dwarf will steal that damned Ring from the River Maidens, and it will begin all over again.” She sighed. “Stupid Tradition.”
He echoed her sigh. Godmother Elena, Godmother Lily, Queen Rosa and King Siegfried had carefully explained The Tradition to both of them before they left Eltaria. It seemed prudent to all of them, given that Leo was a tale just waiting to happen and Brunnhilde was a goddess. It had left Brunnhilde nodding, and Leopold outraged, but with no target to be outraged with. Just some nebulous force that was going to make him dance to the tune it piped unless he learned how to avoid it or manipulate it himself.
“Well, maybe we can find it a whole new path,” he replied. “We’ve got time to think and plan. Well, you do.” He felt a moment of melancholy. That was the one fly in their soup of happiness. He was mortal. She wasn’t.
“Well—it just might be that we do,” she replied, her blue eyes going very serious indeed as her brush stopped moving. “I asked Godmother Elena’s dragons about other places with gods, and they knew all about this one, and what is more, they had some interesting things to tell me about The Traditions here. This Olympia is just stiff with ways for mortals to become immortal. That’s why I brought us here.”
He sat straight up, grapes and melancholy forgotten. He was hard put to say whether he was more shocked, delighted or terrified. Probably all three at once. “You—what?” he gasped. “You mean—”
She nodded. “We’ll have to be really careful, though. Some of the ways for mortals to become immortal are not pleasant. For instance, becoming immortal but continuing to age. Or becoming immortal as a spring or a rock. Or a constellation of stars. Not the sort of thing I want to see happen to you.”
He thought about the first, and shuddered. A bit of waterworks or a rock would be far preferable, and still not something he wanted to think about.
“So how do you go about it without nasty consequences?” he asked. “Or have you found that out yet?”
“Nothing that will work yet, but I expect to. Either we’ll find a god-tale, or we’ll go introduce ourselves to the gods here and ask. Right now, all I know are the things that come to me in my sleep—when you let me sleep—” she began with a grin.
And that was when the ground opened up behind her with an ominous rumble. It really did open up; there was a sound like thunder, the earth trembled, a crack appeared and the ground rolled back as if two giant hands had pulled it apart. Steam issued from the opening. Leo nearly jumped out of his skin, and both of them leapt to their feet, seizing the swords that were never far from their hands.
A chariot pulled by four magnificent black horses rumbled up out of the chasm; the chariot was black without a lot of ornamentation; the horses were huge things, very powerful; snorting and tossing their heads as they plunged up the slant of raw earth. The chariot was driven by a man in a long black cloak with a deep hood, who reached up with one hand and threw back the hood of his garment on seeing the two of them there. Leo hesitated; the man was unarmed, and looked absurdly young, barely more than a stripling. “Well, there you are!” the fellow said crossly as his eyes lit on Brunnhilde. “You went to the wrong meadow, just like a girl. I’ve been looking all over for you!”
“I—what?” Brunnhilde stammered, for once speechless. “I think you must have mistak—”
Too late. The man jumped from the chariot, seized Brunnhilde and tossed her into the chariot as if she weighed nothing. She shrieked with outrage and tried to scramble to her feet, but he leapt back in, grabbed her around the waist with one hand to keep her from jumping out, and wheeled the horses with the other hand. Before Leo could do more than take two steps and Brunnhilde start to fight back, the chariot plunged down into the chasm, which promptly closed up behind them, leaving Leo to claw frantically at the earth, shouting Brunnhilde’s name.
When Persephone finally had woven enough to satisfy her mother, the sun was going down and she practically flew to the meadow on the chance that Eubeleus would be there. Her mother, thank all the powers, had gone off to round up some of her foundlings and had not given Persephone any orders. Persephone didn’t wait for her to change her mind. She didn’t even stop to snatch something from the kitchen for supper, afraid that her mother would invent some reason to keep her indoors until nightfall. And by nightfall, her beloved would certainly have left the meadow.
She’d forgotten her sandals, but that hardly mattered, this was Olympia and the paths were thick with soft moss wherever her feet touched them. Neither Persephone nor Demeter would ever suffer a bruised foot within her walls. Like the magic that kept the carnivorous foundlings from snacking on the rest, Demeter’s magic kept all harm at bay.
Wonder of wonders, her love was still in the meadow, looking altogether forlorn as he perched on a rock with his hands clasped between his knees.
She whistled like a boy, and he looked up, startled, to push off the rock and race toward her. He was quite tall, but it would be difficult to tell how tall he was, since he habitually slouched, as if he carried all of the troubles Pandora had allegedly let out of the box on his own back. His hair was as black as Zeus’s but fell about his face in unconfined ringlets, since he never wore the royal diadem of the gods in her presence. People forgot that he was as much a warrior as his brother-god Zeus, but the simple, one-shouldered garment of linen he wore showed off his muscles rather nicely, she thought, especially when he was running. Of the three original male gods, he was really the cleverest, too, though she suspected if she told him so he would just mumble a little and blush.
It’s just as well he got the Underworld, I suppose. Zeus would have made a dreadful mess governing it.
Only someone who actually knew him would see the Lord of the Underworld in this sad-faced shepherd, who looked gratifyingly lovelorn, and whose face lit up in a way that was even more gratifying as she ran toward him. Oh, how she loved seeing his dark eyes shine when they met hers!
They met in an embrace that threatened to become very heated indeed.
He broke it off, not she, but kept his arms around her as he looked into her upturned face. “I was afraid you had changed your mind.”
Persephone snorted. “No, it was Mother. She decided that today I needed to weave. I’m sorry I was too late to be abducted. I hope your friend didn’t get too bored. Where is he?”
Hades frowned. “Actually, he drove off, saying he was going to look for you, but he’s never seen you, has he?”
“I don’t think so.” She shrugged. “There can’t be that many blond-haired, blue-eyed immortal maidens hanging about in meadows on the slopes of Mount Olympus. Not that there aren’t a lot of maidens, or at least young females, and if they are nymphs or dryads or sylphs, they might very well be hanging about in meadows, but there are not many blondes. Most of them are brown- or raven-haired. I hope he comes back here instead of going back to the stables. We could still go through with this if he does.”
“I suppose you are right. You generally are. But hoping that Tha—my friend does something practical is hoping for a lot. He doesn’t think much past his job, which isn’t exactly hard.” Hades’s brow creased with thought. “Is there any real need for us to go through that entire abduction business?”
She looked at him quizzically. “What do you mean? I thought it was Traditional, and it would make it harder for Mother to demand me back.” She did not mention the other part, which she was not supposed to know but had deduced.
“Well, yes, but—” Hades waved his hands helplessly. “Why not? You were ready to go, why not
