Corn King and the Spring Queen (The Hera Series)

The Corn King and the Spring Queen is a tale of murder and revenge and of lasting love set in the Classical world several centuries before Christianity.
It opens on the shores of the Black Sea when a pagan priest-king takes his rival's eldest daughter as his bride. The match is part of a scheme: she is a witch, and is supposed to weaken her husband's power. Instead, they fall in love. Cursed after her father's death, she flees Scythia to be cleansed of her blood guilt. She journeys from Sparta, on the brink of its own doom, to Egypt, a dissolute empire where scarcely anything is truly sacred. Magic spells, tenderness, brutality, unnatural acts, primitive rites, beauty and love suffuse this intimate rendering of a heroic woman of the distant past. First published in 1931, this is Naomi Mitchison's masterwork.