The Daughter of Zeus novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The White Hind
Starving in the Montana mountains with her father's ashes, Indy kills a golden-antlered hind and eats it, and a champion steps out of the lightning to take her; the mark of Zeus burns across her palm.
On the seventh day without food, a white deer walked out of the fog and looked at me.
I had my father's knife in my hand before I thought about it.
I'd been following the Bitterroot ridge since the river took my pack on Tuesday.
The river had taken the tent, the stove, the rope and every bar of food I owned.
It left me one canvas jacket, one knife and a tin of my father's ashes.
Walt had asked me to scatter him where my mother disappeared.
I was twenty-four and I had never once found the place.
I stood still and watched the deer come closer.
It was the size of an elk, with a coat as white as new snow.
Its antlers were gold, and I don't mean yellow.
They shone from inside.
Nothing wild walks up to a person that way.
My stomach folded in on itself, and I could hear my own pulse.
"Please," I said, out loud, to a deer.
"Please just run."
It didn't run.
It stopped a few paces off and lowered its head.
Its eyes were grey, with a thin ring of gold around the pupil.
I knew those eyes from somewhere, and I couldn't think where.
Hunger doesn't care what you know.
My father taught me to kill clean, because he said an animal deserved that much.
I kept my left hand on its neck and the knife low and quick.
It made no sound at all.
It went down on the moss as gently as a person lying down to sleep.
I sat in the wet leaves with gold running over my hands, and I cried.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"I'm so sorry."
Then I skinned it, because I was a packer for the Forest Service and I knew how.
I built the fire with the last of my matches.
I ate the first strip of meat before it was fully cooked.
It tasted like honey, and like rain on warm stone, and like my mother's kitchen.
I stopped chewing.
That was impossible, and I knew it.
My mother had been gone eighteen years, and I barely remembered her kitchen.
My eyes stung again, and this time I didn't know why.
I ate until the shaking stopped.
Warmth went through my arms and legs for the first time all week.
It rose into my chest.
Then the sky cracked open.
There wasn't a cloud over the ridge, only fog in the valleys.
A bolt of lightning came straight down out of the clear blue and hit the clearing thirty feet away.
I fell backwards over the log.
My ears rang, and the whole meadow smelled like burned metal.
A man was standing where the bolt had landed.
He was enormous, well over six feet, with a shaved head and a black beard going grey at the chin.
His arms were crossed with old scars, and he wore a dark wool tunic.
An iron sword hung at his hip.
His eyes were amber, and they went straight to the pelt on the ground.
"You've shed the blood of the Sacred Quarry," he said.
He spoke quietly and he sounded tired.
"It was a deer," I said.
"It was not."
"I was starving."
"I know," he said.
"I'm sorry for it."
I got to my feet with the knife still in my fist.
My legs shook, but I held it up between us.
"Walk away," I said.
"I'm not kidding."
"I can't."
"Then I'll make you."
He didn't move, so I lunged.
The blade went across his forearm and opened it to the bone.
I expected red.
What came out was gold, bright and thin, running down his wrist and dripping onto the grass.
I stood there with my mouth open.
"That will heal," he said.
He didn't even look down at it.
"Yours will hurt more."
"My what?"
Then my right palm caught fire.
I screamed and dropped the knife.
A line of white light opened across my hand, branching and forking, and it scorched itself into my skin.
When the pain finally died, a mark was left behind.
It was a pale scar shaped like a bolt of lightning.
The man's face changed.
He had been tired and polite, and now he looked like someone had hit him.
He looked from my hand to my face, slowly.
Then he went down on one knee in the grass.
Not to me.
He bowed his head to the mark.
"Then you are his," he said.
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