Chapter 4
If my mother ever had a warm thought, she likely smothered it before it could surface.
She sat across from me now, back straight, hands folded, every inch of her as pristine and severe as the day they’d lit my father’s pyre.
The black veil still framed her face, the mourning robes stiff with age and starch, clinging to her like obligation made cloth.
She hadn’t taken them off in five years.
I wasn’t sure she remembered other clothing existed.
The door clicked shut behind me, final and unforgiving. I settled onto the bench opposite her, the cushions too soft, the lavender oil too strong, the silence thick as wool. I drew in a breath anyway.
A film of red dust clung to the okhèma’s glass windows, thick enough to turn the outside world a darker, bloodier hue.
I glanced down at the hem of my dress, where a pale smear of red dust had claimed the white silk while I’d walked to get in.
The door should keep the stains from getting worse, but gods, I would’ve traded half my dowry for a lungful of that wind.
At least it would’ve felt real. Brutal, but alive. Better than the air in this silk-lined coffin. Better than sitting knee-to-knee with the specter who’d raised me.
I looked at my mother … and winced. It hurt, like always. But I forced the reaction down, burying it where all the other aches lived.
She’d been cursed with a fated mate.
And I do mean cursed. People liked to romanticize it—two souls destined, divinely woven. But I’d watched the aftermath. I’d seen what it did. What it took.
When my father died, she didn’t shatter. She eroded, methodically, like something sacred being undone seam by seam, until only fabric remained. Mourning robes. And a face I barely recognized behind black veils and colder silences.
Before that, I had never believed in fated mates. I’d thought it was a pretty lie, some old myth we told ourselves to make suffering poetic. But now? Now I did believe. And I wanted no part of it.
Let someone else unravel for love. Let someone else be hollowed out by it. I’d seen enough of what devotion left behind.
After watching my mother, it wasn’t a hardship to give up true love for the crown. It felt like strategy. Because I knew now that nothing emptied a person like love that ended. And I had no intention of being emptied.
I watched her across the okhèma, and I wondered how much longer she’d last. Every day, she seemed to fade more, bit by bit, like sand scraping away at a statue.
I didn’t know what would be worse—waking up and finding her gone, or watching her disappear slowly, until all that remained was a robe full of dust and silence.
Either way, she was already halfway gone. And I was already alone.
She sighed, shifting on the padded bench like even my presence exhausted her.
Her hands moved automatically, pulling the mourning drapery tighter around her shoulders, cocooning herself in grief like it was the only thing she had left that still fit.
If she was upset about what happened in the agora this morning, I couldn’t tell.
Since she was always in a perpetual state of mourning.
Grief had become her second skin.
I wanted to scream. To grab her shoulders and shake her until she saw me … really saw me. Talk to me. Say something.
But I’d done that before. I’d begged before. All it ever got me was silence.
So I stayed quiet.
Like always.
The okhèma jolted beneath us, a sudden shudder that pulled a frown from my lips. I leaned forward slightly, listening to the muffled thud of trunks being loaded into the back—my trunks. Everything I’d need for the Trials.
We lurched forward, the jergins surging into motion with startling speed, faster than anything that massive had a right to move. They scuttled in harsh, rhythmic bursts, and soon the manor was swallowed behind a curtain of dust.
We had only traveled a few stadia when I heard a scream.
I didn’t see them—whoever it was—but I could picture the shape of a rag-covered figure hurling themselves out of the way, just barely escaping the crushing weight of the jergins’ claws. They never slowed once a journey began.
I’d seen what happened to those who didn’t move fast enough. Once, a child had wandered too close to the edge of the road. The beasts mistook her for prey. Their blunt teeth sank into her side and tore her nearly in half before the driver’s whip cracked loud enough to jolt them from their frenzy.
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to shove down the memory. The way her little hand had twitched. The way the dust turned dark with blood.
But when I opened them, what lay ahead was no better.
There was only one path out of the village, and it cut straight through the Silent Way.
It wasn’t just a place. It was where we took our cursed.
The Dread was a sickness the gods had left behind when Menelaus forced them out, a punishment scored into the land like a wound that never closed.
Every Spartan village had its version of the Silent Way, a ring of ruin circling the village like a noose.
This was ours. The place where Amyklai’s prayers went to die.
The Dread didn’t care who you were. It didn’t care if you had a family, a future.
It passed over one person like cold mist and left them untouched, blinking in confusion …
and then tore the next apart, blood dripping from their eyes, ears, and mouth in steady crimson rivulets, so violent it soaked the dirt beneath them like the earth itself was bleeding.
I’d seen that too.
Arete, a girl I used to race with through the olive groves, had come stumbling back into town one morning, wild-eyed and whole. I’d watched from the window as her brother ran to meet her.
The Dread’s red mist had appeared and taken him before he could even scream.
His body twisted, spasmed … and then the blood came. Gushing from his eyes, his nose, his mouth … steaming in the morning chill.
His bones were somewhere out here.
Only King Menelaus’s palace stood untouched. Not a whisper of the Dread crossed its gates. No one knew how he’d done it … only that whatever curse had claimed the rest of Sparta ended at his walls.
It only devoured the rest of us.
The ground was littered with reminders. Most of the bodies had been carted out here from the city, but some lay where they’d dropped, visitors or passersby caught by the Dread without warning.
Bodies scattered like dropped dolls, their possessions dropped beside them, others curled in on themselves, arms wrapped around nothing.
Blood had leaked from their eyes and mouths, soaking into the thirsty ground.
One man had fallen against a tree, face slack, jaw unhinged like he’d died mid-plea.
Another was half-buried in dust, legs jutting out at an impossible angle.
He hadn’t fallen there. He’d been dumped by desperate hands too afraid to keep the dead under their own roof.
The Dread had taken my father.
One moment, he was strong, laughing, tugging on my braid while we ate supper. The next, he was coughing blood into his hands, and then—
Gone.
No warning. No reason. Just a crack in the world where he used to be.
We were lucky to have been able to give him funeral rites because of our family’s status in the village.
Most weren’t. What was left of them was thrown out here like trash, dumped among the rest, left to bake and bloat and split beneath the sun.
That was the way of it. You died of the Dread, you didn’t get a funeral.
You got distance. We were fortunate not to have to see his face twisted and bloated, staring up from the dirt every time we passed through.
I wondered if King Menelaus had ever ridden through his own cities. If he’d ever looked out from his blood-polished chariot and actually seen what he ruled.
I doubted it.
Even a butcher flinches when the cut’s violent enough.
But he? He’d have to feel something first. And based on the tales I’d heard, I doubted there was anything left in him to feel.
He wouldn’t be able to pause at the hollowed cheeks.
Or wince at the vacant stares or the blood-crusted mouths.
He wouldn’t be able to experience grief for the silence that pressed against your ribs like it was trying to get in.
The Silent Way wasn’t just the rim of Amyklai …
it was the kingdom’s spine now. A monument to abandonment.
The bones of our people, picked clean and left behind.
It breathed. It swallowed. It grew. And the longer it was ignored, the deeper it sank its fingers into the soil, throttling everything we were supposed to be.
It clung to your skin, your tongue, your dreams.
I guess Menelaus ruled it like he ruled the rest of Sparta … by pretending it wasn’t there.
“Cover your mouth,” my mother snapped, her voice cracking through the cold like ice splintering beneath a foot. I jerked, startled more by the sound than the words—hoarse and stilted from disuse, as if speaking cost her something.
“Helena!”
My hands flew up, yanking my linen handkerchief over my mouth and nose just as we rolled past a mound of bodies piled like broken offerings. The red mist was still thick around them, curling dense and unhurried, like breath just exhaled. It hadn’t scattered yet. That only meant one thing.
The Dread had struck … recently.
Someone had died here. Maybe an hour ago. Maybe ten minutes.
The mist shimmered in the sunlight like it had a pulse. Gorgeous. Seductive. The kind of beauty that made my gut churn.
There was no defense against the Dread. No cure. No warning. But people tried anyway … veils, charms, whispered prayers to Menelaus stitched into their sleeves. Like cloth and hope could stand against a curse that killed without reason.
We all knew better.
We just couldn’t help ourselves.