Ghost Queen in the House of Love

14. Onia

Circe leaves me alone as the pain from her efforts diminishes, but they still ache and burn. After we slathered the ointment on it, the last thing I want to do is wear sleeves over the tattoos, but gooseflesh prickles my skin. So, I go to the washroom and slip the thin, velvet, silver robe over my shoulder. I personally embroidered the red and gold roses that stipple the fragile fabric. Thankfully, it's loose and doesn't snare my skin. I think everything is at peace, that I can sleep between the pink dawn and noon.

As I ready for bed, hands clasping the sheets, Cadmus sweeps in like he never left.

I cannot help but think of the decapitated lamb's head, and the skin around my neck twitches. The blood leaking from the beast's throat, that's what stains my mind when he sweeps me into a hard kiss.

I never knew such forceful passion could be lukewarm.

He observes me. "You must be in a good mood." I must look less tired.

"I am."

He nods. "Good. No need to sulk. It's unfitting."

Stiffly, I reply, "For a queen?" He hasn't seen, hasn't noticed. But he will. Even with the robe, the tattoos glow under it.

"For a beautiful woman."

Yes, there it is. "Ah."

He steps back, and his eyes snap to my arm, and he visibly recoils. "What is this?"

"It's the witch's healing."

"These markings? When will they be gone?"

"Never."

"I agreed for her to help you if it meant restoring you to what you were before." What I was. I wasn't fashioned for him, like Pygmalion molded Galatea from stone, carved her hair, neck, vulva, and then he and Aphrodite gave her no choice but to love him. "I didn't consent to this."

"It is my body she's healing. I don't need your consent."

"That witch needs to leave."

"She's healing me. You agreed to accept Zeus' gift." Like he took me as a bride. "Would you deny it?"

"She's trying to manipulate you, change you. If she's trying to undermine us, she should be put back in exile. Or thrown into the pits of Tartarus."

"Perhaps I want to be changed."

"You've always been perfect as you are."

The perfect queen for him. Agreeable. Docile. Willing to bow my head and supplicate because I feared an argument. A bruise on my wrist. Cruel acts of mercy, such as when he would give me poppy tea before I was meant to service a god, and he told me I was fortunate, since I wasn't awake. Therefore, I had no room to complain.

"You forget yourself."

The fire in my belly is angry and hot. "No, you forget me."

His jaw and mouth are like stone, but his eyes widen a fraction. "What do you mean?"

"Between the both of us, only one has the ichor of war in their veins. My family has toppled cities, started war after bloody war. Left Troy in such ruins no man was alive to dirty their sandals in the rivers of bodies or the mountains of ash. If you wish for the Aiónia Eiríni"--the Eternal Peace--"to stand, you best not bring out the blood of love and war in me."

"You would threaten war because of some hysteria?"

"It isn't a threat. Merely a reminder of whom you share your bed with. If the gods hadn't granted you their nectar and ambrosia, your bones would be dust in the earth, and your soul would be shuffling among the asphodels."

"Nonsense. Heroes go to Elysium."

"These hideous marks are doing something to you."

"The only difference between these and this," I say, gesturing to the necklace embedded in my skin, "is that I asked for the sigils."

He and I share a common fault, a painful flaw: the passive crime of moral cowardice. I know nothing of what goes on, except the wrongs the Olympians have inflicted on my own body and the souls of my children and grandchildren. And, naturally, the wrongs inflict on hundreds of others. Because they were a convenient, lustful whim, because they dared to invoke jealousy by being tricked by Zeus or performing their art too well.

Daphne, sprouted into a tree to spare her from Apollo. Medusa, raped in her own temple by Poseidon. Arachne, changed into a tiny creature because she outperformed Athena, all while weaving art that depicted the Olympians' atrocities. Guile is good, until it bites back against them.

So, I have done nothing because that is what's graceful.

His hand falters when it catches on the slippery balm Circe applied to my new marks, and my skin seizes with brief pain.

Instead of flinching away, I wrench myself away from him, my mouth curling into a snarl. "I am the daughter of Aphrodite and Ares, the very Olympians who brought ruin to countless cities, who erased entire civilizations by crumbling their walls and bones into dust. If it weren't for the water-dragon my father created for your benefit, so you could have one of its hideous heads mounted above our marriage bed, you wouldn't be the king of the world, wouldn't have your immortality. So, think carefully before you ever assume to touch me with spite again."

"For my benefit? He told me if I didn't marry you, he would kill me. I had to do it to appease him after I killed his dragon. I had to be at his service for everything. So, tell me, dear wife, which one of us is the slave?"

I deflate. That isn't the story I know, and I cannot tell if it's the truth or a lie to make me doubt my own reality.

"I had no choice but to marry you. Zeus and my father ordered it."

"I could say the same. If I were to reject a gift from the Olympians, be it a sword or a horse or a woman, their own seed, what would they've done to me?" Plunking himself at the end of the bed, he raises both palms in a shrug, green eyes sparkling with venom. "Here we are, then. Playing our roles perfectly because we have no choice." He shakes his head and laughs, and the way he tilts his head reminds me too much of the young king whose eyes widened when he first laid eyes on me in a shimmering gold shawl. Now engraved in ice.

A pang in my heart. Once, he tucked a golden lotus behind my ear. Set his hand against the swell of my belly and looked at me in awe as we kissed.

"And yet, I've never locked you away to grieve and sink into madness alone. Completely alone. And I've never once touched you with malice."

"If you did, no one would be able to stop you."

I can only imagine how that would go. I'd be conniving, overly ambitious. Doing it for my own purposes, and therefore insidious. Even if I am a goddess, I am still his wife. When Zeus and Father ordered me to come from Olympus and marry a mortal hero, it was a pact where I needed to fulfill my part. Even Mother instructed me on how to caress his cheek, find the sensitive pulse in his neck to kiss. Convince the both of us that we loved each other, so things would go easier when I inevitably spread my legs and accepted his seed.

We share a long look, and his mouth twists, like he's in pain. Thousands of years flash between us: hope, grief, affection, regret.

When he leaves me, I don't know where he goes. It takes me until noon to fall asleep.

In my dream, I have a long, golden beak, and I eat red from the feast table. And I'm never full.

***