Hades' Daughter
Book One of the Troy Game
Prologue
The Island of Naxos, Eastern Mediterranean
Confused, numbed, her mind refusing to accept what Theseus demanded,
Ariadne stumbled in the sand, sinking to her knees with a sound that was
half sigh, half sob.
"It is best this way," Theseus said as he had already said a score of
times this morning, bending to offer Ariadne his arm. "It is clear to me
that you cannot continue with the fleet."
Ariadne managed to gain her feet. She placed one hand on her bulging
belly, and stared at her lover with eyes stripped of all the romantic
delusion that had consumed her for this past year. "This is your child!
How can you abandon it? And me?"
Yet even as she asked that question, Ariadne knew the answer. Beyond
Theseus lay a stretch of beach, blindingly white in the late morning sun.
Where sand met water waited a small boat and its oarsmen. Beyond that
small boat, bobbing lazily at anchor in the bay, lay Theseus' flag ship, a
great oared war vessel.
And in the prow of that ship, her vermillion robes fluttering and pressing
against her sweet, lithe b ... read full excerpt from Hades' Daughter: Book One of The Troy Game ebook
