Daughter of Necessity by Marie Brennan Page A

will not leave. For has she not made a promise to him, in the absence of her husband, whom all presume dead?
    Too late, she will see that it has gone too far. He has coaxed from her words she never meant to speak, implications she cannot disavow. To do so would bring war, and the destruction she sought to avoid. She will have no choice but to acquiesce, for the sake of her people, for the sake of her son.
    She will fail, and pay the price of that failure until the end of her days.
    *   *   *
    This time she is shaking with rage. To be so manipulated, so trapped … she would die before she allowed that to happen.
    Or would she? After all, the future now hanging on the loom is her own creation. However undesirable, it is possible . She could not have woven it, were it not so.
    Her maid waits at her shoulder. They have long since begun to tell tales, she knows, her maidservants whispering of their mistress’ odd behavior. They think it only a tactic for delay, an excuse for avoiding the men. That, they whisper, is why she undoes her work each night, reclaiming her spent thread, only to start anew in the morning.
    As reasons go, it is a good one. They need not know the rest of her purpose. If any hint of that reached the men, all hope of her freedom would be gone.
    Night after night, fate after fate. She can only keep trying. Surely somewhere, in all the myriad crossings of the threads, there is a future in which all will be well.
    *   *   *
    Her son will ask again for stories of his father, and she will tell him what she knows. That the king was summoned to war, and he went; that many who sailed to the east never returned.
    This time, Telemachos will not be content with the familiar tale. He will insist on hearing more. When she cannot satisfy him, he will declare his intent to go in search of the truth.
    It will wrench her heart to let him go. The seas took one man from her already; will they take this one as well, this youth she remembers as a babe at her breast? But release him she will, because perhaps he will find what she cannot: an escape from this trap, for himself, for her, for them all.
    He will board the ship and go to Pylos, to Sparta, and in the halls of a king he will indeed hear the tale. Full of joy, he will set sail for home—but on the beaches of Ithaka, he will find a different welcome.
    Antinoös, Ktesippos, Elatos, and others besides. Armed and armored, prepared not for war, but for murder. There on the beaches they will cut her son down, and his blood will flower like anemone in the sand.
    When the news reaches her, it will break her heart. She will fling herself from the walls of Ithaka, and her sole victory will be that none among her suitors will ever claim her.
    *   *   *
    She wants to weep, seeing what she has woven. The threads fight her, their orderly arrangement belying their potential for chaos. Each thread is a life, and each life is a thousand thousand choices; she is not goddess enough to control them. Only a woman, a mortal woman, with a trace of the divine in her veins. And a trace is not enough.
    It has become far too familiar, this unweaving. Forward and back make little difference to the speed and surety of her hands. Melantho gathers up the loose thread silently, winds it back onto the shuttle, but her mistress does not miss the sullen look in the girl’s eyes. This is one who has made her life pleasant by giving herself to the men. She does not like being a maidservant, even to a queen.
    A queen who can trace her ancestry back through her grandmother’s grandmother to the three daughters of Necessity. From them she inherits this fragment of their gift, to spin thread and link it to men, to weave the shape of their fates on her loom. If she continues her efforts …
    But she has no chance to try again. When she goes to that high chamber the next morning, Leodes is there, and the frame is bare of threads. He