Chapter Twenty-Three
Xander took me by the hand and led me to where the others were dancing.
The people around us wanted to greet him and wish him a good birthday, again. While he acknowledged everyone who spoke to him, he only had eyes for me, and it was exhilarating.
When we came to a stop, I said, “I don’t remember you saying, ‘Lia, will you please come and dance with me?’”
“I don’t have to ask because you are the one who promised to be obedient in our wedding contract.”
“Why did you say yes to everything I asked of you then?” It was something I had wondered about. Io had thought it was because her brother was such a reasonable person, something I still disagreed with.
“Because it wasn’t very much, and I knew that I would be requiring something a great deal more difficult in return. Pretending to be affectionate with someone you hate isn’t easy,” he said.
“You should know.”
He paused before he finally answered, “Yes, I do know, wife.”
I quickly glanced around and saw that all eyes were on us. I leaned in so that only he would hear me. “I don’t know Ilionian dances. We don’t dance like this in Locris. I don’t want them all laughing at me.”
“They will think it’s endearing that your dashing, charming husband is teaching you because of how much he cares about you.
” He reached for my hand. “Only look at me,” he said.
As if I weren’t already. He explained that there were collective circle dances done by all the dancers holding hands, line dances with specific steps, and then partner dances, like the one we were doing now.
“It’s called the Ballos. It’s an upbeat and celebratory dance meant to mimic a marriage. Attraction, flirtation, courtship, pursuit, refusal, and then it ends in surrender.” He showed me the four small, basic steps and how we would move around one another. Sometimes he would twirl me in place.
“And like marriage,” he said, “there is an intimacy and a vulnerability in not knowing the steps but figuring them out together.”
The tiny bumps on my skin multiplied. Did he know the effect his words had on me?
“Eyes up,” he said. “Don’t watch your feet. Heavy eye contact is an important part of this dance.”
I looked around at the other couples and he was right. Instead of watching us, they were gazing into one another’s eyes. But staring into Xander’s beautiful eyes . . . I didn’t know if I was strong enough to endure it.
“Or if that doesn’t work for you, think of dancing being like fighting. It’s about footwork and paying attention to your opponent.”
The longer we danced, the easier it became. “Do you have any other analogies for what dancing is like?”
“Only one more . . .” he said as his hand went around my waist to bring me closer to him. “An activity that has two people focused on each other, touching constantly, moving their bodies in harmony . . . but it wouldn’t be appropriate to mention in a public place like this one.”
I knew exactly what he meant, and it caused me to stumble over my own feet.
Thankfully he caught me, but that meant I was now pressed up against him with all the images he’d just painted running through my mind.
His gaze again dropped to my lips and I was about to push up on my toes and kiss him when we were interrupted.
“Forgive the intrusion, but Prince Alexandros, may I speak with you privately?” Stolos, one of the archons on the council, waited for Xander’s response.
“Certainly.” He somehow managed to get me back on my feet while he moved away. “I will find you later,” he promised. “We can finish our dance.”
My neck felt like it was on fire. I reached up to make sure that I was not actually burning. Finish our dance?
It was supposed to end in surrender.
Yield to me.
Couples twirled around me as I stood on the dance floor watching Stolos and Xander walk away.
“Lia!” Io called, waving me over. I didn’t quite feel in control of my body yet, so I was relieved when I managed to walk to her without tripping over my own feet again.
“Zethus is in listening to the bard,” she said. “We should go try to talk to him.”
Speaking to Zethus felt like a waste of time. He was an archon devoted solely to his own hedonistic pleasures and seemed to vote whichever way the wind blew. His only allegiance was to himself.
But I would welcome the opportunity to get away from the dancing and focus on something else besides my husband and how he made me feel.
Io and Suri walked with me to a smaller antechamber where the bard was performing. I realized that I recognized him—it was the same one I had seen in the Golden Lamb, the night I had sneaked out of the temple with Xander.
The bard was singing a song about other nations that Ilion had faced in battles. I hoped I had already missed the Locrian portion.
“He’s over there,” Io said, and I heard the disgust in her voice. Zethus was, once again, being inappropriate with a young hetaera. I was so glad Io had escaped a possible betrothal to him by joining the temple. “We should wait until the bard is done before we try approaching Zethus.”
I still thought it was pointless but stayed to humor her and because I needed the distraction.
We sat down with the other people who were all listening intently to the bard, something Zethus was not doing.
I forced myself to pay attention to the bard singing instead of thinking about dancing with Xander. The bard spoke of fighting with Thrace, with the Sasanians. I wondered how many times Ilion had gone to war.
The bard moved on to the Carians and sang:
“The men have fled and gone
The others work and toil
The Carians, now rich,
Rule upon iron soil.”
Iron soil? I tried to picture it. Did that mean that it was a silvery-gray? Like steel? That couldn’t be right. I thought of what rust looked like on iron, and my heart began to drum inside my chest. “Io, what color is iron soil?”
“Red,” she whispered in shock, apparently having come to the same conclusion that I had.
The Carians. We were fighting the Carians.
My grandmother had been right. All the answers I needed were in books, scrolls, poems, and songs.
I tried to remember what the bard had said at the inn near the docks all those weeks ago, when he had told stories about the Carians.
After being defeated in the Great War, many Ilionian men had abandoned their nation and gone elsewhere.
Some of them went south to Caria to seek refuge, but they were turned away.
Those Ilionians tunneled their way into the city and slaughtered the men.
They forced the women to marry them and bear their children, which upset the goddess.
The Carians did not share the men’s belief in the goddess and the Ilionians missed their homes, so after ten years, the Ilionians abandoned their new families and went back to Troas, making the walls higher and thicker and creating the labyrinth so that no one could ever defeat them again.
The way they had treated the Carian women was why men were not allowed on the temple grounds. All Ilionian men had to take on the punishment and shame of what their ancestors had done.
But the bard had also said that Caria had been wiped out within a single decade and was only spoken of in song. Something wasn’t adding up.
I grew more and more impatient as I waited for the bard to finish. There were many more verses about other nations, places I didn’t recognize, and then he finally ended his song. I took the opportunity to push through the crowd so that I could speak with him.
“You did a wonderful job,” I told him.
The bard beamed at me. “Thank you!”
“You sang about the Carians . . . I thought their nation had been destroyed.”
“That is what the songs say.”
Supposedly Troas had been utterly ruined after the Great War, and yet Ilion had found a way to rebuild and come back stronger than ever, putting a blockade on Locris and slowly starving us to death.
Why couldn’t Caria have done the same?
It wouldn’t have surprised me if the reason the songs said Caria had been ruined was because the men of Ilion had thought that, without them, the nation must have fallen apart.
And no one had ever bothered to check.
“What’s important about their iron soil?” I asked the bard.
He seemed delighted to have someone so interested in his stories.
“The songs of long ago say that the Carians would stand on their dirt when they fought. That their god would give them supernatural strength so long as their feet stayed in contact with it. It’s why they didn’t attack other nations—they had to be standing on their own soil to win. ”
It sounded similar to what we could do when performing magic—if we touched someone with a white light, it powered us. Their soil seemed to do the same.
But their dirt hadn’t worked for them when the Ilionians had attacked. I wondered why.
And the Carians had apparently decided that they no longer had to stay home to fight. They had come up with a way to distribute the dirt to bring their fight to others.
“Which god do the Carians worship? Is it Arion?” I asked.
The bard looked alarmed and made a motion with his fingers and then spit on the ground. “We do not speak his name, but yes, he is the god of the Carians.”
I was about to ask why we knew Arion’s name but not the goddess’s until I remembered that it was Lysimache’s doing. She had done her best to remove the goddess’s name so that no priestess could call on her power again.
She wouldn’t have cared if Ilionians knew the Carians’ god’s name.
Maybe Io’s theory about Arion’s power being in opposition to his mother’s was correct. What if the Ilionians had done something to disrupt the dirt from working?
I asked the bard that question but he only shrugged. “That has been lost to us. We don’t know why the Ilionian men were successful, other than the goddess willed it.”
That seemed doubtful to me, considering she had put into place the rule that men were no longer allowed into her temple because of their actions in Caria.
Or had Lysimache been the reason behind that, too? She had been furious with the men abandoning them after the war and removing their ability to worship the goddess. That must have been a terrible blow.
“Thank you,” I told the bard. “You’ve been extremely helpful.”
The scholars and historians hadn’t known this information, but a storyteller had. This bard might have just saved all of Ilion.
Now we could prepare. Now we would know where to send scouts and spies. We could get ready.
I made my way back over to Io and Suri and filled them in on what the bard had told me. “You need to go find Zalira and Ahyana. Tell them what we learned. I’m going to go tell Xander, and then we should all meet up to figure out our next move.”
Suri nodded and led Io out of the room.
The Carians worshipped an earth god with dominion over metals. It made sense that his symbol would be a hammer. Did every Carian have a reddish-brown tattoo of a hammer on their chest? We had seen one on a dead soldier, and Artemisia also bore it.
How far was Caria from here? When would their armies arrive? Would they come by land or by sea? The Carians had come after me on the Nikos, so they obviously had some kind of navy.
When I entered the dining hall, I spotted Stolos and Xander deep in conversation. I was sure that whatever they were discussing was important, but this was more pressing.
I had begun to walk toward them when an extremely large man suddenly stepped out in front of me and I nearly ran into him. I was about to apologize when I looked up into his face and froze.
It was the man who had tried to kill me in the temple.