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This is how the story starts. There is a girl in a garden. A lovely girl, her skin like Olympian honey, her dress like spun clouds, her hair like night out in the countryside and her mouth like blood fresh from a broken vessel. A beautiful girl, and young. So young, so young, all untouched by hand or blade. She dazzles the eye, makes him fling his hand up over his eyes, even standing in the shade of a spreading oak. He’s been looking at girls since he disembarked his brother’s ship in his salt-spattered olive drab, the girls and the roads and the lovely lines of the cities. He doesn’t have his brother’s roving eye, but oh, the girls are pretty in this land untouched by war, and the boys who’ve grown up too slowly for it. Supple of limb and flashing of eye, and how they laugh when they haven’t crouched hours in foxholes, in the mud, in the fog, in the smoke taking their sight and clogging their throats, in the blood of men they have fought beside. They had forgotten laughter, in France, in the poppy fields, all of them but Rizzo. Rizzo had laughed, and drawn his knife quick through the flesh of suffering men, and joked in camp and on the march and kept his men fighting through sanity and well beyond it. Rizzo had clapped him on the shoulder and clasped him close and said, “Uncle, don’t be a stranger.”
He has not been home in years, decades. Left young, is the thing, same as they all did, and never drifted back. Remembers enough of the old man that it’s never been any pleasure to wander his halls, knowing where his bones are buried, waking up in the night with the memory of hot blood splashing his face. Doesn’t know, can’t think how the girls have all managed to nest so close by, Tia right on top of him, manner of speaking, still making coffee in the same great copper press their father used, still setting out dinner for herself on the table where he ate. Terry wandered off up North and came back heavy with child and bought a couple hundred acres off Tia and set up house, claimed the factories were suffocating her something awful. Don went to live by the sea, breathe in salt spray and tell himself that their father couldn’t come for them; that their grandfather couldn’t come for them. Hera he doesn’t like to think about, talk about, couldn’t much bear to look at Zee in the war when he came rolling back in from having tumbled a luscious, desperate girl here and there, in desolate farms and mountain crags. The children he barely knows of; hadn’t set eyes on any till about a year ago. Zee had a girl from before his mess of a marriage. Zee and H had one boy who came out whole and hungry and one boy who came out lame—or turned lame, or fell ill, or was beaten, or or or—and them he knows well enough now, lived with Stu and sat up nights with Rizzo. Zee has a parcel of kids with women who have left or died or run insane and H picks and chooses, keeps the ones she thinks might be of use and he’s not above putting children to use himself, never been and never likely to be, but he remembers her, shining, beautiful, glorious, that one year they were all free and young and loved each other. Before Zee came back, before H went to him and said it didn’t count what they were when they’d never grown up with Zee anyhow, and the thing is. The thing is he grew up right alongside her and Tia and Terry and Don, in that basement, with their father—their father, their father, if he was a singer if he was a poet if he could pour himself out in words, way he’s heard Zee’s got a son that can, what wouldn’t he say about their father—he grew up with them in the dark, and he understands why she went to Zee, with his stories of growing up on the mountains, in the fresh air among the goats, how impossible it seemed that he was one of theirs, their blood, their kin, how she loved him, how she wanted to tie him closer than the tenuous claims of siblings. Siblings leave. He hasn’t spoken to Zee in a couple decades himself, not a word even in the months of war, with his sons running ragged between them, Rizzo fair feeding off Stu’s frustrations. He hasn’t spoken to Zee in twenty years and a fair few months, hasn’t looked at him and doesn’t plan on it. But Rizzo, Rizzo who looks like Zee did back when he was a stranger crowned with glory, Rizzo had sat up nights with him and looked after Stu and pretended not to care, and had said, “Come home some day,” and meant it.
And so he’s here, he’s got no business being here when his business needs nothing as much as a strong hand guiding it after his absence, he’s at Terry’s farm, garden, house, ranch, whatever she calls it, and he’s getting the gate open, and he’s thankful he thought to travel light, and he’s thankful there’s a place to go to that isn’t Zee’s place up in the mountains and isn’t their father’s house where Tia lives with Zee’s younger kids, some of the time or all of it depending on if their mothers are dead or simply distant, ‘cause he isn’t aiming for this thing to go badly, but he’d kill Zee sure as sunshine or try his damndest and he’s not a scrawny young thing like he was when first they met, and he’d rather die than step foot in either house. And he’s thinking these things and how brave Tia is and how set in her ways and how set upon revenge and how someone ought have reminded him not to wear dress shoes and then he looks up and there she is, this girl like sweet spring. And all the other stories, all his memories of pain, they stop howling in his bones, they lie down in the dark corners of his mind like trusting dogs and they go to sleep. They don’t die, they can’t die, that house, his parents, the life he had there and the life he’s made to get away, they’re in his bones, they are his bones, same as Stu slaves over blueprints and schematics to forget his leg, but oh, she steps forward from the light toward him, and all of him goes quiet, goes hungry.
“Are you Zee’s girl?” Zee’s oldest one’s about this age, edging into her twenties, no idea what she’ll look like, always a bit of a risk, what with Zee cheating like he breathes, but this girl has a look of their sort, the way she holds herself, the way she tilts her head, regal in a dress of light cotton, faded in the sun.
“Not if you mean his daughter,” the girl says, smiles with that blood-red mouth. “I’m his niece, Persie. Well, Persephone, but folks call me Persie most of the time, when they ain’t just calling me girl. Uncle’s not here right now, but if you can bear to rest a mite I’ll get one of the girls to run on up and fetch him. You bein’ waited for?”
“Not by Zee. Rizzo’s let it be known he would be pleased to see me,” he says, and adds when she frowns, “Folks call me Hades most of the time. I’m kin to your uncle, and your mother.”
She raises her head again, glances over him with searching eyes, and nods: a quick dip of the chin, eyes still fixed on him. “I’ll run tell Momma, if you’ll just wait.”
He wants to say, oh, it would be pleasing to say that his kin are the same as ever: Zee a distant looming threat, Don easy with a smile and story, Tia welcoming, Terry motherly, Hera like the high peaks on a clear day. It would be a balm to his heart, to say that, to say they fold him in and he goes, easy as if he’s never been gone, years melting away in their touch. Ah, but he has taught himself over these years to abjure lies, to offer only truth, as bait, as trap, as bribe. His kin are not as he left them, not as they were in those early years, the spring of their youth that has turned to fierce summer, not so sweet, not so quick to cling. Terry looks him over without her daughter’s tenderness, wiping her hands on her pinafore, looks him over and clicks her disapproving tongue and says, “Took you long enough, little brother. I suppose you’d best come on in.”
This home is one where he’s never set foot. Terry was gravid when he’d left, living out of two rooms in Tia’s house—in their father’s house, in their father’s house where they had lived all those terrible years, how does Tia live in it still—and overseeing the building of this one, moving slow and careful up and down the path between the two a dozen times from sunup to sundown. It is a beautiful house, large pillared rooms and huge windows and deep porches with old chairs left out for those that care to while away their days looking out over Terry’s garden and a kitchen out back that’s hot with the ever-burning fire and oh it feels like childhood, like the dreams they used to spin in the dark, of sweet-smelling flowers and cedar wood. He sits down on the bed in the room Terry’s given him, up under the eaves, with wisteria climbing up through his window, and touches the saffron silk of the comforter, and the washed cotton of the sheets, and takes off his shoes and pulls the comforter back and lies down, for a minute, and then another, and then another. The pillows smell of rosemary and mugwort for vivid dreams, of lavender and chamomile for sweet sleep. The girl who comes up to tell him dinner’s ready is a slip of a thing in a faded shirt and gingham skirt, her thin cheeks red with more than the sun, and her hair pulled into shining braids. She laughs at him when he asks whether they dress for dinner, and some more at the ruin of his shoes, promises to lay out something sturdier and takes her leave.
Dinner is like and unlike his expectations. He sheds his jacket and his tie and is still the most overdressed, Terry and Persie in the dresses he’d seen them in earlier, Rizzo in shirtsleeves and a tall girl with grey eyes who gives herself out as Addy in a man’s shirt with sleeves rolled right up and trousers cuffed up past her slim ankles: that’s as he’d thought it would be, in the moments he’d seen fit to give any thought to the thing. The food is delicious, everything richer and stronger and simply more than the stuff he gets home below, and that’s right, too, all as it ought to be. But there’s nobody for dinner other than the five of them, and hardly anybody talking beyond the terse requests to pass the food around and the hushed bickering between Addy and Rizzo. Terry and Persie keep darting glances at him and looking away before he can meet their eyes or say something. Time was Terry’d have slapped him and pulled him into a hug and stroked the curls off his forehead and fed him herself, but he’s the one who left, and anyway they’re all older now. Strangers now, and there is grey threading itself through Terry’s crown of braids, and lines beside her mouth that’s gone thinner with age, pursed and pinched. The changes in himself… well, he’s got to live with himself and doesn’t rightly know, but there are photographs up along the wall of the six of them that one year of freedom, and he’s sixteen in them, shorter than Zee and Don, shorter than H even, slender with malnutrition, and though his chin is as pugnacious as ever and his shoulders stiff with something other than courage, there’s a light in that boy’s eyes and a smile on his lips that Hades hardly recollects.
Dinner done and over with, Rizzo collects his jacket and pitches hers at Addy and tips his head at Hades and they go stand out on the porch. Nearing December and he’d have thought to find it cold but Terry favors mild climates, and leaves on the tree year round, and flowers always blooming. Rizzo says, “Give them time, they’re all hassled about you coming. Momma near about jumped into the car with me, and then thought better of it and told me not to tell you.”
“And here you are, telling me,” he says, careful, mild. “Such trust, nephew, in a man you hardly know.”
\“I’ve seen the blood drip out of you,” Rizzo answers, easy as anything. “I’ve ichor stains on my olive drab from when your head rested against my shoulder, dread uncle. And anyhow I don’t care if Momma knows I told you, there’s love enough between us I can stand to lose a little. Now, Auntie Tia tells me you might not want to step foot in her house, and that makes things a mite more difficult than they might have otherwise been. Best do things out in the open where earth and air can see. I’m surprised you even accepted the hospitality of this house, but that’s a relief, or I’d have had to cudgel Stu into rigging something up for you; Uncle Don’s too far, and I shan’t insult us by asking you to live under the same roof as Daddy.”
“I have no quarrel with my brother,” he says, and lets his mouth curl into an unfeeling smile. “What are you envisioning, boy? I want no truck with rituals here above, nor any reason for your father to feel provoked. I have come as called, all unknowing.”
“It’s not me you need to watch for pranks,” Rizzo promises, all earnest. “Maybe Dio or Hermes, but I’ve them on a tight enough leash. You’re our uncle, and among us now the first time in our lives: a sad thing when we’re full grown and did it without much as setting eyes on you. We want a piece of you, all us young folk, and though they’re gonna be tight-lipped about admitting it, your siblings have longed for you, same as anyone might.”
“I have come from longing of them,” he admits, halting, all unwilling, Rizzo’s beautiful solemn face drawing it out of him. Zee had never been as young as this, as sincere, but Hera, oh, Hera in the light slipping down from the high, narrow windows set so far above their heads and so close to the ground, Hera holding him close and swearing vengeance, Hera had had such eyes, liquid and steady, such a mouth held firm, such tenderness in her and such terror. This son of hers might have his father’s height and his father’s hair and his father’s great shoulders, but the heart of him in the midst of war and in the homesteads of his kin is his mother’s heart. “I would meet them, but I cannot set foot in my brothers’ houses, or in the house where my father lived.”
“That’s about what I figured,” Rizzo says, and heaves himself off the porch railing. “I’ll send one of the kids running over here moment I get something set up. Addy! Addy we’d best be heading on back or Momma’ll think we’ve quit her for Auntie Terry and ain’t nobody’s got the time for that.”
Addy lets herself out quietly, shakes his hand good-night, cuffs Rizzo upside the head and dodges one from him, and then they’re gone, the car roaring off into the quiet darkness, and Hades turns to go back in and finds Terry gone off to bed and Persie apologetic and awkward and gives in to the longing building for hours in him and takes her shoulders between his hands and brushes a kiss over her braids. She’s looking up at him when he draws back, eyes wide with some quick-waking wonder, and still looking at him as he goes up the stairs to his room as close to the sky as Terry can make it, the way he’d wanted when he was shut away in the earth, the way he’s tried and found unsafe, the way he’s given up and buried himself instead, deep down below. His sleep is a heavy thing, silent and smothering, and he wishes to wake and cannot.
This is how the story starts. There is a girl in the garden, and a man at the gate. That much is true always. Then it splits, forks, goes the way stories go in different mouths and different minds. He opens the gate and takes her shoulders between his hands and takes her mouth and takes her right there and takes her away from her mother and takes away her chance to leave him for good and takes her into the deep darknesses of the earth. She smiles up at him and tips her head hello and tips up on her toes and tips her body into his and tips him off that she wants to run and tips a wink at a servant to stay quiet or tips a servant a time and half his wages and tip-toes off into the night with him. They end up married, any road. And always at the beginning she’s in the garden and he’s outside looking in. That’s how the story starts.
There are other stories. Here’s one. Once there was a man who lived with his wife, who gave him children. Six children, all beautiful, all brilliant, and five of them ill-fated. One child she managed to sneak out past his guards and dogs and high walls, that child in the arms of a trusted friend, brought up elsewhere and told his great destiny. Five children locked in the basement, the royal boys and girls with the royal port, seeing sunlight creeping across bare wall and concrete floor, blue sky through the slats of the one window set too high and narrow to be any use. Three girls and two sons who never knew to greet the sound of a door opening with anything like joy, grew like roots, slim and pale, grey, ghostly, ghastly things, cowering hiding slinking back into the shadows for fear. Their father strolling on down after dinner, like a post-prandial walk in the park every now and again and taking one or the other of his children and bashing their heads against the wall till they bled, breaking an arm or flaying a back open as it suited him. Less and less as they grew and he grew old, till he would come down like clockwork, once every seven days, take his youngest son by the throat and break him. Years, it went on, decades. Down into the basement they went soon as they could do without a teat or bottle, spilling milk, and down in the basement they stayed a long wretched childhood, adolescence. Tia was twenty-four years old when first she saw a blue sky without any bars in front of it, smelled the sweet earth and reveled in the bright air, Hades fourteen, the others strung between them in a line made irregular by the absence of the favored son, the one who got away, the one who came back and fought for them and won and killed their monstrous father. For a time they made themselves at home in their father’s house, walked his halls and drank his wine and rejoiced in the little pleasures of life—picking a flower off the bush, eating fruit off the vine and bread fresh from the oven, sleeping on goosedown, giving their father piece by moldering piece to the ever-burning fire. They were happy, for a time, for a year or for two, never had much of a relationship with time. Still, the girls wandered and came back, Hera with a husband, Terry expectant; the boys wandered and one came to rest at a sea-shore, within easy call of his sisters and one went away to the deeps of the earth and made a mine and made a mill and made a railroad that plunged right on down to Hadestown and never came back again. His sisters longed for him, and his brothers pretended they didn’t, and none ever saw him till in other lands fighting other wars they smiled red smiles and knew each other by the blood on their teeth and the singing in their blood, and so the youngest son came home and found his siblings grown more themselves and their children grown, and the hard shell of his heart cracked a piece and a soft creature looked out and saw a girl in her mother’s garden, honey-dark and honey-sweet.
There are other stories. There are always other stories. Once there was a man who tortured his father, went up to the old man with a scythe and castrated him and threw his bleeding member into the ocean, beat him senseless and took his place. He took a wife and she gave him a daughter and in her babbling he could only hear his father’ screams. He loved his wife, and he adored the child, and he waited, sure it would pass, as she nursed at her mother’s breast, as she began to speak, as she took her first step and his wife grew heavy with child again. The room he put her in had a beauty to it in the early days that her siblings never saw: massive and grey, monumental. She was always going to be let out, just as soon as he had mastered his fear. When she was four, her two-year old sister followed her down into the darkness, the room grown dank now, the bright thread of the tapestries dull. Another sister, ox-eyed Hera, who was never quiet, never easy, bit her father’s striking hand. Then four years of silence before a brother came to them, and then another. Their father’s love had gone, then, grown cold like a dead thing in barren earth.
Other stories, one starting from the other like links in an iron chain. The weight of this place: bowing his shoulders, making him stoop, making him walk carefully, like a man with a grave injury, a withered limb. He follows Terry around the house in the mornings like he is a child again catching at the hem of her dress, crying for attention heedless of her tasks. Terry lets him, the first morning, and the second, and on the third he is banished to the porch with his coffee and strict injunctions not to return until after he has walked off the restlessness. That day he walks till all the light has faded from the sky, lingering at every bush, haunted by memories: this is where he stood and watched the sky the first time he left his siblings and went his own way; that tree is where they had sat down, too soon weary, the first time they had walked in the sunlight. Terry’s property borders Tia’s, their father’s, Hera’s beyond that, and Zee’s lands in the mountains, their little kingdom, their bounded land. When he’d left, the others had just about begun putting the place in order after how their father had let it all go to wrack and ruin, and though the lines of the land are familiar to him, the bones of it are clothed in strange flesh now: prosperous little farms covering the scars of mining, and here and there a field of flowers very different from the straggling wilderness they thought purest bliss upon their escape.
Persie finds him at full dark, in a field hedged about with mayhaw, stands looking at him with her hands on her hips and a frown on her face. “Momma was sure you’d left, hitched a ride or somethin’,” she says. “We were about to send out a search-party, only Paulie came by to drop off one of Momma’s cake tins and said he saw a strange man in a suit go by this way. You know you’ve wandered onto Auntie Tia’s land?”
“It was all one thing when I left,” he explains. “There don’t seem to be any fences or gates.” The land is all one thing still, to look at, no gates or walls or barbed wires marking out property lines, and to him there is little difference even looking with other eyes. Zee’s lands up and around the mountains he knows as a blind man feels the rain, eyes closed and skin thrumming, but in the gentler divisions of his sisters there is only equal welcome for him: everything from the first stand of nightcaps outside Terry’s gate all through Tia’s lands—saving only the house and that’s a warning from his memories more than anything else—up to where Hera’s birdhouses hang against her husband’s wall. All of it is land unfurled and awaiting his footsteps.
“Well, it don’t make no never mind,” Persie says, and sits down and curls her arms about her legs, rests her chin on one upraised knee. “Haven’t been up this way in a few years; mostly the kids play here these days, Dio and the twins. Used to be Rizzo and Addy and I’d come here with blankets and picnic baskets, make a weekend of it. Dragged Stu along, a time or ten, but he’s never much liked sleeping out under the stars, even before he went off to fight. We all came by a while after they got back, and Rizzo and Uncle Zee and Uncle Don kept watch turn and turn again, and Stu still didn’t get a wink of sleep.”
“I could sleep here,” he tells her, and stretches out and hoods his eyes, suiting action to word. “This is a good place; the world falls quiet here.”
“Momma and Auntie H used to bring me and Addy here when we were babies,” she informs him, and idly tugs at the grass by her feet. It is thicker now than it was, and the smell of honeysuckle hangs heavy in the air about her. “Auntie Tia must have come too, there’s a photo of the three of ’em together here, but I can’t remember it much. Barely ever stirs outta the house, does Auntie, unless it’s to chase the kids into caring for themselves. Momma and I think they’re wearing her out, but it wouldn’t do to take ’em into our house. Auntie H wouldn’t stand for it, she’s awful jealous, though she don’t mind it with Auntie Tia so much. Doesn’t precisely like it, mind, but the twins live with Miss Letty more’n half the time, and everyone knows Dio needs all the help he can get, but ain’t nobody can manage Hermes, from what I can see. Don’t rightly know him so well myself, but him and Paulie have a right feud, even with him so much younger. You’re letting me run my mouth an awful lot, y’know. Could’ve just told me to shut up, I wouldn’t’ve minded or anything.”
“I’d have asked you if I’d wanted you to, and not been over nice about it,” he assures her, and draws up his legs in belated imitation. “This is a good place, as I said, sweet to the senses, soothing. There are no such places in my home.”
“You’re welcome to come sleep out here if you want, but if we don’t get back for dinner Momma’ll tan our hides, so we’d best get going.”
She laughs a little when he offers her a hand up, but takes it and scrambles to her feet and tilts her head to look at the stars, the moon lovely like a pearl pin holding back curls. Her braids are twisted into a rope that hangs heavy over her shoulder, and he wants to wrap it round with gold ribbons, strings of pearls big as an eye, big as the moon drifting through clouds like spun silk. She doesn’t let go of his hand as they start walking back, rubs her burning thumb over the back of his hand, steers him around trees and standing rocks like his eyes are weaker in the dark than hers. In the mines it is darker than coal, like going about blindfolded in a lightless room, and his step is silent and sure. He leaves his hand in hers, twines their fingers together, tries to stop smiling to himself and fails.
“Missy’ll be about here somewhere,” she says, “girl can never get to sleeping when there’s a full moon out, wanders ’round with bags under her eyes unless Auntie Tia can make her sleep in, which Auntie Tia don’t much like doing.”
“Tia was never the stern disciplinarian of the lot,” he offers. “It was a while ago, but she was always the one arguing we oughta get our fun if we could and never mind the stains or bruises.”
“Still that way with the most of us. The trouble Rizzo and Addy used to get themselves in, fightin’, and there she’d soothing Auntie H into something that might pass for calm if you only looked at it sidelong. The thing is with the twins Miss Letty lets ’em run real wild, don’t say no to a thing they want, and ain’t Auntie H gonna lend a hand. So the times they live here she tries and keeps them within bounds. Wouldn’t like to do it myself, on top of running after Hermes all day long.”
“They sound real terrors. Here, you’ll need your hands for this, and my eyes aren’t all that bad, y’know.”
“All I know is you’ve got a dog back home and a cane, and you can’t have any sorta foothold in those dress shoes you wore that first day, and I ain’t got time for the ways Auntie H will skin me if you do yourself an injury before she even gets to clap eyes on you.”
“Rizzo told me he’d set something up, perhaps a family dinner of some sort,” he demurs. Her smile is startling, still, even though he ought to have been used to it by now. She smiles often enough, at him, at Terry, at the girls working on the farm and in the kitchen, at the flowers she’s tending to, at the moon or the memory of some other night spent laughing with her cousins. His blood beats when she turns it on him.
\“Didn’t know Rizzo was on the case. Well ,” she says, satisfied, gloating, “then it makes no nevermind what anyone’s been thinking. Ain’t a thing anyone can do to stop Rizzo once he’s gotten started, ’cept Uncle Zee maybe, and sometimes Addy if she puts her mind to it. Suspect we’ll be dragged outta our beds and kidnapped to a picnic soon enough.”
“You like him,” he hazards, and the truth of it sits strange in his heart.
“Now don’t you go accusing me of playing favorites, when anyone with eyes can see you don’t care two hoots for your brothers. I like all of ’em ’bout the same. Can’t say I understand Stu particularly well, and Hermes is too little to really know just yet, but they’re my blood all the same and ain’t gotta do any more’n that to get love. Rizzo ’n Addy ’n I grew up together though, kinda jumbled up all in one, cause Momma and Uncle Zee were busy as anything, and Auntie H barely had time to see to herself with how much Stu needed her when he was little and even a bit later, ‘cause he minded about his leg ever so. Time Dio got born and his Momma died and Uncle Zee was that mad, we were old enough to mind the kids a bit, just when playing and things, and Addy don’t suffer fools gladly or otherwise so mostly it was me and him.”
“So you’re admitting I’m right and you do play favorites,” he says dryly, and turns his head to catch her gaping.
“Well,” she manages, and puts a hand to her mouth to hide how wide her smile’s grown. “If I do it ain’t with Rizzo. You’ve gotta meet Dio before you head on back, though I’m hoping it won’t be for a good long while. He’s the sweetest boy really, no moods or anything, just sweet, like sun-ripened fruit fresh off the vine.”
“Were it mine to choose,” he admits, and finds it easier in the cold night with her hand in his the only warmth, “I might linger a year and a day, or my whole long life. It is a sweet place, and sweet to be among my kin after so long without. But there is work waiting, and my people yearning, and my heart longing to return.”
“You like them,” she asks in turn, and leads him out from the wooded lane into a field he recognizes as one he crossed early in the day. In the distance the lights of Terry’s house eat away at encircling darkness, and out in front of the open door is a figure awaiting their return. They have come by some quicker path than he took on his outward wandering.
“No,” he says, immediate, and looking at the lines of her face, the pursed lips twitching and the eyebrow raised like a banner of skepticism, adds, “not as you would think of it. I see to their survival and they add to my prosperity. There is no love between us. It is not a place for love.”
“Sounds mighty dark,” she says after heavy silence, averting her eyes. “I can quite see why you don’t wanna head right back out this instant. C’mon now, Momma’ll be holding dinner for us.”
Next morning he wakes in a spot of sun, to the curtains drawn back and Persie perched at the foot of his bed tossing an apple hand to hand.
“What you need,” she says when he’s sat up, woken all the way up in a hurry, “is a bit of light.”
“To carry down with me into the dark,” he asks, draws his knees up to make way for her, “and hold against my dank days?”
“There’s no call for bitin’ my head off, even did I wake you up early. Don’t our sort need much sleep anyhow. I was thinking of what you said ’bout there being no love lost among you and your folk. All they need is a little bit of light, just a glimpse now and then to ease their worries. Only human nature to long for the light, like plants stretching out in dark rooms - show them blue skies now and then and ain’t nothing they can’t do just so long as they think they’ll get to see a bit more. Man could toil a month on the memory of the moon.”
“Yes,” he says, “yes I know.” The bed is large, the frame of it carved and the feet clawed, hung about with mosquito nets looped up around the bedposts, but there is a handspan between them, and he has not fallen back in fear since his father died in a house a brisk ten minutes’ walk from this sundrenched room. She is young, and in hand’s reach of him, and terrible as young things are that grow fearless. “It is a thing that was done to me, once, and to mine.”
“I don’t like to think of you alone in the dark so far from all your kin, thinking’ there’s no love to be had. When Momma told me how you’ve lived, I couldn’t help thinking ’bout it and how it was mighty strange you got out from one hole in the ground and straight off plunged into another. Now I know it ain’t a hole any more’n this is a patch of weeds, but it feels an awful lot like punishing’ yourself for something’ you didn’t do.”
“There’s an honesty to the darkness that appeals,” he says, still looking at her, unable to tear his eyes away, even when she smiles indulgently. “It does not dazzle the eyes as light does, nor deceives. My world is a hard thing, and my heart is a hard thing, and it is a hard thing to find jobs and fill bellies in this world. I do not pretend to love, only to deal justice, and there I’ve had no reason to pretend.”
“And your people, they adore you, and they wait on your every word, and they long for you when you leave, as the girls in the farm here long for Momma when she goes into town and the folk in the soup-kitchens long when she drives off away from them. You are loved, or not loved and you do not miss it, never think you might perish for lack of a friendly smile at the end of the day or arms about you when you need ’em, or you never need ’em, never need nothin’, not even a glimpse of sky or starlight in your mines and mills under the sparkling lights, never a breath of fresh air in your stale long corridors, or sweet spring water and the lushness of harvest, never need nothing and nobody? King Hades on his iron throne, who knows no love, you gonna tell me that’s you when I’ve had you at my table these last days and nights and seen you near split open last night just cause you’d managed to sit yourself down in a nice patch of grass?”
“I was split open because I was with you,” he tells her, quiet, quiet like he might tell some broken spirit gone wild on realizing what they’ve signed away for a belly full of food that tastes like ashes. No good for business—people clawing their eyes out, clawing the mortar out from between the bricks of the wall; that’s the kinda spectacle that gets people looking, talking, stopping work. So he’s got this voice, quiet, quiet, talks ’em away from the precipice, from the crazy cliff-side; quiet, quiet, all his words one tone, giving nothing away, a voice for below and strange like ice in this sunlit room. “It’s no little thing, sure, but it’s no frequent thing either, and it’s nothing that’s likely to happen again just any old day. You need have no fear for me,” he says, and closes his teeth against sweet one, against dear heart, against beloved.
“I just don’t like thinking of you alone in the dark all by your lonesome,” she says, dropping her gaze, all the sudden fire in her banked and beautiful. Looking at her now, all lowered eyes and hands twisted elegantly together, he’s tempted to believe the last few minutes pure illusion. None of his sisters know this trick, nor none of their brothers: a new thing, grown in the fertility of peace, to have many natures, many selves, none false. “I came up here to tell you Auntie H is down in the kitchen, talking to Momma. Breakfast’ll be a little while, but coffee’s up already, so I’ll just take myself off outta the way so’s not to be trampled while you charge headlong for the pot.”
“My sister is here?” His face, he thinks later, too late, he ought to watch his face, too long in the dark to remember he can be seen, wears a hat now more often than not, is surrounded more often than not by folks too scared to look at his face, and is too often too uncaring for anything to show. But now, oh, at the thought of her downstairs sitting with Terry at that work-scarred table drinking coffee and talking idly about everything and nothing, or intently about him… Persie looks at him and then away and then at him like she’s intruding, which is enough of an answer for the moment.
But she says only, “And you were scolding me for playing favorites,” and disappears before he can grasp at a reply.
Twenty years he hasn’t been home, and she’s not the same any more’n Terry’s the same, than he’s the same, but she looks up at him, her eyes still the same dark pools fringed with lashes, and her glance is a hook through him, reeling him in. He rounds the table on shaky knees and goes to his knees before her, and she pulls him down, combs her fingers through his curls and kisses his crown and he wraps his arms around her waist and kisses the lace of her blouse fluttering in time to the thump of her heart, and is home, home, home, three and lulled to sleep by her regular breathing, seventeen and watching her walk away from him, beloved and betrayed and hers. “Hera,” he scrapes past his teeth, his dried-out throat, “Hera, Hera.”
“That’s my name,” she says. “Been a while since a man said it quite so reverently, mind. C’mon up, and tell me everything.”
“Half the reason I asked you,” Terry puts in, dry as drought-struck soil. “Been putting me off with evasions like he didn’t drop right off the face of the earth for longer’n any of our babies’ve been around, but he’s never been able to keep secrets from you.”
“Oh I don’t know,” Hera says, smiles an unfamiliar smile and drinks deep of her aromatic coffee. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, he hid his plans for leaving pretty well, didn’t he?”
Not seventeen, he thinks, climbing to his feet and making for the sideboard and its load of biscuits warm from the oven, coffee being kept warm in its pot. Fifteen or thereabouts, struggling to make sense of a world wider than familiar dungeons, his sisters grown and grown incomprehensible. Twenty years gone, and it is a quick queer pain still, the memory of her in the saffron of a wedded woman, some stranger’s wife and no longer his to claim. All his sisters cleaving their flesh from his, their hearts from his and letting his grow callous, grow calluses.
He pours out two cups of coffee and sets one in front of Persie, answers her smile with his own, and chooses a chair about mid-way down the table, closer to Persie than not. “It’s not much in the telling,” he demurs. “No glorious battles, no great loves.”
“No time spent pushing your children onto folks who’ve got better things to do than care for ’em,” Hera rejoins acerbically. “I’ve been hearing things about what you do down below, I’ve got eyes everywhere, or leastways I’ve got myself a man who does.”
“And what does he say about me? Good things, I hope.”
“Some good things, sure: you got a mighty cute dog, and some suits sharp enough to cut glass with. Know for a fact you’re good at building, and if I didn’t Stu sure ran his mouth enough once he got back. Both of ’em did, and it’s a rare sight, Rizzo and Stu agreeing. Like as not they’ll say day’s night to spite each other, and there they were telling stories about you, racing each other to praise.”
“Can’t have gladdened all hearts in your home,” he says, and drinks his coffee to hide his eyes. Persie turns to look at him, her braids swinging, brushing over his arm; the beads threaded through the ends of them click against the back of her chair. It is the safest thing in the room to listen to, the length of three breaths. All these things that’ve changed with age, all these ways they’ve all changed, he doesn’t imagine H’s temper’s got any better.
But she laughs, and if her eyes are cold above her smiling mouth he doesn’t know it: his eyes are full of the white rim of his cup above the rich coffee, and the dark blur of Persie’’s forearm peeking out the white sleeve of her dress. “Oh Zee’s never grudged anyone their reputation, figures it reflects well on him.”
“Generous of him,” he says, and, because it’s never done him any good talking about Zee, and certainly none talking about Zee to Hera, adds, “Should I expect to be ambushed by Tia tomorrow, or is there likely to be notice?”
“Wouldn’t be much of an ambush if you had notice,” Persie points out, and nudges her foot carefully against his and leaves it there.
“I’m liable to react in unexpected ways in unexpected company,” he informs her, pitching his voice low and leaning close, the fuzz escaping her braids brushing his mouth, tickling.
“I’d like to see you reacting to Tia,” Terry says, hauling herself up and away from the table. “Liable to take your fool head right off, all the practice she’s been getting with Dio. Now take our coffee and go reminisce outside, the two of you. Persie, child, stay and help your mother out.”
He’d been right, thinking Rizzo had Hera’s eyes and Hera’s quick confiding way of talking when something loved was at stake. He had forgotten, been unable to identify, the cheekbones set high in the narrow face, the full mouth pursed in irritation, the head held with the pugnacious chin jutting forward.
“They’re good boys,” he hazards once they’re out on the porch and he’s pulled her chair out and set her coffee down and moved outta the way when he’s blocking her sun and view of the garden. “Stu’s prickly, sure, but that mind of his saved us more’n I like to think about, and Rizzo was like a lion covering his cubs most nights, H.”
“Didn’t ask you away from Terry to hear you say good things about my sons,” she informs him, just as repressive as when he was ten, and not an inch as effective. His mouth keeps threatening to twitch up into a smile, blooms into laughter when she swats at him irritably with a fan he hadn’t noticed her carrying. “You know the kids call me Auntie H, or Missus H, dependin’?”
“Noticed Persie doing it a couple times,” he admits, draws her hand between his, gentles her fingers away from the peacock-feather fan and puts it outta reach at his elbow along the porch railing. “You gonna tell me you miss call and response?”
“When Stu was born, I thought maybe it’d catch on for him, and we could be Momma H and Li’l H. No dice. You can’t force a name. Maybe with this girl I’m carryin’. Didn’t bring you out here to reminisce neither.”
“Not as a mother, not as a sister,” he says, makes a show of counting them off on her fingers, folding little and ring towards her palm and pressing them down with his own thumb. “Queen, then, or conspirator?”
“Someone who’s wondering what business is holding you up here so long and coming up short,” she says and frees her hand, pressing it flat on the table beside her coffee-cup, catching heat. “Never catch a sight of you up above for more’n a day, and never so far from a station.”
“Your son invited me,” he tells her mildly, takes a long sip of his cooling coffee, “asked me right into the heart of your domain. What, am I giving Zee sleepless nights so bad you’ve come to know of them?”
“Hard not to know when he’s tossing and turning and making it rain fit to break the windows,” she tells him, cool, amused. “It’s not Zee who’s afraid you’re meddling, he barely said ten words to you before you up and left and all he’s ever heard of you is good. Don might, if he ever broke past his little beach.”
“You’re afraid of what I might do,” he says, the realization like a mouthful of ice travelling down his throat. “You and Terry and Tia, the three of you got together and they nominated you to come and talk to me. That about the shape of it?”
“I can’t make out the shape of it, is the trouble, H. I’ve got myself a man with eyes everywhere, loyal as a hand-raised pup, and he can’t tell me what you’re planning. It worries a body.”
“I came because Rizzo led me to believe I’d be welcome, and I’ve stayed because I’ve believed it.”
“Believe it, brother. Your wants are answered with wants. What those answered wants may breed worries me. You have land of your own, power of your own, you rest content in your domain, that perhaps I can believe. You always were the sort of child to play with your own toys. But you have or had a loving heart and it is lonely, and maybe in the dark you were content in your loneliness, but now you have been among your people, and you have tasted of love after a long starvation. Now hunger grows where it may feed, and our young look upon you with loving eyes, and this is power I would be loathe to surrender.”
“Which of your children,” he says, laughing over the thunder of his heart, truth shaking his bones, “do you believe I desire?”
“I do not know,” Hera says and puts a hand on his knee, careless, his sister who beds the thunder. “They are all splendid, my children and Zee’s, and our glorious Persie. I do not begrudge you the desire. No, c’mon don’t you duck your eyes from me,” she says, and puts her other hand on his chin, tilting his face up till he’s looking her in the eye. “Better. Now. I don’t begrudge you the desire, and I don’t wonder that they look upon you with liking, but you cannot lock them in the dark, H, because you like the look of one or the other and want love back. You will go to your own lands alone, not dragging one of the children with you. You are welcome to return, should you choose, but only to leave empty-handed.”
“I will not come beggar-like to your land,” he tells her, “asking for scraps of love. I will not come again, H, if this is how I must be treated, but you and yours may suffer and prosper as you have done so long without me. Rest content.”
“Rest you content, brother,” she says, touches the tips of her fingers to his chin. “I will have your word on it, and you are welcome in truth again. Now finish your coffee and tell me something sweet.”
“You have my word I will leave your lands and soon, and I will not drag any of the children of this land unwilling with me into the dark,” he temporizes, but she turns him loose and smiles. Still unchanged, his sister, ruthless in her desires and matchless in her love for her own, sharpened through the years and untouched in the core of things. It is he who has altered, grown easy, grown expert, in reading and finding and exploiting loopholes, in saying the form of a true thing and holding its truth cupped in his hands.
Persie comes to him at twilight the next day when his room is painted gold, which in its way is an answer to questions he hasn’t bothered asking, finds him in his room with his valise thrown open on the bed and his shirts in an ordered pile in it, and his socks and pants rolled up. He’s planning on going the way he came, sweating in his seersucker suit, and his other jackets are hanging lonesome in the closet, ties noosed over the rail and kerchiefs coming down atop his shirts.
“Might have to bother you for the loan of a pair of boots,” he tells her without looking up from his dress shoes, take a deal of shining up, best with champagne but you make do with what you got. “Old and hardy as you can make ’em, low chance of return.”
“You’re going,” she says, voice flat, imperative, negative, and he grins a little, chin tucked down where she can’t see. “So soon.”
“Stayed longer’n I meant to,” he tells her, easy as lying. “Got work waiting home below, spent little time as I could sorting things when I came back and didn’t pay much attention while I was there: swelled numbers something awful and it ain’t fair to leave it all on other shoulders, you know how it is, you’ve got your own work here.”
“Momma says she can’t get by without me,” she answers, rallying, shoulders coming down from around her ears, head pulling back near naturally under the weight of her hair, round chin coming out pugnacious and jaw clenching.
“Of course,” he says, turns his shoes for a last critical look and wraps his worst kerchief around them and stows them in his valise, stands meaning to move back across the room to the closet. “I had thought you might have your own domain as your cousins do, but there’s no true reason Terry should do as Hera and Zee have chosen.”
“I am needed here,” she says, and he nods all agreeable, stops in the middle of the room and turns his torso towards her, all at attention. “Don’t know where you get these ideas, my cousins haven’t got their own domains, what’re you on about?”
“It was my understanding that Rizzo had a gymnasium in town and Addy had a bookstore and they were going halves on a shooting range; met Tia and the kids out back this morning and she showed me the vineyard Zee’s got growing for Dio, said a bit about how they’re fixing to find out what the twins like beyond music and mischief so’s they can get something settled on them. Missy near talked my ear off with all her plans for women’s athletics, seems to me that shooting range might end up going thirds.” He smiles and raises his hands in helpless confusion, speaks in midnight voice, ice and doubt and shadowed persuasion. “Am I wrong?”
“No,” she says. “No, you ain’t wrong. Shouldn’t be surprised if Paulie ended opening a string of clubs, says already people’ll always want music and he’s right, doesn’t hurt he’s sweet as sunlight, got everyone thronging him like moths. Missy’s a bit more difficult, cause can’t nobody figure out how to turn training girls into money quite yet. Stu’s got his workhop started again, since he came back from the war, ain’t happy unless he’s cranking out new gadgets nobody knew they needed. You’re not wrong. I’m the only one without her own place.”
If he was a nicer man, he thinks idly, going through his jackets, but nice hasn’t got him anywhere, and nice is a thing for soft-reared children, and nice has never nested in the hollows of his bones, in the eyes of his siblings. “Terry does as she chooses,” he tells her, not looking, “and I can understand why she’d want to keep you still in your first bloom. It’s a lovely thing, the half-furled rose still recalling the tight curl of the bud, beautiful and fragrant. A little unnatural to my mind, but I’ve never had any truck with children or with flowers. Terry won’t thank me for meddlin’ in her affairs, and I don’t plan on making my last meal here bitter.”
“You’re leaving this late? Thought you’d stay through tomorrow, let us have that family meal Rizzo’s been wanting at least.”
“I met the children,” he reminds her, careful still. “Best not dally and meet Zee in the bargain. It’s been sweet, to come back home, but my welcome’s fraying. I’m not in my place while I’m here, and I’m not needed here nor wanted beyond the pull of blood. Blood’s a dangerous thing to depend on, especially blood rich as ours.”
“So you’re going off to be alone in the dark,” she says, and looks it herself, lonely, desolate, this girl in her mother’s house, her mother’s love upon her sunkissed skin, her long supple limbs, her constrained mind.
“I’m going home with work waiting, and my people waiting on me, and my bed and my dog waiting, and the dark lessens with these things about one. You know how we grew up, your mother and aunts and uncles and I, and they have grown fond of light and air and the great heights of mountains and the roar of waves breaking, of soil abundant and flowering, of well-lit homes. Such things we all loved when first we came out of the dark, and it remains in them unchanged, as they are unchanged save that they have become more themselves, shed youth for splendor. You have grown among them and for you it is easy, but it dazzles my eye, to look at Terry in her garden, in her kitchen, to look at Tia by the hearth among the children. It is not with me as it is with them.”
“To you the dark is comforting,” she says, and crosses the room to sit on his bed, run a hand over the folds of his clothes. “There are lamps lit always in this house, and in my aunts’ houses, and the stars are bright over the woods.”
“The dark is the only thing that is honest, and in the dark the minds of men are honest, and their hearts. I do not look for love. Our father loved us and broke us between his hands; our mother loved us and cared only to send Zee away. Zee loves women and they run mad or they die and Hera loves him and slaughters them, brings their children home and raises them if she wills it, or throws them into oblivion if she chooses.”
“Momma loves me,” she tells him, a child’s defense, a frown furrowing her brows, “and keeps me here, safe. Auntie H doesn’t love anyone and turns them loose. Is all love constraint?”
“Love seeks to keep what it loves,” he says, and crosses to the bed with an armful of jackets, sits down with his valise between them. “Love seeks to keep it unchanged. I have had as little truck with love as with flowers, but thus it is among my people, that love sours or turns to fighting because mortals change, with age so the beloved is no longer as in memory, with life itself so tempers flare or what once brought joy no longer does, or with the getting of it so longing turns to satiation and neglect.”
“Not only mortals, and not only because they change so soon. We are not ourselves unchanging, Uncle Zee has changed since first he came upon you, and you yourself have changed since first you came out of the dark, and I have changed since you came upon me in the garden. You may do much but you cannot hide me from my own mind. I may not know much, but what I hold I hold.”
“Have I so changed you,” he asks, “that I am to be held, or simply the knowledge of the change, as you might the memory of storm or sunshine? Persephone,” he says when her eyelids swoop low, her eyelashes shadows over her eyes, over the high curve of her cheekbones in the unrelenting light. “Persephone, have I altered you so much?”
“I was happy before I saw you,” Persephone says. “I have grown life-long in my mother’s garden, wanted nothing wanting nothing and now I’m changed, with you here, now I do not fit back into my snug little box, like a child outgrowing its clothes, now I’m unsteady on my feet and this home this land this place where I’ve lived, it feels like shackles, like a straitjacket pinning my arms to my sides, like a padded room, a prison holding me close, like my Momma’s arms around me holding me close.”
“I’ll be going home soon enough, in darkness to the dark, and my people will stretch their hands out and pull me down. You can begin then, to forget me, to find quiet and joy in your mother’s home. Such as we,” he says, and shuffles his jackets together, one into the other, blue in ash in black, skin in changing skin, “do not so easily alter. We are that we are.”
“You became what you are, you and Momma and the rest of you. She was older’n me before ever she saw new leaves tender on a branch, or a field of wheat stooping under its burdens. I know enough to not believe lies with a smile and a nod.”
“She would tell stories of it,” he says, rifles through his clothing once for the glint of gold: watch, ring, the scales he hadn’t wanted to be parted from. “Tia went down first, oldest and youngest, and by the time Terry followed her in she’d learnt to scrape things together to make enough. So there was no lack of food, when your momma was young, and Terry grew like a sapling, overtopped Don and Tia by one head and two, could look out the one window set close to the ground, to the ceiling, and see distant grass growing. Once she reached a hand through the grill and brought it back bloodied with a straggling stalk, two withering leaves and a curled-tight blue bud; some weed but the first flower we had seen blooming. It died, of course, wasn’t any amount of water could hold it against that dark. Next day everything within handsreach had been uprooted. She chose to keep those scars, Terry, through the next year and the year after it. I saw it on her hand last night at dinner.”
“We don’t scar,” she tells him, irritated and beginning to lose belief.
“I said she chose to keep them. Here,” he says and sketches them out on the back of her hand, two lines, two tines snagging skin and dragging deep where Terry had made her bid for freedom, for knowledge of self. Isn’t one of them as wouldn’t do it for that perfect moment of knowing what in the world you’re for and what’s for you. “She was always who she is now, always reaching for the dirt to grasp growing things. You her daughter are not so easily altered.”
While she is looking at his fingers dark on her dark hand and thinking of the scars pale on her mother’s he looks at her midnight hair left in long braids down her back ungathered and thinks, young so young and all untouched by time or tormenting hands, young like only things grown in sunlight and love are, young like he never was, younger than she is now and ashen with fear and privation, young like Terry never was dreaming of green things and living down among the roots, among the dead bones like dead children. They all still have ash in their skin, his sisters and he and he suspects Don, ash the seashells ground down by surf, ash the morning’s hearth waiting, ash growing trees out of burnt ground, ashen people’s faces as the queen goes by, ash and bones and the ghastly remnants of his life. Only Zee among them had ever been a healthy dark, storm-cloud dark like life was crackling out of him irrepressible. All the children are dark like Zee was dark, Rizzo looming death in battle, Stu fire-limned, the long limbs of the kids flashing as they ran circles around Tia, laughing. Persephone here with her head bowed over their hands and her hand turning pink palm up to fold the tips of her fingers over the edges of his palm.
“If I am my mother’s daughter and unbending in the heart of me, then this was in the heart of me, this quick darting of my eyes searching out new horizons,” she says, still looking down at their hands joined together, his fingers tender on the bones of her hand, swallowingly gentle. “If you speak only truth, I am my mother’s daughter, but I am not that alone. All my life this longing has lain dead in my mind and the Lord of the Dead now has raised it to life.”
“You will find peace only when you find yourself,” he tells her carefully, in the voice he uses to stop his walls from breaking under desperate hands. “So it was with all of us, and easier for some of us, and swifter. Terry walked out into the world and trees burst into flower, fruit; blades of grass sank down under the sudden weight of seeds. Don walked from coast to thundering coast, and Tia, she never even had to step outta the house to know what she was for. In other stories we have had it easier, girl, but this is the same; what we bring to life brings us to life, storms or seas or seeds. Walk the world till you find it, or walk your own mind and bring it forth.”
“I help Momma,” she says, finally looking up, looking him in the eye like that’ll distract him from her other hand coming to rest on top of his, like anything could. “She says things grow faster with me here, fruit tastes sweeter. Always figured that was her just being sweet to me. People do better when I’m around them, that part’s true enough, put their backs into it and laugh while they're lifting loads, sing while the earth crawls beneath their finger-nails. Ain’t got a thing to do with growing things far as I can see, same with Uncle Don’s fishermen and the women working in Auntie Tia’s kitchen, even that foreman Auntie H has skulking round her workshop. Folks are the same everywhere. I bet,” she says, and her hand tightens on his, nails curving into the sides of his hand and digging in like a cat claiming balance. “I bet your folk are much the same as any I’ve met, for all they’re down in the dark and working.”
“You’re welcome to take a look for yourself and judge,” he tells her, still in the steadiest of his voices, promising only compliance. “Wouldn’t be out of the ordinary to make a return visit even if it’s been so long since any of my kin stepped foot in my home. You’re in and out of Tia’s place every day, seems like.”
“You think it’d be the same, visiting you? You think it’d be like looking in on Auntie Tia and spending the day with Dio perched on my hip and outta trouble?” She smiles at him, lip curling up and back over white teeth, and shakes her head. “Can’t tell if you think I’m the fool or if you really are.”
“I won’t promise children to play with but,” he says and finds an answering smile as true as hers and as mocking, “I have a dog as dearly loves strangers.”
“You comparing Dio to a puppy?” she asks, half-laughing. Her teeth are like shells worn smooth by the sea, like the jar of them Don brought over with him and curled up around night as they camped further and further from the shore. “And after Auntie and I put in all that work to get him to stop barking.”
“Come and see my people, Persephone,” he tells her, turning his hand in her grasp to hold on. “I’ll give you over to Don afterwards, if you like, or you can go wandering as your mother did when we were young.”
“Hades,” she says, shifting so they’re hand-clasped, her fingers sliding into his, their calluses scraping together: from pen and ink, from the bark of trees. “Hades, I know what I know, and I hold what I hold. If I came with you I should never leave again, and to be in the dark, even with you, is a thought that terrifies.”
“I shan’t hold you against your will,” he says, taking up and abandoning half-thought wiles, words. “I swore it earlier in jest and now again in earnest. But I would illuminate the dark for you, if you so wished, and set fields of asphodel blooming night-scented and long-lived in the paths you chose to tread. If people are the same everywhere, and turn to your hand with a will, well then my people are docile and their own will long-broken and all they’ll want is guidance I am sore incapable of giving. A gentler hand, a careful touch, a word of kindness could bring them to heel.”
“I’m not afraid of handling your folk. Hades,” she says, and he remembers that he has been frightened of her, this love-bright girl who has known only happiness. “Hades, you have to ask. If you want me to live in the dark with you, you have to ask. I’m not leaving home without knowing there’s another waiting for me, that there’s a place where I’ll be more than the girl tagging in my mother’s wake, dragging in my mother’s wake and greasing the path for her as she brings the world alive.”
“Will you come into the darkness with me, to my home with its jewel-bright lamps and the wall ever-building and the mines ever-teeming and the bars full of workers’ griefs ever-drowning in drink? I can’t promise you blue skies or thunderstorms or the litter of cousins you’ve got lying around. Only silks, only jewels for your ears and your hair braided up into a crown, a sceptre for the people over whom you shall rule. Only myself,” he tells her, draws their joined hands to his lips, “if you will come down into Hadestown.”