Chapter 8
We rode in silence, the jergins’ claws clicking against the stone and packed red earth, their movements smooth and steady as they pulled the okhèma forward. My mother sat across from me, eyes fixed—first on my face, then my hands, then back again. Watching. Measuring.
I met her gaze once. Just once. It held for a beat too long, and then she blinked and looked away, her shoulders drawing in.
I watched the stiffness return to her frame, the softness I’d glimpsed in the forest hardening once more like wax cooling into shape.
Her face emptied. Not cruel. Just … closed.
A door swinging shut. But every few minutes, when she thought I wouldn’t see, her eyes flicked toward me again—quick glances, as if confirming I was still there.
I stayed still, fingers curled around the warmth tucked beneath my cloak. The tiny creature nestled against my ribs didn’t move or make a sound, but I could feel its heartbeat, fast and fluttering. It wasn’t asleep. It was listening. Like me.
I didn’t realize how heavy the air had been until it wasn’t.
The pressure burst like a bubble, silent and sudden, as we passed the last red tree in the forest. One breath I was fine, and the next I was gasping, my palm flying to my temple as if I could catch whatever had just slipped loose inside me. A weight that had coiled around my skull was gone.
I felt lighter. Unmoored. My skin tingled, as if something invisible had been clinging to me and finally let go.
Under my cloak, the creature shifted. It didn’t make a sound, just pressed closer, tighter against my ribs. Like it felt the change too. I sat up straighter. The forest was behind us now, and that meant the palace would be just ahead.
My spine ached from the journey, but I forced my shoulders back, lifting my chin.
I smoothed a hand over my cloak, then down the front of my dress, flinching at the dried mud crusted all over it …
the tears along the hem. Calismae had spent all that time yesterday making me perfect …
and all of it had been undone by a single night in the woods.
I reached up, fingers threading through my hair. It was a tangled mess, knotted and wild, full of twigs and dried leaves I hadn’t noticed. I winced as my nails caught on something matted.
So much for the polished girl they’d dressed like a queen.
I blew out a breath, forcing the tension from my shoulders. Worrying wouldn’t clean the mud from my hem or untangle the knots in my hair. I’d win anyway—mud, blood, and all. Even if I looked like I’d just stepped off the battlefield.
My mother flinched, her body going rigid as she leaned toward the window. Her breath hitched. I turned, followed her gaze … and my own breath caught hard in my throat.
There it was.
Menelaus’s palace.
It cleaved the sky like a gash, jagged and brazen, built from stone scorched past color. Not just black … darker, deeper. The towers rose like claws, spires stabbing upward in defiance.
My whole life, I’d gazed at it from my bedroom window. Always on the horizon, constant as a star. But now, seeing it rear up from the earth like it meant to pierce the sky, I understood. Of course it was visible from the western sea. Of course, the stories said it could be seen from anywhere.
It was impossibly tall, almost unnatural in its defiance of the earth beneath it.
People also claimed the foundation had been laid over a battlefield so utterly ruined by slaughter that the stone itself was altered—the site of one of the last great battles between Menelaus and the gods.
They said what soaked into the earth that day was not mortal blood but something divine, and that its echo still lingered beneath the palace, leaching upward through the bedrock.
Not staining it, but stripping it of light, leaving the stone dense and starved, as if a buried heart still pulsed below, awake and waiting.
I used to scoff at those stories, call them fairy tales for frightened children. But up close, with the spires rising above me … I wasn’t so sure anymore.
Fairy tale or nightmare, it didn’t matter. My stomach twisted, fear coiling beneath my ribs—but I shoved it down, swallowed it whole. I had to survive this place. More than that … I had to make it mine.
My mother began tugging at her dress, trying to straighten the fabric.
She smoothed her skirt with quick, agitated sweeps, swiping at the dust streaking the folds and picking at the tear near her hip where thorns had snagged her during her search.
Her hands flew up to her braid, attempting to tame the stray wisps of hair fluttering like frayed threads in the breeze.
Her gaze flicked to me when she noticed me watching her, scanning my face, my clothes, taking in the mud-caked, torn dress, the bloodstained sleeve on my cloak, the tangled mess my hair had become.
She took a deep breath. “This isn’t ideal,” she muttered, more to herself than to me. Her fingers twitched like she wanted to fix it all but didn’t know where to start. “We’ll have to hope someone in the palace can make you presentable before the Trial ceremony begins.”
Her words were clipped, but underneath the irritation, I heard it—that edge of worry.
I straightened my spine even more. “It doesn’t matter.”
She looked at me again. I met her eyes.
“I’ll make it work,” I said. “No matter what I’m wearing.”
A beat passed. Then she gave a tight nod, the corner of her mouth barely twitching. “You have to,” she said, turning back to the window. “They’ll be sharpening their teeth already.”
The palace gates loomed ahead, banded in thick veins of gold that caught the rising sun and blazed like fire. Two armored guards stood on either side, spears angled just enough to make the message clear. Welcome. Try something, and die.
I shifted in my seat, biting down on my lip anxiously.
As the okhèma rolled forward, the gates creaked open. That gold … so much gold, it flared bright, almost blinding. It wasn’t just decoration. It was indulgence. A gleaming, deliberate show of wealth forged while the rest of us ate rationed grain and threw our dead out in the sun to rot.
The air on the other side felt heavy with the stench of power. The palace beyond was worse than the gates—gleaming columns, carved beasts, fountains spilling water like Menelaus’s power included pissing luxury.
All I could think was: How many mouths could’ve been fed with just one of those golden bands? How many lives saved?
It wasn’t grandeur. It was glittering cruelty.
The palace towered above everything, its dark clay walls rising from the ground like they’d grown from the earth itself. I’d always assumed the whole thing was obsidian, like its name.
I was wrong.
As we drew closer, the illusion peeled back. Beneath the shadowed facade, white stone gleamed through in places—terraces spilling out like ribs, curved walls jutting from the rock like vertebrae. Not polished. Not painted. Raw, exposed … the color of bone.
It unsettled me more than the dark stone surrounding it.
There was something hungry about it. Like the palace was wearing its bloodstained skin too proudly, while the truth of it, the pale, cold structure beneath, waited quietly to be seen.
Friezes adorned the outer walls—scenes of legends I half remembered from childhood lessons.
Titans rising from the sea. Monsters chained beneath the earth.
Heroes crowned in victory. But where I knew other faces should have been—Zeus, Heracles, the old kings of myth—there was only one.
The same face stamped into every coin, engraved into every statue, painted on every banner.
Menelaus.
Even the stories here had been rewritten to worship him.
The entrance was massive and gleaming, flanked by smooth white columns polished so bright they nearly burned the eye.
I blinked against the glare, only to catch sight of the workers crouched at the base, their bodies bent low over buckets and brushes, their shoulders hunched.
They scrubbed at the stone like they could wipe the land clean if they just tried hard enough.
Red dust suddenly swirled in from the east and drifted down like ash, coating everything in its path. It clung to the fresh polish and dulled the shine. The workers paused, just briefly, watching their labor vanish beneath the stain.
Not one of them said a word.
They dipped their brushes again, bent forward, and began to scrub. The exact same strokes. The exact same futility.
I couldn’t look away. Not from the workers, not from the brushes worn to frayed ends, not from the way their hands shook as they kept scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing.
The red always came back. But they kept at it anyway, like maybe this time they’d be shown mercy.
Maybe this time, the stain would stay gone.
It made something cold twist inside me.
The okhèma rolled toward the palace entrance, wheels crunching over red-dusted stone. I leaned forward, bracing my hand against the cracked window as I stared out.
A line of guards stood waiting, statues masquerading as men.
Their armor gleamed, sheened to a glassy shine that caught the light and threw it back in shards.
Firelight on bronze. Their helmets rose in harsh crests, some black as crows’ wings, others red like raw meat.
And on every shield—silver, striking, impossible to miss—was the sigil of the king: a thunderbolt split down the center, coiled by a serpent with its jaws open wide, devouring the lightning itself.
A symbol that once belonged to Zeus, now claimed and conquered by Menelaus.
The guards didn’t move as we passed. Their eyes were locked ahead like they weren’t seeing us at all—or worse, like they were. Like they saw everything and simply deemed it unworthy of reaction. Their silence crawled over my skin.
They reminded me of my mother, so still, so distant, so sharp-edged in her quiet that you knew something was about to break.
And this place?