15. Underworld: We all have our price

Part 2: Chapter 15

This is Part 2: Chapter 15 of the serialised YA Fantasy Fiction novel ‘Underworld’, a reimagining (not a retelling) of the myth of Persefóni. Use the button below to access the Table of Contents and navigate back a chapter, or begin at the beginning. For SHORT STORY content click here instead.

In the previous chapter… After being forced to eat ambrosia, Persefóni woke up in Áris’ chambers, injured, with no recollection of what happened to her. Ekáti found her and took her back to her home among the trees.

Chapter 15: We all have our price

Ekáti’s house is the same as before—a warm and welcoming place with a fire burning in the hearth. I stand before it, feeling the heat on my skin, as she looks over my body, touching with impossibly gentle fingers the scratches and bruises, the blistered skin on my palm and a lump on the back of my head that I hadn’t even realised was there. She doesn’t make a sound all the while, but her kindness and gentle silence shatter something inside me that I have desperately been trying to hold together. My eyes fill with tears at the thought of things I can’t remember. I bite my lip and swallow hard to stop them spilling over, but Ekáti has already seen them. She pulls me to her and holds me tight, and I cry into her wild hair. We stand there a long time in front of the fire, her arms around me. I feel as if they are the only thing keeping my misery from swallowing me whole.

Ekáti helps me into a bath that is somehow the perfect temperature to ease my battered body, even though I didn’t see her filling it, and I sink gratefully into the water, trying to block out everything else.

I stay there for a long time, and still she doesn’t speak to me. I watch her going about her business in her kitchen. She looks as if she’s making tinctures, like Ánitos and I used to make for the mortals of the valley. Eventually, I get out of the tub and dry myself with a cloth she’s left on a chair. My scratches are already beginning to fade away, and my blistered palm is healing fast. I dress in a white shift that’s also laid on the chair. My body feels clean now, but I don’t think I ever will.

I lower myself into a seat at Ekáti’s wooden table and she places an infusion in front of me. I smell lemon balm and skullcup, and something I don’t recognise. I sip it, hoping I can trust her, thinking of winter evenings with Ánitos in Arkadía. The memories hurt my heart, but they are comforting too. It’s a strange feeling.

Ekáti sits down opposite me and fixes me with her storm-grey eyes.

“She will never let you go,” she tells me, and I don’t need to ask who. “You are too valuable to her.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Don’t you know why she brought you here? She visited the Pythía.” I nod—this I know already. “She was told that, without you, her name would one day be dust, blown away on the wind and forgotten. With you by her side, she will attain true immortality.”

Of course. How very like a god. How very like my mother. Her name enduring through the long years is all that matters. My freedom for her glory—it’s a choice she wouldn’t think twice about making.

“That’s why she brought me here, so that she can live forever?”

“Live?” Ekáti asks. “You make the same mistake as your mother. The Pythía may seem mad, but she chooses her words carefully. She did not say Dímitra would live, only that her name would survive through the ages.”

Despite her kindness up to this point, I’m suddenly wary. “How do you know all this—the exact words the Pythía told her?” I demand. “Does Dímitra confide in you?”

“She does. She trusts me, and I find it useful. If there is a poisonous snake in your house, it is always best to know where it is.”

I see the wisdom in that, and briefly think how different my path might have been if I’d had the foresight to act in a similar way, instead of clashing swords with Áris at every opportunity. It isn’t as if Armónia hadn’t warned me, I just didn’t listen. I thought, as I had all the days of my life, that I was invincible, untouchable.

“What else do you know?” I ask her, leaning forward, my tea forgotten. “Can you foretell what will come to pass?” She is, after all, a witch. “Have you seen my future?”

“No one can see the future of any other in its entirety, but I have caught glimpses of yours. I know, for example, that your legends—yours and your mother’s—are entwined, but your fates are not.”

I clench my teeth. I wanted to know which of the prophecies was true. Will I rule the waters of the world with Poseidónas? Will I be Dímitra’s dutiful daughter? But Ekáti, as I should have known, only has more riddles for me.

I glance around the cosy stone house, and I recall that I’ve never seen Ekáti in the palace, and that Armónia told me she often went away for a long time. A different thought occurs to me.

“Why do they leave you alone?” I ask her.

She looks at me for a long time, as if considering how much to tell me.

“They deal in fear,” she says. “There is only one way to make them leave you alone: become so formidable they will not dare to touch you because they are afraid of what you will do.”

“And you have done that?”

I sound surprised, and I am. She’s so kind, so innocuous. It’s hard to believe anyone is afraid of her.

“Power takes many forms. Días, Poseidónas, Íra and your mother are true children of Krónos. They are powerful, but they have traded what they could be for something less. And the others the mortals call gods and goddesses—they are less. They have never tried to hone their gifts because they don’t need to. They have what they want—the fear and adoration of mortals—although their power remains little more than words and theatre and terror.”

“But yours?”

“My power is as ancient as the stones,” she says, and she isn’t boasting. “You have power too, Persefóni.”

“I do?”

“Certainly. All of you”—she tilts her head towards the palace—“have the potential for it. But it is not given, like the power of the children of Krónos, and that is why none of the others have ever discovered the extent of what they can do. Unlocking it will cost you, and may require things that you are not willing to give.”

“What kind of things?”

She shrugs. “We all have our price. Some would kill to get what they want, some would risk their lives. Some would give up eternity, and others would sacrifice their beauty, their youth, their sight or their voice. Whatever you would give to attain what you desire the most, that is your price. Do you understand?”

I nod. I could easily give up my beauty, and probably my immortality too. I feel, now, that they have brought me nothing but pain. Would I kill in exchange for power that would make the gods fear me? I don’t know. I suppose it would depend on who had to die.

“Do you have your price in mind?” Ekáti asks. I nod again. “If you want to unlock your power, you will have to give much, much more than that.”

To be continued …