Chapter 26 #2
Lovely.
But it was Achilles who worried me most. He stood behind the throne, arms crossed, but the tension in his body betrayed him. His jaw was locked, brows drawn just slightly. A pulse beat high in his throat. He wasn’t relaxed. He wasn’t detached.
He was bracing.
The sight twisted something inside me. The air around him felt strained, pulled taut in a way I didn’t have a name for, and my stomach knotted as the silence between each breath stretched thin.
I didn’t know if it was dread or something worse …
but watching Achilles look uneasy made my own fear tighten into something cold and gnawing.
The king shifted. His eyes, dark and pitiless, glinted as he lifted a single hand, and the entire chamber stilled. “Begin,” he said.
The silence stretched as we waited. The High Priestess finally lifted her hand and pointed to the smallest woman at the end of the line.
Even beneath the veil, I recognized Damaris instantly.
Small, slight, almost birdlike in her movements.
She was a girl who seemed as though a strong wind might lift her clear off the ground.
Damaris was barely eighteen, the youngest of us, timid and soft-spoken, yet somehow she’d survived every Trial.
I remembered the way she’d told me, in a quiet moment days ago, how she’d learned to read by tracing words in the red ash on her family’s hearthstone. A shy, almost embarrassed confession.
She flinched when the priestess’s finger landed on her, freezing for a single stunned moment.
The priestess pursed her lips in displeasure, and that was enough to force Damaris to step forward to where the line of chalices waited for her, gleaming and identical, each one a sealed fate.
She hovered in front of them, eyes darting from cup to cup until she finally reached out and grabbed one. Liquid sloshed over the edge of the rim as she moved.
Damaris turned and handed her chalice to Naeri, who had been standing beside her in line.
Naeri was trying to stand tall, but her hands betrayed her, clenching and unclenching in a steady rhythm of panic.
She stiffened as Damaris stopped before her, her shoulders drawing back like a soldier bracing for a blow as Damaris lifted the cup.
Naeri’s trembling hands rose and curled around the chalice. Her grip tightened until her knuckles paled.
“Drink,” the High Priestess ordered.
Naeri’s throat bobbed with a single, visible swallow. She paused, caught in the razor-thin space between movement and paralysis, until slowly, she lifted her veil above her mouth and held the chalice to her lips as she took one measured sip.
The silence in the room swelled, spreading around us like fog creeping over still water as we watched her …
waiting. Her shoulders twitched, a quick tremor flicking through her frame, and for one terrible moment, I thought she might fall.
But then she exhaled, the breath slipping from her as though she’d only just remembered how.
She let out a sob that was half laugh and half wail.
“Gods,” she whispered as she staggered in relief.
A shift near the dais pulled my attention. Menelaus adjusted in his throne, a subtle movement, but his jaw had tightened and his fingers were drumming against the armrest in a quiet, clipped beat of displeasure.
I couldn’t tell whether it was because she’d dared to invoke the gods he’d driven out … or because she’d lived when he might have preferred the spectacle of her falling.
Naeri chose a chalice for Damaris, and then Penelope was summoned forward to drink a chalice that Calliope had chosen.
And with each round, fear mounted. It slid under my skin …
lodged there, refusing to leave. Five chalices had been chosen, and none of them had held poison.
The odds for Anysa and me were getting worse.
I glanced at the king and his court, wondering how they could continue to look so amused. I wondered how amused they’d be if a chalice was selected for them.
“Pick that one,” Chloé ordered Iris, who was choosing for her.
“That’s not allowed,” hissed Anysa.
Chloe scoffed and then turned toward the king. “It was never said that we couldn’t,” she said, and even without seeing her face I could picture her arrogance. My gaze darted between Chloé and the king. Had he told her which one was safe while she’d lain with him?
Iris reluctantly picked up the cup Chloé had pointed to and Chloé stepped forward and seized it from her with a flourish. She raised her hand in a small toast to the king. “This is the part where you all bow,” she taunted, her throat working once before she tipped the chalice back.
The liquid brushed her lips and …
She screamed.
The sound was fractured, shredding the silence. Her back arched violently, the chalice clattering from her grasp, spilling all over the floor as it rolled away. The liquid hissed faintly where it struck the stone, giving off an unmistakable sizzle, and then she crumpled.
Her limbs convulsed, her feet kicking against the stone as her veil slipped off, and her fingers clawed at her throat as if trying to rip the poison out. Her eyes flew wide, so wide they looked ready to split. Whites flooding over irises, foam gathering at the corners of her mouth.
Her desperate gaze found the king and held there, naked with a plea as if he might rise and save her.
But he did nothing. Menelaus only stared back, blank and unmoved.
A gurgled rasp burst from her chest, no real breath behind it. Just the final scream caught in the trap of her lungs. Blood trickled from her nostrils. Her jaw slackened and her gaze fixed blankly to the sky.
And then … she stilled, one leg bent unnaturally beneath her, one arm splayed. Her lips were already turning the gray-violet of death. A single curl had come loose from her veil, brushing against the tile like even it couldn’t believe this was real.
She wasn’t unconscious. She was gone.
The High Priestess knelt beside her, and for a moment, I thought she might pray.
Instead, she reached out and gently brushed Chloé’s hair from her slack face, the gesture so soft it made my stomach turn.
Her jaw was rigid, her face impossible to read …
but her eyes betrayed something else entirely.
Not grief or regret. Something darker. Like the weight of all the inevitability she’d accepted.
I stood frozen, horror rising up my throat like something trying to claw its way out. I hadn’t liked Chloé—gods, I’d despised her cruel tongue, her vicious smile, the way she treated every one of us like insects beneath her sandals. She’d been awful. Venomous. Unbearable.
But hatred wasn’t the same as wishing her dead.
And now she was lying there, not from a sword or a battlefield—but because she’d lifted a cup.
She’d just … drunk. And died. One wrong chalice. One wrong moment. One wrong woman.
My legs wobbled beneath me. Anysa reached out for my hand and I gripped it, no longer caring who was watching as icy terror spread through my veins and reality sank in.
This wasn’t spectacle or metaphor or any of the other comforting lies I’d let myself believe.
This was real. They were really going to let us die.
I looked to the king. Menelaus still wasn’t reacting. His jaw hadn’t tightened. There was no flicker of regret. He was watching it all with the same distant interest he might have given a game already decided.
Chloé had been a daughter of a favored member of the court … she’d slept with the king … and she’d still been allowed to fall.
If she meant nothing in the end, then none of us did.
Whimpers and sobs spread through the room, building like a fire too wild to contain. Panic bled through the remaining girls as we all watched Chloé’s body hauled away like livestock.
Iris’s voice cut through the chaos, thin and reedy.
“Apollo, protect us,” she whispered. Again.
And again. The same line, over and over, like a charm meant to ward off death.
Her fingers strangled the stem of the chalice that Phoebe had chosen for her, her whole body trembling as though she could shake herself free of the moment, free of the walls, the eyes on her, the fate closing in.
I wanted to scream at her, to shove her out of the trance, to snap her neck toward the truth. There is no one coming. The gods are gone. Menelaus has cursed us. Don’t you see?
“She told me to choose that cup. I didn’t mean for her to die,” Iris murmured brokenly as she stared at the liquid in her cup.
“No—no, I won’t do this!” Suddenly, she staggered backward so fast she nearly tripped over her own feet.
She dropped the chalice, liquid spilling out everywhere.
“I won’t die here! I won’t!” Her scream cracked through the room.
Her wide eyes were wet and gleaming with tears and terror.
“You can’t make me! I’m not drinking that—I won’t! ”
“Remove her,” Menelaus sneered, waving a dismissive hand. “And punish her village with her. Any woman foolish enough to beg Apollo for mercy deserves the ruin that follows.” His grin flashed sharp. “I chased that golden coward from Sparta. Did she really think he would answer?”
Iris’s wails grew louder at that, and I felt sick. Iris’s village had just been condemned to the life the rest of Sparta already knew far too well.
My eyes widened as a guard moved forward without hesitation, seizing Iris by the arm. She shrieked once, but didn’t resist as she was hauled from the room, her sobs trailing behind her like ribbons.
The priestess shook her head in disgust. “Phoebe, choose a chalice for Helena,” she ordered.
My name rang out like a bell tolling for the dead. I felt every gaze and all of that awful, eager anticipation shift toward me.