Chapter 9
A flash of crimson darted into view—
A servant nearly collided with us as she rounded the corner, linen robes swishing around her ankles. She was young, no older than me, with a braid coiled tight against her scalp and sweat beading along her brow. “Is this her?” she demanded of the soldier. “The one who’s missing.”
The soldier gave a single curt nod.
“You’re late,” the servant snapped. Her dark eyes swept over me and my mother, before jerking toward the narrow side corridor behind her. “This way. Now.” She didn’t wait for acknowledgment, turning on her heel and moving away as the gold thread at her collar winked back at us.
My mother’s voice was edged with strain. “Is there a room where my daughter can freshen up?”
“There’s no time. She must come now.”
I barely had a second to register the words before another servant appeared, slipping out of a chamber ahead, a silver tray balanced on her arms. Folded silk glowed on its surface—veils and sashes in pale, delicate hues.
“Give me that,” the first woman scowled, snatching one of the veils without breaking stride. She thrust it into my hands, her movements urgent. “Put this on.”
My fingers fumbled with the fabric even though it was nearly weightless. “Now,” she said again, already turning.
Flustered and half-blind with confusion, I draped it over my head and shoulders, tucking the ends beneath my chin with hands that didn’t feel like mine.
Shapes blurred but didn’t vanish, the light dimmed but visible, and the hallway stretched ahead like a softened painting.
I could still see, but everything felt somehow removed, like I’d stepped behind a curtain between myself and the world.
My mother reached toward me as if to help, but the servant turned and blocked her with a firm shake of her head. “There’s a chamber down the hall,” she all but growled. “Freshen yourself up before joining the other guests.”
The servant’s hand closed around my arm and the corridor spun around me as she pulled me forward. My mother’s voice called something frantic behind me—my name, I think—but a door was already swinging open, and then I was pushed inside a room.
The door thudded shut in my face, and I flinched, heart lurching, as I took a stumbling step back. The golden glow of oil lamps wavered against the walls, catching on polished marble and gilded trim. Warm air pressed against my skin, thick with the perfume of incense and crushed flowers.
I slowly turned around, my eyes widening.
The hush in the room wasn’t silence … it was the sound of every head turning toward me. Dozens of girls. All veiled.
A cold realization pooled in my gut. These were my rivals.
They stood like ghosts in the lamplight, arranged in clusters or poised alone, hands folded, backs straight. Their dresses gleamed white and untouched, veils cascading over perfect shoulders, threaded with ivory, pearls, faint embroidery. They looked like offerings.
I … looked like a mistake someone would be blamed for.
My dress was wrinkled and dust-stained, my hem was torn … my hair must’ve looked like it had been dragged behind a cart.
A servant swept forward with a snap of linen skirts. Her fingers pinched the fabric of my dirty cloak as though she didn’t want to touch it at all, and with a jerk she yanked it from my shoulders, nearly pulling me off-balance. “Join the others. Quickly.”
I stepped forward, slow and unsure, the veil casting the room in blurred gold. Behind the silk, faces were featureless. Their whispers though, were not.
“Who is that?”
“Look at her dress …”
“Did she fall in a ditch?”
“… one of the village girls, maybe?”
And then another voice.
“She doesn’t have a chance.”
I pretended not to hear them.
But beneath the veil, my jaw clenched. Of course they’d talk. It was all they knew to do, chatter behind linen and silk, tossing their little barbs from the safety of shadow. Let them.
Still, irritation itched under my skin. I hadn’t been given even a moment to fix my hair or smooth the sweat-slicked edges of my face. The state of me wasn’t a crisis—I wasn’t some washed-out thing who needed perfect linens to shine—but gods, I should’ve been clean. Composed. Prepared.
Instead, I stood among them like something dragged ashore after a wreck.
And why were we wearing these veils in the first place?
A far door groaned open behind us, and a hush wavered through the room. Every veil tilted toward the sound.
A woman stood in the doorway. Her ivory and gold robes swept across the stone floor in layers so delicate they shimmered with every step. Not a speck marred their perfection, as if even the cursed earth itself dared not touch her.
The woman’s skin was darkly toned and radiant, like polished onyx kissed by firelight.
Coiled braids crowned her head, each twist meticulously pinned with amber beads.
Her face was smooth as marble, unlined and expressionless, though her gaze hit like heat from a forge, searing and relentless as she surveyed us all.
Beside me, a girl flinched hard enough to rustle her veil. Another gasped, the sound cut off as she dropped her head in a sudden bow. The one in front of me collapsed to her knees like the woman’s appearance was more than she could take.
“High Priestess,” someone breathed—part prayer, part warning.
My stomach lurched.
High Priestess.
She was the High Priestess Dione. She’d once been the keeper of Apollo’s temple, and now she bent her knee to Menelaus as the guardian of his altar and the mouthpiece of his divinity.
She’d never set foot in my village, of course. But her name still traveled. In warnings. In half-whispered prayers. The kind of stories that made you sit a little straighter … be a little more careful about what god’s name you were invoking.
And now here she was, no longer a tale but something real and fierce and standing right in front of me.
She stopped a few steps from where we were gathered, arms held slightly out at her sides, palms open and facing forward. I recognized the posture from a temple rite, though I couldn’t recall what it meant.
Her eyes closed. Silence followed like a command.
It stretched … suffocating, thick enough to strangle.
I could hear hearts pounding—mine, theirs, all of ours thudding in a syncopated drumbeat of fear and awe.
The priestess tilted her head back, chin lifting toward the ceiling like she was listening for some divine signal.
A prayer. Or the thing that answered prayers.
Her eyes opened, dark and depthless, and her gaze slashed across the room, raking over each of us with such ruthless precision I nearly stepped back.
They landed on me, on the crusted mud smeared down my dress …
and her nostrils flared, just once, as if the stench of the road offended her. “Present yourselves.”
Her voice wasn’t loud, but it didn’t need to be. It rang with command.
“The age of the old gods has ended,” she said dramatically. “Sparta kneels now to the divine made flesh—our king, Menelaus, lord of thunder and flame. Through me, his will is spoken today.”
A shiver passed through the line like wind through reeds. The girl beside me sucked in a breath. Someone at the front let out a quiet whimper and quickly smothered it. A few dropped their heads in reverence … or fear.
But I—I almost laughed.
Divine made flesh? As if Menelaus hadn’t crowned himself with the ashes of Olympus and called it holiness.
My eyes narrowed as I stared at her. I wondered if she truly believed what she was saying, if she’d convinced herself that mortal breath could carry divinity … or if, somewhere deep beneath the sanctimony, she still mourned the sun god who had once claimed her altar.
Did she really believe Menelaus was a god? Or did she simply know where power now stood and chose to kneel beside it?
“The will of our king is clear. He shall not rule alone. His power demands an equal.” Her pause lingered. “Sparta must have its queen.”
Queen.
The word echoed, louder than the priestess’s voice, louder than the girls shifting nervously beside me. I didn’t care if it was true—something divine or some carefully staged spectacle. Let them believe in omens and divine will.
I believed in power.
Sparta would have its queen.
Me.
“Three Trials will be held to ensure that Sparta’s new queen is worthy.”
My breath caught, just for a second. Worthy. The word thudded through me.
I pictured the little girl with hollow cheeks who’d laid a tribute at our gates just yesterday. The mothers who wept over their dead beneath a sky that had forgotten how to rain—unless it came in a cruel deluge that washed away everything we’d scraped together.
Thalessa’s defiance as she struggled to stay upright, bloody rivulets pouring from her mouth.
I could be worthy. I was worthy. I would prove it—no matter what it took. I had to.
“Menelaus will ordain her. Sparta will crown her.” The High Priestess raised her arms, fingers splayed toward the heavens in a fluid, reverent motion. A hush fell again, deeper this time. The girls around me shifted, some shaking, some blinking back tears most likely, all of them spellbound.
But not me.
I didn’t need omens or flame to tell me what I already knew.
My jaw tightened. My spine straightened. And I closed my eyes, envisioning myself walking toward a throne.
“Your training and the Trials,” the High Priestess said, her voice ringing clear as an oracle’s cry, “will begin on the morrow. But tonight, I will choose who is worthy to face them.”
My eyes flew open.
Choose?
Was that what she’d just said?
I blinked, my pulse thudding in my throat. Around me, a few of the other girls shifted—barely perceptible movements, but enough. A braced spine. A caught inhale. They hadn’t been expecting this either.
It was one thing to fight … to earn my place with grit and will. That, I understood. That, I was ready for. But I’d never heard anything about a choosing. About being sifted through before the Trials even began.
I searched her face, a hot rush of fear crawling up my neck. How would she do it? What would she see? My dried mud? My posture? My bloodline?
For gods’ sake, she couldn’t even see my face. We were wearing these infernal veils.
My hands curled into fists at my sides.
I couldn’t go back.
Not to the cracked, red dust roads of a starving village. Not to the children with hollow cheeks and mothers who’d buried too much.
Not to Nikandros.
If I wasn’t chosen …
If I failed here …
Then I hadn’t just failed myself.
I’d failed them all.