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The first time Persephone sees her, Artemis has a hand curled around her shoulder in a way that exposes the tunic-covered curve of her breast in a shockingly lovely way, and it takes Persephone a moment to realise that she's reaching back for an arrow.
Behind her, the deer, startled by her sudden presence, leaps off into the thicket, splashes through a puddle, startles birds. Escapes death.
Artemis' hand lowers slowly. The hard line of her body seems to uncoil.
Persephone can't help it that the colours of the world make her eyes ache, and that she feels bewildered by the fact that she can see that Artemis' eyes are blue. Her vision is still streaked with the black of the dead.
“That was the first deer of the season,” Artemis calls across to her, her voice unfathomable. “But then I guess you'd know that.” There is something hard in the words. She turns around and walks away with the light feet of spring.
Persephone sees the muscles of her back, and feels strangely upset by them. When she looks up, the first buds of soft-green spring leaf fleck across her vision like they dot the trees. The sky is a careful sort of blue. Waiting.
-
Her mother says, like only a mother can: “Don't go out tonight. I only just got you back.”
Demeter likes to brush Persephone's hair in the evenings, and Persephone thinks about age and adulthood in a way that she never did, before. Hades understands, in a way. Regression, he calls it, and he bites down on the word and holds her hand between his fingers, traces prudently the path of her bewildering blood in her wrists. If he could, he'd never let her go, she knows.
It doesn't feel like regression when she sits with her mother and feels like a daughter again. It feels like rebirth.
Hades' understanding doesn't survive the long and arduous way back up, Persephone finds, and at night, when she braids and re-braids strands of her hair, that scares her.
-
After a few days, Persephone can no longer resist the call of the woods. Demeter lets her go – she insists on a few days of something that feels like quarantine, when she lets Persephone sit in the doorway and soak up the soft first light of spring without letting her go outside, but after that she concedes. This is Demeter's area of understanding, after all.
Persephone touches the bark of the awakening trees on those first nights. They're still mostly bare, but she can feel something speeding up beneath her fingers. The first flowers look feeble but are frost-resistant, and when she touches their small, white heads, closed and bowed against the treachery of early spring, there is the sound of tinkling. Not for the first time, she wonders about winter, and has trouble remembering Hades' face.
-
“Well,” Artemis says as a greeting, and straightens from her reclined position on a sun-spattered moss-covered rock. She's alone; fleetingly Persephone wonders about handmaidens.
“Yes,” she replies, unable to dig up from her childhood and training the proper way to adress a high goddess of Olympos. Artemis seems to like it, and smiles a smile that reminds Persephone of the white frost-flowers (beautiful, strong, a little sharp).
“Everyone's talking about you these days, you know,” Artemis says. She's leaning back on her elbows, and when she casts her eyes up to the canopy the long line of her neck is exposed, still pale from the earliness of the season. Persephone feels warmer than she has for – for a long time, though she'd be hard pressed to say how long, just from looking at the way Artemis' throat moves with every swallow of air, and the way her loose hair, the colour of – of ripe grain in deep summer (as the memory returns to Persephone in bursts of colour), brushes over her arms.
“Are they?” she asks, and feels a pleasant thrill at her own voice. It sounds different in the ceilingless woods, like there is more of her voice. Down below she progressively descends into whispering as the days wear on and she loses track of the concept of days.
“Of course they are,” Artemis says, then seems unwilling to say more. A long moment passes. A solitary finch trills a few anticipatory notes.
“Can I sit here?” Persephone asks on an impulse, because very suddenly, she doesn't want to share the woods with only creatures without language. And at home Demeter is still afraid to sing to her, as if she'll shatter at the sound.
Artemis studies her. “Yes,” she says then, as though having found something that satisfies in Persephone's face.
Persephone perches next to her, stiff and unsure. Artemis relaxes back into her reclined pose, and puts her arms above her head. The swell of her breasts against the light fabric of her tunic makes Persephone's heart race, and it's an old, forgotten feeling that rushes back like a warm wave.
“I, for one, am glad you're back,” Artemis says, eyes closed, face sun-dappled, and Persephone isn't sure who she's talking to.
-
“What's it like?” Persephone asks, when they crouch over the first lily-of-the-valley together, and Artemis doesn't pull back when their thighs touch.
“Winter?”
“Yes.”
Artemis very gently touches one of the flower heads with her fingertip. It opens further under the ministrations, and Persephone remembers with a sudden rush of exciting shame in whose company she is. “Cold,” she says. “Like forgetting.”
Persephone thinks she understands, and looks at Artemis in a way that she doesn't know how to stop, not even when Artemis looks back, eyes a careful blue, waiting.
-
“Where are you off to now?” Demeter complains, but she's smiling, holding her palms open so the bees can come and dance in them.
“Woods,” Persephone calls over her shoulder, and feels like a daughter, a woman, free.
-
In the mornings, the fog dissipates before Persephone has time to wash her face. Demeter is awash with energy, and brings honey from the mountain bees, fresh goat's milk, fresh fragrant thyme, ripened olives oozing oil.
At midday, the world steams and has to stop for breath. The sun is a shimmering disk of molten gold – Persephone shades her eyes often and looks up at it, tries to see it for what it is, tries to see the wings and the chariot and the glint of blue that must be there, in the flame, if he looks anything like his sister at all. Artemis catches her at it one time, and pulls her chin down, laughing.
“Apollo doesn't reveal himself that easily,” she says. Her lips are the colour of the berries they shared. “Nor do I,” she adds, as an afterthought.
Persephone feels like praying, feels like offering herself up in sacrifice for this uncovering, this blessing. So she does – the only way she can think of: pressing forward and licking the berry from Artemis' lips, and allowing her inside in a way she can't remember if she has ever let anyone before.
-
“It's a disgrace,” Artemis says, silently in the dusk. “He had no right to take you from this world. It needs you.”
“He's a god,” Persephone counters logically.
Artemis turns luminous eyes on her, blazing blue. Belatedly, Persephone remembers that Artemis is a goddess, too. “He takes life,” she says, unmoved in a way Persephone doesn't recognise.
“He... he keeps people,” Persephone tries. She knows she needs to defend him, even now, with her hand so lazy on Artemis' knee. “He guides them on their final journey.”
“He's a man,” Artemis says, with a strange kind of bitterness, as though that explains everything. Then, she puts her lips to the hollow of Persephone's collarbone, as if to silence herself. Persephone tries to think of something to say, and fails – and not only because she can't remember what the underworld looks like, except for a darkness, a cloudy absence of light and breath.
-
“Is it very different?” Artemis asks softly, and her fingers trail down over the curve of Persephone's hip, leaving something hot in their wake. Persephone knows what she means, but she can't... even if she tries... Hades wavers in her memory, his face wiped clean, his fingers cold and unmoving.
“I don't remember,” she finally admits, whispering. Artemis' hand stills, and Persephone curses herself for a moment, because there is nothing she wants apart from Artemis' hand there, and Artemis' breath on her cheek. But Artemis doesn't withdraw; she slides her palm from Persephone's hip to the lowest strip of skin on her belly and leaves it there.
“Good,” she says, satisfied and a little sad, and radiates heat from every one of the points of her fingers.
-
“I thought you never wanted anyone to do this,” Persephone murmurs, burning with something other than shame, mouthing at the skin of the inside of Artemis' knee.
“Not anyone, no,” Artemis says breathlessly, and tangles her fingers into Persephone's hair.
It feels like prayer, like worship, when Persephone kisses deeper, further, and drinks from that sweetness that is like earth, dark and nourishing.
-
The shadows lengthen quickly. The wheat is golden and fat in the field.
Demeter watches her daughter go with guarded eyes, but Persephone misses it, too busy watching the sky full of birds.
-
“I will never marry,” Artemis states later, tying her tunic with uncharacteristically angry hands. “I will never lose myself that way.”
Persephone, sated and drowsy, rests her head on her hand. “I thought you liked... isn't this...?”
Meeting Artemis' stare is harder, sometimes, than trying to pick out the shape of Apollo at noon. Persephone blinks.
“Do you – do you really think this is –” Artemis fumbles over the words, which restores a shock of consciousness to Persephone, because Artemis doesn't lose her words, ever. “This is finding myself,” Artemis says finally, and there is something so broken in the way she looks away, hunches her shoulders.
Persephone doesn't understand, traces the tenseness of Artemis' back with a finger, but feels wholly, completely unequipped to say something.
She tries, because she has noticed the way Artemis looks up at the sun these days, with wide and pained eyes, as though needing her brother to do something for her: “I won't forget you.”
Artemis turns to look at her. Everything about her is soft, but Persephone knows she is like the first flowers of spring: so brittle on the surface, so hardened underneath.
“Promise me,” she says. “Swear to your goddess.”
“I swear,” Persephone says without a trace of uncertainty, and puts her hand on Artemis' neck, where her head connects to it – that place of soft vulnerability. “I swear. I swear.”
Later, she burns thyme and pigs' bones to seal it, and watches how the smoke crowns Artemis.
-
Demeter grows old and pained each year when the leaves turn. Persephone washes her mother's feet at dusk, and looks out at the fog trying to climb the trees.
It never gets easier, her mother says, as though to herself.
-
Her mother hugs her when she gets up one day and the sky is still dark, and then Demeter leaves to do something on the fields, shoulders heavy with an unnamed weight.
Something in Persephone knows what to do.
She waits for Artemis at the cave's mouth, picks up the first leaves that fall, yellow with spots of red. The trees are still full of life.
Artemis never comes, and inching forward all the time is the darkness, the cloudy absence of light and breath, welcoming her back.
-
Hades waits for her, the long way down. Her eyes are not yet adjusted, and blurry with carry-over light and something wet. She can hardly make him out, a dark shape against a darker backdrop, reaching out for her.
“My love,” he says, voice awash with relief, and somehow, knows not to touch her, not yet.
-
The first time Persephone sees her, Artemis is sitting cross-legged on a rock, her quiver of arrows next to her. She's taken off her sandals, and her toes shine with dew from where she's walked through the grass.
Persephone can't help it that the colours of the world make her eyes ache, and that she feels bewildered by the fact that she can see that Artemis' eyes are blue. Her vision is still streaked with the black of the dead.
“You look like death,” Artemis calls across to her, her voice unfathomable. “But then I guess you'd know that.”
She turns, walks away barefoot, her sandals dangling from her fingers. The display of light muscle on her back, set tense and unreadable, upsets something in Persephone.
Artemis disappears between the still-barren trees. When she's alone, Persephone looks up on an impulse, and inexplicably feels like crying at the sight of the first buds of soft-green spring leaf, flecking across her dark-dimmed vision like they dot the trees. The sky is a careful sort of blue overhead. Waiting.