Chapter 2 #2
As though some part of the beast still believed it might one day fly again.
Its eyes were twin orbs of milky white, each one cut through by an old gash, and they stared straight ahead, as if they were searching for a future long since torn away. Two short, wrinkled trunks coiled before its muzzle, twitching restlessly, scenting the filled square.
Sparta blinded its Aetherthorns after capture. A cruelty paraded as control. As if stealing their sight could sever their power—or make them forget what they were born to do.
Another deep, shuddering exhale rattled the bars of the cage, and I struggled not to flinch as the sound rolled outward—and with it, the silence broke.
Breath rushed back into the crowd, gasps and cries spilling free as though the creature had drawn the fear from our chests and then released it again.
The metal groaned, and I couldn’t tell if it was from the beast … or the weight of our collective fear.
I forced my legs to move, each step scraping through the red dust that clung to everything it touched. As I climbed the platform, the air grew heavier, thicker, until it felt like breathing through ash.
When I reached the top, I turned slightly, scanning the sea of faces below until I found Calismae. She stood near the front, her chin lifted, her expression hard. When our eyes met, she gave a single, crisp nod that was actually a silent command. Stand straight. Show them who you are.
I obeyed.
Nikandros spread his arms in theatrical grace. “Behold,” he said in a voice slick with pride. “We have been favored with a beauty that surpasses any other in Sparta. Surely through her, Amyklai will rise again.”
A murmur surged through the crowd, awe and envy and something else. Not quite hope, more like a grasping faith, a desperate belief that if I succeeded, they might be saved along with me.
I stood beside Nikandros, my hands clasped before me so tightly my knuckles whitened, every muscle in my body straining against the urge to move.
To reach for him. To tear that smug, sanctimonious smile from his face and make him choke on the blood he’d spilled in the name of the gods he’d betrayed.
“The gods will return!” a voice suddenly cried, ringing through the square like a prophecy. “Tell our king their silence is not surrender!”
A shocked hush swept through the gathered bodies, a single, shivering breath drawn all at once. The Hippeus shifted, metal scraping as they searched for the source.
Nikandros’s head snapped toward the crowd. “Who said that?” he roared, the veneer gone from his tone. “Who dares insult our king?”
No one answered.
The crowd shifted uneasily, the sound of movement spreading like wind through dry grass. Faces turned away, eyes dropped to the ground. One by one, they stepped back, creating a widening circle in the sea of bodies. Each desperate to prove their innocence by distance alone.
The air thickened with fear as a woman was revealed.
My mouth dropped in surprise when I saw Thalessa, the town healer.
Her gray hair had come loose from its braid, strands catching the light as she stood, unflinching, in the center of the agora.
Her hands trembled, but her chin was high.
“The gods have not abandoned us,” she said in a steady voice.
“It is we who turned our backs first. It was we who helped the king push them away. They will return. And when they do, they’ll remember who cursed their name.
” Her gaze went to me. “You must not make that mistake.”
Another ripple of gasps broke through the crowd. I felt my stomach drop, a sick, spiraling weight pulling me under.
Nikandros’s smile curled, ugly and thin. “Seize her.”
The Hippeus moved at once, bronze-faced and wordless, closing around Thalessa like a trap. Hands wrenched her arms behind her back. Her satchel hit the stones with a dull thud, herbs spilling like secrets.
“How dare you profane this day,” Nikandros said, his voice carrying across the wind. “On the very hour we celebrate our champion and Amyklai’s future, you choose defiance? Let all see the price of such insolence.”
“No,” I breathed, useless against the power he commanded.
I couldn’t move though. Not now. Every instinct begged me to lunge, to claw, to drag him from his pedestal and feed him to his own men …
but I had nothing to fight with except a promise I hadn’t yet earned.
The Trials were why I was leaving. For this.
For her. If I broke now, he won. If I broke now, there would be no change, only another spectacle.
One of the Hippeus uncoiled their whip.
The crack split the air.
The first lash tore through Thalessa’s tunic and the skin beneath, opening a long red smile across her back.
She staggered but didn’t fall. Blood welled in beads, then ran, bright against the dust. The second stroke crossed the first where welts were rising up, the edges already swelling, raw and wet.
By the third, threads of fabric clung to the wounds, and every breath she took was a shudder.
She didn’t scream. A sound rose from the crowd instead, a helpless moan, quickly swallowed. The taste of iron flooded my tongue as I held my tears back. I forced my spine straight, Calismae’s command still living in my body. Stand tall.
I would do nothing today that gave Nikandros one more excuse to break her, or anyone else.
But I watched. I counted each strike. And I vowed that when I got to Mene laus’s palace … I would remember.
Chains scraped and metal groaned as the Aetherthorn shifted, its shackles dragging across the ground like a warning. Each clank twisted my spine tighter. The sound of the chains together with the sound of the whip became a grotesque duet: submit, submit, submit.
They hauled Thalessa upright when she began to falter. Her head drooped … but then, inch by inch, her chin rose.
Defiant.
Even through the blood and gashes, something in her still burned. A flickering, furious ember that refused to be stamped out.
Thalessa’s gaze moved over the crowd, as if searching for someone … and then she found me.
Her eyes locked with mine, even as her body shuddered with every lash. She wasn’t begging. She wasn’t afraid. She wasn’t asking to be saved.
Thalessa saw me, and in that endless second, I felt the weight of everything she could no longer say.
Don’t look away. Don’t forget. This must end.
I nodded, barely. Not enough to draw attention. But enough for her to see.
I won’t lose. I won’t fail Amyklai. I swear it.
A tear slid down her cheek, carving a line through the red dust like blood on marble.
She raised her fist, and a gasp tore through the crowd.
“No matter what you do,” she cried, her voice pained but defiant, “they will come back.”
The words didn’t just echo. They cracked across the agora like Zeus himself had hurled them to the earth. For a single, suspended heartbeat, Amyklai forgot to breathe.
I saw the glint of steel a second before one of the soldiers grabbed Thalessa’s jaw with brutal force, yanking it open so hard her neck twisted. The dagger rose, flashed once more, and came down hard.
There was a spray of red and a choking gurgle. The dagger came away crimson, and the small, ruined shape of her tongue hit the stones with a sickening thump.
I flinched, my stomach lurching. Below me, someone gagged. Another choked on a sob. Hands flew up to mouths, to eyes, but no one moved forward. Mercy was treason here.
“You will spend your life in the cells in silence, katàratos,” Nikandros hissed as blood poured from Thalessa’s mouth in thick, glistening waves, vivid against the red dust. She tried to gasp, but what came out was a wet, broken rasp, air bubbling through blood, catching on the mangled sounds of what had once been a voice.
“Take her away,” he barked. “See that she lives to suffer her punishment.”
They moved on his word. Two soldiers seized her by the wrists, the same hands that had held the whip now hauling her forward.
Her feet trailed, heels scraping the stone, and for a breath I thought she might fall.
But she did not. She kept her chin up, eyes half-closed, as if saving what dignity she had left for something private and stubborn inside her.
They reached the archway and passed out of sight, and for an instant I allowed myself to imagine her standing again, only a little straighter, when the cell door shut. Then I wiped my face with the heel of my hand and looked up at Nikandros.
His jaw worked. His expression was smug and small. Around him, the crowd breathed as if waking from a fever. A few hands clapped, tentative, ashamed. Most of them only watched, as if the act had been a lesson graven into their ribs.
I kept my face still and my voice closed.
My eyes locked with Calismae’s again across the crowd, her expression cutting through the haze of dust and fear.
There was sorrow there, but something harder beneath it, steady, resolute, the kind of strength that refused to break even when everything else did.
Her lips formed a single word. Remember.
“Take that as a warning to all who dare defy the king. He is your god,” Nikandros shouted, his voice slicing through the crowd like the blade had through Thalessa’s tongue. “And this will be your fate if you forget that.”
Nikandros turned to face me, his gaze sweeping over my figure like a man assessing a prize he already owned.
“I wish you well, Helena,” he said smoothly.
“Go and charm the king. Win his favor, win his crown.” He leaned forward and I had to stop from flinching as his lips brushed my skin.
“But hear me now. If you fail … you will be my wife.”
My eyes dropped to the xiphos at his hip, a short, cruel blade polished to a mirror’s gleam. I wondered how long it would take to pull it free, how deep I’d have to drive it to stop the smirk from ever gracing his lips again.
When my gaze rose to meet his, he was already smiling. A knowing curl of the mouth that told me he’d read the thought like an open page. “You’re dismissed, Champion,” he said softly, his breath an insult to my nose.
The words slid over me like grease. My stomach twisted, heat and disgust rising together.
I continued to keep my face still and my body rigid, though every muscle still screamed to strike him.
Instead, I inclined my head the barest fraction, the motion small enough to pass for respect, and I slowly walked off the platform.
I didn’t have the power to stop him today, but someday I would.
I felt his eyes digging into my back with every step.
“Come, child. We must get you cleaned up again and ready,” Calismae said as she hurried toward me. Her voice was barren, stripped of warmth, stripped of grief. As if the horror we’d just witnessed hadn’t reached her at all.
But I saw through it.
I saw the way her jaw clenched too tightly. The glassy sheen in her eyes that never quite blinked away. She wasn’t cold or heartless. She was surviving.
Just like the rest of us. Smothering the scream inside before it could rise. Wearing the mask Sparta demanded.
Calismae pretended not to see the tremor in my body, when usually she wouldn’t allow it. She didn’t flinch when I wiped at the angry tears gathering in my eyes. I would give myself a small moment to feel, but when the moment was gone, all that remained would be sharpened steel.
The Trials were coming. And I would meet them with every ounce of fury and fire they’d tried to bleed out of me.
I turned, but not before I took one last look at Nikandros and the blood that stained the ground where Thalessa had been tortured.
Searing it into my memory, I made a shrine of it in my chest. Let it stand as proof that I would never look away again.
I followed Calismae out of the agora, each step heavy with the weight of what I’d witnessed, what I’d sworn.
Eyes tracked me, rimmed red from weeping, shining with fear they dared not voice.
The crowd parted, but slowly, like they weren’t sure I wasn’t a specter risen from the dead, and I met their stares head-on and nodded.
Promising … vowing … that I would save them.
The wind swept behind me, erasing every trace of my path as if I’d never walked it. As if I were nothing.
But I was not nothing. I was not gone.
Sparta could try to scrub away my footsteps, bury my name, drown my voice. But I would not be silenced.
Let the wind take my prints. I would carve something greater in stone.
I was going to win.
For Thalessa.
For Calismae.
For everyone in my village who’d been forced to survive a life that should have been lived.
I would become Sparta’s queen.
And I would make it a kingdom worth surviving.