Apollo's Priestess Read online

  Well, what good would love do her now?

  Another scream tore from her throat when the front door splintered. Lor raced for the statue of her beloved god. Perhaps her love for him was the only weapon she needed. Kneeling at his feet, she placed a hand on his thigh and begged, pleaded, for help, be it from him or in the form of another. Surely the villagers had heard the commotion; why had none come to her aid?

  With one great deafening crack, the invaders forced the door open, breaking all the locks. Lor sobbed and gripped Apollo tighter, hating that she had let these vile men into her sacred space.

  “Please,” she whispered, her breath catching, tears spilling down her cheeks. “Please forgive me. Please help me—”

  She shrieked when a burly arm snaked around her waist and hauled her up.

  “Look at what we have here,” the man sneered, spinning around, as if to show her off while she struggled in his grasp.

  “What a pretty priestess!”

  “Any gold?”

  “Just some fucking flowers.”

  “They’re laurels,” she cried, hoping she sounded fierce like the Amazonian warriors of old—and knowing she’d failed. “They’re laurels for Apollo! Don’t touch them!”

  The men laughed as they flooded into the temple, rifling through her sacks of grain, her handwoven blankets, and her father’s collection of precious stones, which she kept in a basket at Apollo’s feet. One man slid his hand along her bare legs, and she kicked out, her face hot and wet with tears. More laughter, and they switched to a language she couldn’t understand, the noise around her mounting and swelling until Lor couldn’t even hear herself think.

  Finally, the man holding her so harshly that she struggled for breath, his arm around her middle like a rabbit snare, carried her toward the door. The indignant heat under her skin intensified when he slipped his hand beneath her shift, feeling her as no man ought to—for she had dedicated herself to Apollo.

  Lor wriggled in his arms, twisting and contorting herself so that she could see over the beast’s shoulder, her eyes searching out the now lifeless bronze ones of her beloved god.

  “Apollo!” she screamed, an arm outstretched toward him. “Apollo, please!”

  Her cries were met with rough hands and breath that reeked of ale. Her captor tossed her onto the grass and was on her before she could scramble away, his weight knocking the wind out of her. Lor kicked, scratched, bit—but he was twice her size.

  After what felt like an eternity of struggle, he rolled her onto her belly and hiked up her shift dress. The warm night wind tickled her exposed thighs, and Lor’s fingers dug into the grassy earth as he pressed down on top of her. Behind them, flames licked their way across what was once her front door. Beyond, the sheep screamed and the men laughed. Wolves howled somewhere far away. The man on top of her, inside of her, grunted. Her temple crumbled. Lor wept.

  And Apollo said nothing.

  Two Years Later

  “Unless I’m mistaken,” Apollo said with a cool chuckle, “and I seldom am, I believe Father told you to set your ridiculous quest aside and stay put.”

  Grey eyes darted toward him from the end of the stable, the goddess they belonged to seeming surprised that she had been caught. “Brother.”

  “Sister,” he crooned, leaning against one of the thick wooden dividers between the horse stalls, his arms crossed. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  “Mind your own business,” Athena told him curtly, then slipped into the stall housing her steed. Apollo sighed, glancing up and down the stable corridor. Not a slave in sight. She really did intend to slip away in the dead of night, disobeying their father’s direct orders to stay within the empire. Apollo’s spies had been correct. The thought made him grin; there was nothing like watching the favourite child sink to the level of the rest.

  At the sound of her horse whinnying softly, he strolled forth, not stopping until he reached the hip-high door of the stall. Enbarr, a steed only the gods themselves could handle, snorted at him, his greeting about as warm as Athena’s.

  “Whatever will the mighty Zeus say when he learns his favourite has disobeyed him?”

  “Apollo, unless you intend to help, you may go,” Athena said from behind the enormous snow-white horse. Moments later, a thick saddle fell upon the horse’s back, and he watched the raven-haired goddess of wisdom, a hood drawn over her delicate features, strap everything in place. Enbarr huffed again, shifting his weight from foot to foot, then turned his head slightly and stared Apollo down. An unnerving glimmer of intelligence flickered in those dark eyes, and he shot the beast a scowl before moving out of his line of sight.

  “Well, I don’t intend to hinder, if that’s what you’re concerned about,” he told her, drumming his fingers on the wooden gate for a moment before studying the baggage she no doubt planned to lash to the horse next. His sister shot him a skeptical look, then returned to her work in silence.

  Honestly, ever since she had returned from Dagda’s court in the western isles, she really had been the most insufferable bore.

  Well, more so than usual, anyway.

  “Athena, I cannot understand why you insist on seeing this through,” Apollo said, his golden brow wrinkled for a moment before he busied himself picking a few flecks of dirt out from under his nails. “Honestly. A single house betrayed us. Ares is dealing with them,” he rolled his eyes, “in the only way he knows how. I see no evidence of this Cult of One sweeping through the empire—”

  “Then perhaps you’ve been toddling along through the years with your eyes closed,” she snapped, roughly adjusting the fur padding above and below the wooden saddle before fixing him with a glare. Apollo arched an eyebrow; that icy stare might have made mortals quiver, but it was wasted on him.

  “Do you feel your power weakening?” He waited, knowing the answer whether she dared admit it or not. No. None of them felt any weaker—and that would be the first sign that their humans had forsaken them.

  Gods thrived through the centuries on the worship of their humans. They were hailed as immortal beings, yet their immortality was dependent on the mortals who loved them. Apollo had seen many a house rise and fall, turn to dust, through the ages. His father’s pantheon was the strongest in the world. His sister’s obsession with their decline was not only tiresome, but troublesome too. By alerting other godly families to some absurd “threat,” Athena was exposing them all to outside attacks. Bids for power.

  She had gotten a taste of that firsthand when Dagda and Morrigan, sensing a weakness in Zeus’s house, turned on her and butchered her traveling party—his youngest, sweetest sister Hebe among the dead. And now she wanted to drag more of their family into the fray? Go north? Their father wouldn’t allow it, and Apollo couldn’t understand it.

  “I have walked our empire many times over,” Athena told him, the anger leeching out of her tone as she hastened her packing. “The love of the people is shifting. We should respond before the threat becomes dire, not after. Not when it’s too late to stop it.”

  “And you think that by telling the other houses that we cannot control our own worshippers, everyone will set aside centuries of tension and bickering, join hands, and sit on your silly little council?” Apollo had thought it absurd when the idea was first presented to him, and his opinion hadn’t changed any in the days that followed. The fact that she had lost him a sibling in all this foolishness had only weakened his belief in her cause—and, to some extent, in her.

  Less than a month after her return from the emerald isles and the Otherworld, Athena was ready to do it all over again in the north with the Aesir king Odin and his ilk—a tribe of warmongers. Ha. Had Morrigan replaced Athena’s tactician mind with that of a simpleton?

  “I think that those who can see the merit in preventing the annihilation of all our kind will lend their support,” Athena said dryly. She pinned him with a look that blurred the lines between incredulous and uppity, and Apollo made sure she saw every bit of his theatrical eye roll.

  “Your dramatics are unnecessary, sister.”

  “Perhaps.” She took a step back from her steed, hands on her narrow hips, and quickly assessed the stall. When it was clear that she had strapped every bag in sight to Enbarr, she gracefully climbed up and settled on the horse’s back. Reins in hand, she nodded to the stall door, which Apollo opened with a sigh. When she and the great flying steed had sauntered by, he closed the door and faced her with his arms crossed.

  “Perhaps?”

  “And perhaps not,” she countered, hands resting on her lap. “Apollo, if I’m wrong, then what are the consequences? The other houses aren’t strong enough to defeat us, even if they think we’ve grown weak, nor would they be able to unite without my guidance. I count Odin as one of my oldest friends, and there are many others who would give their lives for me. We have allies, despite what you all believe.”

  “We have more enemies who want to tear us apart,” he said with a scoff. “Surely you can’t—”

  “But if my suspicions are correct,” she pressed, the light of the nearby torches dancing across the half of her face he could see, “then my council will prevent a catastrophe.”

  “Athena—”

  “The Cult of One is not a phantom threat, brother,” she told him, finally drawing her hood down and shaking her head. “It is real. Churches are cropping up across the empire. They are replacing our temples in some communities. Their people are killing ours—”

  “As ours did to them.” He’d once stood in a crowd of screaming Romans, Ares at his side in a rare moment of brotherly bonding, as they watched Christians slaughtered for crimes they may or may not have committed. The Cult of One had existed for centuries, on the fringes of Roman society. In fact, he recalled one emperor declaring the followers of the One were sordid and degraded, and taking great delight in blaming them for any problem the empire faced. Now, the tables were turning a fraction, but the worshippers of the many gods would endure; they always had.

  “It’s different now. These followers are a true threat to the established order,” Athena told him. Voices echoed outside the stables, and both gods glanced in their direction with mild interest. Only those who served Dionysus dared walk the stone pathways to the stables, which housed the beasts of many gods. Athena had taken up residence on their brother’s estate for the last month at Zeus’s request. Perhaps their father thought that stranding her far from her belongings, surrounded by orchards and grapes and debauchery, might sway her from her quest.

  A foolish notion, if it were true. Athena was nothing if not childishly stubborn and steadfast to her beliefs. If anything, spending all this time around their drunken brother and his rambunctious orgies had made her more determined to see her mission through, not less.

  Just as he’d suspected, two of Dionysus’s human slaves in lilac chitons stumbled in, faces red and eyes wild. When they caught sight of the gods at the end of the corridor, they swiftly disappeared out into the night, their voices fading fast in the vast expanse of the wine god’s domain.

  Softly, Apollo sighed again. “Athena—”

  “We’ve taken them for granted,” she said briskly, “our humans. When have you last dragged yourself from your own affairs and walked among them?”

  Apollo scowled at the implication—and the truth behind it.

  “When did you last give something, rather than take from them?” she continued when their gazes met, hers awhirl with storm clouds and murky horizons. Grey-eyed Athena, daughter of Zeus and intolerable know-it-all.

  And a sister who knew him better than he cared to admit.

  “I cannot say,” he admitted. Apollo had too much respect for her gifts to outright lie to her. What had kept him so preoccupied as of late that he had forsaken his godly duties? Had the sheer size of his father’s kingdom made Apollo complacent? The Romans were so proficient, so competent. For centuries, Apollo had left them to their own devices, confident in their ability to rule themselves after he and his family had steered them in the right direction. Had the Romans and their vast empire, their hierarchies of law and civility, made him lazy?

  The Greeks had once controlled most of the known world too, and yet he had been so active in their everyday lives—managing every little detail, seeing to every little thing, to the point where it had become dreadfully tedious.

  A bit boring, too.

  Perhaps that was his answer.

  Athena nodded, lifting her stormy gaze away from him, and he wondered just how far those eyes could truly see. Worlds beyond this, it was rumored. He studied her for a moment and thought it strange to find her without her little owl companion. Of all the lives taken in Tír na nÓg, he suspected that Nocta’s death had struck his dreary sister the hardest.

  “We’ve all failed,” she admitted. “Myself included. I hope to right that wrong before we are naught but dust in the wind. Before they forget us entirely.”

  “This paranoia of yours—”

  “When have you ever known me to be paranoid?” she asked curtly, some of the bite easing out of her glare when he floundered for an answer.

  “Well…” Apollo shook his head. “You certainly overthink everything. It’s very trying, even when I’m in a good mood.”

  They stared at one another for a long moment, two siblings hiding away in their brother’s stables, surrounded by darkness, the laughter of drunken maenads carrying on the wind. Then, they smiled. Shifting herself about, Athena leaned down and grabbed the front of Apollo’s tunic, then dragged him closer. He closed his eyes when she planted a chaste kiss on his cheek. As he heard her withdraw, he cracked one eye, then the other, wishing she wasn’t so stubborn.

  “You aren’t going up there alone, are you?” he asked. While he had heard stories of the world tree—Yggdrasil to the northerners, a grand supernatural tree along whose branches all the realms of the universe sat—none of them were good. Apollo dealt primarily with the creatures of this realm, yet there were tales of travelers taken by those of the next along the pathways surrounding the trunk of the tree. Frost giants. Flesh-hungry trolls. Snakes and worms and wolves as large as mountains. Even for a god, the journey seemed daunting.

  “My traveling companions will meet me at the foot of the world tree,” Athena told him as she adjusted her cloak, pulling the cowl up to cover most of her face. Apollo’s eyes swept along Enbarr, who was overladen with furs and bags; those furs would come in handy in the great frigid north. Even Asgard was said to be tolerable only to those thick-skulled northerners.

  “Not taking any of our siblings along this time, are you?” He cocked his head to the side, trying to bury the unspoken accusation. “I don’t know if Father could stand to lose another child.”

  “Father loses children all the time.”

  “Demigods,” he argued, a slight tremor in his voice. “Half-breeds. Not true gods. Hebe was immortal.”

  She looked down enough for him to catch the furrow of her brow, the downturn of her thin lips, but within moments all that fear and doubt vanished. Athena straightened, her head held high and her shoulders back—as was her way.

  “I’ve kept my traveling party a secret thus far,” she said. “I don’t intend to break that vow of silence now.”

  “Not even for me?” He fluttered his golden lashes up at her as a brilliant smile spread across his lips. That smile could make men grovel and women beg for him. Athena merely stared down, her shadowed expression unflinching.

  “Farewell, brother.”

  “Be safe, sister.” He stepped back when she gave her steed a gentle nudge with her heels, spurring the blessed creature to walk. Apollo followed at a cautious distance, unable to shake the tightness in his chest. “Come back alive.”

  Her laughter, the first pleasant sound he’d heard since they started speaking, washed over him like a wave lapping at the shoreline.

  “Have faith in me, Apollo.”

  “I always do.” When she glanced back, nearing the doorway, he shrugged. “Most of the time, anyway.”

  When it came to her own survival, he had complete faith. This mission of hers, however… Well, he hadn’t much confidence in that. Swallowing hard, Apollo rushed after her, the beat of Enbarr’s hooves falling like thunder. When he threw himself through the doorway into the courtyard beyond, he had to look up to find her, her flying beast whisking her away on the northeast wind. Apollo watched until she disappeared, vanishing into the nightly realm of the titan Nyx and his own dear sister Artemis. He stared up at the stars, at the black sky, his features shifting into a frown as Athena’s words echoed in the chambers of his mind.

  She was usually right about everything. It was why Apollo never invited her to gatherings where the primary goal was fun. But as dismal and bleak as Athena could be, her mind had saved this family time and time again. She didn’t rival Ares as a war tactician for nothing, nor had she earned her title of the patron goddess of influential Athens by chance. Zeus took counsel from none of his children save for Athena. Her opinion, her theory, shouldn’t be cast aside so lightly.

  “Perhaps,” he murmured, “it is time I walk among the people again…”

  If only to prove Athena’s fears baseless. Apollo grinned, strolling toward the nearby orchard, whistling a tune his mother used to sing. He would walk among the people, across the whole empire if need be, and listen. Learn. Absorb. And what a glorious day that would be: the day mighty grey-eyed Athena was finally proven wrong.

  A Little Bird Flew

  The sight of a new village through the trees made Lor’s stomach turn. As the whole company marched in its direction, she could only assume this was where they would settle for however long her master desired. Cassius had been known to spend months at a single village, frittering away his riches on ale and women and trade goods—or no more than half a day, should nothing pique his immediate, somewhat fickle interest. With his immense wealth of coin and trade goods to spare, most villages wanted him to remain for as long as they could possibly have him. His men preferred staying put to the difficulties of the road: food, drink, and women were a guarantee in most villages they frequented, whereas all three were scarce in the wild—which forced them to look to seek company among those in their traveling party.