Chapter Fifteen
“I thought you were coming yesterday,” Lysimache said as I entered the room.
“It may surprise you to know that I’m very busy, especially with an army on their way to invade us.”
She was again seated at her table with an untouched tray of fresh food. I set down the vase next to the tray and then backed away. I didn’t want to be within arm’s reach of her.
Dolion left the door slightly ajar so he could hear me if I called for help.
The high priestess reached for the vase and poured herself a drink. She downed the entire cup and I saw the look of smug satisfaction that temporarily crossed her features, as if she had fooled me.
“Shall we begin?” she asked.
“You’re going to answer my questions?”
“I said I would and I’m a woman of my word.” In a horrible way that was true. She had said she would avenge her sister and destroy two nations, and she’d kept herself alive for more than a thousand years to make certain that it was done.
“Should we start at the beginning?” I prompted.
She stayed silent for a moment before she spoke.
“It was my brother who did this. His obsession with Menelaia is why the Great War happened. He stole her from her husband, brought her back to Troas, and risked the anger of everyone around him, including the goddess who protected marriage. Before he died I told him that I would make certain no one ever remembered his name, but they would never forget what he had done.”
I was tempted to ask for his name, but that was only for my own curiosity. It would be a foolish thing to do because it would definitely tip my hand that she was being compelled. “During the war, why didn’t you use magic to fight your enemies?”
“Our high priestess forbade it. She limited our access to magic because she didn’t want us using it at all.
She thought that the glory and power of it belonged solely to the goddess and we shouldn’t try to take it for ourselves.
” She sounded both furious and disgusted.
“I practiced in secret. Kysandra refused—she wanted to be obedient to what the high priestess ordered. If she had only practiced with me . . .”
The pain and regret in her voice were real. I told myself to not be affected.
“We could have saved our city,” she said. “But one woman’s opinion stopped that from happening. It’s why I knew my plan would work. That I could control everything once I took over the temple.”
Lysimache poured herself another cup and drank the entire thing again. Making herself strong. And dosing herself with Io’s mixture.
“When the army began to hammer away at the main gate, I tried to get Kysandra to hide with me in the temple because I incorrectly assumed the goddess would keep us safe. My sister refused. She had seen the Achaeans using the secret tunnels under the palace to gain access and knew they would attack from that position as well. She went to warn our father, to tell him to flood the lower levels to stop them, but he wouldn’t listen. What did a woman know about warfare?”
I had questions but thought it better to just let her speak. I would let her talk until she ran out of words.
“In the lower level of the temple, there is a room behind the statue where priestesses can hide. Kysandra tried to reach me there but she wasn’t fast enough. Ajax, prince of Locris, came and raped her in front of me, next to the statue of the goddess, then dragged my sister out of the temple.”
I couldn’t stop my jaw from dropping. The blasphemy was terrible enough, but I hadn’t known that she’d witnessed her sister’s assault. That was horrific.
Her voice trembled slightly. “I was pregnant and I had just lost my son and husband. I was determined to keep my baby so that she could someday rule Ilion. I knew that if I went to my sister and tried to help her, I would meet the same fate. I wasn’t strong enough.
I didn’t know how to fight. So I watched and bore silent witness to every scream of pain, every entreaty she made to the goddess that was ignored, every plea with your ancestor to stop raping her, and I could do nothing. ”
All I could think about was what I would have done if it had been Quynh. Kallisto. My adelphia. What would I have done in Lysimache’s position?
She added, “Kysandra was good and kind and loving. She didn’t deserve what happened to her.”
What would I do to men who harmed my loved ones? I had been ready to kill Thrax just for wearing Quynh’s bracelet. What would I have done if someone had assaulted her?
I could easily imagine myself lying in wait for a thousand years if it meant that I could destroy the people who had hurt and killed my sisters.
Lysimache had taken such great pleasure in pointing out how similar she and I were when we had fought, and much as I didn’t want to believe it, I was starting to.
We had the same aspect.
And there was a version of me that could make the same decisions she did, taking revenge on everyone who had hurt my loved ones, destroying the places that had caused my sisters pain and death.
“Are you thinking how you might understand what I’ve done?” she asked with a knowing smirk. “That I’m not the villain you imagined me to be?”
The fact that she could intuit what I was ruminating on bothered me as well.
She cocked her head to the side. “Do you know what it’s like to devote years of your life to a goddess who ignored you when you begged for her intervention?”
Maia had taught me the answer to this. “The gods are not allowed to directly interfere with our lives. They can’t stop evil things from happening. We all have the ability to choose for ourselves.”
“That’s convenient,” she snapped.
“It’s not,” I disagreed. “Perhaps our lives would be easier if the gods could make all our decisions for us and we didn’t have to struggle and suffer and make mistakes. But we wouldn’t learn anything.”
“Quite the philosopher,” she said sarcastically. “If that’s true, it didn’t stop the goddess from taking Ajax’s life.”
That had happened. The goddess had opened the earth under him and smothered him to death. “Then why didn’t she stop you?”
“After Ajax died I no longer felt her. As if she had vanished completely.”
“But you still tapped into her power when you destroyed Locris.”
“That was the last time,” she admitted. “I didn’t need her magic to help me take over Ilion.
I was their princess, the last remaining priestess, and they followed me without question.
My younger cousin was only five years old, and as his regent, I was able to start changing everything, to bend this nation to my will. ”
“Why would you hurt Ilion? These were your people.” Locris, I understood. But here?
“The weakness of my brother, of the men of this nation, the way they abandoned us to save their own hides, leaving us behind. They hid in the outskirts and mountains while women were taken as concubines to their enemies and their children made slaves.” She practically spit the words out.
There was somewhere else the men of Ilion had gone—I remembered hearing about it but couldn’t recall the details.
“And I wanted all the goddess’s believers dead. I wanted her power gone. That meant Ilion also needed to be destroyed.”
Just like I’d read in my book. “Then why not destroy the temple? Remove her worship entirely? It’s what you did in Locris.”
“I considered it. But after ruining your nation, I had to make sure that my changes would be permanent. I went to the oracle in Phocis, and she made the prophecy about the savior who would rise up and undo everything I had put into place.”
“How did you expect to find the savior?”
“That was easy enough,” she said. “I took away women’s rights and education and said they were inferior, which, again, the men of Ilion were eager to agree to.
Women who wanted a different kind of life, who wouldn’t accept the new status quo, they would join the temple. I knew the savior would be among them.”
“So . . . you’ve hurt Ilionian women for over a thousand years to make sure you found the savior?”
“It worked, didn’t it? I also had to be certain that the savior couldn’t access magic by eliminating the knowledge of how to do it.
I kept some rituals, reinstituted old ones that other priestesses had done away with, and created some new ones.
Although I hadn’t ever considered that the savior would come from Locris.
” She narrowed her eyes at me. “I still have a hard time believing that you’re her. ”
I pulled down the left shoulder on my tunic to show her the mark of the goddess.
Her eyes widened slightly before her expression of superiority and disdain returned. “I should have slit your throat the first night you arrived.”
“Yes, you should have. Because I’m what you feared. I am going to undo everything you’ve done.”
Lysimache shot me a look of such pure hatred that I could feel the chill of it seeping into my bones.
“Why did you write the prophecy down? Why did you share it?” I asked. Wouldn’t it have been in her best interest to hide it? Io had found it in a book from her mother’s library.
“I wanted the savior to know that she was going to die, that all her efforts would be in vain.”
How was I supposed to respond to that? I had spent so much time worrying about this very thing, and she’d shared it to make sure that I would suffer. That chill inside me grew.
“And it gave the people something to look forward to and distracted them from what else was going on. Whenever there were hard times, they pressed forward because they foolishly thought they were going to be saved.”
She had kept it from Locris. Because she didn’t want us to hope. “Why didn’t you just destroy Locris outright? You had the ability to wipe us out at any time.” They had the wealth, population, control of the blockade.