More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
What I did not know was that I had hit upon a truth of womanhood: however blameless a life we led, the passions and the greed of men could bring us to ruin, and there was nothing we could do.
No longer was my world one of brave heroes; I was learning all too swiftly the women’s pain that throbbed unspoken through the tales of their feats.
I would be Medusa, if it came to it, I resolved. If the gods held me accountable one day for the sins of someone else, if they came for me to punish a man’s actions, I would not hide away like Pasiphae. I would wear that coronet of snakes, and the world would shrink from me instead.
Asterion. A distant light in an infinity of darkness. A raging fire if you came too close. A guide that would lead my family on the path to immortality. A divine vengeance upon us all. I did not know then what he would become. But my mother held him and nursed him and named him, and he knew us both. He was not yet the Minotaur. He was just a baby. He was my brother.
In the flurry of moments that followed, someone handed him to me, and I held him, small and damp and outraged in my arms. I did not have the words for this feeling.
The baby’s perfect, tiny fingernails gleamed like miniature shells in the first rays of the morning light as he clutched his little fist around my finger.
No comet blazed across the horizon proclaiming the birth of Dionysus’ son. No earthquakes shook the ground or thunderbolts rattled the heavens. My son was not born to tear down mountains or battle giants. I never had to look on his small, sleeping face and see a mighty destiny looming in his tiny, furrowed brow while he slept, milk-drunk and dazed, against my skin. When his body startled awake, limbs flung out like a starfish in his surprise to be out of the close cradle of the womb, I never saw the shadows of a great future gather around to enfold him in their heavy darkness. His infant fists
...more
