She gritted her teeth and willed herself not to vomit. She wouldn’t be seen like that, like some lush handmaiden at the Dionysia.

The motion of the boat did her no favors. She closed her eyes and imagined the shape of a narcissus. Six tepals, count them—one, two, three, four, five, six—surrounding a corona. Within the corona, six pollen-bearing stamens (one, two, three, four, five, six), around a central style.

When she opened her eyes again, the nausea had diminished sufficiently that she was no longer in danger of embarrassing herself. She pushed the bucket away, and it scraped against the deck with an awful whine.

“What is wrong with me?” she whispered, barely audible over the slap of water against the side of the boat. She loathed the weakness in her voice but could not force any more air from her lungs.

“You are alive, and thus the transition to the underworld is... unpleasant,” Hades said.

Persephone gripped the vessel’s wall once more and peered over the edge. The water was dark, but there were glints of light in its inky depths. She looked closer and gasped.

Someone stared back at her.

The dead man’s face was visible for just an instant, long enough to embed within her mind the bloated pallor of his skin, the colorless eyes rimmed with purple. She longed for the bucket, but it was too far out of reach, and she didn’t trust her legs to support her. She longed to be on dry, sun-kissed land. She longed for her mother.

“What is that noise?” Persephone asked. It set her teeth on edge and sent shivers down her back—distant cries of lamentation and woe, seeming to grow louder as the boat pressed on.

“The shades are restless tonight,” Hades said.

“Every night,” Charon said from the prow.

He and Hades shared a laugh.

How could they find humor in something so terrible?

Hades’ hand landed on her shoulder, her fingers closing in as if to never let go. Persephone was too weak to swat her away. “Almost there,” Hades said.

The other side of the river rapidly approached. The boat bumped against a pier, and Charon secured them to the dock. He leaned on his pole, hood obscuring his face as he waited for them to disembark.

Before Persephone could protest, Hades scooped her up in her arms and carried her onto the pier. Behind them, Charon freed the boat and pushed off, a solitary guardian endlessly crossing from one side of the marsh to the other.

Persephone stared at the craggy not-quite-sky overhead. Torches lined the path, flaring into life with blue flames as they approached, then winking out behind them. The lights blurred when she blinked, and at some point she must have fallen unconscious once more, for the next time she opened her eyes they were in a chariot.