A Tangled Web Read online

  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.”