Chapter 1 #2
The girls jolted into action, robes tangling at their ankles as they scurried out again. I crossed my arms and fixed her with a look. “We’ve already reached our water allowance for the week. If—”
“Hush, now,” Calismae snapped, waving a weathered hand like she could swat away drought itself. “Your mother sold her last jar of Cretan saffron and half her Mycenaean beads for this day. We are not sending you into that palace smelling, even if the rest of us may never get to bathe again.”
I blinked. “She sold her beads?”
Calismae didn’t flinch. “She offered them.”
A hollow silence yawned between us.
The Mycenaean beads, deep blue and smooth as river stones, had been a gift from my father before he’d passed. One of the only beautiful things she’d been able to keep after years of Sparta’s misfortune. A flicker of mourning slid beneath my ribs.
Calismae caught the look on my face and softened, just a little. “They were gathering dust, and your future was not,” she said.
Our land had been stripped bare by drought and blood and time. Sparta’s once-proud rivers were now little more than withered memories, and the sea, our vast red Aegean, offered salt, occasionally some fish, but definitely not salvation.
First the water, then the beads.
More sacrifices that added to the myriad of reasons why there was no choice but to win.
“Tonight, you will look your best.” Calismae stepped closer, her voice resolute, thick with the kind of conviction that I’d seen make Menelaus’s priests nervous and nobles far above her station listen with trembling awe.
“The other maidens will vanish in your light. They’ll be dull …
forgettable. Now strip. If the gods won’t give you magic, you’ll go in with perfume, petals, and prayers clinging to every inch. ”
She lifted a strand of my blonde hair, letting it fall through her fingers like thread. “You will shine tonight, Helena. When you step through those palace doors, no one will remember the others’ names.”
I swallowed hard, her words settling over me like armor. “I hope so.”
She jabbed a finger at my chest. “I don’t care if the other women have more silk or more coin. They are not Helena the Beauty,” she said, her eyes gleaming. “They are not you.”
I tried to picture what it would be like tonight.
The king’s great hall filled with noblemen with thinning hair and swollen pockets, draped in fabric finer than anything Amyklai had ever seen. King Mene laus’s eyes would crawl over the maidens like flies, his gold-ringed fingers wrapped around goblets and favors alike.
There would be music. Perfumed air. Oil lamps that never burned out, because someone else was always there to fill them.
I imagined columns inscribed with stories older than Sparta itself, and a gilded throne in the center of it. And somewhere in the middle of it all … me. Not Helena of the dust. Not Helena of Amyklai. But something new. Something hungrier.
Calismae had always believed in me, maybe too much. Like my father—
No. I shoved the thought away. I couldn’t think of him.
But the memory bloomed anyway, bitter and poisonous. Blood slick on the floors. Screams echoing off the manor’s walls no matter how far I ran. The way his body had writhed, the foam at his lips tinged red.
“Helena!” Calismae snapped tensely and my gaze flickered to her, that familiar feeling of terror clinging to my skin like the smell of rotted fruit.
The girls had returned. I hadn’t even noticed. They stood frozen with their steaming pails, watching me like I might shatter.
Gods. What had they seen in my face? The household would be whispering about it for a week.
“Stop gawking and pour the water before I die,” Calismae snipped.
There wasn’t much staff around the manor, but the rest weren’t nearly as nervous as these girls appeared to be. Calismae wasn’t that terrifying.
Usually.
They poured the water into the copper tub, some of it splashing to the floor again in their haste.
Calismae moved like lightning, seizing one of the girls by the ear. The girl squeaked and went still, trembling in her grip.
“Do you know what that drop cost?” Calismae hissed, her voice a venomous whisper. “Each one is worth more than your dowry. More than your life.”
The girl’s eyes welled with tears.
I winced, not because I disagreed—in Sparta, water was more precious than gold, more precious than its citizens—but because it was one of the crueler things Calismae had said recently. And that was saying something.
Still, I liked to pretend she meant it with a certain … affection. The begrudging sort you offer a stray cat who repays you in scratches.
Even if, in twenty years, I’d yet to find proof of that theory.
She finally released the girl, who bolted as if she’d been shot from a catapult. The copper bucket banged against her leg as she ran, and her shoes smeared red powder across the clean floor.
“Useless,” Calismae spat, eyeing the footprint with a sneer stretched across her face. Her gaze snapped to me. “Get in the tub!”
“Yes, ma’am,” I muttered, peeling off my red silk sleeping gown and letting it slide to the ground like spilled wine. I lifted my leg to step into the basin … and paused.
A thin film of red dust floated on the water’s surface. “No,” I whispered in horror, gesturing toward the tub. In my mind, I was already counting the cost.
Three full jugs of water to fill it halfway. Maybe four. That was nearly a week’s ration gone in a single morning. And to replace it?
My fingers curled at my sides.
Calismae growled and rubbed a weathered hand down her face, muttering something decidedly unholy under her breath.
“Slop out the dirt and bring another bucket to rinse her,” she ordered one of the girls still lingering by the door. Her voice held the tight edge of panic.
Panic. From Calismae. My spine went taut. She never panicked. Not when the fields first dried up. Not when the Dread took ten villagers in one night … Never. Until now, apparently.
And yet … I understood.
It had been three years since Cynisca, the Queen of Sparta, had died, suddenly and without warning. In Sparta, a queen was not born, but chosen, tested in a series of trials that every village sent one woman to face.
Amyklai had chosen me to represent them.
We’d all been waiting for the king to finally announce the Trials. And now that the day had come, after years of held breath and dried wells, everything had to be perfect. No stains. No tangles. No excuse for me to be overlooked or rejected.
Because whatever happened in that palace tonight, it wouldn’t just be my fate on the line. It would be the fate of my entire village.
The new water was steaming hot when it came, and I hissed as I slid down into its depths, letting the heat bite my skin. It felt like I was sitting in guilt. Like I’d stolen it from the throat of the thirsty.
“Wait!” Calismae lunged forward and snatched my hair up before it could sink below the surface. “We’ll leave it unwashed. It will curl better and last longer for the journey.”
Another bucket thudded onto the tiles. “Don’t spill a single drop of that,” she growled, and the girl’s hands trembled as she poured.
My gaze drifted to the window, to the far-off black silhouette of King Menelaus’s castle. A jagged shadow against the sky. The Twisted Forest curled around it like a crown of thorns, bare trees with gnarled limbs that reached toward the heavens, as if in mourning. Or warning.
How ironic.
A fortress protected by nature itself, even though no one in Sparta was foolish enough to try to get in when the whole place was soaked in ruin. The only people who wanted to go toward that kind of power were the desperate.
Like me.
“Give me your hand,” Calismae ordered, startling me back to the present.
She examined my fingernails, shaking her head and clucking her tongue in outrage. “Have you been digging in the dirt?”
I sighed and held in my eye roll. “Yes, that’s exactly what I did this morning. Dug through the dirt with my bare hands before the gods opened their eyes.”
Calismae made the sign of Hades in the air, scandalized. “You blaspheme, Helena. Don’t bring them into this.”
I bit down on my lip, watching as she glanced out the window as if she expected Zeus Himself to appear in the clouds.
It was a futile hope though, dreaming of them returning.
Menelaus would never allow that.
“Chin up,” Calismae griped, scrubbing beneath my jaw like she expected to uncover a hidden layer of filth I’d been hoarding there since infancy. She worked the rag with military precision, her expression pinched, like my pores’ existence was the worst thing she’d ever been witness to.
“Leave some skin on my body, will you?” I teased, wincing as she attempted to rub every freckle off.
She tossed the rag into the basin with a wet slap, not even dignifying my complaint with a response. “Finish up and get out. Time is short.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I’m telling you, you’re going to miss this. Ordering me around.”
Her scowl deepened, and I reached for the rag immediately. Apparently, jokes were not allowed today.
The balcony doors suddenly slammed open, banging against the walls as a gust of wind shrieked through the air.
In came the cursed red dust, fine as flour and angry as ash.
I barely had time to flinch before Calismae shoved my head under the water like a priest performing a very aggressive baptism, gripping my hair so it was the only part of me not submerged.
My mouth opened in shock … and promptly filled with soap and near-death.
I surfaced a heartbeat later, gasping like a fish gutted too soon. “By the gods—”
“Close those doors!” Calismae bellowed, ignoring my choking. “If this bath is ruined, I swear I’ll have your hides drying on the line by nightfall, and you can sleep in the corpse pits till winter solstice!”