The Daughter of Zeus novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Third Dawn

The Stadion held ten thousand gods, and I wasn't afraid of any of them.

I was past that.

I had slept two hours, with my back against a cold wall and my face in my hands.

Hermes had sat beside me the whole time and hadn't made one joke.

Now the sun was coming up on the sand.

Two guards carried the pelt out between them on a pole, and my mother's song was still humming faintly in my pocket.

I walked a step behind it, with my head up.

Alekos came out last.

He kept ten feet away from me, because I'd told him to.

"Not now," I'd said, in the tunnel.

"Not a word.

Stand where I can see you."

He stood at the edge of the sand with the black ring on his wrist, and he did.

Hera rose in the royal box.

"The third dawn," she said.

"The Judgement.

Let the accused kneel and hear the sentence of the Quarry."

"No," I said.

It rang around the whole arena.

"I won't kneel.

I want to say something first."

"You are in no position to."

"Let her speak," Zeus said.

He sat in his box beside her, in his plain white wool.

His hands gripped the arms of his seat so tight that his knuckles shone.

His voice was hoarse.

Hera's mouth thinned.

"The accused may speak."

I stepped forward and put my boot on the sand.

"You wrote a law," I said, to her.

"The Law of the Sacred Quarry.

You wrote it eighteen years ago, around the time my mother vanished off a mountain in Montana.

You wrote it so that whoever killed what you put in those woods would die."

A murmur went around the Stadion.

"You put a hind in the Bitterroots.

You put a keeper over her to make sure nobody else touched her.

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