Page 97 of This Divine Revelry

Slipping my bonds.

Which I don’t do just yet – not when they would only retie them tighter.

I will only have one chance at this.

I’m dragged back before Perseus a handful of times. The same questions, the same rants and lectures.

You belonged to him and now you belong to me – the sooner you realize that, the easier this will be.

Loyalty is in a woman’s nature – it’s commendable. But if the roles were reversed, do you think he’d be keeping your secrets? He’s probably fucking one of those many, many women in his retinue as we speak.

Dionysus is weak and so his followers are weak. Power trickles – and when I have it, so will the men who follow me.

But he just mocked Theseus and my father for believing power flowed down – and all at once I see what this is: rhetoric. A way to gain a following.

He’s practising for godhood.

The same way Dionysus builds renown through fun and entertainment, Perseus would do it through ego – by promising boys they can be great and strong and powerful because they are already male, and if they have no other place to exert that great strong power, the nearest woman will do. Does he even believe all this himself? Or is it just a way to manipulate men into following him and clawing his way to power?

All these men, so desperate for godhood and immortality.

And I never even questioned it, because of course people would want power. Would want to live forever. But would I?

Sure, probably. I never thought much beyond my eighteenth birthday, but having survived it and freed the Athenians, it seems there’s still a lot I’d like to do. A lot of women to help. I would not be dissimilar to Dionysus – wanting to spread joy, to tell people happiness matters. That life is about how much you dance and sing and smile.

And, selfishly, I want to dance and sing and smile myself for as many years to come. Being powerless is crushing, debilitating, has had me holding my breath for half my life – so if power is its opposite then yes, I want it.

But what would I do for it? Certainly not this – destroying someone else because I want what they have.

Besides, Perseus and the other heroes already have those things I want.

So if they’re free anyway, then what’s driving them?

Days pass – at least, I think they do. It is difficult to tell with no natural light and no meals and a mind growing increasingly hazy, a mouth dry, a stomach devouring itself.

I press my ear to the crack of the door – and when someone stops outside I roll back to the centre of the room so they can drag me to Perseus.

I only mean to perhaps garner some sense of routine – when the men leave their beds to go up on deck, or return for meals or … something. Anything.

I did not expect the hardest part of captivity to be how damn boring it is – though admittedly the shoulder cramping and numb wrists are a close second, or perhaps the starvation. Or the way a violent wave tosses me against the walls and floorboards, without hands to temper my fall. Or – no, best not to dwell on it.

At the door, I catch voices. Conversation.

‘… are we going to have an actual destination?’

‘… so stupid, going round in circles …’

‘… don’t imagine … partying when we have her …’

‘… starve before we can kill her.’

And on and on – enough to figure out, finally, what they mean to do. No, not enough to murder me. They mean to plant my body at the next revelry – to claim that it is Dionysus’s rites and the frenzy of it all that killed me.

I can’t even conceive of what that would do to him, other than, perhaps, entirely what Perseus means to do: to make Dionysus so weak he can murder him too.

For all his talk of grandeur and strength, the man is terrified of taking on Dionysus at his full power – where a snap of my husband’s fingers might have him squeaking forever.

But would Dionysus even host a revelry right now? I’ve only been missing a few days – he’s hardly going to throw a party.