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“I want to die quickly,” she said. “Not cowering. Tighter.”
Her mother bound her tighter.
“Look well, Mother. Look well at your child. Am I beautiful now, in these chains? Is this the marriage you arranged for me? Your daughter wed to Death? Will you brag that you’re the most beautiful woman in Father’s kingdom when I’m gone? Was that your plan all along?”
Her mother wept and did not speak.
“Why do you weep?” Lia asked.
“You can’t imagine what it is like to be unloved,” the queen said. “To be unwanted by your husband. He would rather play games with you than make love to me.”
“Now you can have Father all to yourself. Be careful, Mother. He cheats at draughts. He plays to lose so he has an excuse to say, ‘Let’s play again. Surely I’ll win this time.’”
“Forgive me,” she said. “I have been a fool...”
“You have. All my life I have known this one thing...that my mother, in my eyes, was the most beautiful woman in all the world.”
A sob caught in her mother’s throat. Her knees buckled, and she went down to the sand.
“Leave me,” Lia said. “It is time to meet my husband, and a bride and her groom should be left alone.”
Her mother stretched her long and lovely arm to touch the toes of Lia’s feet. But a soldier came forward then and gently pulled the queen away.
“Andromeda...” she called out.
“I forgive you, Mother. Now leave me to my fate.”
Alone and chained to the rock, Lia waited.
And before her, the dark water began to boil.
Lia wanted free from this madness, but she was as bound to it as Andromeda to the rock. The iron chafed her wrists. Tears streaked down her face, and she would have given anything for her father to come and wipe them away. But he was far behind her. The last she’d seen of him, four guards held him back from flinging himself into the sea in his grief.
A dark form appeared under the water’s surface.
Long and dark, serpentine but not a snake, for surely no snake was as wide as her father’s throne room, nor as long as the path from the sea to the palace. She had thought Poseidon would send a wave to drown her or a stone to crush her.
But no, he sent Cetus...to devour her.
Artemis, let it be merciful, she prayed.Warn Hades his bride comes soon. Tell him to prepare our bedchamber. I pray his dark kingdom is kinder to me than this one has been.
A thing with gray skin surfaced, breached and sunk down again.
Almost time.
Lia looked up at the sky in the hopes of seeing a star before she died, for there were no stars in Hades’s underworld. And she did see a star, the evening star, glowing like a white dove. The star most certainly had feathers.
But, no, it wasn’t a star falling from the sky. What was this? A horse with wings? A winged horse and a man astride it?
In the blink of an eye, the horse dropped its hooves hard into the sand and raised its proud head.
“I have gone mad,” Lia, who was Andromeda, said to herself. “Terror has driven me to see things that cannot be.”
A man in a white tunic stood next to the horse, holding it by the bridle. He gazed at her in wide wonder.
“What is your name, maiden?” he asked. “And why are you thus chained? A lady of your great beauty should be bound in sweeter chains, those of lovers, not of criminals.”
“I am no criminal, my lord.” Her voice shook, and she could not look at the man for her humiliation. Why didn’t he turn his head like the other men?
