Dazzling Brightness Read online

  Persephone busied herself with cutting a small piece off the bread, opening the pot, and spreading the dark brown paste. She was very ready, too ready, she told herself, to give Hades the promise he asked. What held her silent a few moments longer was her fear that Hades would sense that readiness and read into it light-mindedness or wantonness. She was tossed on roiling waves of contrary emotions—shame at her eagerness to remain with this man, utter delight in the beauty that surrounded her, wonder that that beauty should so diminish, almost wipe out, the terror of the dangers she had experienced, an astonished pride in her own ability to withstand such terror, and an even greater astonishment when she realized she did not wish to give up forever the looming possibility of facing new dangers.

  “I will promise not to try to escape you,” Persephone said at last, “only if I do not recognize any landmark that could guide me back to Olympus.”

  She almost smiled when she said it. Having been out of the temple so little—only into the main squares of the city and to a few sacred places within the valley. Persephone was almost sure she could not recognize any landmark.

  To her surprise, Hades’s lips thinned with anger. “Did you think I would not realize that is as good as saying you intend to run away the first chance you get?” he retorted. “I do not like to be taken for a fool and lied to slyly.”

  “If by now I still took you for a fool, I would be one,” Persephone said. “You are wrong about my intentions. I do not even understand of what you are accusing me.”

  It was Hades’s turn to look surprised, but he said, “One mountain peak looks much like another. I thought you intended to convince yourself that you were seeing a peak you recognized. I tell you it will not be so. We will be outside of the valley of Olympus entirely. There is no way you can get there from where we will come out, except by climbing the mountains between.”

  Persephone lifted the bread toward her mouth, barely choking back a promise that she would not run away under any circumstances. The scent of the spread, apple and spices, should have made her homesick, but instead it brought her the assurance that no matter how different Hades’s realm was, it was also much the same.

  By the time she had chewed and swallowed the bite, she had found what she considered a safe answer. “I will except mountain peaks from my list of landmarks,” she said, and took a second most satisfying bite of bread and tangy spread. Then she recognized the odor of the spice, and she raised shocked eyes to Hades. “This is apple butter? It is not some concoction of hudorhaix and cave moss is it?”

  Hades stared at her for a moment, then laughed, stuck a finger in the pot, and tasted what he brought out. “Not hudorhaix, certainly. No one, not even my cook, has ever discovered a way to make goat taste like apples—and hudorhaix tastes like goat. We do have apple trees, so I imagine the spread is mainly apples, but I think the spice is blue-light cave moss.” He paused and added with cynical politeness, “I hope you do not dislike it. It is widely used.”

  Persephone lifted her arched golden brows into an even higher arch, and the twist of her lips implied “What good would it do if I did not like it?” while the words she spoke, with equally false politeness were, “I do not dislike the taste or the scent of the moss, but I cannot say I like to think of what was walking on the ground from which it grew—

  “You mean you prefer bull’s shit to hudorhaix shit for manuring the earth?” Hades interrupted, choking on laughter.

  For one moment Persephone stared at him, her mouth—full of another bite of bread and spread—inelegantly open. She had been thinking of the pallid, slimy creatures walking on the moss. Then she shut her mouth and almost strangled, trying to laugh and swallow at the same time. Hades kindly pounded her back until she could breathe again.

  “That was a low blow,” she said with what dignity she could gather. But as the real sense of what he had said penetrated through the jest, she drew a shocked breath and asked sharply, “What do you know about manured fields? That is a mystery of the Goddess.”

  “Not among the natives,” Hades replied. “I had heard that digging manure into the earth brought richer crops and so I went to see. I did not wish to call in the favors Zeus owed me. But even though their land is far better than our thin-soiled valleys, their crops cannot be compared with those of Olympus. I knew manuring would not yield grain enough to feed my people, and I had already tried everything that I remembered seeing when I was a boy before my father drove me from Olympus—everything except asking for a priestess of the Goddess. Can you truly bring richer crops to our fields, Persephone, or is there something holy to the Goddess in the earth of Olympus?”

  She did not even consider lying to him and saying that Olympus was holy soil so that he would take her home. She said, “How can I answer that? I have never been out of Olympus. I know the rites and have performed them. I know that when a field is cursed by Zeus’s command or for some insult to the Goddess, and the seed is not blessed nor sown by a priestess, little grows. Thus I believe it is the Goddess’s blessing that makes the stalks thick in the field and the heads of grain heavy on each stalk.” She looked up at him and then down again. “My mother says I can bring from the Goddess the power—

  The word caught in her throat and brought back a vision of Hades, his eyes sparking red with power and his face steeled against pain, and she asked the question that had been in the back of her mind all the time.

  “What is my Gift, Hades?”

  For a moment he did not understand the question. First he had been appalled at having given Persephone the opportunity to say she would be useless to him in Plutos and that keeping her there would be for nought. When she did not seize the opening, his joy was so much more intense that he only filled his eyes with her, not really paying attention to what she said. The change in her expression warned him, however, and he gathered his wits.

  “I am not certain I know it all,” he said, “but what you did for me the first time was to restore the strength I had drained to open the passage. In the cave of the golden death, you made greater—much greater—my own Gift.”

  “Is that a Gift?” she whispered, searching his face.

  “To another mage, the greatest that can exist,” he answered honestly. “To you, yourself… I do not know whether it can serve any direct purpose of yours, Persephone.”

  “But my mother must have known of it, and she told me I was not Gifted. I asked more than once.” Her voice trembled near tears. “She lied to me. My own mother.”

  Hades looked down at her bent head, wondering whether it would serve his purpose better to let her believe the worst or to comfort her. But he knew what feeling betrayed had done to others, even to Poseidon, who had his own great Gifts, and beside that, he could not bear her sadness. He knelt down before her and took her hands in his.

  “If she knew, and I am not certain she did know because what you gave—if you gave to her when you blessed seed and sowed it—may have felt like a Goddess-granted burgeoning of her own Gift. But if she did know, I think it likely she kept silent for your own good.”

  “For my good?”

  Her eyes met his again, and her expression was a mingling of anger and hope—and trust. And the trust was in him, Hades thought with warm satisfaction.

  “Can you not see that if knowledge of such a Gift spread abroad in Olympus, every mage would have striven to have control of you? They would have torn you apart among them. To speak the truth, I am not at all sure I would have told you myself if I had not been driven half out of my wits by the power you poured into me. Nor am I certain my silence would have been for your good. I cannot swear that I would not have wished to keep what you had all to myself. But I am sure that whatever other motives drove your mother, her first was a desire to protect you.”

  “She is always trying to protect me,” Persephone said, exasperation rather than grief and bitterness in her voice, and after a moment a little smile pulled at her lips. “You, on the other hand, bring me places where goats, ra
ts, and yellow slime try to eat me. Since you have decided on noble confession, will you not admit that it is unfair to expose me to one danger after another?”

  Swallowing a shout of joy, Hades rose from his knees and looked haughtily down his nose at her as he said, “Ah, but I do not think you need protection.”

  Her eyes widened with surprise at first, and then she stuck out her tongue at him like a naughty child. Hades very nearly bent and seized it in his lips, but she had pulled it back and taken the last bite of bread. He stood a moment longer, clenching his fists behind his back while he restrained a desire to push her back on the fleece and love her at once, which would have ruined all his good work in being “fair” to her mother. That she trusted him now and did not want to run back to Demeter’s protection was clear enough from the way she joked about the horrors they had survived and dared him to offer to return her to the temple. Should he take the dare, just to see how she would avoid accepting his offer?

  A chill slid over his skin. “Let me remind you,” he said severely, “that the confrontation with the hudorhaix was all your own idea—and all the other dangers grew out of that.”

  Hades sat down and reached for one of the meat rolls, telling himself it was an errant breeze from one of the tunnels that had chilled him. He did not wish to admit to himself that there was even the smallest element of doubt in the certainty he felt that Persephone would be his. The sudden rush of desire he had subdued was not important, more a mark of his swelling delight in her than an urgent physical need. And it was easy to control because he knew she would be his in the end. He knew it as surely as he knew his naming of her had been perfect. Only a dazzling brightness of spirit could have poured that power into him.

  Persephone sniffed again, this time clearly implying that she accepted no responsibility for their troubles.

  “You mean I should have sat there like a ninny waiting for my abductor to finish his nap when I believed I saw a way out?”

  Hades sighed and took a bite of the meat roll. When he had swallowed, he remarked, “That is just what I thought you would do, or perhaps cry a little—but as I have said before, I did not know, neither you nor that a blue-light cave was so near.” He laughed suddenly. “What we both need is to be better acquainted with each other—much better acquainted.”

  He leaned toward her, his eyes fixed on hers, and held his breath as she seemed to sway closer, but before he was sure she had been tempted to respond to his wordless invitation, she dropped her eyes to the basket.

  “You are not going to like what a closer acquaintance with me shows if you do not find me more to eat,” she said tartly, eyeing the last meat roll.

  “Take it. Take it,” he offered, gesturing toward the basket. “It is a small sacrifice when I was just about to offer you my whole heart.”

  Persephone’s eyes sparkled even more brightly as she looked up. “Were you planning to bake it or broil it?” she asked eagerly, and then when she saw he was dumbstruck, added thoughtfully, “Too bad we do not have a pan. If we did we could fry it, which would be best because heart is very tough and it is most edible when sliced thin.”

  Hades, who to tease her had hurriedly taken another bite of his meat roll as soon as he stopped speaking—pretending he feared she would demand that too—had been caught totally by surprise. His eyes bulged as he struggled not to laugh and spray her with half-chewed food. This time she pounded him on the back, and when he had finally conquered his need to cough, and swallowed, he put down the remaining portion of the meat roll and made a gesture of defeat.

  “Very well. You win. I will put filling your belly ahead of my desire to win your—no, I will not say ‘heart’. I can imagine what you would answer to that. I will see if there is anything in the pool.”

  Persephone pushed the basket a little toward him, smiling faintly. “Finish your meal,” she said. “Filling your belly is as important as filling mine.”

  He smiled back but shook his head. “Mine does not need so much filling just now. All jesting aside, take the last meat roll. You are hungry because you drained yourself and need to be restored. I am not hungry because I still hold some remnant of what you gave me.”

  “I never thought of that,” Persephone said with a note of relief. “I have never been so greedy in my life. I pretended to be joking, but to my shame I begrudged you every bite you took.” She put out her hand and touched his gently. “Are you sure you do not need the last of the meat rolls? There is only a little bread and apple butter left for tomorrow if you cannot find any fish.”

  “I am sure,” he said, and was glad that it was true, because he was afraid she might sense a lie, but he would have said the same if he were famished. Then he laughed and added, “And you will not be so hungry tomorrow.”

  They chewed together in companionable silence until the meat rolls were gone, then Hades said, “I will spread the other fleece. Lie down and sleep. That will do you as much good as more food, I think.”

  She lay back when the fleece was adjusted, but caught at Hades before he turned away toward the pool. “If you had not been so strong a mage, I could have killed you by pouring too much into you. Is that not true?”

  He hesitated, wanting to soothe her but knowing that simple soothing was too dangerous. In fact, he thought the only reason she had not killed him, accustomed as he was to gathering and storing power, was because he had been so depleted by his earlier striving with the earth. However, he was not going to admit that, which would be as dangerous to him in another way. He thought now that he could make her love him, but if he could not or love should change to hate, he dared not place such a weapon in her hand.

  “Perhaps,” he said at last.

  Her eyes were huge, magnified by unshed tears, which also lent a glistening brilliance to their gold. “But I do not know what I did, not the first time when it was safe nor the last when it was not. I do not know how to judge or measure or even prevent myself from giving. Hades, do you think my mother locked me in the temple because I was dangerous? Is my Gift wild and untameable?”

  “No Gift is untameable,” Hades replied. “Yours only responded to the need. You were frightened by the chrusos thanatos and the outlaw and poured out too much. As to your mother, you know she did not really lock you in the temple, nor did she forbid your mingling with the other priestesses, so she did not believe you to be a danger to anyone. Do not create horrors for yourself. Demeter kept you close, as I said, because she feared some mage would seize you.” He paused, looking down at her, his dark eyes lighting. “And some mage has.”

  “Most wrongfully,” Persephone murmured, glancing away from him and then up again, provocatively, from under her eyelashes.

  “Not wrongfully at all,” Hades protested, keeping a sober expression, although he was delighted that his abduction seemed to be turning into a source of teasing. “Your father gave permission…”

  He had let his statement trail off, expecting a smart rejoinder, but she did not respond at once. She must be working on a gem, he thought, quite content to wait and watch the way the gold irises glinted through the gold lashes, but in another moment her eyes had closed completely, and Hades realized she had fallen fast asleep.

  The sudden slumber made him feel somewhat more confident that she would not burn him alive accidentally. Her hunger and exhaustion implied that she had expended nearly all her strength, and he remembered she had nearly collapsed after passing power to him. Long practice had taught him ways to draw more power than flowed naturally, tapping his lifeforce to near extinction if necessary. But he did not believe Persephone could do that, at least not now, and he need not teach her that technique. When she was recovered, they could examine her Gift and he could show her how to bind it within her and dole out the flow.

  Smiling, he pulled on the cloak gently, until the cloth was no longer bunched under her and would cover her more completely. He stood looking down for another moment, wondering whether Demeter had truly been ignorant of her daughter�
��s power or merely selfish in keeping it secret. That Demeter had told Persephone she had no Gift for her daughter’s own good was unlikely. Persephone’s advantage would have been best served by explaining the danger of exposing her ability to give power to another, and teaching the girl—

  The word checked the flow of his thoughts and brought conviction. Demeter had known, Hades thought, turning his back on Persephone for fear she would feel his anger and be disturbed. Demeter had been silent because she did not want her daughter to have anything of her own—not even a name. Demeter had seen “Kore”—girl—only as an extension of herself and had used her daughter’s Gift as if it were her own.

  Then Hades’s grim expression relaxed. Demeter had done him a very good turn by her selfishness. He would teach Persephone how to control her power, how to withhold it, even from him. Thus, he thought cynically, he would demonstrate his “nobility” and prove that he wanted her for herself, not for what he could drain from her.

  He glanced back at her, considering that thought, and decided it was by no means a lie. The priestess was necessary to his people, but he, as a man, certainly wanted the woman who was a dazzling brightness to him as much as, no, more than, he wanted the mage Persephone. As he started to walk to the pool, he chuckled softly. Of course, teaching Persephone to bind her power within her would also ensure that no other mage in Plutos would become aware of what she was, and stick a knife in his back to get her.

  In the pool, darting shapes soon caught his eye and he smiled at them. He had expected some life, because they were nearer the surface than he had admitted to Persephone, but the size of the fish pleased him. In fact, he had smelled the growing things of the outer-world in the air coming in through one of the tunnels, although he did not know whether there was a usable entrance. Sometimes a crack opened onto a sheer cliff, but he did not need to worry about getting out and hunting now. Now his only problem was catching the dinner and breakfast he could see but not reach.