Chapter 5
Time didn’t pass so much as crawled, slow and disjointed, like a wounded creature dragging itself through the dust. The landscape outside never changed, just an endless stretch of dry red earth and desiccated brush, all of it the same shade of forgotten.
A terrain that scraped at your spirit, that made you wonder if you’d already died and this was the after.
I gripped the bench, trying not to bounce with each jolt of the wheels, but the motion kept rattling my brain loose, kept tearing open new doors in my mind about what was coming.
Would the king make us fight? Bleed in the sand like the old stories said? Would we be made to kneel? Strip? Burn?
The last queen’s Trials had started with a feast. Not for her—for the nobles.
The women had been made to serve them wine on their knees while the nobles laughed and made wagers on which girl would cry first. Then came the fasting.
No food. No water. No shade. Just sun and silence and eyes, waiting to see who collapsed.
After that, they’d thrown the remaining girls into the baths and sealed the doors.
Steam so thick it stripped your breath. One slipped on the slick tile and cracked her skull trying to claw her way out.
She didn’t win, obviously. But the girl who did?
She emerged swaying on blistered feet, lips cracked, a smile like war paint, and then she’d bowed low enough to kiss the floor.
She became queen.
That’s what it took.
I imagined worse for the Trials I’d endure.
Like a pit fight. Bare-skinned, bare-knuckled … teeth and nails and blood smeared across stone. Maybe they’d drag in beasts from the northern cliffs, their fangs yellow with hunger, and chain us up just close enough to feel the hot breath of death before it chose someone else.
Or perhaps it would all look polished. Silk-spun dresses and perfumed wrists, a careful choreography of grace and restraint. A trial that demanded smiles instead of strength, clever lies instead of courage, all while we were paraded before the king as he lounged on his throne.
I honestly wasn’t sure which of those would be worse.
I also wasn’t sure what it was all for. What did any of it prove? That a woman could bleed prettily? That she could choke without complaint? That she could smile while being measured, weighed, and then discarded?
Was that what made a queen?
I doubted it.
The journey was taking forever. Or maybe it just felt that way, each mile stretched thin by my building anxiousness, the wind rocking the okhèma as the storm I’d seen this morning finally reached us.
But finally, the trees began to change. I recognized them instantly, the thick, gnarled limbs of the Twisted Forest, rising like claws from the earth.
It encircled Menelaus’s Obsidian Citadel like a border, or a warning maybe.
I’d grown up watching that bleeding border from a distance.
Too far to touch, too cursed to approach.
We all knew the stories. How the trees never bloomed, never bent, never died.
How the forest had been caught in some divine punishment—trapped in the moment the gods abandoned us.
Their trunks bled the same sick red as our soil, bark curled and blackened like it had been burned and left to smolder forever.
The forest suddenly wasn’t a myth anymore as it loomed before us. We were about to drive straight into it.
The second we passed beneath the crooked canopy, the air changed and the wind from the storm abruptly disappeared. Before, the silence had felt distant … lazy, stretched thin by sun and dust. But this was different. This silence watched.
It coiled around the okhèma like a living thing, thick and suffocating, like the forest had lungs and was holding its breath. No wind. No birds. Not even the buzz of insects. Just the low, miserable groan of the wheels beneath us.
My hand braced against the window, fingers pressing hard to the glass as I peered out, needing to see what kind of place could kill sound itself.
The trees surged up around us like sentries … tall, leafless, and unwelcoming. Their limbs weren’t branches, they were arms bent in torment, crooked at unnatural angles, frozen mid-scream. Roots ruptured the ground in violent knots, like something beneath the soil was trying to claw its way out.
Light barely touched anything here. What little that made it through the canopy dripped down in cold streaks, pale and useless. The shadows didn’t stretch … they stalked, hugging the okhèma wheels, crawling up the sides like they were looking for a way in.
I didn’t flinch when a tree branch scraped against the glass, but my shoulders locked tight, every muscle on edge. It felt like they were crawling closer with each turn of the wheels—those twisted limbs and gnarled roots inching forward, testing the boundary between forest and flesh.
I studied them the way I’d been trained to study courtiers: cataloging weaknesses, memorizing patterns, pretending I wasn’t unsettled.
But the deeper we drove, the more certain I became …
something old lived here. Not just aged by time, but ancient in the truest way.
Age that remembered the blood spilled in its soil and the names of those who dared to spill it.
Something moved.
I caught it, just a flicker, by the base of a tree. It was gone before I could track it and my eyes narrowed.
It happened again. And again.
Always just out of reach, like the forest was playing a game it knew I’d lose. I pressed closer to the glass as I scanned the twisted trunks. Red dust curled through the air in little whorls, kicked up by something that wasn’t there. My pulse beat harder, not from fear but focus.
One thing was for sure … the forest wasn’t empty. And whatever was in here was very aware of us.
I glanced at my mother. Her eyes didn’t move. If she noticed the shadows slithering through the trees, she gave no sign. She stared ahead, looking not at the road or the forest, but at something only she could see. Something long gone and buried.
Time dragged, like honey poured over stone, stretching every moment into something unbearable. My thoughts wouldn’t stop circling. Thalessa’s tongue on the ground, my mother’s still silence, Calismae’s goodbye … the Trials that loomed ahead.
I folded my hands in my lap, locking each finger into place until they couldn’t move. My knuckles gleamed bone-pale, but I didn’t loosen them. My heart pounded against my ribs, too loud, too fast—but I didn’t let it show.
Calismae had taught me how to do that. Still your face, she’d said when I was eight and shaking too hard to speak because I’d seen someone drop dead in front of me.
If they don’t see fear, they can’t use it.
She’d pressed a cool hand to my cheek, made me meet her eyes, and forced me to sit in silence until I could breathe without trembling.
And then later, when we knew I would be competing to be queen: Royalty doesn’t panic, child. You pause.
So I paused. I erased the panic from my features and left only calm behind.
Dignity was mine. And no one—nothing—could take that from me.
The farther we traveled, the heavier the air became. Not with heat … that I could handle. This was something else, thick and wrong, like breathing through wet clay. A pressure that slipped past skin and settled deep against my soul.
My mother’s hands tightened around the hilt of the dagger at her waist. It was small and completely ceremonial. It would be useless against whatever watched us from the trees.
“We’ll be there in just a few hours,” she said, her voice too even, too light. She was trying to sound calm. For my sake or her own, I couldn’t tell.
I didn’t answer. Something sour twisted in my stomach. I turned to the window, needing the distraction and … the trees had changed again.
They bore leaves now, unlike the skeletal ones we’d passed for miles, but not red.
Not the way the rest of this cursed forest bled.
These were dead-looking instead. Matte and dry, the shade of old ash and crumbled stone, of tombs sealed shut and never mourned.
They drank the light. Devoured it. As if the sun had never touched them.
They didn’t move. Not even with the jergins’ passing. The branches should’ve rustled, but they held still. Watching. Waiting.
Helena.
A sound—thin and wet, like mud sucking at a sandal. My head whipped toward it.
“Did you hear that?” I murmured, glancing over to my mother.
She didn’t blink. Her gaze was locked straight ahead, her face unreadable.
Of course she hadn’t heard. Or she had … and she was pretending not to.
I leaned closer to the window. The glass was cold and smudged from my breath. I pressed my ear to it. There. Again.
Helena.
A whisper. A sigh. A breath of a name drawn out like mourning. My name. Over and over again.
Helena … Helena … Helena—
“Don’t listen!”
Mother’s voice crashed through the whispers, like stone cracking beneath a hammer. I flinched, jerking back from the window.
All the color had drained from her face. She was gripping the dagger tighter, white-knuckled and shaking.
“The Griefwillow,” she said, her voice barely more than a breath. “It feeds on it. Our grief.”
I froze.
Once, Sparta had thrived on magic. Not just in myth, but in the marrow of its people.
Calismae used to tell me stories from her childhood, about how seers read the wind like scrolls, pulling secrets from its currents.
How warriors struck their swords to the earth and lit them with sunfire, flames trailing like banners into war.
How healers could close a wound with nothing but a touch and a few whispered words, the flesh stitching itself whole like time rewinding.
But all of that died when Menelaus cast out the gods.