Chapter 26
The doors opened with a loud grating sound as the guards ushered us into an enormous atrium.
We hadn’t been to this area of the palace before, and as I stepped inside, my gaze swept over the room in wonder.
Decadence clung to every surface. One gold vase alone could feed my village for years—maybe longer.
The room yawned wide and cold, its domed ceiling swallowed in shadow.
Marble columns loomed along the edges, each etched with stone-carved effigies of Menelaus, whose eyes seemed to follow us, accusatory and unblinking.
Low-burning torches lined the walls, their flames casting restless gold over obsidian tiles that mirrored our forms as we stepped forward.
Above us, voices chanted in a haunting harmony, the sound leaking through the cracks like the walls themselves had learned how to sing.
“You should say your prayers,” Chloé murmured under her veil, her smug voice carrying just enough to reach me. “I already know I’m going to win. My visit to the king’s chambers last night ensured that.”
I blinked.
Her … visit to the king’s chambers?
Beside me, Anysa stiffened, her hands curling into tight fists at her sides.
“Are you sure that secured you anything?” Anysa whispered back, her voice deceptively sweet.
“Considering we were all sworn to arrive untouched, I’d think bragging about spreading your legs would get you tossed from the Trials, not crowned.
There’s also the fact that he now knows your kysthos dries out faster than fish left on a rock. He’s not going to want it again.”
Chloé jerked toward her, veil trembling with fury. “Whore,” she spat furiously. “You’ll choke on your own tongue before this Trial is done.”
“Whore. What an interesting choice of words,” Anysa said.
I ignored them both and glanced to the far end of the atrium, where the king waited atop a raised dais.
Menelaus wore a jagged crown of gold today, the peaks like fangs, and a smile that curled like it knew something.
Even at the last Trial, this still seemed like it was nothing but theater to him.
A spectacle instead of the key to the woman who would be by his side.
His eyes gleamed with satisfaction as his advisors flanked him, robed in crimson, bristling with expectation, their gazes sharp and searching.
Had Chloé bought herself an edge? How much did a woman’s kysthos mean to the king when that was what we were all offering him at the end of this?
Before I could dwell on it, movement near the throne pulled my attention. Achilles was walking toward the king, spine straight, his steps sure and unhurried.
My breath faltered for an instant as I watched him hand Menelaus a wax tablet. Menelaus frowned at whatever was on it. He nodded and handed it back to Achilles, exchanging a few quiet words before Achilles moved toward the wall behind the king.
Achilles looked devastating. Beautiful in a way that made it hurt to look too long. Like something formed by the gods, all golden skin and broad shoulders, his jaw set with a quiet fury.
For a single heartbeat, I thought he might look at me again. Really look. The way he had in the dark, like I was the only thing that mattered.
But his gaze slid past me … completely indifferent. As if I were nothing at all.
The ache came fast and biting, landing in my chest like something had cracked. I felt it all. My stomach twisting, my eyes blinking too fast against the sting.
He was right not to look. It was what I had chosen. And still, I felt sick with it. Like some final, invisible thread had snapped.
I forced my chin higher, my steps steady as I crossed the atrium floor, but inside, I was splintering.
If I were to stay at the palace … if I were to win …
was this always how it would be? Always walking past him like he was nothing.
Always pretending I didn’t feel the pull in my chest. Always swallowing words I had no right to say.
Was this what becoming queen meant? A future forged from silence and restraint, while the man who made my pulse misbehave stood only a breath out of reach? Or would it finally fade if we stayed away from each other long enough?
The High Priestess emerged from the shadows behind the king. The white robe she wore today was harsher than the other days, rigid, like armor sewn from sanctity. Golden bands encircled her wrists and throat, and ivory feathers crowned her headdress. She stopped a step behind the king.
The chanting abruptly cut off as Menelaus slowly rose.
The crimson folds of his robe cascaded from his chair like blood spilling down stone. He stepped forward until he stood at the edge of the dais, the platform placing him above the rest of us by design, by declaration. By inevitability.
He didn’t rush. He let the silence gather, let every eye find him, let the hall remember who it belonged to.
“Sparta has been remade,” he said at last.
His voice carried effortlessly, filling the space, pressing against skin and bone alike.
It bore the certainty of someone who believed the world had changed because he had willed it so.
“We cast out the gods who chained us. We drove their fickle shadows from our land. We chose strength over supplication. Power over prayer.”
I swallowed hard. He wasn’t even pretending our suffering was accidental. He was taking pride in it. Of course he was.
The king who drank rivers of wine while villages wilted. Of course he would call ruin a rebirth.
“You stand here because you endured the world I forged,” he said, letting his gaze slide over the line of candidates. “Because dust did not swallow you. Because despair did not claim you.”
His attention drifted over the veils … then seemed to stop on me. His mouth lifted in a knowing slant.
“Because beneath your beauty lies something far more valuable.” He paused, knowing the room was following his every word. “Fire. Will. Hunger.”
Whether he meant it for me or not, the words hit as if he had spoken them into my ear.
“This Trial is the last. And it will be the hardest. For only one of you will rise. Only one of you will wear the crown beside me. Only one of you will usher in the golden age of Sparta. The rest”—his lip curled—“will return to their homes with nothing but ashes in their mouths.”
My breath burned in my chest.
He lifted his goblet then, the metal catching the firelight as he raised it high. “To the gods we drove out,” he said, teeth glinting. “May they never dare return.”
When he lowered the cup, something in him … shifted. The torchlight caught his eyes strangely, and a cold fear crawled up my spine. For one stunned moment, they weren’t a man’s eyes at all.
A strange gleam lived there, an unnatural shine that prickled across my skin and raised every hair along my arms. It was the kind of wrong that didn’t shout. It whispered. It crept. It knew.
And it called back, unbidden, to what Achilles had called the king one night, something I’d never gotten to ask about. Creature.
I felt it now, felt the truth humming beneath the surface of the king’s smile.
He had driven out the gods … and Sparta had no idea what had taken their place.
We stood in a silent line before a long stone table, its surface draped in crimson cloth. Before each of us sat a single gleaming chalice, ten in total, arranged in a perfect unbroken row.
They were identical. And they glinted like a threat.
The High Priestess moved to the front of the table, her robes rustling. She stopped just behind the row of cups, the gold bands around her throat flashing as she turned to face us. “Now you prove you deserve the crown,” she announced dramatically as she raised her staff in the air.
A wave of tension moved through the room.
“Most of the chalices in front of you are filled with wine, consecrated in the sacred fires of Menelaus’s altar.” She paused. “But two,” she said slowly, “hold poison.”
My heart lurched. All around me, I heard the flutter of veils shifting, the rustle of panic too restrained to be voiced aloud. I could feel Anysa trembling next to me.
“You will each choose a chalice,” the High Priestess said, her voice calm and serene like she hadn’t just announced we could be poisoned. “But you will not drink it.”
Confusion flickered through the line. What the gods did that mean?
“The woman beside you will choose what you drink.”
A shocked murmur tore down the row. Someone let out a whimper. Another girl hissed in disbelief. I caught the edge of a gasp in my own throat.
“The choice,” the High Priestess said, eyes sweeping over us, “is yours alone. You will not know what is in the chalice. You will have only your instinct. Your faith. And your will. Choose wisely. What you do in this trial not only determines your own fate … but holds the weight of another’s life.
” Her voice dropped. “A choice a queen would have to make.”
I turned my head, just enough to find Anysa through the gauze of our veils beside me.
Her fingers fluttered around her veil, shaking in panic.
Her body was tense, like she might bolt, like she couldn’t breathe beneath the weight of it all.
Her chest rose too fast, too shallow, and the veil quivered each time she exhaled.
She pressed her hands hard against her sides, as if trying to hold herself together.
I wanted to reach for her. To grip her hand, to calm her. But that too would be watched and then judged.
So I kept still, holding myself as tall as I could while my pulse hammered hard enough to bruise.
This had to be more theater though. A spectacle meant to shake us so the nobles in the room were entertained. The poison had to be symbolic. Maybe it would make us faint … but nothing more.
They wouldn’t really let one of us die.
Would they?
I flicked a glance toward the king. Menelaus was back on his throne, utterly unmoved. A girl in red fed him grapes, her fingers shaking as his tongue slid out to catch the juice dripping down her knuckles.