Chapter Text
BLAKE’S FATHER WAS A KING AND THE SON OF KINGS. He was a tall man, as most of them were, and built like a bull, all shoulders. He married Blake’s mother when she was fourteen and sworn by the priestess to be fruitful. It was a good match: she was a pretty girl, and her father’s fortune would go to her husband.
He did not find out until the wedding that she was not very willing. Her father had been scrupulous about keeping her veiled until the ceremony, and Blake’s father had humored him. If she was ugly, there were always slave girls and serving boys. When at last they pulled off the veil, they say Blake’s mother wasn’t smiling. That is how they knew she was quite smart. Brides did not smile. When Blake was delivered, a girl, he plucked her from her arms and handed the child to a nurse. In pity, the midwife gave Blake’s mother a pillow to hold instead of her baby. Blake’s mother hugged it. Missing the warmth of her newborn child.
Quickly, Blake became a disappointment: small, slight. A girl, not a boy. She was not fast. She was not strong. She could not sing. The best that could be said of her was that she was not sickly. The colds and cramps that seized her peers left her untouched. This only made her father suspicious. Was Blake a changeling, inhuman? He scowled at her, watching. Blake’s hand shook, feeling his gaze. And there was her mother, drinking wine by herself.
BLAKE IS FIVE when it is her father’s turn to host the Olympic games. Men and women gather from as far as Thessaly and Sparta, and their storehouses grow rich with their gold. A hundred servants work for twenty days beating out the racing track and clearing it of stones. Her father is determined to have the finest games of his generation.
Blake remembers the runners best, nut-brown bodies slicked with oil, stretching on the track beneath the sun. They mix together, broad-shouldered husbands, strongly fit women, beardless boys and youthful girls, their calves all thickly carved with muscle.
The bull has been killed, sweating the last of its blood into dust and dark bronze bowls. It went quietly to its death, a good omen for the games to come.
The runners are gathered before the dais where her father and Blake sit, surrounded by prizes they will give to the winners. There are golden mixing bowls for wine, beaten bronze tripods, ash-wood spears tipped with precious iron. But the real prize is in Blake’s hands: a wreath of dusty-green leaves, freshly clipped, rubbed to a shine by her thumb. Her father has given it to her grudgingly. He reassures himself: all Blake has to do is hold it.
The youngest girls are running first, and they wait, shuffling their feet in the sand for the nod from the priest. They’re in their first flush of growth, bones sharp and spindly, poking against taut skin. Blake’s eye catches on a light head among dozens of dark, tousled crowns. She leans forward to see. Hair lit like honey in the sun, and within it, glints of gold—the circlet of a princess.
She is taller than the others, and still plump with childhood in a way they are not. Her hair is long and tied back with leather; it burns against the dark, bare skin of her back. Her face, when she turns, is serious as a stone.
When the priest strikes the ground, she slips past the thickened bodies of the older girls. She moves easily, her heels flashing pink as licking tongues.
She wins.
Blake stares as her father lifts the garland from her lap and crowns her; the leaves seem almost black against the brightness of her hair. Her father, Taiyang, comes to claim her, smiling and proud. Taiyang's kingdom is smaller than Blake’s, but his wife is rumored to be a goddess, and his people love him. Blake’s own father watches with envy. His wife is not a goddess and his daughter too slow to race in even the youngest group. He turns to Blake.
“That is what an heir should be.”
Blake’s hands feel empty without the garland. She watches King Taiyang embrace his daughter. She sees the girl toss the garland in the air and catch it again. She is laughing, and her face is bright with victory.
BEYOND THIS, Blake remembers little more than scattered images from her life then: her father frowning on his throne, a cunning toy horse she loved, her mother on the beach, her eyes turned towards the Aegean sea. In this last memory, Blake is skipping stones for her, plink, plink, plink , across the skin of the sea. Her mother seems to like the way the ripples look, dispersing back to glass.
Or perhaps it is the sea itself she likes. At her temple a starburst of white gleams like bone, the scar from the time her father hit her with the hilt of a sword. Her toes poke up from the sand where she has buried them, and Blake is careful not to disturb them as she searches for rocks. She chooses one and flings it out, glad to be good at this. It is the only memory Blake has of her mother and so golden that she is almost sure she has made it up. After all, it was unlikely for her father to have allowed them to be alone together, his simple wife and simpler daughter. And where are they? Blake does not recognize the beach, the view of coastline. So much has passed since then.