Chapter 1
They said Sparta bled itself dry when Menelaus forced out the gods.
But blood remembers.
It seeps into the soil, stains the stone, clings to what remains.
And everywhere I looked, I saw it, the memory painted into everything we called home.
The scarred earth outside my window was red. The dust spiraling, lazy and sun-streaked, through the air? Red. Even the sea, churning beyond the edge of our scorched hills, bled to match it. A red so deep it swallowed the sun at dusk and spat it back out in veins of rust.
I even dreamt in red.
The air was still this morning, unnervingly so. I leaned against the balcony railing of our aging manor house, one of the few left standing, and let my eyes trace the place where land met cursed sea.
For just a breath, I imagined I was somewhere else. Anywhere else. Somewhere with green hills and cold rivers and skies that didn’t taste like iron on your tongue.
But pretending had its limits.
Truth, like rot, always clawed its way back to the surface, rising with the monsoon floods, red as the blood they carried.
That was what it looked like when the storms swept in: the sky splitting open, red water rushing past our gates. It seeped through the stone, finding every fault, every fracture, until the walls themselves seemed to bleed.
They said our land wasn’t always like this. Once, Sparta’s glory belonged to all of us. Until Menelaus decided it should belong to him alone. He drove out the gods and took their place. Now the only thing left shining here was his throne.
Sparta was dying.
Or maybe it was already dead, and we were too stubborn to admit it.
Because Sparta’s land wasn’t the only thing dying. We were dying … in more ways than one.
If the curse the gods had left behind didn’t kill our bodies, it hardly mattered, because our spirit was dying too.
Like the land, we were fading away more and more every day, as though our spirits were being bled into the soil. As though the weight of waiting for the end was becoming too much, and fear, slow and unrelenting, was creeping into our lungs and coaxing them still.
We weren’t screaming toward our end. We weren’t running.
We were dulling.
I watched it happen. I watched voices grow quieter, laughter stretch thinner, smiles wilt before they fully bloomed. Children who used to run, now stood. Songs that once lifted through the dusk died on dry lips.
We moved through each day like echoes.
And I felt it, sinking into the marrow of me. Our fire, the thing that made us Spartan, was dying. Flickering low. Not smote by gods. Not taken in a blaze.
But unraveled.
I felt every thread come loose. Every light go out. We weren’t just losing our strength. We were forgetting we ever had it.
It was a splinter running through my ribs as I stared out to the distance. A quiet, aching question no one else dared ask aloud: Was this it? Was this all our lives were?
A group of children trudged past the crumbling gate below me, their footsteps dragging. I watched from the balcony, arms braced on the stone, and the weight of their suffering settled heavy in my chest.
They kept their heads lowered, shoulders curved tight as if bracing. They didn’t glance at the manor until one of the youngest, a girl with a lopsided braid and a tear in her hem, stepped out of line with a bundle of dried rushes in her arms.
An offering for me, of course. I was Helena of Amyklai, after all. The famed beauty who was going to save them.
She knelt, her knees pressing into the red-cracked dust, and laid the rushes down hesitantly, as if she might be punished for offering too little. The bundle was brittle and sun-bleached, plucked from a dying field, but still she arranged them carefully alongside the other offerings.
A tribute for the beauty they expected to save them … who would save them.
For me.
She rejoined the group, and their feet left bloodied footprints that seeped into the earth behind them as they left, dark and ruddy, sinking into soil desperate for rain. They didn’t look back. Just walked on, shadows trailing behind them like smoke from an already burned house.
My eyes stung as I stared after them, their bodies too thin. I felt guilt that they’d walked all this way just to leave me an offering, but I would accept it, like I did all the others. Because it was the least I could do.
A sudden gust clawed at the shutters and red dust lashed my skin, hot as sparks. I closed my eyes and turned my head, used to it by now. The dust was just Sparta falling apart one heartbeat at a time.
And I—I had only ever watched as it did so.
Something was shifting inside me though, rising like a spark caught to kindling. A fire gathering in the hollow place where despair had only lived.
Because after tonight, I would no longer be a woman on the balcony watching my village fade and die.
Tonight … everything would change.
Thump. Thump.
The pounding on my door echoed through the room, and I braced myself for the onslaught about to happen. Letting out a long sigh, I kept my gaze fixed on the sea of red dust building in the distance that signaled an oncoming storm. Calismae would come in whether I told her to or not.
She wasn’t exactly one to wait for permission.
A second later, she did indeed sweep in like the gathering storm, her crimson robes whispering against the floor—though robes was too gentle a word for the structured folds of fabric she wore like armor.
Everything she owned was red, dyed that way or stained beyond salvation.
There was no use dressing in anything else, beyond our few special occasions. Not here. Not anymore.
“Gods help me,” she muttered, eyes already narrowing like I’d personally offended Olympus by existing. “You’re filthy.”
I turned toward her slowly, trying to keep in my mirth. Although under the circumstances, maybe I’d be able to get away with a little disrespect without her threatening to box my ears. The fact that it was me she called dirty in a village caked in grime had to be at least a little amusing.
The sunlight caught the fine web of lines across her face, what she called her “wisdom marks,” as if the universe had etched truth into her skin and forgot to tell the rest of us. Her sharp blue eyes, watery but never weak, met mine with all the softness of a whetstone.
She’d been my nursemaid since I was born, although her primary role in my life the last ten years had been that of a nagging hen.
“Off the ledge, girl,” she snapped. “I swear if I have to scrape mud from your fingernails again, I’ll shave your head and call it penance.”
I snorted, I couldn’t help it, and I completely forgot to hide the smile that followed. Too late. Her brows arched like drawn blades, glinting with the promise of consequences.
“You think it’s funny?”
“I think you’re funny,” I murmured, stepping back into the room, away from the sight of the cursed land and the threat of a storm.
“You’ll be laughing less when the king sees you and thinks you’ve been rolling with the pigs.”
“What pigs? They starved to death last spring.”
Her eyes narrowed further, as if my smart mouth was the reason for their death and not the famine that left the ground so barren that all the rain could do was run across it and leave floods and ruin in its wake.
“Let me look at you.” Calismae’s fingers dug into my arms, not cruelly but insistently.
“What are you going to do,” I asked, “when I leave today and you realize you can’t order me around anymore?”
Her mouth pursed like I’d said something obscene.
“What makes you think I won’t still boss you around after today? Queen or not, you’ll still need to listen to me,” she said, sniffing once, deeply, dramatically, like she’d caught the scent of my defiance and found it distasteful.
I rolled my eyes because I’d been a dream of a ward, but I didn’t retort. There was a tension around her eyes that wasn’t usually present.
“Everything alright, Nana?” I asked, the old nickname rolling off my tongue.
She didn’t answer right away.
That expression—lips tight, eyes distant, something haunted flickering in their depths—I’d only seen it once before.
And the day she wore it had changed everything.
Her gaze skimmed across my face like she was reading an omen. Her hand lifted, fingers cool and calloused as they grazed my cheekbone.
“That face,” she murmured, more to herself than to me. “I hope to gods it can save us.”
I straightened. “It better,” I said, brushing her hand away with a gentleness I didn’t quite feel. “Because I’m not leaving that castle without the crown.”
Her eyes widened slightly, but I didn’t let her interrupt. My blood felt like it had turned to fire.
“If my face won’t save us,” I added in a biting voice, “then something else will. My spine. My teeth. My will. Whatever it takes.”
I smiled, but it was the kind that came with barbs.
“I’ll burn the whole throne room down if I have to. But I’m not walking out empty-handed,” I vowed.
“Zeus, may He keep … don’t you dare lead with that line, Helena, or Menelaus will think we’ve raised a barbarian,” she moaned, shaking her head in despair as she stepped back.
“Gods forbid,” I muttered, glancing around to see if anyone else was listening.
If Calismae had mentioned Zeus like that out in public, she would have been punished.
Though, if any barbarian existed in Sparta, it was the king.
He was the one letting his people starve to death.
Proclaiming himself Sparta’s new God, but withholding every gift the old gods had once bestowed.
Calismae clapped her hands, and the sound cracked through the air like a command.
Two girls burst into the chamber a breath later, their red robes billowing behind them. They skidded to a halt, faces flushed, eyes wide, like Calismae had summoned them from the Underworld itself and they were afraid she might send them back.
“What are you waiting for?” she barked. “Draw the bath before I turn to stone!”