Chapter 25
The final Trial was tomorrow.
The thought worked its way beneath my skin, restless and growing, tightening its hold with each passing hour.
Ten of us remained, ten women draped in silks, balanced atop sandals that blistered our feet, trained for yet another week in how to sit, speak, bow, kneel. How to smile just enough but not too much. How to be the kind of woman a god might want on his arm.
Ten women … who couldn’t afford to lose.
I hadn’t spoken to Achilles since that night in the garden. But I’d seen him.
Briefly. Cruelly.
A glimpse of his back disappearing into a corridor. The tilt of his head in the training yard, too far to reach. Flanked by his soldiers, unreadable and untouchable.
He never came near me. Not once.
But his eyes … his eyes still found me. Swift and staggering, like a memory I hadn’t meant to keep.
I rolled onto my back, sleepless and restless, eyes fixed on the sliver of moonlight slicing across the stone floor. The quiet pressed in too tightly. Roz was late tonight. For the first time, the little creature hadn’t been waiting for me to come to my room. Even it had vanished.
A soft knock suddenly tapped the stone across the room.
“Psst!”
My lips twitched into a relieved smile before I could stop them. I pushed myself upright, heart lifting for the first time all night. “Took you long enough,” I whispered, already crawling toward the hole in the stone. “I was starting to think you’d taken a vow of silence.”
“Your life would be far too tragic without my commentary. I could never be that cruel to you.” Anysa’s voice carried through the hole, smug and bright as ever.
“I would have graced you with my presence earlier, but I was trying to decipher a letter from my mother. Took me three reads to figure out she wasn’t saying my brother had married a goat. ”
I leaned closer, amused already. “What was she saying?”
“That they had to eat my pet goat.”
I froze. Then burst out laughing. “They ate your pet?”
“You sound so scandalized, Helena,” she said dryly. “We’ve got no food. The crops failed. The well dried up. She’d stopped producing milk. It was only a matter of time.”
That was true.
“She was old anyway,” Anysa added. “Practically suicidal. She used to try and jump off cliffs all the time.”
“Sounds like it was her time to go,” I said, my lips still curled in a grin she couldn’t see.
“It’s a hard loss though because I told her everything. My goat was especially good at interpreting my dreams.”
“That’s one of the stranger things you’ve said.”
“She would also chew on my sandal straps while I cried about village boys. Very helpful.”
I pressed my palm to the wall, still smiling. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks. She’d appreciate the respect. But really, I think my mother was just trying to soften the blow of saying we were out of goats and out of luck, but at least someone in the family had a chance to be important now.”
“That’s what she said?”
“Not exactly. Her actual phrasing was, ‘If you lose, come home quick, because your cousin’s having twins and we’ll need extra hands—but if you win …’”
Her voice wavered, just for a breath. “She said, ‘if you win, know we already thought you hung the stars. We couldn’t be prouder.’”
She sighed, and I could picture the shine in her eyes as she tried not to cry.
“From my mother?” she added softly. “That was … everything.”
I bit into my palm, trying to quell the sudden ache digging into my skin as I thought of the letter I’d read today. The one from my mother.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m just picturing your goat in a stewpot,” I said half-heartedly.
“Don’t weaponize Fenya against me. Tell me why you sound so sad.”
I sighed and leaned back against the wall. “I also got a letter from my mother today.”
“Oh,” she said, knowing from my tone it hadn’t carried good news.
I swallowed, but it did nothing to loosen the knot in my throat. “One of our servants, Filippos, is dead.”
“What happened?”
“The Dread,” I murmured. “It passed over the village again. He was out in the fields. They found him slumped in the dirt, blood pouring from his nose, his ears, his eyes.” It was hard to breathe as I remembered how nervous he’d been in the forest … how young he’d been.
“I’m sorry, Helena.” Her voice was thick with genuine regret.
“Just another reminder how much is riding on this last Trial. How much they are depending on us,” I whispered.
You must win. Even if it breaks you, Helena. You must. My mother’s scrawled plea reverberated through my head.
“Yes,” Anysa said, her voice fading off in her own heavy thoughts.
“Do you think we’ll know before the sun sets who will be queen?” she asked after a moment.
I pressed my forehead against the stone. “I hope so.”
“I keep wondering if I’ll feel different. If I’ll wake up tomorrow and something in me will say: This is it. This is your crown.”
I closed my eyes, my voice a whisper through the crack. “If that voice starts talking to you, ask it to yell at me next.”
Anysa exhaled a laugh. “So far, all mine says is don’t puke on the king.”
That almost got a smile out of me. “Mine’s suspiciously quiet at the moment.”
“If Chloé wins,” Anysa whispered, “I say we run.”
I shook my head, thinking what a disaster that would be if she won. For all of Sparta. After a month with her, it was clear there wasn’t a more selfish woman on the planet.
Earlier today she’d been bragging about the dresses she’d have made once she became queen … as if that was the most important outcome in all of this.
“Agreed.”
“We’ll take a ship. Steal a fishing boat. I don’t care. We sail until Sparta’s a myth.”
“To where?”
“Anywhere with wine and no her.”
That sounded heavenly. “And what do we do once we get there?”
“I charm the locals while you steal food for us.”
“I don’t know how to steal.”
“You’ll learn. We’ll carry matching marks and answer to false names. You’ll be Helena the Vicious, and I’ll be Anysa the Unbothered.”
“I’m not sure those are accurate names for us,” I mused.
“Well, Helena the Beauty is too obvious. These new names are hopeful names. We can grow into them.”
We both giggled, our laughter pressed thin through the wall like a secret. But it faded quickly. Because the truth lingered in the silence that followed.
One of us might win tomorrow. Or both of us could lose.
“Did you ever think about marrying the king?” Anysa asked. “Before you knew you needed to.”
I stared out the window as a cloud slid over the moon and the room darkened.
My fingers curled against the stone. “I think … like most girls … I used to think I would marry for love.” The yearning slipped into my voice before I could stop it.
And immediately, Achilles rose in my mind. His voice, his eyes, the way he looked at me as if he could peel back every layer I’d ever hidden behind. The memory hit too clearly.
I forced the thought away, shoving his face back into whatever corner of my heart it had no business occupying.
“We haven’t even gotten to know the king,” I muttered. “He’s seen us writhing on the floor, and I barely know the sound of his voice.”
Anysa snorted at that. “At least he’s handsome, I guess.” She sighed. “I used to think love was sneaking out behind the bakery with someone who smelled like hotchgotten and bad decisions.”
I tried to picture that. “Sounds romantic.”
“It was. Until he ran off with the butcher’s daughter, and I spent a week crying into a sack.”
I smiled, even as something stung beneath it.
“He looks at you like he’ll die without you.”
“The king?” I asked incredulously.
Anysa let out a soft huff. “You know who I’m talking about.”
Gods. Was she talking about Achilles? My breath stuttered. Heat shot up my spine. I opened my mouth to object—to deny, deflect, defuse it with a joke. But nothing came out. I closed it again, the protest collapsing before it could reach my lips.
“It could never be,” I finally whispered, feeling too exhausted to try to lie to her.
“Maybe,” she said. “But maybe it could. You know, if the queen thing doesn’t work out.”
That was worse. That was what made it so devastating. Achilles wasn’t anyone’s second best, or runner-up. But he also wasn’t my future if I wasn’t chosen by the king. Nikandros was.
There was no path where he was at the end waiting for me.
“It doesn’t matter whether he sees me or not.”
Anysa didn’t answer right away and I listened to the soft sound of her breath filtering through the hole in the wall, like she was weighing whether to press or let it lie.
Eventually, she said, with that maddeningly light tone she used when things were too heavy, “Sure. And it doesn’t matter if we win tomorrow either. ”
My answering laugh wasn’t real at all. “I mean it. You know it could never be. Women like us, we aren’t born for love. We’re born for duty.”
She didn’t have a response to that, and I stared at the ceiling, how a faint crack split the stone directly above me like a warning.
“My father once told me that becoming something new always costs something old,” she mused.
I let that settle in. “What if you like the old version of you better?”
“Then you fight like hell to keep her.”
I smiled, even if it trembled. “You’re wiser than you look.”
“Don’t let it get around. I have a reputation to uphold.”
“I’m glad it was you on the other side of this wall,” I said finally.
Anysa didn’t speak for a moment, and I thought maybe she’d fallen asleep. Then her voice came, thick with something suspiciously like tears. “Me too.”
We stayed there like that, breathing together, hearts beating in time on opposite sides of the stone. Two women suspended in the in-between … of night and morning, of friendship and whatever came next.
And when I finally drifted into sleep, it wasn’t with fear in my chest.
It was with Anysa’s quiet direction echoing in my mind.
Fight like hell to keep her.
I woke with a start. A scream lodged in my throat as my eyes flew open, and I saw Achilles leaning over me.