This Immortal Heart: A Novel of Aphrodite(36)

“I didn’t think anyone was barred from a festival of love,” he says.

I stare at him. “Are you here to celebrate?” It’s too ridiculous even to contemplate.

I can see the conflict in his face. He doesn’t seem to be here to argue with me, but he’s battling something in himself. “No.”

I can’t think clearly, hazy with drink and still heady with euphoria. I’m grasping for the words that will make the pieces fall into place. “These are my rites,” I say.

“I know,” he says. “You came to Thrace. You saw mine.”

“So you want to make it equal?”

He shakes his head.

“Then tell me why.”

He runs a hand through his hair, a jerky movement of frustration. A shiver runs through me, tingling across the nape of my neck, and I feel suddenly and intensely alive to every sensation—the brush of my dress against my skin, his scent of earth and flame, the stir of the wind that rustles the leaves. I understand what drew him here even as I think it can’t be true.

“I came because since the moment you left Mount Haemus, I haven’t stopped wondering,” he says, his voice so low I can hardly hear it.

A delicious thrill races up my spine. My lips part around a question I shouldn’t ask but can’t stop myself from saying. “What were you wondering?”

“I was wondering,” he says as he draws closer and all I can see are his dark eyes looking into mine. I notice the touch of bronze in the black and I want to silence him before he can say it, but I don’t. “Wondering what it would have been like if you’d stayed. If you’d come inside.”

It’s the festival sweeping me up in its fevered atmosphere; it’s the rites that have made me so lightheaded, so reckless, I’m sure of it. That same urge I had at his sacrifice, to jump without knowing where I’d land, only then the blood and the violence stopped me. Here, in my fragrant garden, there is nothing to hold me back.

“Why don’t we find out?” I whisper.



* * *



—

His helmet and spear are on his chariot. He lifts them out of my way, settling his helmet back on his head as he helps me up. The touch of his hand on my elbow sets my skin aflame. Now that I’m leaving my own celebrations behind me, now that he’s next to me with his face armored in bronze, my head begins to clear. There are dozens of reasons to turn around and no reason at all to stay at his side, in the silence that holds us both.

But I don’t move, and his horses gallop on through the night, until the twisted peak of Mount Haemus is before us again and we’re landing in that same desolate courtyard once more.

No wraithlike attendant materializes this time. Ares jumps down from the chariot and then reaches out his hand to me.

I take it.

“Will you come in?” he asks. “Or will you disappear again?”

Part of me wants to take flight.

But another, more insistent part of me wants nothing more than to step into the home of the War God.

He opens the ebony doors and gestures me inside. Blazing torches light the way, the fire glinting off onyx pillars and silver chairs.

He told me before that his battle camp was no place for me, and neither is this. I can feel how hostile it is. A place devoid of love. But still I gaze around, taking in every detail.

He stops by a long table, lined with low benches at either side, carved from oak. I wonder if anyone else has ever sat here with him. Maybe his warriors come here to celebrate after the battles they survive; maybe their whoops of victory ring from the cold stone and metal. Maybe that woman who stared at him so hungrily at the sacrifice, or others like her, have looked on all the same things I’m looking on now, their eyes flashing and wild.

It’s only me here now.

“Does Zeus know about this place?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “I never want him to know where to find me. But let’s not talk about Zeus.”

“Do you trust me?” I ask. “Not to tell him?”

“Shouldn’t I?”

Doubt crawls under my skin, urging me to run, but he looks so sure of himself. “How do you know?”

His eyes are steady on me. “We aren’t as different as you think.”

“Aren’t we?” I haven’t moved from the doorway. I need to keep this distance between us. If I take a step closer, I will be lost. I sweep my hand around, gesturing at the stark hall, the cold silver and dark onyx, every surface unyielding. “Everything about you is different. This place is so bleak, so unforgiving.” As far removed from the scented groves of Paphos, the lushness of my forest pool and the radiance of the sunlight sparkling on the sea as it could possibly be.

“Death isn’t something the other gods understand,” he says. He starts to pace toward me, slow and measured. “They never come close to it. They’re never there, in the struggle at the end, not like I am. And it isn’t bleak, Aphrodite. It’s the opposite—it’s a mortal’s whole life, blazing against the darkness. When they fight, they’re the most alive they’ve ever been. Everything else is stripped away, and they’re raw and vulnerable and intensely themselves. I feel it with them, and so do you. You’re with them in their most passionate moments too.”

My eyes widen. “It’s hardly the same.”