Excerpt from Ariadne by Jennifer Saint, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I would shudder at her description of the legendary beast, squeezing my eyes shut as I saw it rise in front of me, unimaginably hideous and cruel.

"Orion was not afraid," Pasiphae continued. "Or he would not show fear. Either way, he was no match, and Artemis did not intervene to pluck him from the mighty scorpion's clutches.…" Here she would pause, her silence painting a more vivid picture of Orion's pitiful struggles than her words ever could. She picked up the tale after a moment in which I saw the life squeezed from him, his human weakness exposed at last as he submitted, exhausted from trying to keep up with the gods for so long in his mortal frame. "And Artemis grieved her companion, so she gathered up the remnants of his body, which were strewn across Crete, and she placed them in the sky, where they would burn in the darkness and she could look upon him each night as she set out with her silver bow, alone, her supremacy and her virtue both unchallenged."

There were many such stories. It seemed the night skies were littered with mortals who had encountered the gods and now stood as blazing examples to the world below of what the immortals could do. Back then, my mother would fling herself into these stories as she would her dancing, with wild abandon, before she knew her innocent pleasures would be taken as evidence of her uncontrolled excesses. No one then was looking to call her unwomanly or to accuse her of wanton and unnatural feelings, so she would dance with me, unconstrained, while Phaedra and Icarus played together, always absorbed in another game, another world of their own creation. The only judgment we were to fear was the chill of my father's emotionless rationality. Together, we could dance away the dread as mother and child.

As a young woman, however, I danced alone. The tapping of my feet across the shining wood created a rhythm in which I could lose myself, a whirling dance that could consume me. Even without music it could muffle the distant rumble that groaned beneath our feet and the skitter of tremendous hooves far below the ground at the heart of the construction that had truly cemented Daedalus' fame. I would stretch my arms out, reaching upward to the peaceful sky, forgetting for the duration of the dance the horrors that dwelled underneath us.

This leads us to another story, one that Minos didn't like to tell. It was from a time when he was still newly king of Crete and, as one of three rival brothers, he was desperate to prove his worth. He prayed to Poseidon to send a magnificent bull and swore steadfastly that he would sacrifice the animal to bring great honor to the god of the sea, thus securing Poseidon's favor and the kingship of Crete in one.

Poseidon sent the bull, the divine endorsement of Minos' right to rule Crete, but its beauty was so great that my father believed he could trick the god and sacrifice another, inferior creature and keep the Cretan bull for himself. Insulted and enraged by this defiance, the sea god devised his revenge.

My mother, Pasiphae, is a daughter of Helios, the great god of the sun. Unlike the searing blaze of my grandfather, she shimmered with a gentle golden radiance. I remember the soft beams of her strange, bronze-tinged eyes, the warmth of summer in her embrace, and the molten sunshine in her laughter in the days of my childhood, when she looked at me, not through me. She infused the world with her light, before she became a translucent pane of glass through which the light was refracted but never poured forth its precious streams of brightness again … before she paid the price for her husband's deception.

Briny and barnacled, from the depths of the ocean Poseidon rose in a mighty spray of salt and fury. He did not level his sleek, silver vengeance directly at Minos, the man who had sought to betray him and dishonor him, but turned instead upon my mother, the queen of Crete, and riled her to insanity with passion for the bull. Incensed with an animalistic lust, the desire made her conniving and clever, and she persuaded the unsuspecting Daedalus to create a wooden cow so convincing that the bull was fooled into mounting both it and the maddened queen, hidden within.

Excerpted from Ariadne by Jennifer Saint. Copyright © 2021 by Jennifer Saint. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.