Yesterday, 09:35 PM
Someone had set a cup down on the lowest step below his throne.
Hades saw it from the bronze doors when returned to his throne room. It was a plain cup from the kitchens, half full, standing on the black stone at the foot of the dais where no one had ever set anything down.
His brother's household had been in the hall since midmorning. When the frost reached the passage outside the Sovereign's court, he had brought them here, because it was the only room in the palace large enough to hold them all. At Thanatos's order the kitchens had sent up warmed wine. The air in the hall was warm enough, but the stone was cold to sit on and the vault was high, and they had kept to the edges of it: on the few stone benches between the columns, on the floor at the columns' feet, close together in their feast linen with the cups held in both hands. Between them and the dais, the floor lay open. Whoever glanced toward the dais looked quickly away again.
Zeus sat on the bench nearest the doors, as far from the dais as the hall allowed. Ares's oxblood wool lay across his knees. Bia stood at his left shoulder, as though he still sat a throne.
As Hades passed, his brother looked up, and their eyes met. Zeus's fist closed on the brooch.
"Where have you been all day?"
"Finding somewhere to put all of you."
Zeus's eyes went past him, along the wall to Aglaea and the girls asleep against her, and out across the open floor to the dais.
"Anywhere is better than here."
Hades followed his look. Then he drew the list from his coat and walked the length of the hall with it.
He read a name, and looked along the walls for whoever might answer to it. A woman with a steward's keys at her belt; another beside her, with the same keys. A man asleep sitting up. Aglaea, with her daughters asleep against her. He read the next name, and the next. Which of them were husband and wife, which child belonged to which mother, who had served whom on Olympus and who could not bear to sleep beside whom, the roll did not say. As he passed, a woman looked up, saw who held it, and looked down again.
At the foot of the dais he stopped beside the cup. He left it where it was.
Through the binding, the queen was in the palace.
She had been moving about Elysium all day. Now she was below him and crossing toward him by the shortest way, without a pause at any turning.
He rolled the list shut, put it inside his coat, and turned to face the doors.
Moments later, Thanatos led her in and stood aside. Four of her women followed with bundles in their arms, and palace stewards behind them carried more: linen, lamps, jars of oil. She wore a mantle of midnight blue over a plain gown, and had pinned her hair up off her neck. The gold pomegranate lay at her throat.
Her eyes went along the walls: the children asleep, the cupbearer with her split lip, the cups in their hands. Last of all they found Zeus, an arm's length from her at the doors, and passed over him at the same pace as the rest.
She crossed the open floor and stopped before her husband at the foot of the dais, and her eyes went over him then: the coat he had pulled on in the night, other men's blood dried stiff at the cuffs, the linen on his right hand gone black. They rested on the bare wool at his breast, where she had last pinned his key with her own hands.
She said nothing about it.
"Any news of my mother?"
"Morpheus said she was dreaming of a threshing floor when it happened."
He had asked on the elm, in the middle of the night, between one falling leaf and the next.
Persephone looked at him a moment longer. Then her shoulders came down, and she breathed out.
She looked along the walls at the household.
"Your hall has never held a Grace before, husband."
"It has held you."
Her eyes stayed on him a moment.
"Then let us see who else it holds."
He drew the roll from inside his coat, past the folded lead, and gave it to her.
She unrolled it and read it through to the last name, her lips moving once as she counted.
"Thirty-one." She looked up. "Who examined them?"
"Every weapon the Atharim brought through is with Kleitos, to be taken apart. This morning I read the palace for stakes. Nothing has been driven into my stone."
"Then they are safe here."
"Yes."
She looked at him, and then at the household along the walls, and rolled the list a turn tighter between her hands.
"Who wrote this list?"
The chamberlain rose from the end of a bench. He stood with the rest of his rolls gathered in the crook of his arm.
"I did, Majesty."
"Then you will read it to me, one name at a time, in the order I ask for them, and beside each name you will write whom they will sleep beside."
"Majesty."
At the queen's word, two stewards carried a table in and set it on the mosaic at the center of the hall, where petitioners stood to be heard before the throne. The chamberlain set his rolls down at his elbow, laid out ink and a reed, and spread the list flat on the table.
Hades stood beside her, with his back to his own throne. At the far end of the hall, his brother sat on his bench by the doors with his arms crossed, watching them. Hades kept his eyes on his wife.
"The children first."
He looked at her.
"Before they wake."
She crossed the open floor herself to the wall where Aglaea sat, and looked down at the girls asleep against their mother. She said something too low for Hades to hear. Aglaea answered with one word.
Persephone came back to the table.
"Aglaea and her girls, together."
The chamberlain wrote.
After that, one by one the chamberlain read the names, and they crossed the floor to present themselves to the queen. Persephone asked each of them three things: what they had done on Olympus, what they could do here, and whom they would sleep beside. The cupbearer was given to the palace cellars. Two of the stewards were given to the kitchens. A woman who had kept the looms in Hera's household was told the palace had looms, and no one who knew how to keep them.
Some of them she knew by sight from Olympus. The rest she had worked out before they reached the table: whose servant each one was, and who would not let go of whose hand. She read a room the way he read a seam, and faster.
Persephone's finger stopped on the roll.
"Hermes." She looked along the walls.
Hermes had followed Ares's bier down to the Embalmer's house that morning, with Apollo's lyre still on his back. He was there still.
"Hermes has made his own arrangements."
"Has he."
Her eyes stayed on her husband a moment longer. He knew that look. She was deciding whether Hermes's arrangements were worth asking about. Then she turned to the chamberlain.
"You can note that."
The chamberlain wrote it.
When the last of them had gone back to the walls, two names were left unplaced at the head of the list: his brother's, and Bia's beside it. Persephone ran her eye down the roll to the last name, and up again.
"Your own name is not here."
"It did not occur to me, Majesty."
"Then you will be the last."
The passage behind the kitchens ran a long way into the mountain with nothing opening off it, and its walls were warm under the palm. The household stood along it in the order the chamberlain had read them, with nothing in their hands. Persephone's women waited behind them with the bundles from Elysium.
Persephone walked to the head of the line, with Hades beside her, and stopped at the first stretch of wall. She laid her fingertips flat on it, as she would have on the bark of a tree.
"Aglaea and the girls here. A bed along the far side, long enough for all of them. A bench by the doorway."
Hades set his palm on the stone beside hers.
He read the rock behind the wall and marked out a room in it, with the bed and the bench left standing where she had put them. Then he cut. The rock inside the shape came free of the mountain with a long, low grinding and sank away beneath it, down through the bedrock into a hollow he had left there when he first cut the palace.
What was left was a room. Along its far wall a bed stood up out of the floor, joined to it: flat across the top, where he had cut, and rough down its sides, where the rock still showed its grain. The bench ran out of the wall beside the doorway.
Persephone stepped in and looked at the bed.
"Longer."
"It is long enough for any man."
"It is for a mother and four girls, husband. Not one of them will lie still."
He had not thought of that.
He cut the end wall back a pace. Then, after a moment, another hand's breadth.
They worked down the passage. She walked ahead of him and told him how each room should serve and who would sleep in it, a bed here and a bench there, two beds for the stewards who had shared a room on Olympus, a niche in the wall for a lamp. He cut each at her direction. Behind them her maidens and the palace stewards carried in what she had brought from Elysium: mattresses and cushions to lay over the stone, blankets of wool, tapestries to hang across each doorway.
In the ninth room, the bench had parted along a fault in the rock and come out a little out of true at one end. He stepped in, dropped to one knee beside it, and set his palm to it to square the corner.
Persephone's hand came down on his arm.
"They will put cushions on it."
"I will know it is there."
"You will survive, husband."
He looked at her hand on his sleeve. Then he took his palm from the stone, and rose with his other hand on the bench.
At the tenth room he laid his palm on the wall.
Back along the passage, Eupheme had slipped free of her mother's hand. Through the doorway of the first room Hades saw her cross the bare floor to the new wall and lay her palm flat on it, as she had watched him lay his. The wall stayed where it was. She pressed harder, with both hands.
Persephone laughed. It was out of her before she could stop it, and the color rose with it from her throat into her face, the way it always had; the last time he had heard that sound, she had been standing in his armory with her hand still flat on his coat. His hand came away from the wall without his deciding it, and he stood before the half-cut stone until she had finished.
When he set his palm to it again, he saw the blood. It had soaked through the linen across the back of his hand, dark and fresh. The bite had split open.
Persephone saw it at the same moment. She took him by the wrist and turned the hand to the lamplight.
"Who tied this up for you?"
"I did."
She looked at the wound a long moment. Then she looked up at him, and she was nearer than she had stood to him in years: near enough that he could have counted the pins in her hair, near enough to catch the green smell of her gardens under the lamp oil and the cut stone. She held out her free hand without looking away from him, and one of her women laid a roll of clean linen in it.
She wound it herself, firm and close, her head bent over the work so that he looked down on the crown of it, where the lamplight caught red in the chestnut. One strand had slipped its pin and lay against the nape of her neck. Her fingers were cool against the heat of the wound. His left thumb found the ring instead, and turned it while she worked, and the passage went on around them, the lamps and the low voices and the household waiting at its doors, as though it had nothing to do with either of them.
She tied the knot. Her fingers stayed across his palm when it was done, and his hand lay open beneath them, and neither of them moved. Then her thumb passed once across the heel of his hand, and she let him go and turned to the next stretch of wall.
It was a moment before he followed her.
At the end of the passage she asked for a room larger than the rest, with a table long enough for all of them to sit at together. He left the table standing in the rock, a pace shorter than the one they had laid Ares upon.
By the time the fixtures dimmed toward night, he had cut twelve rooms out of the mountain, a lamp was burning in every doorway, and the children were asleep on wool.
When they came back to the throne room, three remained to be placed. His brother had not moved from his bench by the doors. Bia leaned against the wall at his side, her ankles crossed. The cups had been cleared away from the walls. The one on the step of the dais was gone too.
Persephone crossed the floor and stopped before the bench.
"Your household is asleep. There is space for you beside them."
Zeus's eyes went past her, to her women and their empty arms, and then to his brother.
"The guest rooms."
They were the rooms kept beside the Sovereign's court for a king who came through its Pyle. Their far wall was the court where his son had fallen.
Hades looked at his wife, but her attention had settled on his brother.
"Write it," Persephone said to the chamberlain, without turning her head. The reed moved.
Zeus climbed to his feet with Ares's wool and brooch in his hands, and walked out through the bronze doors without waiting for anyone.
The chamberlain stayed where he was, with the roll and his own rolls held together in both arms. He came round the table to face the queen, and bowed.
"Majesty. If the queen permits, I would sleep within call of my king."
Persephone looked to her husband.
"It will be cold."
The chamberlain's arms tightened on his rolls.
"It is no matter, Majesty."
Hades inclined his head. The chamberlain bowed, put the finished roll into his hands, and hurried out after Zeus.
Hades put the roll inside his coat, beside the lead.
The hall had emptied. The fixtures had dimmed to night, and the throne stood dark above them. Persephone drew her mantle straight on her shoulders.
She began to turn away.
"Persephone."
She stopped, and looked back at him.
"Husband?"
"Thank you."
She looked at him a moment. Then she crossed the two steps back to him and laid her hand on his coat, on the bare place where the key had been. Beneath her hand, under the wool, lay the roll and the lead.
Her fingers pressed once, flat, the way she tested the soil in a bed. Then she took her hand away and walked out through the bronze doors.
When the binding had taken her down to the Pyle, Hades drew the roll out again and read it to the last line. Every name had its place. The last, in the same small, even hand as all the rest, was the chamberlain's own, and beside it he had written: With the king.
Hades saw it from the bronze doors when returned to his throne room. It was a plain cup from the kitchens, half full, standing on the black stone at the foot of the dais where no one had ever set anything down.
His brother's household had been in the hall since midmorning. When the frost reached the passage outside the Sovereign's court, he had brought them here, because it was the only room in the palace large enough to hold them all. At Thanatos's order the kitchens had sent up warmed wine. The air in the hall was warm enough, but the stone was cold to sit on and the vault was high, and they had kept to the edges of it: on the few stone benches between the columns, on the floor at the columns' feet, close together in their feast linen with the cups held in both hands. Between them and the dais, the floor lay open. Whoever glanced toward the dais looked quickly away again.
Zeus sat on the bench nearest the doors, as far from the dais as the hall allowed. Ares's oxblood wool lay across his knees. Bia stood at his left shoulder, as though he still sat a throne.
As Hades passed, his brother looked up, and their eyes met. Zeus's fist closed on the brooch.
"Where have you been all day?"
"Finding somewhere to put all of you."
Zeus's eyes went past him, along the wall to Aglaea and the girls asleep against her, and out across the open floor to the dais.
"Anywhere is better than here."
Hades followed his look. Then he drew the list from his coat and walked the length of the hall with it.
He read a name, and looked along the walls for whoever might answer to it. A woman with a steward's keys at her belt; another beside her, with the same keys. A man asleep sitting up. Aglaea, with her daughters asleep against her. He read the next name, and the next. Which of them were husband and wife, which child belonged to which mother, who had served whom on Olympus and who could not bear to sleep beside whom, the roll did not say. As he passed, a woman looked up, saw who held it, and looked down again.
At the foot of the dais he stopped beside the cup. He left it where it was.
Through the binding, the queen was in the palace.
She had been moving about Elysium all day. Now she was below him and crossing toward him by the shortest way, without a pause at any turning.
He rolled the list shut, put it inside his coat, and turned to face the doors.
Moments later, Thanatos led her in and stood aside. Four of her women followed with bundles in their arms, and palace stewards behind them carried more: linen, lamps, jars of oil. She wore a mantle of midnight blue over a plain gown, and had pinned her hair up off her neck. The gold pomegranate lay at her throat.
Her eyes went along the walls: the children asleep, the cupbearer with her split lip, the cups in their hands. Last of all they found Zeus, an arm's length from her at the doors, and passed over him at the same pace as the rest.
She crossed the open floor and stopped before her husband at the foot of the dais, and her eyes went over him then: the coat he had pulled on in the night, other men's blood dried stiff at the cuffs, the linen on his right hand gone black. They rested on the bare wool at his breast, where she had last pinned his key with her own hands.
She said nothing about it.
"Any news of my mother?"
"Morpheus said she was dreaming of a threshing floor when it happened."
He had asked on the elm, in the middle of the night, between one falling leaf and the next.
Persephone looked at him a moment longer. Then her shoulders came down, and she breathed out.
She looked along the walls at the household.
"Your hall has never held a Grace before, husband."
"It has held you."
Her eyes stayed on him a moment.
"Then let us see who else it holds."
He drew the roll from inside his coat, past the folded lead, and gave it to her.
She unrolled it and read it through to the last name, her lips moving once as she counted.
"Thirty-one." She looked up. "Who examined them?"
"Every weapon the Atharim brought through is with Kleitos, to be taken apart. This morning I read the palace for stakes. Nothing has been driven into my stone."
"Then they are safe here."
"Yes."
She looked at him, and then at the household along the walls, and rolled the list a turn tighter between her hands.
"Who wrote this list?"
The chamberlain rose from the end of a bench. He stood with the rest of his rolls gathered in the crook of his arm.
"I did, Majesty."
"Then you will read it to me, one name at a time, in the order I ask for them, and beside each name you will write whom they will sleep beside."
"Majesty."
At the queen's word, two stewards carried a table in and set it on the mosaic at the center of the hall, where petitioners stood to be heard before the throne. The chamberlain set his rolls down at his elbow, laid out ink and a reed, and spread the list flat on the table.
Hades stood beside her, with his back to his own throne. At the far end of the hall, his brother sat on his bench by the doors with his arms crossed, watching them. Hades kept his eyes on his wife.
"The children first."
He looked at her.
"Before they wake."
She crossed the open floor herself to the wall where Aglaea sat, and looked down at the girls asleep against their mother. She said something too low for Hades to hear. Aglaea answered with one word.
Persephone came back to the table.
"Aglaea and her girls, together."
The chamberlain wrote.
After that, one by one the chamberlain read the names, and they crossed the floor to present themselves to the queen. Persephone asked each of them three things: what they had done on Olympus, what they could do here, and whom they would sleep beside. The cupbearer was given to the palace cellars. Two of the stewards were given to the kitchens. A woman who had kept the looms in Hera's household was told the palace had looms, and no one who knew how to keep them.
Some of them she knew by sight from Olympus. The rest she had worked out before they reached the table: whose servant each one was, and who would not let go of whose hand. She read a room the way he read a seam, and faster.
Persephone's finger stopped on the roll.
"Hermes." She looked along the walls.
Hermes had followed Ares's bier down to the Embalmer's house that morning, with Apollo's lyre still on his back. He was there still.
"Hermes has made his own arrangements."
"Has he."
Her eyes stayed on her husband a moment longer. He knew that look. She was deciding whether Hermes's arrangements were worth asking about. Then she turned to the chamberlain.
"You can note that."
The chamberlain wrote it.
When the last of them had gone back to the walls, two names were left unplaced at the head of the list: his brother's, and Bia's beside it. Persephone ran her eye down the roll to the last name, and up again.
"Your own name is not here."
"It did not occur to me, Majesty."
"Then you will be the last."
* * *
The passage behind the kitchens ran a long way into the mountain with nothing opening off it, and its walls were warm under the palm. The household stood along it in the order the chamberlain had read them, with nothing in their hands. Persephone's women waited behind them with the bundles from Elysium.
Persephone walked to the head of the line, with Hades beside her, and stopped at the first stretch of wall. She laid her fingertips flat on it, as she would have on the bark of a tree.
"Aglaea and the girls here. A bed along the far side, long enough for all of them. A bench by the doorway."
Hades set his palm on the stone beside hers.
He read the rock behind the wall and marked out a room in it, with the bed and the bench left standing where she had put them. Then he cut. The rock inside the shape came free of the mountain with a long, low grinding and sank away beneath it, down through the bedrock into a hollow he had left there when he first cut the palace.
What was left was a room. Along its far wall a bed stood up out of the floor, joined to it: flat across the top, where he had cut, and rough down its sides, where the rock still showed its grain. The bench ran out of the wall beside the doorway.
Persephone stepped in and looked at the bed.
"Longer."
"It is long enough for any man."
"It is for a mother and four girls, husband. Not one of them will lie still."
He had not thought of that.
He cut the end wall back a pace. Then, after a moment, another hand's breadth.
They worked down the passage. She walked ahead of him and told him how each room should serve and who would sleep in it, a bed here and a bench there, two beds for the stewards who had shared a room on Olympus, a niche in the wall for a lamp. He cut each at her direction. Behind them her maidens and the palace stewards carried in what she had brought from Elysium: mattresses and cushions to lay over the stone, blankets of wool, tapestries to hang across each doorway.
In the ninth room, the bench had parted along a fault in the rock and come out a little out of true at one end. He stepped in, dropped to one knee beside it, and set his palm to it to square the corner.
Persephone's hand came down on his arm.
"They will put cushions on it."
"I will know it is there."
"You will survive, husband."
He looked at her hand on his sleeve. Then he took his palm from the stone, and rose with his other hand on the bench.
At the tenth room he laid his palm on the wall.
Back along the passage, Eupheme had slipped free of her mother's hand. Through the doorway of the first room Hades saw her cross the bare floor to the new wall and lay her palm flat on it, as she had watched him lay his. The wall stayed where it was. She pressed harder, with both hands.
Persephone laughed. It was out of her before she could stop it, and the color rose with it from her throat into her face, the way it always had; the last time he had heard that sound, she had been standing in his armory with her hand still flat on his coat. His hand came away from the wall without his deciding it, and he stood before the half-cut stone until she had finished.
When he set his palm to it again, he saw the blood. It had soaked through the linen across the back of his hand, dark and fresh. The bite had split open.
Persephone saw it at the same moment. She took him by the wrist and turned the hand to the lamplight.
"Who tied this up for you?"
"I did."
She looked at the wound a long moment. Then she looked up at him, and she was nearer than she had stood to him in years: near enough that he could have counted the pins in her hair, near enough to catch the green smell of her gardens under the lamp oil and the cut stone. She held out her free hand without looking away from him, and one of her women laid a roll of clean linen in it.
She wound it herself, firm and close, her head bent over the work so that he looked down on the crown of it, where the lamplight caught red in the chestnut. One strand had slipped its pin and lay against the nape of her neck. Her fingers were cool against the heat of the wound. His left thumb found the ring instead, and turned it while she worked, and the passage went on around them, the lamps and the low voices and the household waiting at its doors, as though it had nothing to do with either of them.
She tied the knot. Her fingers stayed across his palm when it was done, and his hand lay open beneath them, and neither of them moved. Then her thumb passed once across the heel of his hand, and she let him go and turned to the next stretch of wall.
It was a moment before he followed her.
At the end of the passage she asked for a room larger than the rest, with a table long enough for all of them to sit at together. He left the table standing in the rock, a pace shorter than the one they had laid Ares upon.
By the time the fixtures dimmed toward night, he had cut twelve rooms out of the mountain, a lamp was burning in every doorway, and the children were asleep on wool.
* * *
When they came back to the throne room, three remained to be placed. His brother had not moved from his bench by the doors. Bia leaned against the wall at his side, her ankles crossed. The cups had been cleared away from the walls. The one on the step of the dais was gone too.
Persephone crossed the floor and stopped before the bench.
"Your household is asleep. There is space for you beside them."
Zeus's eyes went past her, to her women and their empty arms, and then to his brother.
"The guest rooms."
They were the rooms kept beside the Sovereign's court for a king who came through its Pyle. Their far wall was the court where his son had fallen.
Hades looked at his wife, but her attention had settled on his brother.
"Write it," Persephone said to the chamberlain, without turning her head. The reed moved.
Zeus climbed to his feet with Ares's wool and brooch in his hands, and walked out through the bronze doors without waiting for anyone.
The chamberlain stayed where he was, with the roll and his own rolls held together in both arms. He came round the table to face the queen, and bowed.
"Majesty. If the queen permits, I would sleep within call of my king."
Persephone looked to her husband.
"It will be cold."
The chamberlain's arms tightened on his rolls.
"It is no matter, Majesty."
Hades inclined his head. The chamberlain bowed, put the finished roll into his hands, and hurried out after Zeus.
Hades put the roll inside his coat, beside the lead.
The hall had emptied. The fixtures had dimmed to night, and the throne stood dark above them. Persephone drew her mantle straight on her shoulders.
She began to turn away.
"Persephone."
She stopped, and looked back at him.
"Husband?"
"Thank you."
She looked at him a moment. Then she crossed the two steps back to him and laid her hand on his coat, on the bare place where the key had been. Beneath her hand, under the wool, lay the roll and the lead.
Her fingers pressed once, flat, the way she tested the soil in a bed. Then she took her hand away and walked out through the bronze doors.
When the binding had taken her down to the Pyle, Hades drew the roll out again and read it to the last line. Every name had its place. The last, in the same small, even hand as all the rest, was the chamberlain's own, and beside it he had written: With the king.