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All roads led, eventually, to Hadestown. It was the end of the line, the point where light stopped and echoes faded. So it followed that if all roads led to Hadestown, then all roads, eventually, led out of it too. If you followed them long enough, and watched your step.
Well, they would find out. One way or another.
Hades paced the length of his office, polished shoes clicking against the polished cobalt floor. Persephone had teased him for this office since the first time she saw it. Black floor, black walls, a ceiling varnished and painted to look like the night sky through an industrial haze.
“No wonder you need a wife,” she’d said, running one finger across the desk. “This is hideous.”
“It’s modern,” he’d said.
He could still see the way she’d held up her finger, brown skin blackened with coal dust until he could see each whorl of her fingerprint.
“You have so many souls,” she’d teased, “ask one of them to clean. Open a window.”
“A window on what?” he’d asked, and she’d laughed and kissed him until his own lips tasted of summertime.
When she came back that fall, she’d brought the very last of August’s flowers. In a vase of water, they’d lived all winter on his desk. They wilted the first day of spring. The first day she left. Though that had been years ago, he could still see them there, curled scarlet petals smeared with dust across the tabletop. Dead, those too, the moment she turned her back.
No.
He slammed his fist against the wall, harder than he meant to, and cursed the ache in his knuckles.
He would not think about that. This wasn’t what was important now.
On the desk, the basin of water rippled from the force of his fist. He looked down, narrowing his attention only to the basin, the image trembling within it. The ripple sent lines across the face of the boy, distorting his handsome brow with worry. Even after the ripples passed, the lines did not fully disappear.
Good. Let him worry.
Hades had locked the office door, but when he looked up from the basin, they were there waiting for him. The three women swathed in silver, voices that had never been kept at bay by a locked door.
“They’re on their way?” he said.
The women nodded, all three of them in perfect unison.
“On the road you chose,” said one.
“Him in front, her behind,” said another.
“The winds are changing already,” finished the third.
Hades would have lashed out at them, if his hands had ever been able to touch them. The damn winds. The winds were Persephone, always had been. She was pulling away again. What more did she want from him? He’d let the boy try. The boy had the same chance that Hades had.
Better, even. Orpheus only had to succeed once.
“Leave me,” Hades snapped.
The three women looked at one another, and it seemed to Hades that they shared one smirk across three faces. Of course. Even he, even the king of the underworld, he couldn’t tell these women what to do. They followed their own whims, always had.
“Leave me,” he said, loud enough that the water in the basin rippled with it.
The three women’s smirks broadened, and then they were gone, and the room was empty again. He was under no delusions that they’d left because he’d wished it. They left because it was time to go, nothing more than that.
Hades slumped down into the chair and took his head in his hands. Damn them. Damn them, and damn the girl for coming here, and the boy for following. And damn his wife for—
He swore and dragged the basin forward, peering at the image of the boy picking his way through the dark. That fear in his eyes. Hades knew that fear. The fear of not knowing what was behind you in the dark.
Or worse, what wasn’t.
That first time Persephone had packed for her six months on top, she’d let Hades into her private rooms. He’d sat on the floor with his forearms on his knees, watching as she pawed through her closet and stuffed shawls, skirts, a coronet of daisies into her bag made of woven heather. Hades wanted to warn her that the delicate blooms wouldn’t survive such rough treatment, but even the thought felt out of place in the cogs and gears of his mind. He couldn’t imagine how ridiculous it would sound in his mouth, and so he said nothing.
A litter of belongings surrounded Persephone. Every time she decided against packing something, she simply threw it over her shoulder and let it land where it pleased. The room looked like a meadow of wildflowers, more color in one room than anywhere else in the underworld. His pinstriped suit, though flawlessly tailored, felt unbearably plain beside her.
He cleared his throat, watching a red scarf float from her hand to the floor. “Bring that one,” he said, his voice more gravel than words.
Persephone turned and smiled at him. Her eyes crinkled when she smiled, which made the freckles across her temples dance. “It’s more of a winter color than a spring one, love,” she said.
“I like that one,” he said. “I like to think about you wearing it.”
It wasn’t true—he liked her equally in everything she wore, even when it was nothing—but it still made her smile soften. She’d liked his lies back then, knowing that he’d created them just for her.
She crossed the room and sat beside him, her body curled perfectly against his side. He closed his eyes and tried to commit her scent to memory, honeysuckle and cotton and the fertile stamens of goldenrods baking their pollen in the sun.
“I can stay another day,” she murmured, and ran her fingers through his hair until he almost let out a purr of pleasure. “What’s a day more of winter?”
He hummed into her touch, then shook his head, though he did not push her away. “No,” he said. “We made an arrangement.”
“A promise,” she agreed.
“Yes,” he said, and her lips laid the softest of kisses at the edge of his collar. “And promises have to be kept.”
“Be careful,” she whispered, “or they’ll think the King of the Mine is a hopeless romantic.”
And he’d laughed and pulled her to him, and they’d made love right there on the floor, surrounded by an endless field of brightly colored fabric.
When he woke the next morning, a blanket had been laid over him, the mess had been cleared, the bag was gone, and so was Persephone.
He opened her closet and saw the red silk scarf she’d left behind, messily folded and shoved into a corner.
Hades had pushed the scarf to the back of the closet, and they had never spoken of it again.
The boy, Orpheus, had begun to sing into the darkness. Hades couldn’t hear the tune through the liquid mirror, but he could see, and he knew when the boy had turned to the music as a last resort.
Hades shook his head, trying to mask his discomfort with disdain. Let Orpheus find out how loud your voice would echo in the darkness. Let him think about those echoes, and wonder if anyone would ever wait long enough to hear the reverberation.
Orpheus thought he was special. He thought he was different. But through the watery mirror Hades could see the truth dawning on the boy, the same realization Hades himself had felt during that first long summer, the heat that stretched through to October, those early creepings of spring at the end of February, when the wind began to change on its own.
The realization that you were not special.
That you could trust her all you liked, claim you trusted her to return to you no matter what, but in the pit of your heart you would always know she was waiting until your back was turned. Searching for some way to escape.
Persephone was only just outside. On the factory floor, that iron flask he’d had the workers make for her never far from her lips. He could call her in. Open the door and call to her, and she’d come, and perhaps if two people were watching, this boy Orpheus would find something more like strength in the music.
After all, Hades had forged the song, but Persephone’s light had let it grow.
In his head, Hades stood up. In his head, he opened the door. He called out to her, and she came, because she was only on the other side of the door, right there within his grasp, and she’d promised she would always come back when he asked.
Hades did not move. The door remained closed.
He sat as still as the stones around him and looked into the mirror at Orpheus. The boy’s features were beginning to change. Not so shadowed, clearer around the eyes, his chin rising higher. Toward the light. They were close.
So very close.
Hades was no longer breathing.
The challenge he’d set was not impossible. It couldn’t be impossible.
He had to believe it was possible for the boy to succeed.
He leaned forward and gripped the sides of the basin with hands that—despite himself—were trembling.
Another step forward.
Toward the light.
If the girl had followed, and the boy had believed she would, then it was possible.
If it could be done once, it could be done again.
If it could be done, then they could try again.
The brilliant glow of sunlight spilled across Orpheus’s face, like a fledgling bird bursting through a fragile shell.
Hades felt the corner of his mouth twitch toward an unfamiliar smile.
And then Orpheus turned.
After the first time, they’d lain naked and sun-kissed and languid in the field. He felt the petals of wildflowers crumpled beneath the bones of his shoulders, the muscles of his back.
“I love you,” Persephone whispered into his ear.
He propped himself up on one elbow and turned to look at her. “You barely know me,” he said, because it was true.
“I know you enough,” she said, and her kiss tasted like honey, like warm rain, like birdsong.
Even then, he hadn’t quite believed her. He’d seen his own hands against her hip, the coal dust he’d never be able to fully clean out from his manicured nails. The calluses against his palms, where the roughest thing she’d ever held was a rose studded with thorns.
(You, his mind had reminded him, she’s held you now, and it’s only a matter of time before that smooth skin begins to roughen, those beautiful hands begin to blacken with the dust and ash of you, but in those days, he had been better at silencing the thoughts before they grew too loud, and in the foolishness of that moment he had dismissed the fear as passing foolishness, something that would disappear once he knew better.)
“What if you find out something more?” he asked. “Something you don’t know now. Something you don’t like.”
And she’d plucked a single wildflower from the meadow and tucked it behind his ear, where it fit as though it had always belonged there, and he didn’t feel foolish even for a moment.
“What if you find something unbearable about me?” she asked.
“Impossible,” he said, because it was true.
“Well, then,” she said, and her kiss pressed him back onto the flowers, and every petal that crushed beneath him seemed to release the sweetest perfume.
“Trust me,” she whispered.
“I do,” he said. It was the first lie he ever told her.
Hades watched as Orpheus reached out, his hand retreating from the sunlight back into the shadows. But there would not be another hand to take it. Orpheus hadn’t created the song, but he’d begun singing it, and now he would have to continue
The challenge had been a simple one.
It would have been pleasant, to believe that it hadn’t been impossible.
But some songs always went the way you expected them to.
Sometimes, you already knew the end.
Hades cleared his throat once, then again. The echo of it chimed hard against the stone walls of his office, like a pick swung in the depths of a mine. Then he stood, and straightened his jacket, and checked the knot of his tie.
The image in the basin was gone, and he looked down into the cool, clear water to see his own face reflected back at him. He brushed his hair to the side, then straightened his posture and walked out of the office, down the stairs, to the factory floor.
In a few moments, he knew, he would hear a thin whistle in the distance, and a railroad car would claw its way back into the darkness. Bringing one woman to him, and taking one woman away. And neither of them would ever look back.