forget.”

She nodded, and the two of them stepped a little off the road, which now passed through a long span of the dark purple mosslike growth. It actually felt quite nice on her bare feet. The road itself was crowded with shades, waiting in line. Eventually Persephone made out three platforms ahead of them, each platform holding a kind of throne. The closer they got, the more details she was able to make out.

The three platforms stood in the courtyard of an enormous building, which, at the moment, was little more than a shape in the mist. There were three men there, one enthroned on each platform, and Persephone already knew who they were. They were the judges of the dead, who had been three great kings in life, well-known for their wisdom. Minos was the chief of them, and held the casting vote, if the other two disagreed.

Hades led her past them with a wave. Minos, in the center, shook a fist at him, but with a smile.

Hades chuckled. “Minos would rather have more to do than less,” he explained. “Despite what Charon said.”

The judges held their tribunals in the forecourt of what proved to be a great palace, which, as they approached and details resolved out of the mist, was not what Persephone had expected. She had thought it would be gloomy and black, forbidding, bulky. It was, in fact, all of white marble, and as graceful and airy as anything built on Mount Olympus. Waiting there impatiently in front of the great doors was a young man holding the reins of four black, ebon-eyed horses hitched to a black chariot. There was a bundle in the chariot that moved and made ominous and threatening noises.

“By Zeus’s goolies, it’s about time you got here!” the young man said, indignation written in every word and gesture. “I thought you said the wench was going to come willingly! I finally had to gag and bag her! If I can’t father children, Hades, it’ll be all your fault!” Then he stopped, and stared at Persephone. “Who,” he said slowly, “is that?”

Horror crossed Hades’s face. “This is Persephone. We decided to forgo the abduction and figure out some other way to keep her down here. Maybe arrange for my priests to have some dreams about her or something—”

Thanatos went pale. Which was quite a feat for someone already as white as the marble of the palace behind him. “Then who have I got?”

“That is a very good question,” Hades replied in a flat voice.

All three of them stared at the moving bag. The sounds it was making were very ominous indeed. And very, very angry.

 

By the time Leo had dug out a pit the size of a shallow grave, he had to give up. He sat back on his heels and restrained his first impulse, which was to scream imprecations at the heavens. His tunic was plastered to his body with sweat and dirt, there was dirt in his hair and dug under his fingernails. And he didn’t care. All he wanted was Brunnhilde back.

Screaming wasn’t going to do any good. This was either the work of a very powerful magician, or—possibly one of the local gods?

Leo clenched his fists and tried to remember what the charioteer had said. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

He ran a grimy hand through his hair, thoroughly confused now.

Think, Leo. Think this through. The man shows up coming up out of the ground, and the ground closes up behind him. He says, “There you are! I’ve been looking all over for you!” And I’ve never seen him in my life.

Could the man have been looking for Brunnhilde?

If it was someone from the northlands…maybe. He was dressed like a local, not like one of the gods or mortals of Vallahalia. He’d never seen a chariot that looked like that in Vallahalia, and anyway, the only chariot there was one pulled by goats. The rocky terrain of the north wasn’t very good for chariots.

And he was dark, not blond; virtually every northlander he’d seen was either blond or red-haired. No, he looked like the people around here.

They didn’t know anyone local.

“There you are! I’ve been looking all over for you!” The man certainly thought he knew Bru; Bru had certainly stared at him without any sign of recognition at all.

The only way he could have known her was if someone local had been scrying them—but if so, why would he say, “I’ve been looking all over for you”? If he could scry them, he would have known exactly where they were, and he wouldn’t have had to go looking for them.

He couldn’t have been looking for Bru.

If he hadn’t been looking for Bru, he must have been looking for someone like Brunnhilde.

What else had he said…? “You went to the wrong meadow, just like a girl.”

“You went to the wrong meadow”?

It not only sounded as if he was looking for someone, it sounded as if he was looking for someone who was expecting him.

And it must have been someone he had never actually seen.

So he had been looking for someone like Brunnhilde. It was a case of mistaken identity.

It would be hard to mistake Bru for anyone else, if you knew her. Even someone who had only been scrying them from a distance would have a hard time mistaking her for anyone else.

Conclusion: the man had to have been going from a description, and not a very good one, either.

And that meant another question. Man, or god?

Leo didn’t even have to think twice about that. Only a god would be so sure of his own power that he would simply appear and abduct a complete stranger without thought of consequences.

All right. Assume that it was one of the local gods. That put Leo up against a god. With all the power of a god, who could probably squash him flat without thinking twice about it….

To hell with that!

He lurched to his feet, feeling rage surge through him. So what if they were gods? They were pretty damned small gods, and he was married to a god, and he was going to get to the bottom of this and get her back no matter what it cost him!

He caught up his discarded sword and headed for the Vallahalian horses at a grim trot. Damn if he was going to bother going through an intermediary; let the natives putter about with priests. After all, he’d been presented to a goddess of the earth as her son-in-law, and faced down the All-father. In a Kingdom where the gods were real, physical beings, he might as well go straight to the top.

Or wherever he needed to get to in order to confront them directly. And he had a pretty good idea of who could get him there.

The two big bay horses—well, they weren’t just horses, after all, they could stride through the air, you never had to worry about them straying off and they always looked magnificent—were still where he and Bru had left them. They weren’t happy though; they were prancing and pawing the earth, looking every bit as agitated as he was.

And now, if ever, was the time to find out just how different they were from “horses.”

He seized the reins of the horse he had been given on either side of the bit and looked into its eyes. “Do you know where the gods of this land live?” he asked it. On the surface of things, such a question, put to a horse, might have seemed insane, but these were horses that had served the Valkyria, were bred in the pastures of Vallahalia, and he wasn’t inclined to put anything past them. One of Brunnhilde’s sister-Valkyria had given her mount to him, saying with a laugh that it made a fitting “dowry” for him, and that this way he wouldn’t have to ride pillion behind Bru. The other Valkyria had found this hilarious at the time.

Since then, his mount, named Drachen, had done literally anything he asked of it. The only “supernatural” ability it had displayed so far was the ability to fly—or rather, to run through the air. It had a doglike loyalty, was a cherub to him and Bru, and a devil to anyone else. He’d suspected it had a very high level of intelligence, and perhaps a lot more than that, but hadn’t had a chance to ask Bru.

The horse looked at him measuringly, and then slowly bobbed its head up and down.

“Was that a god who took our lady?” he asked it fiercely.

Drachen snorted, as if it thought the answer to such a question was so obvious the question didn’t even need asking, but again bobbed its head up and down.

He didn’t ask any further questions. He threw himself into the saddle and took up the reins—but left them slack, because clearly, he was not going to be the one in charge on this ride.

“Then let us go to these gods and get her back!” he growled.

Both horses threw up their heads and trumpeted agreement. Leo’s mount reared up; its forefeet found purchase on the air through whatever magic it used to run, and they were off. Both of them plunged up toward the sky as if they were running on a hill. Powerful muscles drove them upward at a pace that far exceeded that of a flesh-and-blood horse.

Once they were well above the level of the treetops, it was pretty clear where they were heading; a cloud-capped mountain loomed in the middle distance, and looked to be exactly where one would want to set up housekeeping if one happened to be a god, at least in Leo’s mind. And as they headed upward, Brunnhilde’s horse cast a glance over its shoulder at him…and snorted.

“What?” he shouted at it. He got no direct answer. But his horse swerved a little and made a beeline for a patch of dark clouds. Before he got a chance to object, both beasts plunged in, and a moment later he found himself in the middle of a rainstorm.

When they emerged again on the other side he was spluttering and soaked. But clean.

His hide and the little one-shouldered excuse for a tunic he wore in imitation of the locals were both dry long before the slopes of the mountain and the buildings there were clearly visible. And if he hadn’t still been so angry he was quite ready to set fire to the entire mountain, he would have been enchanted by the view.

The lowest slopes, mostly forested, were dotted with flowering meadows where flocks of sheep and goats grazed, or little isolated structures of white marble rose. A little higher, as the trees began to thin, there were more substantial buildings, about the size of one of the manor houses that he was familiar with, also of white marble. Halfway up the slope, a line of clouds formed an unmoving ring around the mountain; so far as Leo could tell, this ring would make it impossible for anyone on the ground to see what he saw from his vantage in the air.

With its base rooted in the top of the clouds, a massive wall stretched around the mountain itself, not at all unlike the wall around Vallahalia, and probably erected for the same reason. The gods were not inclined to permit just any old mortal to come walking up the front path. There was a gate in this wall, and it was closed; not that this mattered in the least to Leo.

Behind the wall, and crowding up to the summit, were more of the white-marble manors, surrounded by terraced gardens. As Leo’s mount galloped above the wall and these buildings passed beneath him, he saw the occasional person in the gardens or on a terrace gaping up at him. All the buildings had a kind of inner glow, like light shining through translucent porcelain.

He ignored the people below him. The gods were like anyone else; the most important personage lived at the top, and that was where he was heading, to a single enormous, colonnaded structure ornamented by heroic statues of men and women.

The horses seemed to take on fire and life as they neared this building; and rather than feeling intimidated, Leo experienced a surge of energy and strength, as if he had opened up some sort of heroic spring inside himself that he had never known was there. His anger stopped being all-consuming, and became focused; Brunnhilde had been taken, and there was nothing on this earth, above it, or below it, that was going to keep him from getting to her.

Beneath him, his horse began to shine with an unearthly, golden glow, just as the buildings here glowed, but brighter. He took heart from that; these beasts were the mounts of gods themselves, and if they felt he was worthy of being carried up here, then who were these upstarts in their draped sheets to stand between him and his mate?

The horses trumpeted a challenge as they landed in the forecourt of the chief building; their hooves rang on the pavement as they touched down, now blazing with golden light. Leo jumped out of the saddle without even thinking about it, pulling his sword from the sheath at the saddlebow. He was barely aware of half a dozen people in robes and tunics staring at him dumbfounded; he had eyes only for one. That one sat on what looked like a throne at the center of the forecourt; a man with the physique of a fighter, long, curling black hair and beard, and some of that same golden glow about him. Like the others, he wore one of those draped garments, but at least this man imparted the ridiculous swath of cloth with a sense of dignity.

Even with his mouth hanging open.

Leo stamped toward him. Evidently these gods were so convinced of their own power and invulnerability that they had nothing whatsoever like guards. But—anger didn’t kill caution; Leo stopped a good twenty feet away. Just in case.

While the man still stared at him, Leo pointed at him with the sword he still held in his hand.

“You!” he roared, his own voice echoing at such a volume that he himself was startled, though he took care not to show it. He swept the sword point around in an arc. “All of you! What have you done with my wife?”

 

Demeter examined one of the trees in her orchard with a critical eye; like all the trees, it had buds, blossoms, green and ripening fruit on it all at the same time. She wondered if perhaps she should have some of the insects eat a few of the blooms so as not to overburden the tree unduly. While there were the strange cycles known as “seasons” outside Olympia, here there were no such things as set times to blossom and ripen or lie fallow; there was planting and harvest, of course, but no particular time for either. That was because of her; beneath her care, every plot and field in Olympia flourished, and year-beginning to year-end marked not so much a cycle as a progression.

Care had to be taken, though, to make sure the soil stayed fertile, the trees and bushes were not stressed. Demeter spent a great deal of time among the mortals, speaking through her priestesses, schooling them in husbandry, and spent almost as much time in her own fields and orchards, seeing to it that what she tended personally served as an example of perfection rather than neglect.

She directed a beetle to snip off a particular bud and drop it into a swarm of waiting ants, when she felt a tremor pass through her—and a sensation as if something had just been cut off from her as that bud had been cut from the tree.

Bud? she thought, and then, in something like Panic fear—Kore!

She whirled and ran as she had not run since she was a child herself, in that long-ago time when she played in the fields with the sheep tended by her shepherdess mother—ran back to her villa, and stopped, panting for breath, hand pressed against her aching side, in the door to the weaving room.

The loom was unattended except for a kitten playing with a ball of yarn and a faun curled around a basket of sleeping hedgehog babies, poking at them with a curious finger to see them stir.

“Where is Kore?” she demanded of the hooved child, who looked up at her with startled eyes, his mouth forming a little o.

“M-m-meadow?” he stammered.

Demeter ran to the meadow where Kore was used to playing. There was nothing there, nothing but a scatter of blossoms.

Nothing at all.

 

Gingerly, Hades approached the squirming bag. The very fabric looked angry. “What did you do, Thanatos?” he demanded.

“I did what you asked me to do,” Thanatos replied, looking indignant and sullen at the same time. “I looked for an immortal maiden with yellow hair in a meadow. I found lots of maidens in meadows, not many with yellow hair, and only one immortal. So I took her. You said she wouldn’t fight me, that she was expecting to be abducted, but she fought like five she-goats! I’m bruised all over!”

“You’re a god, Thanatos, heal yourself,” snapped Hades. “Who did you rape?”

“I didn’t rape anyone!” Thanatos yelped.

“You know what I mean! Who’s in the sack?” Hades bellowed.

“How should I know?” Thanatos shrieked back.

“Oh, for—” Persephone pulled the little dagger she used to cut fruit out of her belt, stalked around them and went straight to the bag. She bent over and cut the rope holding it shut, then leapt back with the grace and agility of a young doe.

The bag writhed, a pretty foot and a long, strong leg emerged with a vigorous kick, then the rest of the young woman fought free of the fabric, with only a momentary glimpse of something the lady probably would not have wanted strange men to see. A pair of extremely blue eyes beneath a mass of tumbled golden hair blazed at all of them, and it was only Hades’s quick thought to cast a circle of magic around her that saved them all from the tiny bolts of levin-fire those eyes shot at them.

Thanatos yelped again, jumping back automatically.

“Well,” Hades said slowly. “Definitely god-born.”

Persephone approached the circle slowly. “One woman to another,” she said, getting the captive’s attention. “There has been a dreadful mistake. I’m going to cut you free now so we can explain it, all right?”

The woman glared for a long, long moment, then slowly, grudgingly, nodded. Persephone glanced at Hades, who dismissed the magic circle with a little twirl of his fingers. Then she knelt beside the woman and first cut her wrists free of their rope, then handed her the little knife so she could get rid of the gag herself.

When the woman untangled herself from ropes and sack, she stood up, rubbing her wrists. She did not give back the knife.

She was taller than Persephone by more than a head; she was nearly as tall as Thanatos, and he was not small by either mortal or godly standards. As she glared at them all, he stopped sulking and began gawking.

Then the gawking took on a bit of a leer.

“Well,” he said, looking aslant at Hades, “if this one isn’t yours, can I have her?”

The words hadn’t even left his mouth before he was dancing in place as levin-bolts peppered the area around his sandaled feet. She was tossing them this time; they looked like toy versions of Zeus’s thunderbolts. Fascinated, Persephone wondered if one day she could learn to do that.

Persephone clasped both hands over her mouth to restrain her laughter, as Hades merely folded his arms and watched. Eventually the woman wearied of tormenting Thanatos and allowed him to stop capering to her crackling tune. She stood with her fists on her hips and looked them all over, ending with a glare at Thanatos.

“I’m no one’s property, god or mortal. And I’m married,” she said shortly. “Another suggestion of that sort, and I’ll aim higher. And maybe with the knife, too.”

Hades gave her a short bow, equal to equal. “Your pardon, sky-born,” he said so smoothly that Persephone could only sigh and admire his manners. “The gods of Olympia are…somewhat free with their favors, as often as not.”

The woman raised an eyebrow. “Some wouldn’t consider that a ‘favor,’” she retorted dryly. “Now, what, exactly, am I doing here, and where is here in the first place?”

Hades and Thanatos began speaking at once, and the stranger’s head switched back and forth between them to the point where Persephone feared she was going to get a cramp. “Wait!” she cried, holding up her hand. Both men stopped. Hades bowed.

“My name is Persephone. I am the daughter of the goddess Demeter. My mother is—” she made a face “—overprotective. This is Hades, the Lord of the Underworld, where the dead go.”

“Ah!” The woman’s eyes brightened with understanding. “Like Vallahalia. Go on.”

“You are actually in the Underworld now, to answer your second question,” Hades put in. She nodded.

“I managed to catch sight of this lovely maid, and—” Hades reached for Persephone’s hand. She let him take it, blushing. “I asked the king of our gods, Zeus, for permission to wed her. He agreed, but cautioned me that her mother would never let her go.”

Persephone nodded. “She thinks I am still a child,” the girl said sourly.

The stranger nodded, sighing. “All mothers are like that, I think. I begin to get the shape of this. I take it that you decided to abduct her?”

Hades hesitated. “Not—exactly. That is more in Zeus’s style than mine.”

“He courted me!” Persephone said proudly. “And as if he was nothing more noble than a shepherd’s god, or one of the minor patrons of a brook or grove, so I wouldn’t feel as if I had to yield to him!”

Now it was Hades’s turn to blush, as she squeezed his hand.

The stranger’s cold eyes warmed a little. “I begin to favor you, god of the Underworld. So. This still begs the question of why I am here.”

“My mother is the Earth goddess, Demeter. Fertility,” Persephone said pointedly. The woman’s eyes widened.

“Aha! So you complicate things by sending another in your place to take the maid. So that she does not know who to curse, and you may garner more allies to soothe her before you reveal the truth.”

“Exactly.” Hades beamed.

“And because he did not know the maid—” she eyed Persephone “—there cannot be many yellow-haired wenches among your people. You are the first I have seen in this place. I can see where there would have been a mistake.” She nodded, satisfied. “Well, with that settled, I forgive you. You can take me back now and in return for this insult you can help me and my Leopold with a problem of our own.”

“Uh…” Hades bit his lip. “This is where things become…complicated.”

“Complicated?” The woman’s expression suddenly darkened. “What do you mean by complicated?”

“Thanatos is the god of death, you see—” Hades gestured helplessly with his free hand at the hapless Thanatos. “That was why he was supposed to take Persephone. She’d be dead, and have to stay here, you see—”

“But I am immortal!” the woman shouted, making them all wince.

“Well, er, yes. But gods can die—” Hades freed his hand from Persephone’s and it looked to her as if he was preparing to cast another protective circle.

“I—!” the woman roared—and then suddenly fell silent. “Damn it,” she swore. “We can. Baldur did. And I was supposed to die to bring about the fall of Vallahalia—”

“So…er…you can’t leave. I mean, I just can’t let you go, you see.” Hades gestured apologetically. “It would be a terrible precedent. People would be coming down here all the time, demanding that I turn this shade or that loose. You see?”

“Yes, damn it all, I do.” The woman gritted her teeth. “But I am not staying here. If I have to, I will fight my way out.”

Hades and Persephone exchanged a long look. “I think she would,” Persephone whispered.

“I have no doubt of it,” Hades responded. He ran a hand nervously through his dark curls. “I think we need to figure a way out of this.”

“Yes,” the woman said sharply. “You do.”

 

Demeter stood in the middle of the open meadow with both hands clenched in her hair and her heart torn with anguish. Of all of the things that could have befallen her daughter, this had never, ever occurred to her. That Kore might, in some childish fit of pique, run away—yes, that she had thought of, and put barriers around her own small domain so that Kore would be turned back from them if she tried to cross. She had carefully kept Kore out of sight of the other gods once she began to mature, so that none of them would have been tempted to steal her away. The lesson of Hebe was plain there; Zeus had fancied the child as a cupbearer, and whisked her off before her mother could say aye or nay.

So who, or what, had stolen her child? Where had she been taken?

She did not stand in anguish for long; if there was a single being that knew, or could find out, everything that went on between heaven and earth, it was Hecate. Hecate was one of only a few Titans who had been permitted by Zeus to retain her power. To Hecate she would go, then.

With her thoughts in turmoil, and her heart in despair, she did not even notice that in her wake, the growing things were beginning to fade and droop.

She paused only long enough in her kitchen to gather up what she would need; the roast lamb from the supper Kore would not now eat, poppy-seed bread, red wine and honey. She caught up three torches and sped to the nearest crossroads, a meeting of two paths that her flocks and their shepherdesses used. With a flat rock for a table, the three torches driven into the ground around it and lit, Demeter laid out the meal, and waited, slow tears tracing hot paths down her cheeks.

As darkness fell, she heard the slow footfalls of three creatures approaching; two four-legged, one going on two feet.

Through the trees, a golden glow neared; as Demeter waited, holding her breath, the light took on the shape of a flame, the flame of a torch held high by a figure still obscured by distance and the intervening foliage and tree trunks.

Soon, though, that dark-robed figure paced slowly and deliberately through the trees; on either side of her was a huge dog. As she drew near, the stranger slowly removed the veil covering her head, revealing that she was a gravely beautiful woman of indeterminate age, taller than Demeter. It was Hecate. Demeter’s mouth was dry, and she could not manage to speak for a moment.

“What means this, sister?” Hecate asked. “Why do you invoke me as if you were a mere mortal?”

“I did not know how else to call you quickly, elder sister,” Demeter whispered, and her voice broke on a sob. “Oh, Hecate, it is my daughter, my Kore! She has been taken from me, and I do not know where nor how!”

Hecate blinked with surprise. “This is a grave thing that you tell me,” she replied. “And a puzzling one, for I know you fenced your child about with great protections. Tell me what you know.”

While Demeter related the little that she knew, Hecate listened carefully. “I think,” she said at last, “that we should go to Mount Olympus. If there is any being who would have seen your daughter stolen, it is Helios, and as the sun has set, he will be with the other gods, feasting.”

She held out her hand to Demeter. “Come. If Zeus has been up to some mischief, or countenanced it, he will not dare to deny the both of us combined.”

Demeter took Hecate’s hand, and Hecate passed the torch in front of her from left to right. The world blurred for a moment, and when it settled, they stood in the forecourt of Zeus’s palace.

But Zeus and the other gods were already occupied—with one very angry, and seemingly very powerful, mortal.

 

“What have you done with my wife?” Leo shouted again, holding down his sense of shock and surprise that no one had struck him dead with a thunderbolt yet. On either side of him, the Vallahalian horses pawed the marble, striking sparks with their hooves, tossing their heads and snorting.

“Ah…” The fellow on the throne looked down at the tip of Leo’s sword, which was unaccountably glowing. “We haven’t done anything?” He glanced around at others of his sort who were gathering in the twilight, while torches and lamps lit themselves. “At least I haven’t. Have any of you lot been stealing mortals this afternoon?”

A chorus of baffled no’s answered his question. Leo wasn’t backing down. “We were minding our own business, when someone came up out of the ground in a chariot drawn by four black horses,” he thundered, taking full advantage of the fact that his wrath seemed to have taken them all aback. “He said something about ‘I’ve been looking all over for you,’ grabbed my wife and dragged her underground. If that wasn’t a god, I’m a eunuch, and you are the only gods hereabouts, so what have you done with my wife?”

“Impeccable reasoning, Father,” said a rather stern-looking young woman in a helmet and metal breast-plate in addition to the usual draperies. In her case, the draperies covered a disappointing amount, from her collarbone down to the ground.

His conscience chided him for that thought; he put it aside. Besides, she was carrying a spear and looked as though she knew how to use it.

“Four black horses? Then it can’t have been Helios or Apollo,” the young woman continued. “It’s unlikely to have been Hephaestus. That leaves only one possible candidate.”

“Two, if you count Thanatos. Hades lets him drive, sometimes,” the man on the throne corrected with a sigh. He turned his attention back to Leo and was about to say something, when there was a soundless explosion of black smoke, and two more women appeared at the edge of the courtyard. One, dressed in a dark blue drape, was visibly distraught. The other, dressed in black and carrying a torch, with a huge dog on either side of her, looked sterner than the young woman in the helmet.

“Hold, Zeus!” the black-clad one intoned. “Hear now the pleas of Demeter, whose daughter has been foully riven from her this day!”

“What, another one?” exclaimed a young man, who was dressed in sandals with wings on them and not much else, exclaimed. “There hasn’t been this much excitement around here since Zeus turned into a swan!”

The man on the throne colored, and the oldest-looking of the women glared metaphorical thunderbolts at both of them.

“Or was it a bull?” mused the irrepressible young man, glancing slyly at the chief of the gods.

“Hermes!” the young woman in the helmet hissed at him. The oldest woman glowered.

The woman in dark blue—Demeter—wept. Leo shifted his weight uncomfortably, but—damn it, I was here first. He firmed his chin and stood his ground.

But at this point all the gods started talking at once. The males were adamant that whatever had happened to Demeter’s daughter, they had nothing to do with it. The females had started to group themselves around Demeter and the other one. Clearly, this was turning into a potentially ugly situation.

It was broken up when two literally radiant young men appeared in another explosion of smoke, this one white instead of black. “Hail Zeus!” said the handsomer of the two. “Ha—”

He did a double take.

“What in the name of heaven and earth is going on?” he demanded.

The gods all started talking again. Finally the young woman in the helmet silenced them all by pounding the butt of her spear on the marble, which rang like a gong.

Leo blinked. That was certainly an interesting trick. And effective.

“Hail Apollo,” the young woman said, with no hint of mockery. “This mortal came before us on god-horses, making a claim that one of the gods falsely stole his wife away. He had not done making his testimony when Hecate appeared with Demeter, saying that Persephone was also stolen. That is the long and the short of it. However, now that you are here, you—or rather, Helios—are in a position to answer both those accusations, for Helios sees all things.”

“Most things, wise Athena,” said the other young man with a slight bow. “In the matter of Persephone…” He hesitated.

“Speak, Helios!” the woman in black commanded him sternly.

Helios sighed. “Much as I hate to break a mother’s heart, I did see Hades take Persephone. But it looked to me as if she went willingly.”

Demeter let out a wail that woke tears in Leo’s eyes, and at least half the gods’ as well. “No, great Zeus, this cannot be! Hades? Lord of Darkness and Gloom and Death? He is no fit mate for my golden child!”

Helios coughed. “Ah, gracious goddess, I hate to contradict you, but Hades is ruler of the Underworld, the third part of creation, and is the brother-equal to Poseidon and Zeus himself. If he isn’t worthy, no one is.”

“Then I shall linger here no longer!” Demeter let out a heartbroken cry and fled, vanishing among the gardens and marble edifices below. The woman in black watched her go, broodingly, then turned to Zeus.

“I would learn the truth of this myself, Zeus,” she declared.

“By all means, Hecate, do as you please,” the man on the throne said weakly. “Don’t mind me, I’m only the king here.”

With a sardonic smile, the woman in black vanished in another poof of black smoke.

Now Helios turned to Leo. “As for this mortal…” he said, his brow wrinkling thoughtfully. “Ah, yes. It was Hades’s chariot that took his golden mate. But it was Thanatos who took her.”

A leaden silence fell. It was the woman in the helmet who broke it. “Mortal, what was it you said that Thanatos called out?”

Leo licked lips gone dry. Whoever this “Thanatos” was—the gods thought the situation was very serious indeed. “Uh—he said, ‘Well, there you are! You went to the wrong meadow, just like a girl. I’ve been looking all over for you!’ Then he grabbed her and vanished into the earth.”

“Oh, dear.” The silence grew even heavier. “Mortal, I am sorry. Given that Hades was seen to leave with Persephone—who is a golden-haired maiden—and given that Thanatos, Hades’s servant, was driving Hades’s chariot—I believe your wife is the victim of a case of mistaken identity.”

Zeus looked unhappily down at the helmeted woman. “Do you think?”

She nodded. “Aye. I think he sent Thanatos to fetch Persephone, so that her mother would have no way to take her back. But Thanatos had never seen the girl, and took the first woman that matched her description. This mortal’s wife.” She turned to Leo. “Mortal, I am sorry. There is nothing we can do for you.”

Leo’s anger erupted again. “What do you mean, there is nothing you can do for me? He’s one of you, isn’t he? Order him to bring her back!”

“Mortal—” The oldest woman stepped forward, a sympathetic and sorrowful expression on her face that filled him with dread. “Mortal, even the gods are subject to rules. Thanatos took your lady. Thanatos is the god of death. Not even we can take her back from him. That is why Hades must have sent Thanatos to take Persephone.” She shook her head. “I am sorry. But we are as helpless as you.”

 

“Is there a precedent for getting someone out of here?” Brunnhilde demanded.

“Well…” Hades paused.

“I didn’t actually die, you know!” she snapped. “I was kidnapped by your dim-witted flunky!”

“Hey—” Thanatos objected weakly.

“She has a point,” Persephone said patiently. “Just because Thanatos took her doesn’t mean she actually died. He took her body and spirit.”

“It’s a technicality, but it’s the technicality we were going to use to keep you here,” Hades pointed out.

Brunnhilde’s eyes darkened dangerously. “Do you really want to get into a battle between my people and yours?” she asked, her voice low and menacing. “You wouldn’t like that. We’re not civilized.” She moved very close to Hades and narrowed her eyes. “We live for fighting. We thrive on doom. My father actually tried to bring on Ragnorak. He’d be overjoyed to find a way to destroy not just one, but two entire sets of gods. If only to get away from his wife.”

“What’s Ragnorak?” Thanatos wanted to know.

“Never mind. I don’t want to know.” Hades waved his hands frantically. “No, we have to work together to figure out a solution. There has to be an answer.”

A puff of black smoke erupted next to Hades’s throne. “By Gaia’s left breast, Hades, you really are a moron,” said a sardonic female voice from inside it. The smoke cleared away, revealing a handsome dark-haired woman with a torch in one hand, accompanied by two dogs. “I cannot believe what a hash you made of this business. And you’re no better,” she added in Thanatos’s direction. She looked down at her dogs. “You two, go run and play with Cereberus.” She stuck her torch in a nearby holder, and the dogs, suddenly looking like perfectly ordinary canines, yipped and ran off.

She turned to Brunnhilde. “I’m Hecate. You must be the abducted barbarian.”

Brunnhilde nodded, and drew herself up straight. “Brunnhilde, of the Valkyria, daughter of one-eyed Odin, king of the gods of Vallahalia, and Erda, goddess of the Earth.”

“Or, in other words, half-Fae like all the rest of us.” Hecate did not quite smile. “When we choose to remember it, that is. Bah! A fine mess this is.”

She sat down on Hades’s throne. Hades didn’t even bother to protest. “All right, first things first. Persephone, I assume you’re here of your own free will?”

Persephone looked ready to burst. “Aunt Hecate, I am sick to death of being treated like a toddler! I love my mother, really, I do, but she—”

“Was smothering you, as I told her a dozen times in the last year alone. You, Hades. Is this some enchantment or some other trick?” The gaze she threw at Hades would have impaled a lesser man.

Persephone answered before he could, proudly detailing how Hades had met her as a simple shepherd-god, much her inferior, and wooed her gently and with humor and consideration. Brunnhilde caught Hecate’s lips twitching a little during this ebullient tale, as if the goddess was having trouble keeping her expression serious.

“All right, all right,” Hecate said when Persephone paused for breath, before she could start in on another paean to her love. “I’ll take that as a no. And I suppose Athena was right—you intended to have Thanatos take her so you’d have the rules on your side to keep her here. Right?”

Hades confined himself to a simple “Yes, Hecate.”

“By Uranus’s severed goolies, this is a mess. Let me think.” Hecate drummed her fingers on the marble arm of the throne. Her nails made a sound like hailstones. “Persephone, keeping you here should be easy enough. Eat. Eat something that was grown down here.”

Hades grimaced. “Ah…not…that…easy. The only thing that grows here is the asphodel—and that only nourishes spirits. We bring all the food we eat from Olympia. There just aren’t that many of us that need real food.”

“Try the Elysian Fields, at least there’s light there,” Hecate suggested. “Persephone, there has to be some of your mother’s powers in you, go coax something to grow, then eat it. That will make you part of this realm. That’s what works for the Fae realms, and The Tradition should make it work here.” She pointed a thumb at Brunnhilde. “Now, you, and your mate. What is it, usually, Hades? Nearly impossible tasks?”

Hades nodded. “As few as one, as many as seven.”

Brunnhilde quickly saw where this was going, and nodded, though not with any enthusiasm. “And a year and a day, usually,” she said with resignation. “Damn.”

“Hades, you figure out some tasks for the barbarian woman. I think the best thing to do with the man is to set him to guard Demeter so she doesn’t manage to get herself abducted by something nasty, or fall down a well, or something.” Hecate pondered. “I’ll manufacture more tasks for him if I need to. Or who knows? He might just fall into some, thanks to The Tradition. Let’s see if we can’t get this happening sooner than a year and a day, or everyone and everything in Olympia is going to starve to death.”

She got up and reached for her torch. “Wait!” Brunnhilde said.

Hecate paused.

“This was all your fault,” Brunnhilde said, pointing at Thanatos. “I want something in exchange for going along with this and not just summoning my father and giving him an excuse for a war of the gods.”

Hecate raised one eyebrow. “She has a point. And I’m a goddess of justice, among other things.”

Hades nodded. “All right.” He sighed. “What is it you want?”

Brunnhilde smiled in triumph. “I want you to make my husband an immortal.”

 

So this was Elysium.

It was certainly pretty. Flowers, flowers everywhere, underfoot, overhead in the trees, clouding the bushes. But not a hint of fruit. Nothing like a vegetable garden. No fields of grain.

Which, all things considered…was not at all surprising. Everyone here seemed to be blithely uninterested in the humbler tasks, or indeed, in work of any sort. Well, it wasn’t as if they had to work; they were spirits after all, they didn’t eat, or drink, they had everything provided for them. But it made her feel just a little impatient, looking at them lolling about, doing nothing but exercising, having games, discussing ridiculous things like “How do I know the color blue is the same to you as it is to me?”

Hecate was at least right about one thing. Elysium did have light. It had its own sun, and its own stars, which were in the heavens at the same time. She had gone to it by means of an imposing gate in an otherwise blank wall; here the gate stood, quite isolated, in the middle of a field of—yet more asphodels. She had the feeling that she was going to be very, very tired of asphodels after a while.

Perhaps if this experiment worked she could get other flowers to bloom in the gardens of Hades’s palace.

There was none of that all-enshrouding mist here. Aside from the extraordinary sky—in which the sun, as near as she could tell, did not move, but simply winked out from time to time, making “night”—it was rather like the slopes of Mount Olympus, minus the animals and birds. No flocks of sheep, no songbirds, no insects. Hmm. And no bees.

Which means I am going to have to pollinate whatever I am trying to grow by hand.

But it wasn’t wilderness. It was all very tame. Mannered groves, manicured meadows big enough to conduct games in, hills with just enough slope to make a good place to watch, rocks where they were most convenient to sit on, small, “rustic” buildings or miniature temples dotted about.

And everywhere, people. Which she ignored, because she was trying to figure out what, if anything, she might be able to get to bear fruit, and why there was nothing bearing fruit here now.

Finally she gave up trying to reason it out herself, and went searching for someone who could tell her. Most of those she asked looked at her askance, and said they hadn’t really thought about it. A couple groups actually turned the topic of their debate to whether or not there should be such a thing as planting and harvesting here.

Well, it was no worse than the “color blue” question.

Finally she was sent to the ruler of Elysium; the former king Rhadamanthus, who was the son of a Titan. Or, as she was well aware now, at least half-Fae.

She found him arbitrating a dispute between two philosophers, but once he caught sight of her, he seemed more than pleased to tell them they were both wrong, dismiss them, and go to greet her.

“So, this is ‘little’ Persephone.” The king chuckled. “I must say, I envy Hades. Perhaps Thanatos can find me another like you?”

“Oh, he already did, and you wouldn’t want her,” Persephone replied, thinking about the rather formidable war-goddess she had left stewing in Hades’s care. “Cross Athena with Ares’s temper, and throw in a bit of Bacchus’s madness, just to keep things uncertain—” She explained to Rhadamanthus what had happened as briefly as she could. “So the problem is,” she concluded, “since Thanatos didn’t abduct me, I have to find another way to keep Mother from getting me back. Hecate says the only way she can think of is for me to eat something grown down here. But it has to be real food, apparently, flowers won’t qualify, or I would already have had a salad of asphodel.”

“Well…that is a problem. The definition of Elysium is that it lies in eternal spring—not a good time to produce anything edible.” Rhadamanthus pondered this for a moment. “Well, if you have any of your mother’s power…”

She sighed. “Hecate said the same thing.”

“There might be one place where you can succeed. Come with me.”

She followed Rhadamanthus, for quite some time. He proved to be an excellent conversationalist and told her many valuable things about Hades’s moods and personality. It was only when he took her through a very precipitous cleft that she noticed that this part of Elysium was a bit different than the rest. Drier, not so lush, and at the moment—warmer.

On the other side of the cleft was a tiny valley. It was not a particularly fertile valley, either. But there were three stunted pomegranate trees here, with a few blossoms on them.

“I really don’t know why this part of Elysium is resistant to the eternal spring we have everywhere else,” Rhadamanthus mused. “But it is. No one but myself ever comes here. I only found the place by accident. I’ve seen fruit start—I’ve never seen one ripen, but I have seen them start. If there is anyplace in Elysium where you can succeed, it will be here.”

Persephone stared at the unprosperous-looking trees, and for a moment was ready to give up completely. This was ridiculous. The trees were warped by drought and deprivation, the soil was poor, and in any event, pomegranates took five months from blossom to fruit! By that time, Demeter would surely track her down and demand her back!

“The Tradition does demand the almost impossible in order for the Hero to succeed,” Rhadamanthus said, as if he was reading her thoughts.

She almost groaned, but he was right. This was exactly the sort of thing that The Tradition required.

It seemed she was going to be growing pomegranates. Hopefully, at an accelerated pace.

Hopefully, her mother’s power actually was in her.

 

Leo had more than a few choice words for the Olympians, and he was delivering them when Hecate returned. This time the billow of dark smoke sprang up between him and the others, so that Hecate was in an excellent position to interrupt them all when she stepped out of it. “Your woman seems to be fine, mortal,” Hecate said, cutting his tirade short. “And she’s no better pleased with this than you are. I pledge you that Hades has no intention of holding her if there is any way we can work out a solution for this predicament he and Thanatos managed to muddle into.”

Leo frowned, and was about to demand what she meant by if, when she held up her hand, forestalling him. “However, if you’ll give me the favor of holding your tongue for a moment, Olympia has a much bigger problem to deal with here than just one separated couple, and unfortunately, this is one that won’t wait.”

“Just what would that be?” Leo asked angrily.

Hecate’s somber face made him pause. “Demeter is the goddess of fertility,” she said slowly and deliberately. “And the goddess of fertility has just abandoned her home and run off into the wilderness and beyond. I would not in the least be surprised to discover that she has abandoned her duty and fled past our borders as well. The Tradition has put her firmly in charge of the magic that keeps Olympia fertile and growing, and there is no way to replace her. And we have a country populated by mortals who have no concept of ‘seasons,’ and no reason to store food, since Demeter has insured that things ripen all year long.”

Athena was the one who grasped the gravity of the situation about the same time that Leo did. She gasped and paled, understanding that Hecate meant the country was about to plunge into starvation as the last of the food was eaten and there was nothing growing to replace it. Leo’s first reaction was another flare of anger. These people had made their bed, so to speak, let them lie in it! What did he have to do with them, or the troubles they brought on themselves? He only wanted Bru back!

But then…

Then something else cooled the anger as quickly as if he’d had a bucket of water thrown over his head.

He couldn’t let that happen. The mortals of Olympia were innocents in this, and what was worse, the gods could probably hold out and it would be the innocent mortals that would suffer.

He could not let that happen. Not and still be himself.

He was Leopold, the People’s Prince, who had fought a city fire in his shirt and breeches like everyone else, passing buckets and setting the firebreaks among the homes of the great that saved the greater part of the capital. He was the Prince who had joined in with his own two hands while the citizens rebuilt.

And now, he was…well, if he wasn’t quite a Hero like Siegfried, he was still the Prince who fought dragons and tyrants in lands not his own. And while he claimed that he did so because it was exciting and dangerous and therefore a fantastically amusing thing to do, down deep inside he knew that he did it for the same reasons Siegfried did. Because it was the right thing, because The Tradition, and magicians and powerful creatures and people, all conspired to make misery of the lives of ordinary people, and someone had to help them. He was a Prince. Noblesse oblige, that was the concept that his own father had taught him, and it wasn’t just a nice phrase to him.

It was an obligation and one that, despite his outwardly cavalier attitude, he took seriously. He and Bru had talked about this at some length just before they crossed the border into Olympia, and it had been an interesting conversation.

At first, when he and Bru had embarked on this life of adventurers, Bru had been rather like a child let loose in a circus. While her fighting ability was both inherent—because she and her sisters were, after all, minor battle-goddesses—and instinctive, she had never actually used her weapons much. Like her sister Valkyria, her main tasks had been to fetch the heroic dead from the battlefield and take them to Vallahalia, and it was a rare occasion when she even brandished her spear or sword, much less used them. She and her sisters sparred, and that was about the extent of her opportunities to fight. She had the spirit of a born warrior, and to be finally able to go up against creatures and people that were clearly evil and best them in combat had been, for lack of a better term, exhilaratingly fun for her. She’d really not taken any thought for anything but the sheer excitement of pitting herself—and him—against them.

But it had been a brief visit to Siegfried and Rosa that had opened her eyes to the other side of the situation. They had just had a very odd encounter with another dragon, one who agreed to come guard Eltaria, but only if they could beat him in combat. After their victory, it seemed rude not to drop in on Queen Rosamund and King Siegfried.

After the initial greetings were over, Siegfried had asked casually if they wanted to come along and lend him a hand with a “wild bull problem.” The Tradition was making things lively within Eltaria since the King was a genuine Hero. While the presence of guardian dragons on the border was keeping armies at bay, this did nothing to stop the country itself from presenting the new monarchs with all manner of Traditional challenges whenever things started to look a little too peaceful.

And Siegfried was very much a Hero King in the style of his native land. Which meant that he turned up wherever there was a problem, without fanfare or escort (other than the Firebird, his constant companion), talked to the locals, then dealt with the situation, or sent the Bird for some reinforcements. Usually (he said) he didn’t need the reinforcements, and having seen him in action, Leo could well believe it. Besides, he was a Hero—and a Hero, Traditionally, was supposed to get rid of such things single-handedly. Siegfried had it down to a kind of routine now. Once he had the measure of the situation, he’d dispatch the menace in question, then allow the locals to make a great victory fuss over him, and depart.

“It’s useful,” Siegfried had pointed out. “I’m a foreigner, after all. Most of them expect me to turn up wearing nothing but a lion pelt or a bearskin, waving a club and grunting. They get a good look at me, I prove I’m dedicated to protecting them, and everyone feels better when it’s all over.”

In this case, however, without even going to the village being threatened, Siegfried already knew he would need a little help. This bull was a monster, powerful and preternaturally fast, very crafty, and he would need a team to tease and distract it until one of them managed to kill it.

“The Firebird could help,” he had told them, “but she doesn’t have the agility she did when she was just the little brown forest bird. A slash with a horn at the wrong moment—” He’d shaken his head. “I won’t risk her. But the three of us are good enough to keep anyone from getting hurt, I think.”

Leo and Bru were both more than willing to help out—and this was where Bru had gotten her first taste of what Leo and Siegfried both felt. That noblesse oblige, though if she had said anything at the time, Siegfried would just have shrugged and said, “But that is what a Hero does.”

They went to the village, which was nearly on the eastern border, and saw at firsthand how the Black Bull had actually smashed cottages unless they were made of stone. She was at first impatient as Siegfried listened to the stories of his people and soothed them. She didn’t see why he needed to talk to them. After all, Siegfried already knew the Black Bull was a monster, and that he needed to kill it because it had done dreadful things, he was king, and it was his job to remove such dangerous creatures. He didn’t need to listen to story after tearful story. All he needed to do now (in her mind) was find out where it was so they could kill it.

But then she started to pay attention. Leo knew the moment when she understood that these were people to him and Siegfried, and not just warriors. He could see in her eyes the moment she stopped feeling impatient with what she had probably initially thought of as their “whining,” and began to empathize with them.

The fight had gone as planned; the Black Bull, a creature easily twice the size of a farm cart and as vicious a beast as anything Leo had ever seen, was no match for three fighters, two of whom were as fast and deadly as it was, and the third, who, while not as fast, could take an astonishing amount of punishment. They had killed it, the villagers descended on it, and them, and there was a great feast. Siegfried had been genial and gracious, Leo had played the madcap “best friend,” and Bru had watched them both as they filled the roles that the villagers expected, watched as the villagers took this “barbarian King” to their hearts and accepted him as their own.

It had been a good visit, if short. Gina, another of the Dragon Champions, had dropped by, and Bru had had a long talk with her that had led to them coming to Olympia.

For the entire visit, Brunnhilde had been very thoughtful, watching Leo and Siegfried as if she had just discovered something about them that she had never expected. That was when they’d had that talk, and it had been hard for her to articulate some of what she felt, but from that moment, their adventures had become something more meaningful than just another exciting battle for her, a chance to test her strength and skills. He could tell that her attitudes had changed. She was a protector, a defender now.

And so was he. They fought for more than adventure and glory. They fought to keep ordinary folk from extraordinary harm.

In a way, he suspected he had always felt like this. He might have cultivated a devil-may-care facade, but under that facade was a deep drive that was not unlike that of a fierce guard dog for its master.

Which was why, when Hecate had said what she had, he knew very well that he couldn’t just let these people wallow in the crisis they had made for themselves. Once again, unless someone stepped in, it was the poor mortals who were going to suffer. The common folk. And as far as he could tell, these gods were about as useful in this situation as a lot of gawky adolescents. He was going to have to do something about it.

“How much food do you think is stored?” he demanded of the dark goddess. “Obviously the mortals are going to have no idea what is going on when winter falls on them, and they won’t have prepared for such a thing, so how long do you think it will be before conditions get dire? A week? Less? More?”

“For the humans, a week, perhaps two.” Hecate nodded. “They will be frightened within a few days when blossoms wither and fruit and vegetables do not ripen. For animals, the grass-eating ones at least, it will take a bit longer before they begin to starve. For the Otherfolk…I am not sure.”

“Who’s in charge of wild animals?” he demanded, looking around at the bewildered deities. “You’re all gods, so presumably you have the duties and patronage all divided up. At least, that’s how things usually go.”

“Ah, I suppose that would be me,” replied a young woman in an abbrieviated tunic, her hair cropped short, with a bow and arrows on her back. “And Pan, perhaps. Crius is in charge of domestic animals. I’m more of a huntress, but I’d better work with Pan to be sure he doesn’t get distracted and forget what we’re supposed to do.” Her brows furrowed. “So what are we supposed to do?”

By this point all of the gods had gathered about him and Hecate; it was very clear that while they were completely willing to do what he told them, none of them had the faintest ideas of their own. At least they’d all seen the gravity of the situation at once. They could very well have taken the attitude that “what happens to the mortals doesn’t concern us, there will be more along soon enough if this lot dies.”

“You’ll have to come up with some sort of way to awaken the wild things’ instincts about winter,” he told her. “Maybe you can borrow the memories of animals from outside your borders where there are seasons, but it has to be done if you don’t want all your wildlife dying off. Can this be done by means of a spell or something?”

He looked to Hecate, who nodded.

“I think I can do that, with Pan and Artemis taking part in the ritual,” she replied. “And I will tell Crius that we must do—what, with the flocks and herds? The pasturage won’t last long once the grass stops growing.”

“Let me think…” He massaged his temples with his fingers. He considered himself a quick thinker, but this was a bit like being thrown into the deep ocean and told you were going to have to reason your way to land. “Your neighbors…are they friendly?”

“Mostly absent,” Zeus answered immediately. “The lands around Olympia are largely wilderness. Not nearly as lush as our land, nor as fertile, so mortals who are near the border tend to decide to join us,” he added with great pride—but then his face sobered as he remembered who was responsible for the lush fields.

“As your land was. It won’t be in a few weeks. Well, that is perfect. Tell Crius he must speak with the herders—and with the herds to get them to cooperate with their keepers. Some sort of pronouncement from the clouds or something outrageous to get the attention of the mortals. The point is, they need to be impressed with the urgency of this situation and begin to move the herds of this land across the border until you have gotten Demeter back to her duty.” He spoke, and suddenly realized that he didn’t sound like himself at all. His air of authority, his steadiness, were not like careless Prince Leopold, but rather like his father…

Hell. I’m turning into Papa.

“It will take time, of course,” he added, quickly driving that uncomfortable thought out of his head, “but they can afford to go slowly, and take what grazing they can find until they reach a good place to stop. It’s late spring out there, so they’ll be all right for several moons. Let us hope this situation doesn’t persist until winter.”

Instinctively they were all turning toward him, as to the only person who seemed to have any ideas about what to do in this situation. Even Zeus. I am standing here giving orders to gods… It would have been a heady thought, except that this lot of “gods” seemed to be as feckless as a lot of young squires.

“As for the inhabitants of Olympia, I suggest you inform those creatures that are not mortal to seek the Fae realms for now, unless they want to begin starving. They can come back once Demeter returns.” He made a wry face. “I don’t suppose any of you have Fae allies? Or still are in contact with your parents?”

Zeus flushed, a few of the gods looked puzzled, as if his words made no sense to them. It was Zeus who answered.

“We…” He coughed. “As a whole we have tended to avoid the Fae.”

“You have,” Hera replied tartly. “Not all of us are so shortsighted.” She turned to Leo. “Would you have us seek out our relatives, mortal?”

He nodded. “You’re going to have to get food from somewhere. In the short term, see if you can find some Fae to supply something that mortals can eat safely. They’re Fae though, they won’t have the patience to put up with this for too long, you gods are supposed to be taking the place of Godmothers, not mucking things up. The good ones will wash their hands of you pretty quickly. The bad ones…well, I understand you fought them once already. So you know they’ll take advantage.” He rubbed his temples again. “You are going to have to find a way to buy food from outside your borders. And transport it.”

“I can help there.” The lively fellow with a look of mischief and little wings on his sandals and odd flat helmet had lost his smile, trading it for a look of determination. “I am the god of merchants as well as speed. I myself have never bargained before, but you might say it is in my blood.”

“I’ll bring that out in you with another spell, Hermes,” said Hecate. “And I am sure Hephaestus can come up with all manner of things you can barter with. Gold certainly.”

“We can get the Giants to help with moving the food you buy.” The speaker was a voluptuous woman that Leopold was resolutely not looking directly at. The moment she had joined the group, he’d had to keep himself under very tight restraint, because it was pretty clear what this lady was the patron of. “They won’t say no to me.”

“Nothing male will say no to you, Aphrodite,” Hera replied with a touch of venom. Aphrodite just smiled lazily.

“And right now,” she purred, “even you will admit that is a very good thing.”

Leo decided that he had better get between the two of them before something erupted that would distract all of the gods. “All right then. The sooner you get going, the least harm will come of this,” Leopold interjected. He gave Zeus a look. “And your king and I will sit down and work out more detailed plans, while the rest of you take care of the immediate situation.”

Zeus nodded. “Winter…we just never had to think about such a thing before,” he said weakly. “Demeter always kept things under control.”

“If I have learned one thing in my short mortal life, King of the Olympians, it is that nothing lasts forever,” Leo retorted. “And if I have learned another—it is that those who rule a land are responsible for it. Especially when things go wrong.”

“You should be a philosopher,” Zeus said glumly, and motioned for him to follow.

 

Demeter had experienced many emotions in her long life, but grief was new to her, and so painful that it overwhelmed her in every possible way. And now she was so lost in her grief that she was not sure where she was going, only that she needed to leave Olympia, for it had become a terrible and alien place to her. The other gods, who should have been her allies, were clearly not going to help her get her Kore back. Zeus had probably been in favor of this from the beginning!

Her grief was deepened by that betrayal.

She could not believe that her golden girl had gone with grim Hades of her own free will. He must have bewitched her somehow, and they were unwilling to admit it. Perhaps some of them had even helped him—she wouldn’t have put it past Aphrodite to work her magic just for the sake of the mischief it would cause.

And as soon as Kore was carried beneath the earth, such enchantment would never last. How could Kore, who loved to laugh and frolic in the sun, ever find Hades and his sunless realm attractive, even under the most persuasive of Aphrodite’s magics? She had never seen Hades so much as crack a smile in all the years she had known him. Surely once the magic wore off or was broken, he would terrify her poor child. And as for his realm, his “third of the earth”—

She shuddered. Oh, the Fields of Elysium were all right, but he would never allow an attractive girl like Kore to go there, populated as they were with all manner of the shades of the so-called “Heroes.” Most of those “Heroes” were as lascivious as Zeus, and most of them regarded women as disposable playthings—no, Hades wouldn’t allow his stolen bride anywhere near them. So Kore would find herself mewed up in Hades’s gloomy palace in the Asphodel Fields, without sun, without music or laughter, where nothing grew except the lilies of the dead, and nothing moved but the shades in their dull, bleak, never-changing afterlife, condemned to be bored in the netherworld because they had been boring in their mortal lives. Not that Demeter had ever been there herself, since only Hecate, Hermes, and the gods of the Underworld could journey there, but Hades had complained about it often enough in her hearing.

By now, surely, she was learning the truth of this; by now she must be weeping with fear and loneliness, and longing desperately for her mother and home!

Demeter’s throat closed, and her tears fell faster at the thought. How did mortals bear this dreadful emptiness, this aching sorrow? She was consumed with it, swallowed up, until grief was all that there was. And it was all the worse for being sure that Kore was wrapped in the same agony.

The Tradition held that a goddess was not bound by the restrictions of mortals or even Godmothers; she did not need a spell or magic sandals to make the miles speed beneath her feet. As Hecate did with or without her torch, Demeter only needed to desire to be somewhere—or away from somewhere—and it was so. So her feet took her, as only the feet of a goddess could, across the breadth of the Kingdom in moments; she rejected the fields of Olympia, and the gods that had been her companions, and her feet bore her swiftly away from their knowledge. The gods had not helped her, would not help her, and the fields that no longer would be the playground of her daughter could wither for all she cared. She suffered—so let all of Olympia suffer with her! She mourned—well, all of Olympia, if it would not mourn for her, let it mourn with her.

She knew, though, the moment when her path crossed the border. Behind her, the land was already showing the signs of her sorrow and neglect, as flowers faded and died, fruit dropped unripened and ripe fruit withered. But here…

Here there was something Olympia never saw.

Spring.

Confronted with this living exemplar of the renewal of life, Demeter sank to the ground beside a pure spring that welled up out of the greening earth, sobbing, grieving. As she grieved, she deliberately threw off her beauty and ripeness, transforming herself into the likeness of a barren old woman, withered without, as her heart and soul were withered within.

She cried until her eyes were sore, wept until her voice was no more than a hoarse croak, and thought, Let it be so. When she heard footsteps approaching, and the soft laughter and chatter of young women, she did not even look up.

The chattering suddenly stilled, and silence took its place. Finally, Demeter did look up, to see four pretty young maidens with bronze pitchers in their hands, clustered together and looking at her with faces full of pity. Their clothing was not unlike that of the mortals of Olympia, but they wore wool rather than linen, and were wrapped in the rectangular cloak as well, to keep off the chill in the spring air. They reminded her, in their grace and charm, of Kore, and she was about to burst into tears again, when one of them stepped forward.

“Old mother, we see that there is great sorrow in your heart,” the pretty thing said as the others filled their pitchers. “Why do you lament beside the spring, alone with your grief, when there are many houses in our town that would welcome you, and many who would help you with your burden of tears?”

Demeter listened to the maiden’s words with a faint sense of astonishment. Was this how mortals coped with loss? By sharing it? Was that even possible?

But her heart warmed a very little, because they were so young and pretty and so like Kore, and spoke out of hearts that were clearly kind. “I should not be welcome in your town, dear children,” she replied. “My people are far away, and there are none who would care to be near me in my loss.”

The maiden shook her head. “You are gentle of speech, old mother, showing a noble heart and birth, and clearly rich in experience. If your own people would not welcome you in their houses because you mourn, then the more shame to them. We honor the wisdom that comes with age, and cherish those who achieve it. There are Princes in this land who would be glad of one such as you as nurse to their child, and help you to temper your grief with the joy of an infant’s smile.” The maiden offered a shy smile of her own. “Indeed, my own father, Celeus, would gladly give you hearth-room for such a cause. My mother, Meitaneira, has given us a new brother, and she would rejoice to find such wise help with Demophoon. I feel sure that your heart would grow lighter with him in your arms.”

It took Demeter a moment to realize that the girl was, essentially, offering her a job, that of nursemaid to a young Prince. And rather than feel offended, as Hera might have, she actually did feel a little of her grief pass from her. They meant it kindly; the girl who had spoken had understood, instinctively perhaps, that having an infant in her arms again might well be the balm that Demeter needed to keep from going utterly mad with grief.

So Demeter bowed her head a little. “I am called Doso, maidens.”

The four girls named themselves to her: Callidice and Cleisidice, Demo and Callithoe, who had spoken to her first.

“I thank you for your kindness,” Demeter said gravely. “And I shall follow along behind, for I would have you ask your mother if she would indeed find me suitable as a nurse. Not that I doubt your honesty, but perhaps your hearts are a little more open to a stranger than hers.” She choked back her grief. “Mothers are wise to protect their children, for the world is not all a kindly place, and disaster can fall upon the trusting and unwary.”

But Callithoe only smiled. “We will run ahead, Mother Doso, but you will find that our mother will welcome you as warmly as ever you could wish.”

With that, the four girls ran back up the path they had taken to the spring, with Demeter following.

 

“I don’t know what to do,” Persephone cried into Hades’s shoulder as Hades comforted her. “I barely got the poor thing to get me half a dozen fruits, and now there are only three left, and they don’t look as if they’ll live to ripen! I’ve done everything I could think of, everything anyone in Elysium has suggested…I can’t think of anything else!” She buried her face in the shoulder of his tunic as panic rose in her chest. Unless she could get something she could eat to grow here, her love for Hades and his for her was doomed.

“If it were dead, I would be of more help, my love,” Hades replied, stroking her hair. “The asphodel might as well be weeds—nothing that happens to them ever seems to kill them, and they are the only plants I have any experience with. All I know is that you are doing your best.”

Persephone sobbed into the smooth, dark fabric. Hecate had borrowed Hades’s helmet, which granted invisibility, and followed Demeter to keep an eye on her. They both knew that things were getting rather dire in Olympia, because of the reports that Hecate brought them regularly. Demeter had left the realm entirely, and was playing nursemaid to a mortal king’s child under the name of “Doso,” which meant “to give,” which was certainly an accurate description of her now-neglected duties as the goddess of fertility. From what Hecate said, she was pouring all her thwarted maternal energy into this child. For a little while, Persephone had hoped this would solve their problem; Demeter would be willing to let Persephone go and lavish her attentions on this mortal Prince. But her hopes were soon dashed; Demeter did not return to her duties, and Olympia continued to fail. For once, all the other gods were working together to keep the realm alive, but it was clear that what was needed was for Demeter to return to her duties.

But then something changed. Demeter was doing more than merely playing nursemaid; Hecate got very tight-lipped about it when Hades probed. From what Hecate did not say, Persephone suspected she was pouring something else into him, too.

Immortality.

Of all the gods, only Demeter knew the secret of how to give a mortal true immortality. Aphrodite had tried, and failed, with more than one of her lovers. Many of the others had done likewise. Demeter held the transformation as a closely guarded secret, and if her new charge was supposed to be a substitute for Persephone, it would make sense that she would make him immortal. And again, that seemed a cause for hope.

But once again, that hope failed.

The child’s mother interrupted whatever it was that Demeter was doing, and although Hecate did not elaborate, it was clear that any hope Persephone had that the little Prince Demophoon would take her place were gone forever. Demeter forgave the king and his family because they immediately turned one of their palaces into a temple dedicated to her, but she did not return to them. Instead, she blessed his fields so that his land, at least, would still bear fruit, but she withdrew entirely into her new temple and did not even appear to her new priestesses.

And conditions were still dreadful in Olympia; from being one of the most lush lands in all the world, it had now become a wasteland. The climate was not as harsh as it was farther north—all around Olympia, the season of “winter” only meant that one needed a fire and a cloak to keep warm, and change the usual sandals for boots or shoes. But the last grain and vegetables had dried up without ever producing much in the way of seed, nothing that had been sown since had even come up. Fruit and vegetables that had been half-ripe when Demeter abandoned her post had rotted or withered on the branch or in the ground. Grass had stopped growing; the only things that would grow were weeds that not even goats would eat. All the flocks had been moved elsewhere; even the wildlife had abandoned the forests and meadows and fled over the border to territory where, if they did not live as well as they had before, at least they would not starve to death. Olympia was a realm of rock and dust, withered trees and rank weeds. Even the mortals were starting to abandon the realm.

If it had not been for the warrior-woman’s mate, and Hecate, who had foreseen the disaster that Demeter’s defection would mean, things would have been much worse than they were—but they were bad enough. Yes, food was coming in, but for how much longer? As mortals left, their belief in their gods waned, and the gods themselves lost power. Of course, they still had their inherent magics that they had as half-Fae, but they were losing the great powers they possessed as gods. It wasn’t bad yet, but it could become very dangerous indeed. As the gods lost power, their old enemies could rise to challenge them anew. Fortunately, the Titans and their king, Kronos, had been cast into Tartarus, and so far, it seemed, the one god who was not losing even a little of his powers was Hades. People still believed fervently in the Underworld and its king, it seemed, even when their belief in Zeus and the rest faded. So Hades was able to keep the worst of the gods’ enemies safely bound here. And he was reinforcing that by sending the barbarian woman down into the pit to remind them that he still had the power to hold them.

But the rest would not be content to reign over a desert with no more power left to them than a common mortal wizard. It could not be too much longer before the other gods would give in to Demeter, beg her to come back and give in to her demand. Which would, of course, be that Persephone leave Hades.

Hades knew that as well as Persephone did. Unless she could somehow manage to get something growing here that she could eat, she would have to give in to her mother and leave him, since it was clear that there was no chance at all to get her to behave rationally about this.

All he could do was hold her.

Demeter would never, ever believe that she wanted to be with him—

This room in Hades’s palace was quiet, dark, but comforting rather than forbidding. Hades’s sturdy presence was just as comforting. She clung to his tunic with both hands. “Your mother…your mother has never been in love,” Hades said slowly. “I have known her since the beginning, you know. From the very beginning, Zeus and Hera were bound. For all her jealous rages, Hera truly loves Zeus—when he’s not letting his goolies lead him about, he really does love her…your mother never had that.”

“Zeus…couch hopping. Isn’t that as much the fault of The Tradition as it is of his own nature?” Persephone ventured.

Hades nodded. “Which is why Hera keeps forgiving him. And why she has remained faithful to him despite everything.”

“But why doesn’t Mother understand if she can see that?” Persephone tried very hard not to sound as if she was wailing.

“That is why she does not understand Aphrodite, who is often genuinely in love, if only briefly. Again, I suspect part of that is the fault of The Tradition. Aphrodite is a little minx, but mortals seem to think that the goddess of love should have the morals of a she-cat, so…” He shrugged.

Persephone sighed. She actually rather liked Aphrodite; because Hades was right, she did love very genuinely.

“The one I feel sorry for is poor Hephaestus. His situation is pure tragedy. If I were Zeus, I’d damn well hold him down and pour Lethe-water down his throat until he forgot Aphrodite.” There was heat in Hades’s voice that Persephone had rarely heard. Then he shook his head. “Not that it would do any good. The Tradition again. We’re puppets to it. But I am sure that when Demeter thinks of Aphrodite and Hephaestus, she thinks you must feel the same as Aphrodite does for her husband. She doesn’t believe in love, and she assumes you must be as revolted by my looks and manners as Aphrodite is by Hephaestus’s crippled legs. That is why she cannot understand why you would wish to be with me of your own free will.” He cupped his hand under her chin and raised her eyes to meet his grave gaze. “She has reason for this. On the whole, she has always been carelessly treated by men. When we came into the power granted to us by The Tradition, the men received theirs first, and most of us acted like the foolish boys we really were. Selfishly, taking no thought for anything but the pleasure of the moment, and thinking we deserved whatever we cared to take as a reward for ridding this realm of Kronos and the marauding Titans. After all, we were not being cruel, only enjoying ourselves.”

He sighed. She smiled tremulously. It was so like him, to be able to see all sides to something.

“I would have thought you would be furious with her,” she replied. “She prides herself on being the mother of all things, and yet look what she does to her ‘other’ children in her quest to get a single one back! If I acted like she is right now, she’d say I was having a tantrum, and I promise you, I would be eating dry bread and water until I stopped acting like a petulant baby.”

“But you are the only child of her body, my love.” She hoped that he would kiss her, and as if he had read her thoughts in her eyes, he did. He broke it off before she would have liked, however. “As lord of the dead, I see people at their best and worst. I do not like how she is acting—how could I, when she wants to force us apart? But I understand it. What a mother feels for her child is not rational, especially not when she thinks her child is threatened. In a way, this is Demeter acting as we all did when our powers were new and we were drunk with them, thinking only of what she wants, and feeling only her own pain. And I can understand that. I do not like it, but I can understand it.”

He kissed her again, and this time did not end it too soon. Persephone reveled in the bittersweet joy he gave her, knowing that their loving was going to be ended too soon, unless she somehow worked a miracle.

He picked her up in his arms, but just before he turned to take her into the inner chambers, he paused. “I have a thought.”

Her arms tightened around his neck. “I know—”

“Not that sort of thought. I set the warrior-woman to chastising some of the inhabitants of Tartarus who had been giving trouble, but…perhaps that does not qualify as an impossible task. The Tradition is more likely to help us if what we ask her to do is something that seems to be outside of what she is good at. Well, look at what her mate is doing! He’s giving Hermes a challenge with his bargaining and negotiation skills, and Zeus is acting as his assistant in organizing the food distribution. He and she were acting as Heroes or Champions, not as administrators, so this should have been an impossible task for him, and The Tradition is rewarding him with success I would never have predicted.”

“She is very good at breaking skulls,” Persephone agreed, repressing her sigh that this was interrupting their pleasures. Hades would not have said anything at this moment unless it had a bearing on their predicament. “So…you think you should find her something that she is not good at?” Suddenly it dawned on her, what Hades’s thought must have been. “Do you really think she has any idea of what to do with a tree besides sit under it?”

“I don’t know, but I think I will tell her she must help you,” he said, firmly. “It may be she has some skills, but they are not obvious, so by definition, that is an impossible task. And thus, by the rules of The Tradition, having her help you makes it more likely that you will succeed.”

Persephone blinked. The twisted, inverted logic made her head ache, and yet, instinctively, she felt sure he was right.

“I think you are a genius, my husband,” she replied, feeling hope once again. “I think you are more clever than Hephaestus, wiser than Zeus, and have deeper understanding than Athena.”

A slow, gratified smile spread over Hades’s face. With an exuberant step, he carried her off to their couch, and proved just how gratified her praise had made him.

 

Brunnhilde regarded the death god with a curious gaze. He had laid out what he wanted from her, and why, with all the skill of a master craftsman. “This is not the sort of thing I know,” she replied. “In my land, I served as a sort of Charon on the battlefield, and as a cupbearer in the High Hall. Outside my land, I am better at breaking heads than nurturing much of anything. But I can see your point.” She pondered for a moment more.

She had to give Hades this much; he was patient. He was perfectly prepared to let her think things through on her own time with no sign that he was getting irritated at how long she was taking.

“It is true that it seems absurd to set a warrior to making a tree grow,” she said at last. “And thus, it is the sort of impossible task that The Tradition so loves. It further seems absurd to send someone from the snows of the north to tend a summer fruit. And likewise, to set a battle-maiden of death to bring something to life. I think I see a pattern of three, here, and a pattern of three is likelier to bring success than not.” She thought a bit more.

There were things Hades could not know, of course, because she had told him as little as possible about herself. She wanted to hold on to every advantage she had. She was fairly sure, for instance, that Siegfried, Rosa and Lily knew something of what had happened to her. After all, they had promised to keep an eye on Leo and herself through their mirrors. She was also fairly sure that if she really put her mind to it, she could either fight her way out of here, or summon help from Vallahalia—not a battle of the gods, perhaps, but something smaller, a sudden raid by her sister Valkyria.

But this would turn things upside down here—and while she had been breaking heads down in Tartarus, she had gotten the measure of the things that were imprisoned down there. It was only Hades’s strength, backed by The Tradition, that kept them chained. If she did anything that muddled The Tradition or weakened Hades—

Kronos and the Titans would break free, and bring with them an unpleasantly large number of monsters. The battle that followed would ravage this land, and if Kronos won, she didn’t think he would care to rule over blighted Olympia. He and the others would look elsewhere.

She was not going to have that on her conscience.

Finally she nodded decisively. “I like this plan of yours, death god. Summon your mate, and she and I will go to look at this poor little tree. I will see what I can make of it.”

What she did not say aloud—because Lily, in educating her and Leo about how The Tradition worked, had been very emphatic that when you had an edge over The Tradition, it was wise not to voice any part of that edge out loud—was that it was not as absurd for her to tend a plant as it might appear to be on the surface of things. Yes, she was a minor goddess whose main tasks had been to fetch and entertain the worthy dead. Yes, she was, indeed, better suited to wielding her sword than figuring out why a plant would not bear fruit to ripeness.

But despite that, her father Wotan’s wife was the rather formidable Fricka, and despite that she had been known to refer to Fricka as “mother,” in actual fact, her mother—as all of the Valkyria—was Erda, Goddess of the Earth. And unless Bru was dreadfully mistaken, she had the feeling that there was more than a little of her mother’s power in her.

Certainly Bru was reasonably acquainted with the husbandry of a land where there was no goddess meddling with the passing of the seasons, and where it took sweat and hard work to wrest food from the ground. Poor Persephone had likely never even seen a plow in action, much less gotten any notion of what a plant needed; Bru might not have been a patron goddess of farm holders, but she had watched them at work and admired their skill. Maybe farmers in the north didn’t get carried off to Vallahalia when they died—but without them, the warriors wouldn’t have the strength to fight, and certainly there would be no mead or beer in the festive drinking horns. Bru paid more attention to some of these small things than her father did, and often rewarded some of these fellows with spoils from the battlefield so that they could make themselves new tools and plows out of them.

“Excellent!” Hades beamed. “If you would wait here, I shall find her and send her to you.”

Bru was not loath to take a seat on one of Hades’s fine, comfortable couches that were placed about the courtyard. She would have expected stone, but instead, there were things more suited to indoors rather than out. Then again, there was no weather here. She rather liked the style of this place. If she and Leo ever were to settle down, she thought she’d get some furnishings made in this measure for their Hall.

Persephone looked both dubious and hopeful when she came out of the great palace to join Bru in the mist-wreathed courtyard. “I hope this Elysium of yours is more pleasant than Tartarus,” Bru told her by way of preamble as she stood up to greet the young Olympian. “While I enjoyed thumping skulls, I didn’t enjoy doing so in a pit so dank and dark it seemed as if night itself would have found itself groping in the darkness.”

“I have not been there—” Persephone said doubtfully.

Bru shook her head. “Trust me, you won’t miss anything if you don’t go down there. Your mate asked me to explain to some of his old enemies just how ill advised their attempts to escape were, so admittedly, I was in the deepest part, where the monsters and the creatures called Titans are, but in a way, the region where mortals are punished is just as bad.” She motioned to Persephone to take the lead, and the pretty little creature nodded and struck off in a purposeful manner. The girl had become very much a woman over the last several—weeks? At least. Maybe months. It was hard to tell time down here, when there was no day or night, and she slept when she was exhausted enough that even the ache of being without Leo was dulled. No matter how long it had been, that ache had not lessened in the least, and only the prospect of seeing him made as “immortal” as herself could have allowed her to endure it. “The darkness is bad enough, but the despair would be enough to make the Fenris-wolf howl with grief.” That despair had come close to infecting her. She’d only kept it away by giving vent to a full-on rage. Tartarus was a dangerous place for someone in her position.

She was glad that Persephone knew where to go; within moments of leaving the courtyard, the two of them had been engulfed in mist. There did seem to be some sort of path there, though; a bit of moss winding through those ever-present white lilies.

Persephone shivered, as a dark shadow loomed ahead of them, and Bru wondered what was casting it. “I have enough despair of my own,” she replied. “I don’t need to seek any more out. Here we are.”

What Bru had thought was a shadow turned out to be a sheer cliff face; in the midst of the rock was a plain wooden door with a simple bronze handle.

“This leads to the Fields of Elysium,” Persephone explained. “It’s where the worthy dead go.”

Bru blinked as she took that in, then frowned. “Oh, no. You mean Heroes, don’t you?” She sighed. “Which means we’ll be wading through a sea of hearty bone-heads who think they have the right to grab anything that takes their fancy.”

Persephone paused with one hand on the door. “Not…entirely. You have to be interesting to go to the Elysian Fields, not just heroic. There are a great many philosophers there. Rhadamanthus says that there are a few women, poets mostly, though I have never seen them. But…yes, some of the men are quite rude.”

Bru smirked as she remembered that she was not subject to the same rules here that governed what she could do in Vallahalia. “Oh,” she said with a certain relish. “I certainly do hope so.”

Persephone gave her an odd look, then shrugged, and opened the door.

 

The bright light of Elysium was always a little bit of a shock after the mist of the Fields of Asphodel. As Persephone let her eyes adjust to the light, the warrior-goddess stared about her with an air of relief. “If I had known this place was here, I’d have been less testy,” she told Persephone. “I’ve been going half mad for a bit of sun.”

“It’s not a real sun,” Persephone felt impelled to point out. “It doesn’t move. When night comes, it just winks out.”

“Yes, but there’s real light here, and none of that confounded mist.” The woman stretched her arms up toward the sky, as if she was reveling in the bright air. “If I’d known your tree was in a place like this, I’d have come offering to help instead of you having to ask. Speaking of which, where is your tree?”

“It’s a long walk,” Persephone began, apologetically.

“Not for me,” the woman replied with a grin. “We Valkyria are a sturdy lot. Lead on. And you might as well call me Bru. I might still want to thump that numbskull Thanatos, but you and your mate have been doing your best for me, and I appreciate it.”

Persephone winced a little as she led the way to her pathetic little trees. “If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be stuck here. I know I would be going half mad if I’d been taken from Hades. I don’t know how you stand it.”

“It hasn’t been good. Believe me, I have been well employed taking out my frustrations in Tartarus,” Bru said darkly. “I have to get fighting mad to keep from blubbering like a puling infant. Still…I am getting the chance to earn immortality for Leo, and that in the end is going to be worth all of this.”

Persephone decided not to say anything about her mother being the only person who knew how to bestow true immortality. After all, there was no telling how Demeter would regard these two when it was all over. She might well decide to go along with the decision to reward them.

Still…better make sure that no one but she and Hades knew Bru was helping him to keep Persephone here. The warrior had been badly treated, and she deserved to get the reward she wanted.

As they followed the path to the half-barren spot where the stunted trees were, they began to collect quite a crowd. Word spread quickly that a woman who was not Persephone had turned up in Persephone’s company, and predictably, every Hero in Elysium had to come and have a gawk.

It quickly became evident that not all of them were inclined to restrict themselves to a gawk.

At first they limited themselves to posing and posturing. When Bru ignored that, they seemed to take it as a challenge, and called out to her, lewd comments that quickly went far beyond mere “suggestions” of what she could expect from an hour or so in their company. Persephone was soon scarlet with embarrassment, but Bru continued to act as if she couldn’t even hear them.

But then one of them got bold enough to make a grab for her.

Persephone didn’t even see what happened. One moment, the overly muscled oaf was reaching for her arm. The next, he was on the grass, gasping in pain. Persephone stopped cold, staring. So did the others. Bru looked down at her victim dispassionately.

“In my land,” she said without any inflection at all, nor any sign of even minor annoyance, “the man who tries to force himself on a woman counts himself lucky to get off with only temporary pain. I suggest that you lot go back to what you were doing, and leave me and Hades’s wife to get on with our work.”

The stunned silence, punctuated only by the whimpers of the “hero” curled in a ball on the ground, was broken by the sound of solitary applause.

Persephone looked in the direction it was coming from, and spotted Rhadamanthus standing at the top of a bit of slope, looking down on the path.

“Well said, barbarian,” he called out. “You’ve saved me from having to chastise these fellows, and possibly even banish one or two for being ordinary. There’s certainly nothing worthy about behaving like he-goats in season. You are acting worse than centaurs who’ve gotten into the wine. Even satyrs have more sense than you lot are showing right now.”

The expressions on the faces of the men surrounding the two women were as varied as the men themselves. Chagrin, guilt, annoyance and alarm predominated. Alarm, because of Rhadamanthus’s threat—no one wanted to be banished to the Fields of Asphodel, or worse, Tartarus.

The annoyance, of course, was because, like rude boys, they had been caught.

But the expressions directed toward Bru were all alike—respect. Wary respect. Maybe a touch of fear. Aside from Athena, Persephone had never heard of any female warriors in Olympia, and a woman who looked like Bru and fought like a she-cat crossed with a snake was a new thing to these shades.

Well. Rhadamanthus definitely had the situation well in hand, so Persephone decided to let him deal with it. After all, he was their “king,” and they were his subjects. She turned back up the path and struck out again, Bru following. As soon as they were out of earshot, she turned to her companion.

“Was that true?” she asked. It seemed incredible; even in relatively idyllic Olympia, even her mother could fall prey to the whim and will of a more powerful male god. And had. “Are women really treated with such respect where you come from? Are they all taught to fight like that?”

“No, actually,” came the cheerful reply. “I was lying through my teeth. But now they’ll think twice about giving me anything other than a polite greeting. I intend to come here on my own for some sun every day, and I don’t feel like having to run a gauntlet every time I do so. How far are we now?”

“Not far,” Persephone assured her, and pointed up to the cleft they were heading toward. “See that? It’s on the other side.”

Bru quickened her pace, until Persephone had to run to keep up with her. They came out into the sad little clear area with Bru well ahead; Persephone caught up to see her looking at the poor little trees thoughtfully.

With despair, Persephone saw that yet another of the fruits had withered and fallen from the branch.

“I just don’t know what I can be doing wrong!” she cried. “I water them, I tend them, there are no insects here to trouble them, and I even found scrapings of bird dung to feed them with!”

“Huh,” Bru said after a moment. “I’ll be damned. I know just what your problem is.”

Persephone stared at her.

“Or actually, two problems, but the ground is both of them.” Bru knelt down, pulled a little knife out of the sheath at her belt and prodded at the ground beneath the tree. “Look at it! Hard as flint. You’re watering the poor things, yes, but the water just runs away. And the other problem is there’s no…sustenance in this ground.” She chuckled mirthlessly. “There’s one way to provide it, but that’s a bit nasty, and there is a danger of damaging the tree by giving it too much of a good thing, so I think I’ll go around to the kitchen—I know you have a kitchen—and claim some vegetable scraps. Meanwhile, you and I have some digging to do. This ground has to be cultivated and carefully, so as not to damage the roots.” She examined the last three fruits carefully. “It’s going to be touch-and-go, but I think we can count on getting you one all the way to ripe.”

Persephone almost danced with joy.

By the time Bru declared the ground “fit,” however, she was aching with exhaustion—not just physical exhaustion either. Both of them had concentrated all their will on the tree, coaxing it to flourish, as they had worked. Persephone was familiar enough with this sort of thing; this was how she had managed to save three of the six fruits in the first place. It was very hard work, and by the time they were done, they were both drained physically, mentally and magically.

When she realized that they were going to have to do this day after day, until one of the pomegranates ripened, she groaned.

“I know, I know, it’s harder than breaking skulls,” Bru said, helping her to her feet. “Just keep remembering that the harder it is, the more likely we’ll succeed. I wouldn’t even mind having to fight my way here every day, just to make sure the job is difficult enough.”

“That might not be a bad idea…” Persephone said slowly. “If you are really willing.”

The warrior-woman snorted. “Child, I would do more than that to drop more weight on our side. Who would we see about setting up some opposition? Your husband?”

“Rhadamanthus. The one who was applauding you.”

Bru smiled. “Good. Let’s not waste any time in finding him.”

 

The scene had all the air of a carnival. The cleft that led to the pomegranate tree was blocked by no less than twenty strong men. Rhadamanthus, who was supervising the gauntlet and set the rules of the contest, had decreed that the fight would be in full armor, which in the case of the Olympians was not much, and in Bru’s case, it was quite a bit. Then again, she was outnumbered twenty to one.

He had also decreed that while he would arrange for wounds to heal instantly, the combatants would still feel the pain of their injuries. That hadn’t stopped the Olympian shades from lining up to try themselves against the Valkyria.

But far more of the shades gathered as spectators—roaring, betting, cheering and jeering spectators. Hence the carnival atmosphere.

“Ready?” Bru asked. Persephone nodded. The warrior-woman took a deep breath and flung herself on the waiting throng.

A roar went up from the crowd as Bru vanished beneath a pile of bodies. A moment later, she emerged, with four men lying on the ground, groaning with the pain of healed-but-fatal wounds. The remaining combatants circled her warily, and Persephone averted her eyes. Even though no one was permanently hurt, she couldn’t bear to watch. Bru would eventually clear the way to the trees; all she had to do was wait. The disadvantage in numbers was more than made up for by the advantage of her armor and her skill. Even fully armored she was much faster than any of the shades.

“You can look now,” Rhadamanthus said quietly in her ear. When she turned to look at the field of battle, she saw that, once again, Bru was triumphant, grimacing with pain, her hair plastered to her head with sweat, but taking the congratulations of those losers still able to stand through their pain. Rhadamanthus had ensured that the contest was fair by ensuring that the pain of the wounds persisted until the competition was over and the losers had all surrendered.

Now he waved his hand, and they straightened or pulled themselves to their feet as their pain vanished.

Bru turned to the cleft, without waiting to see if Persephone was following. Persephone hurried to join her as she stumbled to the tree in exhaustion.

She went to her knees beside the tree still bearing fruit, and she and Persephone carefully cultivated a tiny amount of fertilizer made of finely ground vegetable peelings, a bit of eggshell and herb stems into the soil at the base of the tree.

Bru took a dulled dagger and stirred the mix into the earth as Persephone poured it out of a small jar. Then she sat back on her heels as Persephone carefully poured water from a second jar into the earth.

The tree looked ever so much better than it had when Bru pointed out what was wrong. There were more leaves on it, and they were greener. By now there was just a single fruit, barely a third the size of Persephone’s fist, and almost ripe. She thought about plucking it—then thought better of it. There was no telling what the effect would be if she took it when it was still a little green. Better to wait.

She put the water jar down as a breeze came up and dried Bru’s yellow hair, sending little tendrils floating. She put both her hands, palm down, on the earth at the base of the tree; wearily, Bru did the same.

Persephone closed her eyes and concentrated with all her might on bringing more life to the little tree—not just for now, but for as long as it stood. She didn’t want to just take the one fruit and abandon it; that felt wrong. The tree was giving her what she desperately needed; she wanted to sustain it and reward it.

She felt Bru doing something that was not quite the same—Bru seemed to concentrate on the earth itself, where Persephone concentrated on the tree. Strange, but perhaps this had something to do with how their two mothers’ powers worked. When Demeter had blessed the fields, it had actually been the seeds that she placed her magic in—farmers brought their seeds to her temples, and representatives of their flocks and herds for her blessing. By contrast, from what Bru had said, her mother actually was the earth itself, she was made up of it, more like Gaia than Demeter. So, perhaps their magics reflected that.

The last of Bru’s strength quickly ran out, however, and as they got to their feet, it was Persephone’s narrow shoulder that Bru leaned on as they made their way down to Rhadamanthus’s palace.

The king of Elysium was waiting there for them, with the usual nectar and ambrosia that was the common drink and food among the Olympian gods. Bru had made a face and complained after the first few days of this, saying she would have preferred mead and meat. Persephone couldn’t blame her actually, for she was used to more “common” fare with her mother.

This time Bru didn’t complain, and neither did Persephone. They were both in desperate need of restoration, Bru in particular. Yet beneath the exhaustion, Bru was clearly happy and triumphant, as always, because The Tradition was obviously working in their favor now. Persephone would get her pomegranate, and presumably a solution was being found for Bru and Leo’s problem.

When they had rested a little, Rhadamanthus had Thanatos take them up in his chariot—nothing like as impressive as Hades’s, of course—to bring them back to Hades’s palace, where Bru, at least, would fall down onto a couch and sleep as if she would never wake again, until Persephone came to get her to do it all over again.

They were nearly done.

And if so, it would not be a moment too soon. Yesterday, Hecate had reported that the gods had gathered to confront Demeter in her own temple. Demeter would again demand the return of Persephone, and there could be only one answer to that, if they all wanted Olympia to be restored.

But as the two of them arrived from their daily battle, the sound of a gong shattered the silence of Hades’s palace, a strangely penetrating sound that made the very walls ring.

Persephone paled. Bru put a steadying hand on her arm. “Is that what I think it is?” she asked. The girl nodded.

“All right then. Courage. We’ve done all we can do. No matter what happens, no one can have done more.” Bru patted her shoulder. “You go take your place. I’ll get myself cleaned up and wait in the courtyard, and we’ll see what the Norns have in store for us.”

Persephone was rattled enough that she didn’t even ask what the Norns were.

Persephone felt cold all over. This was the day she had been dreading. And it was the one day of all days that she knew, deep in her heart, she had to be the strongest. The Tradition would not reward a weeper or despair.

And when she appeared to her mother, she would have to look, not like little Kore, but like a woman, and one capable of knowing her own mind and choosing her own destiny.

Steeling herself, with head high and wearing her best woman’s gown—the long gown, not the little tunic that her mother preferred her to wear—she went to Hades’s throne room and took her place on the new throne that had been placed at his side. There they waited for Zeus’s messenger.

He was not long in coming; it was Hermes, and her heart sank because she knew that Zeus would only send Hermes, and not Hecate, if this was a command that had the force of all of the gods behind it.

Hermes would not look at her. Instead, he concentrated on Hades, and there was nothing of his usual playful nature as he addressed the lord of the dead. “Hear, Lord Hades, the command of Zeus, the king of the gods of Olympia, and master even of you, as you yourself have acknowledged.”

Hades bowed his head, but his grip upon Persephone’s hand tightened, even as her throat tightened. “Speak,” Hades said, his voice dark with grief. “I hear the command of he who is overlord to us all.”

“It is commanded that Persephone, daughter of Demeter, come up out of the Underworld and be restored to her mother, so that the good goddess will once more bring life to Olympia,” Hermes said in flat tones that brooked absolutely no argument.

Persephone couldn’t help herself; a single cry of anguish broke from her throat. Only Hades’s hand on hers steadied her.

But his words almost undid her. “Let it be so,” he said, and though his face was impassive, there were tears in his words. “But know that she does not look unkindly upon me. Know that I truly love her above all things. And know that I, who can make her a great Queen of the Kingdoms of the Olympians, am no unfit husband for Demeter’s child.”

“All this may be true,” said Hermes, “yet still she must go. Make ready your chariot that I may take her to the Upper World.”

“First let my husband and my love give me a last ride in his chariot,” Persephone demanded. “Husband, I would bid farewell to the Fields of Elysium, the kindly realm where the worthy souls find their home, and to Rhadamanthus who is lord over it.”

Hermes nodded; the chariot was brought, and Hades took the reins. Persephone stepped into the chariot beside him and he put his arm around her. Hermes crowded in with them.

“Is it ripe?” he whispered urgently to her. She could only shake her head.

“I don’t know,” she replied. His arm tightened and he said no more.

Hades had no need for doors or gates within his own realm. The horses had carried the chariot only a few paces when they broke through the mist and into the bright light of Elysium. Persephone recognized the path to her little tree immediately as the horses stepped onto it, and with a shiver of apprehension, she felt the chariot lurch as it headed up the slope. She hid her eyes in Hades’s shoulder. She couldn’t bear to look.

The chariot stopped, and she felt Hades—moving. Passing the reins to Hermes. Reaching out with the arm that was not holding her.

“Look up, my love,” he whispered, and Persephone looked up to see him pulling the branch of her tree within her reach. And on that branch was a single, gloriously ripe fruit that glowed like a ruby in the sun.

Her heart soared. She plucked the fruit from the branch; it came away in her hand so easily it might not even have been attached.

“Will you share it with me?” he asked tenderly. With a nod, she broke the tiny fruit in half and handed half to him. Within her half were seven scarlet-pulped seeds. She ate them.

They were tart, very nearly bitter and dry—and she thought she had never tasted anything so good in her life, because the poor little tree had given her the best that it could, fully ripe. No one could say otherwise, and Hermes was the witness.

In fact, Hermes’s eyes were as big as an owl’s. He surely knew that nothing grew in the Underworld except the asphodel. Well, nothing had, until now.

Hades stepped down from the chariot then, his half of the pomegranate still untasted in his hand.

 

Demeter waited, impatiently, on the top of a hill just below Mount Olympus. Her stubbornness had cost the land dearly; the thin, brittle grass beneath her feet was brown and lifeless, the trees around her leafless, and nothing stirred on the wind but dust. There was not a bird or an insect in the air, and the only living things on the ground were the gods themselves, who waited with her.

Demeter felt a moment of guilt, but only a moment. All of this could have been prevented if Zeus had forced Hades to relinquish her daughter moons ago. Now her magic, pent up within her, stirred and pressed against her, threatening to burst out at any moment. And she could feel the great weight of The Tradition hovering over her, waiting.

She saw a plume of dust in the distance, a plume that soon became a trail, and beneath the trail, the black form of Hades’s chariot. It was driven by Hermes, and beside bright Hermes—

Yes! It was Kore!

She flew like a bird to meet her daughter, love and magic bursting out of her, the grass literally greening at her feet as she ran. Everywhere that her footsteps fell, grass and flowers exploded out of the ground, and streaks of grass and flowers raced away from her. As those streaks of magic reached the trees, they, too, came to life; buds swelling on the branches, and unfurling to leaves and flowers in a moment.

But Demeter had no eyes for that, only for Kore, who leapt from the chariot and into her mother’s arms.

“I didn’t realize until now how much I missed you!” Kore cried, and for a long, long time, all they did was hold each other, kiss and weep.

But then, as the first sound of birdsong in moons echoed across the greening fields, and as the Otherfolk crept out of whatever places they had been keeping themselves until Demeter restored the land, Demeter’s heart…felt a moment of doubt.

She held Kore at arm’s length, and for the first time, saw that she was wearing the long gown of a woman grown, that her face had grown grave and beautiful and—mature. Saw that the loose, flowing locks of the girl had been bound up into the hairdo of a woman. And knew that there was more going on with Kore than just the change in appearance.

“My dearest,” she said, dreading the answer. “I know it should be impossible, for nothing but asphodel grows in the Underworld, but—has any food of Hades’s realm passed your lips in the moons you were with him?”

Her daughter raised her head and regarded her with clear, blue eyes. “As we bid farewell, I plucked a pomegranate from a tree in Elysium, and Hades and I divided it between us. I ate seven seeds.”

Demeter regarded her in horror. “Why would you do such a thing?” she gasped. “Was it some spell? Did Hades force you?”

She saw a strange expression on her daughter’s face then. One that at first she could not identify. And when she did at last, she could hardly believe her eyes, for it was pity.

“Ah, my dearest,” she cried, “if you had not eaten the pomegranate seeds you could have stayed with me, and always we should have been together. But now that you have eaten food in it, the Underworld has a claim upon you. You may not stay always with me here. Again you will have to go back and dwell in the dark places under the earth and sit upon Hades’s throne.”

“I grew that pomegranate myself so that I could eat it, Mother,” the young woman said softly. “I know that you do not understand, but I love Hades. Not because of something he did to me, or some magic spell, but for himself. He is my beloved, and I am his and I could not bear the thought of being unable to return to him.” Then her eyes filled with tears. “But now that I am here, I know I cannot bear the thought of being unable to return to you.” Her lips trembled and she managed a hesitant smile. “Can you not at least agree to share me? What you call the ‘dark places’ hold so much joy for me, because they hold my lord and my love.”

And that was when Demeter realized that little Kore, her baby girl, was gone.

As egg becomes chick, which becomes a bird that must fly, as flower becomes fruit that must ripen and fall or be plucked, so Kore had become Persephone. She who was the goddess of fertility, knew this better than anyone; and though it was bitter, it was something that she had, in her heart, known would come.

Weeping, she bowed her head to the inevitable.

“As you ate seven seeds, so seven moons of the year shall you be with Hades,” she said. “And in that time, I shall mourn, and Olympia will suffer winter as other lands do. But not always you will be there. When the flowers bloom upon the earth you shall come up from the realm of darkness, and in great joy we shall go through the world together, Demeter and Persephone.”

When she said that last, Persephone’s face lit up, for she had used her daughter’s adult name at last. “And when I go beneath the earth again, let that be a season of plenty and rejoicing, the Harvest Moon, when all things ripen and the earth is glad, for though I go from my beloved mother, I go to my beloved husband.”

“So be it,” Demeter said.

 

Leo stood before the throne of Hades, already exhausted. He had literally fought his way down into the dark god’s realm, step by step, guided by Hermes, but facing every sort of obstacle that could possibly have been placed in his path. He had climbed a cliff, picked his way across a field of jagged rocks that held unexpected pockets of fire, fought a one-eyed giant, tamed a three-headed dog with the help of Hermes and had to outrun a pack of hellhounds.

And now, at last, he saw Bru for the first time in months, and he wasn’t allowed to go to her or touch her. They stood before Hades and Hecate with Hermes standing between them, preventing them even from looking at each other.

Hades sat on a tall throne carved of some black material, set in the middle of a courtyard in front of an enormous building that was the twin of the one Zeus called his home up on the mountain. But here there was no sun, no blue sky, only mist overhead, and more mist drifting across the courtyard, with a twilightlike light permeating everything.

The goddess was shrouded from head to foot in black material, and held a torch. Two dogs stood on either side of her—and Leo wondered, suddenly, what was the obsession that these gods had with dogs? Athena had dogs, Apollo had dogs, Hades had hellhounds and that three-headed thing, and now Hecate had these enormous beasts whose heads came up to her chest. “You have done well, outlanders, in all the trials that we have set you, but there is one task yet you must face, before we can reward you,” Hecate said, her face absolutely still as a stone. “You must face yourselves.”

Before either of them could ask what she meant, Hades spoke.

Now, Hades was impressive. Much more so than Zeus, to tell the truth. There was a gravity about him, and a stillness, that were quite unnerving. Like his brother, he was dark, but unlike Zeus, every movement he made was slow and deliberate. “Within you both are monsters,” Hades said, and gave Leo a penetrating look. “Your fears, your secrets, all the things you would never share with anyone, the things that will tempt you almost beyond bearing. Those monsters will take tangible form, and you must battle them—you will battle them alone, and yet bound together in faith. Leopold, you will lead the way, and Hermes will guide you. But you must never look back to see if Brunnhilde is following you. And you must never hope for her help in your battles, nor aid her in hers. These are yours to deal with alone.” He turned his gaze to Brunnhilde. “Brunnhilde, you must follow him, but you may never give him any sign that you are there, nor interfere with what he does nor how his confrontations go in any way. And you must fight your own battles, with no help from him, nor ask for any.”

Mist wreathed around Hades, emphasizing his distance. That was why Hades was more impressive than Zeus, Leo realized. Zeus was very human. Hades…wasn’t.

Leo nodded; he assumed that over on the other side Bru did the same. Hades lifted his hand. “Then let the final trial begin.”

Hermes turned and walked back in the direction they had come, into the mist that had suddenly billowed up behind them; Leo averted his eyes to avoid looking at Bru, and followed.

But of all the things his imagination had pictured for him to face, the first thing that appeared out of the mist and held up a hand to stop them was nothing he had expected.

“Leopold,” Aphrodite said, and smiled. She seemed to have an inner glow that warmed the mist around her, and the delicate swath of cloth that clung to her body seemed held there by nothing more substantial than force of will. Her hair was unbound, and tumbled down her back in impossibly silky waves. “You know, you really don’t need to go through all this.” She waved her hand vaguely at Hermes and the mist, and gave him a smoldering look. Her lush sexuality left him feeling more than half stunned. “Why, after all, should you? If you were to simply give up here and now, you could come back to the Upper World and Olympia with me.”

“And why would I do that?” Leo asked after clearing his throat.

Aphrodite pouted a little. “Why wouldn’t you? You don’t really think you’ll be able to stay with Brunnhilde, do you? You’ve never been a man to be contented with only one woman, so how long do you think it will take before you are bored with someone who is as much man as woman, hmm?” One delicate eyebrow arched upward. “Think about it, and be honest. You could come with me right now, you know. I like you. I know you find me alluring and hard to resist. Why keep resisting? I could show you things, couch games your barbarian never dreamed of.”

Leo felt himself growing hot and cold by turns, and his armored trews were suddenly much, much too tight. Her perfume wafted over to him, a combination of roses and musk.

“You wouldn’t get immortality, of course,” Aphrodite continued. “But why would you need it if you were leaving her to her own devices? And what I can offer you is worth so much more.” She winked. “You wouldn’t be the first mortal lover I’ve taken, so don’t worry, I’ll be gentle with you.”

His mind spun in circles as he tried to sort his thoughts out. Aphrodite was right, it was as if she had read his past, and even some of his thoughts, for he had never thought of himself as the sort to settle down with a single woman. And even when he had been trying to find himself a Princess, or at least a fabulously wealthy wife, there had always been the vague surety that there would be a mistress or two on the side…

Of course, that had been before he met Bru. Somehow, the moment that he’d seen her asleep in that circle of fire, something inside him had changed forever. Or, perhaps, the change had come earlier than that, when he had passed out expecting that he was bleeding to death from a fatal wound, and awakened discovering that the death of a gentle unicorn had given him an undeserved second chance.

“I am the goddess of love, so I should be the expert on it,” Aphrodite purred as the thin draperies she wore shifted as she moved, alternately concealing and revealing her body in ways that were far more erotic than being naked could have been. “What you mortals call love is a fleeting thing, fragile and quick to fade. Better to be honest now, come and enjoy the pleasures I offer, and we will part when we are both weary, without any vows that are impossible to keep.”

Somehow, it was that last sentence that made his thoughts stop swimming, and settle. And he had been around Aphrodite enough the last several moons to have learned how to shake off the mesmerizing effect that her beauty and raw sexuality had on the susceptible.

“I know about you gods,” he said, carefully choosing his words. “The funny thing about you is that you’re a reflection of us mortals. A bigger reflection, like one in a mirror made to distort and exaggerate, but still, just a reflection of what we are.”

Aphrodite took a small step back, blinking in confusion.

“You see, we made you. We saw you, we made up stories that we thought fit with what you were, and we believed in those stories so strongly that you became what we wanted you to become.” He shrugged apologetically. “So, as the goddess of love, you’re basically what we mortals want you to be, and most of us, I guess, want you to be the way you are now, beautiful, sensual and…” He paused to think of a diplomatic word. “Liberal with your favors. Only a goddess could possibly be that generous. That makes you the expert on some kinds of love, but not all of them. If I wanted to know how to seduce someone, you would be my first choice for advice and help. But for how to stay in love with someone for a very long time? Not so much.”

Aphrodite’s mouth actually fell open for a moment as she stared at him. But a moment later, her sense of humor caught up with her shock. “You’re quite clever, Leopold. Perhaps not wise, to say such things to a goddess, but clever.”

“I wouldn’t have said something like that to a god who would get angry,” he replied. “I hope you noticed that I didn’t say ‘stay in love with someone forever.’ I don’t even know if that’s possible. I’m going to try, but I am not going to make any promises that are that, well, impulsive and inflexible. The Tradition loves those. It uses them to break people.”

Aphrodite nodded. “Well said. And you have passed your first trial. Pass on—and—good luck.”

“Thank you,” he said, and meant it.

She stepped aside and vanished into the mist. Hermes had been waiting for him, and now continued to lead the way.

 

When that barely clad hussy had tried to seduce Leopold right under her nose, it had taken all of Bru’s self-control to keep from running up to her and shield bashing her. “Goddess of love,” was she? All well and good, she was as promiscuous as Freya, but Freya didn’t go around trying to seduce other people’s husbands!

Bru’s hand tightened on the hilt of her sword, and she ground her teeth together.

And the way she was eyeing up Leo, like someone examining a particularly choice bit of roast she was about to devour—it just made Bru’s blood boil!

And that very anger was what woke her up to the fact that this might very well be one of her trials, and the monster she was facing was her own jealousy.

So she stood, and seethed, and clamped her jaws shut on everything she wanted to shout, told her feet that they were not going anywhere just now, and waited.

And inside, besides the anger, she discovered a hard, cold core of fear. Because she wasn’t anything like the lush, dark-haired Olympian beauty. Oh, she wasn’t ugly, but she wasn’t like that. Her body was muscular and hard, not soft and curved. She knew how to kill a man, but all she knew about how to please one, she had learned from Leo.

The more the woman spoke, with her dulcet voice and beguiling ways, the more her anger faded and her fear grew. She couldn’t deny that most men wanted as many women as they could get. She couldn’t deny that she herself was no great bargain unless you were looking for someone who could dispatch your enemies and then share a little bit of tickle-and-poke afterward.

But still, she did not move, or speak. How often had she seen her father running after some wench, and not anything Fricka could say or do would prevent him? In fact, her jealousy and railing seemed to make things worse. Whereas Freya, who actually led the Valkyria, could make virtually any male do her will in the same way that Aphrodite did. Why, she persuaded the gods to let her husband, Odr, enter Vallahalia even though he hadn’t died in battle! None of the male gods, and few of the female, could resist her!

Bru was no Freya…but she was no Fricka, either. She would not rail at Leo like a fishwife. He would be himself, and though he might choose to change, she would not try to make him.

She was afraid to lose him, but if she could not keep him at her side and still be herself…had she ever really had him?

In the end, as her thoughts twisted and turned in confusion, all that she really knew was this: if she violated the terms of the trial, she would lose him, forever.

Just as she was about to close her eyes or look away, he said something that made Aphrodite step back a pace and blink. And both fear and jealousy fell away as she realized she had won.

At least, this time.

 

Leo could not recall a time when he had felt so battered in body and soul. He had thought that the fight to reach Hades’s palace had been the hardest he had ever undertaken—harder than facing the Huntsman and Prince Desmond, harder than fighting off the Children of the Dragon’s Teeth.

This…this was even harder.

It wasn’t so much the combat by itself. It was the opponents.

One by one, he faced every fear, every humiliation and every defeat he had ever had. One by one, he was terrified, humiliated and defeated all over again. The first time it happened, he was petrified, thinking that to lose one of these battles was to lose Bru.

But as he picked himself up off the ground and his opponent faded away, he understood that winning wasn’t the goal after all.

It didn’t matter if he won or lost, only that he faced the things inside himself and survived. And, presumably, the same was true for Bru; he had heard nothing of her behind him, but that was the point, wasn’t it?

But it was hard. Bad enough to have dealt with these over the course of a lifetime, but to face them one after another, but with no breaks? By this point his strength was just about run out; he kept his eyes fixed on Hermes’s heels, and plodded along through the mist like an old man.

The one thing he didn’t have to face again was the temptation to give up; evidently Aphrodite was deemed the most potent weapon in the rack on that score, and there was no point in bringing out anything else.

Just as he was thinking that, he almost ran into Hermes. He looked up.

Ahead of them was a solid wall of ebon blackness. Night was not this black. It oozed despair, dread and fear, and the end of hope. Hermes pointed.

“You must follow me through this,” he said tonelessly. “This is your last trial. You must face the final darkness, the last fear, that of knowing that you are utterly, utterly alone. On the other side is the Upper World. This is your last chance to turn back and admit defeat.”

Leo looked at the Void, and shuddered. He didn’t want to go in there. He had never much liked being alone in the conventional sense, and to willingly plunge into that? Instinctively, he understood the import of Hermes’s words. This wouldn’t be merely being “lonely.” This would be—being alone. He would find himself in there with nothing for company but all his faults and fallibilities, and he would be unable to escape them.

He didn’t have a choice. Not if he ever wanted to be able to look at himself in the mirror again.

Hermes vanished into the black. Leo followed.

 

Five months since Persephone had returned to her mother and for the first time, spring and summer had come to the realm of Olympia, and now, on this the very first Harvest Moon of the Olympians, there was another occasion that would (hopefully) not be repeated. All of the gods and no few of the Godmothers had conferred and consulted; all agreed that Brunnhilde and Leopold had earned their respective rewards. As everyone had expected, for his reward, Leopold chose to have his beloved back, and Brunnhilde had chosen immortality for her love.

This was all agreed, and yet to make sure that The Tradition was properly satisfied, there was one more ordeal that they had to pass. The Harvest Moon, and the occasion for Persephone to return to the Underworld, seemed to be the most suitable moment. After all, there would be a trade of sorts—Brunnhilde for Persephone, one entering the Underworld, and one leaving. So now, as the Olympians gathered at one of the openings into Hades, Persephone among them, they waited and watched.

This would be a test of faith, in each other. Hades had decreed that Leopold could, indeed, fight his way down to the great palace and lead Brunnhilde out. But he had also decreed that once he began the journey back, he was neither to look back to see that she was following, nor speak to her, no matter what he saw or heard. And for her part, she was not to make a sound, nor touch him, nor give any sign that she was there—no matter what she might encounter.

And both of them would encounter a lot. Persephone, who knew her love very well, knew that he would not make this test a mere token.

What that long ordeal would be, what the two of them would face, no one knew, but since Hecate and Hades were the ones in charge of the obstacles Brunnhilde and Leo would encounter, they were bound to be very personal, and very dark. On the whole, Persephone reflected, she would rather face an ordeal created by any gods other than those two. Most of them would simply line up shades for a simple fight. Not Hades, and not Hecate.

Brunnhilde would have to trust that no matter what she saw, Leo wouldn’t lead her astray. Leo would have to trust that, no matter how tempted she was, nor how terrified, Brunnhilde would follow him.

The gods waited with bated breath. Others had failed this test before. Others would likely fail it in the future. As Hades had pointed out, this would set a precedent and he couldn’t afford to make it anything less than the worst that anyone could bear. It could never be permitted to be easy to take a soul from Hades’s realm, even when that soul wasn’t actually dead.

Finally the door opened. A great stillness settled over the clearing.

First to emerge was Hermes, acting as Leo’s guide. Then Leo, looking white and anguished. Then—nothing, and someone in the crowd groaned.

But then, stumbling and shaking so hard her armor rattled, Brunnhilde.

The assembled gods cheered, and Persephone ran from the crowd to meet them—

But she didn’t reach them before Hermes signaled to Leo that he could turn, and the lovers fell into each other’s arms.

Persephone stopped, right at the door into the Underworld, smiling so hard her mouth hurt. They clearly didn’t need her.

And then she felt the presence she had ached for over the last five months, just behind her.

She turned to find Hades behind her, smiling down at her.

She had thought of all the things she would say to him when she finally saw him again, but now, when she saw him, she forgot all of them.

“Welcome back,” said her love, and pulled her into his arms. And while the attention was on everyone else, she and he walked hand in hand into the darkness, and home.