Harvest Moon: A Tangled Web / Cast in Moonlight / Retribution

Leo picked a grape and ate it, still admiring the view. The sweet juice ran down his throat and at this moment, tasted better than wine. “I have to admit I am rather confused about that. If Godmothers are so good at keeping things from getting out of hand, why are gods so bad at it?”

“I’m not sure.” Brunnhilde paused, and put the brush down on her very shapely knee to regard him with a very serious and earnest gaze. “The ravens told me once that gods are nothing more than another kind of Fae, who get power and shape from worship and the mortals who worship them. So I suppose it’s because we are made in mortal image? Formed the way that mortals would choose to be themselves, if they had godlike powers?”

“Hmm, awkward,” Leo acknowledged. “Given that every man I know would think he was in paradise if he could carry on with women the way the gods do. And given that gods don’t seem to suffer the sorts of consequences from that sort of carrying-on the way mortals do.”

“And other things. Mortals, given the choice, would rather not think too far ahead, or even think at all. So—the gods they worship don’t, either.” Brunnhilde nodded, and took up the brush again. “Then, of course, because awful things happen, the logical question becomes Why didn’t they see this coming? and then the mortals make up all sorts of excuses for why infallible gods end up being very fallible indeed. Like Siegfried’s Doom. Then they make us live through it. Ridiculous, really. I wish that there were no such things as gods. I’d rather be a nice half-Fae Godmother, and be on the side of making The Tradition work for us, instead of on us.”

“But if you had been, I would never have met you, and that would be a tragedy.” Leo grinned at her. She twinkled back at him.

“I don’t think Wotan likes the idea of the others knowing about our true nature,” she observed. “He’d rather we all believed the creation stories, which, even before the ravens told me about being Fae, I didn’t entirely believe. My mother, Erda, told me there was no nonsense of me springing forth fully formed from Wotan’s side, or his head, or any other part of him. I was born like any of the others, I was just first.” She sighed. “Poor Mother. The shape and fate The Tradition forced her into was rather…awkward.”

“Your mother is very…practical, and she seems to have done the best she can with her situation,” Leo said, doing his best to restrain a shudder at the thought of that half woman, half hillside, who had done her awkward best to make polite talk with her new son-in-law without lapsing into fortune-telling cries of doom. “I was going to say ‘down-to-earth,’ but that is a bit redundant.”

Brunnhilde barked a laugh. “Since she is the Earth, I would say so. It’s a shame that the northlanders are so wretchedly literal minded.”

Her nephew Siegfried’s escape from his fate had seriously disturbed the northlanders’ unswerving view of The Way Things Were, and had shaken them all up a good deal. Having Brunnhilde take up with a mortal, and an outsider, had shaken them up even more.

That just might be all for the best. If it shakes them up enough to start changing how The Tradition works up there, everyone will be better off.

Once they had left Siegfried and Rosa, Queen of Eltaria and his new bride, Leo and Brunnhilde had worked their way up to the northlands to break the news of their marriage to Brunnhilde’s mother in person—in no small part because they weren’t sure Wotan had done so. It had been an interesting meeting, if a bit unnerving. He’d sensed that Erda hadn’t really known whether to manifest as a full woman and offer mead and cakes, or manifest as a hill and leave them to their own devices. She’d opted for a middle course, which made for a peculiar meeting at the least. He’d ignored the beetle and moss in his mead and brushed the leaves from his cake without a comment, and tried to act like a responsible son-in-law.

“My mother is delusional, as they all are,” Brunnhilde responded dryly. “I’d come to that conclusion once I saw what life was like outside of Vallahalia, long before you woke me up, you ravisher.”

Leo raised an eyebrow and smirked a little, since the “ravishing” had gone both ways. “You promised me you were going to explain why you seemed to know all about everything when I woke you.”

She laughed. “You see, while Father was planting me in meadows and on rocks across half a dozen Kingdoms, he forgot that I would see what was going on around me in my dreams. It’s something the Valkyria can do—we get it from Mother. She sees everything going on around her, no matter what state she’s in. I might not have been trudging through all those places afoot the way Siegfried was, but I learned a lot. Probably more than he did, because I wasn’t having to do anything but watch and learn, while he was trying to keep from starving to death or being hacked up.”

Leo blinked. He tried to imagine what that must have been like, and failed. “Well, that must have been useful.”

“Useful enough to know when you came marching across my ring of fire I had a good idea of exactly what I wanted.” She winked at him. He grinned. He hadn’t awakened her with just a kiss, and they had very nearly reignited the fire ring all by themselves.

“At any rate, unless the mortals of our land manage to actually learn to think, now that my sisters have told Wotan what he can do with his magic spear and flown off, what will probably happen is that he’ll seduce Erda all over again. She’ll have another litter of daughters, Wotan will create another swarm of Valkyrias. Then, not having learned his lesson the first time, he’ll philander with another mortal, produce another set of twins-separated-at-birth, another dwarf will steal that damned Ring from the River Maidens, and it will begin all over again.” She sighed. “Stupid Tradition.”

He echoed her sigh. Godmother Elena, Godmother Lily, Queen Rosa and King Siegfried had carefully explained The Tradition to both of them before they left Eltaria. It seemed prudent to all of them, given that Leo was a tale just waiting to happen and Brunnhilde was a goddess. It had left Brunnhilde nodding, and Leopold outraged, but with no target to be outraged with. Just some nebulous force that was going to make him dance to the tune it piped unless he learned how to avoid it or manipulate it himself.

“Well, maybe we can find it a whole new path,” he replied. “We’ve got time to think and plan. Well, you do.” He felt a moment of melancholy. That was the one fly in their soup of happiness. He was mortal. She wasn’t.

“Well—it just might be that we do,” she replied, her blue eyes going very serious indeed as her brush stopped moving. “I asked Godmother Elena’s dragons about other places with gods, and they knew all about this one, and what is more, they had some interesting things to tell me about The Traditions here. This Olympia is just stiff with ways for mortals to become immortal. That’s why I brought us here.”

He sat straight up, grapes and melancholy forgotten. He was hard put to say whether he was more shocked, delighted or terrified. Probably all three at once. “You—what?” he gasped. “You mean—”

She nodded. “We’ll have to be really careful, though. Some of the ways for mortals to become immortal are not pleasant. For instance, becoming immortal but continuing to age. Or becoming immortal as a spring or a rock. Or a constellation of stars. Not the sort of thing I want to see happen to you.”

He thought about the first, and shuddered. A bit of waterworks or a rock would be far preferable, and still not something he wanted to think about.

“So how do you go about it without nasty consequences?” he asked. “Or have you found that out yet?”

“Nothing that will work yet, but I expect to. Either we’ll find a god-tale, or we’ll go introduce ourselves to the gods here and ask. Right now, all I know are the things that come to me in my sleep—when you let me sleep—” she began with a grin.

And that was when the ground opened up behind her with an ominous rumble. It really did open up; there was a sound like thunder, the earth trembled, a crack appeared and the ground rolled back as if two giant hands had pulled it apart. Steam issued from the opening. Leo nearly jumped out of his skin, and both of them leapt to their feet, seizing the swords that were never far from their hands.

A chariot pulled by four magnificent black horses rumbled up out of the chasm; the chariot was black without a lot of ornamentation; the horses were huge things, very powerful; snorting and tossing their heads as they plunged up the slant of raw earth. The chariot was driven by a man in a long black cloak with a deep hood, who reached up with one hand and threw back the hood of his garment on seeing the two of them there. Leo hesitated; the man was unarmed, and looked absurdly young, barely more than a stripling. “Well, there you are!” the fellow said crossly as his eyes lit on Brunnhilde. “You went to the wrong meadow, just like a girl. I’ve been looking all over for you!”

“I—what?” Brunnhilde stammered, for once speechless. “I think you must have mistak—”

Too late. The man jumped from the chariot, seized Brunnhilde and tossed her into the chariot as if she weighed nothing. She shrieked with outrage and tried to scramble to her feet, but he leapt back in, grabbed her around the waist with one hand to keep her from jumping out, and wheeled the horses with the other hand. Before Leo could do more than take two steps and Brunnhilde start to fight back, the chariot plunged down into the chasm, which promptly closed up behind them, leaving Leo to claw frantically at the earth, shouting Brunnhilde’s name.

When Persephone finally had woven enough to satisfy her mother, the sun was going down and she practically flew to the meadow on the chance that Eubeleus would be there. Her mother, thank all the powers, had gone off to round up some of her foundlings and had not given Persephone any orders. Persephone didn’t wait for her to change her mind. She didn’t even stop to snatch something from the kitchen for supper, afraid that her mother would invent some reason to keep her indoors until nightfall. And by nightfall, her beloved would certainly have left the meadow.

She’d forgotten her sandals, but that hardly mattered, this was Olympia and the paths were thick with soft moss wherever her feet touched them. Neither Persephone nor Demeter would ever suffer a bruised foot within her walls. Like the magic that kept the carnivorous foundlings from snacking on the rest, Demeter’s magic kept all harm at bay.

Wonder of wonders, her love was still in the meadow, looking altogether forlorn as he perched on a rock with his hands clasped between his knees.

She whistled like a boy, and he looked up, startled, to push off the rock and race toward her. He was quite tall, but it would be difficult to tell how tall he was, since he habitually slouched, as if he carried all of the troubles Pandora had allegedly let out of the box on his own back. His hair was as black as Zeus’s but fell about his face in unconfined ringlets, since he never wore the royal diadem of the gods in her presence. People forgot that he was as much a warrior as his brother-god Zeus, but the simple, one-shouldered garment of linen he wore showed off his muscles rather nicely, she thought, especially when he was running. Of the three original male gods, he was really the cleverest, too, though she suspected if she told him so he would just mumble a little and blush.

It’s just as well he got the Underworld, I suppose. Zeus would have made a dreadful mess governing it.

Only someone who actually knew him would see the Lord of the Underworld in this sad-faced shepherd, who looked gratifyingly lovelorn, and whose face lit up in a way that was even more gratifying as she ran toward him. Oh, how she loved seeing his dark eyes shine when they met hers!

They met in an embrace that threatened to become very heated indeed.

He broke it off, not she, but kept his arms around her as he looked into her upturned face. “I was afraid you had changed your mind.”

Persephone snorted. “No, it was Mother. She decided that today I needed to weave. I’m sorry I was too late to be abducted. I hope your friend didn’t get too bored. Where is he?”

Hades frowned. “Actually, he drove off, saying he was going to look for you, but he’s never seen you, has he?”

“I don’t think so.” She shrugged. “There can’t be that many blond-haired, blue-eyed immortal maidens hanging about in meadows on the slopes of Mount Olympus. Not that there aren’t a lot of maidens, or at least young females, and if they are nymphs or dryads or sylphs, they might very well be hanging about in meadows, but there are not many blondes. Most of them are brown- or raven-haired. I hope he comes back here instead of going back to the stables. We could still go through with this if he does.”

“I suppose you are right. You generally are. But hoping that Tha—my friend does something practical is hoping for a lot. He doesn’t think much past his job, which isn’t exactly hard.” Hades’s brow creased with thought. “Is there any real need for us to go through that entire abduction business?”

She looked at him quizzically. “What do you mean? I thought it was Traditional, and it would make it harder for Mother to demand me back.” She did not mention the other part, which she was not supposed to know but had deduced.

“Well, yes, but—” Hades waved his hands helplessly. “Why not? You were ready to go, why not just come with me? We might not get another chance. Especially if Demeter finds out about me.” He looked at her with pleading eyes. “We’ve been tempting the Fates, dodging anything that could tell her. We can’t have good luck forever. And I don’t want to lose you.”

She didn’t have to think about it very long. A solid afternoon at that loom, while Demeter kept popping in “just to see how you are doing,” while that wretched little faun-baby made the most appalling sounds on his flute, was more than enough to convince her that if she didn’t get out of that house soon, she would probably be a candidate for the Maenads.

And she didn’t want to lose him. Not ever.

“It’s a wonderful idea,” she said warmly. “Let’s go.”

Obviously, Persephone had never been to Hades’s Realm before. The passage in proved to be surprisingly uncomplicated, since she was with the Ruler. The most complicated part was when Hades decided it was time to Reveal His True Self.

Hades found a cave, and led her inside, that was when he held up his hand and made a ghost-light. The little ball of light drifted just over his palm, and reflected off his face. She could tell he was working his way up to the Revelation. “Um,” he said awkwardly. “I—uh—I’m not really a shepherd…”

She stood on tiptoe and kissed the corner of his mouth. “I know you aren’t, silly. You’re Hades. And the friend who was supposed to abduct me is Thanatos.”

His jaw dropped. He stared at her for a moment.