Chapter 26 #3
But my eyes … my eyes found Achilles. He was no longer still.
No longer carved from indifference. He looked …
terrified. His shoulders had gone rigid, discipline locking him into place as though he were bracing for a blow.
His eyes locked with mine like a tether pulled taut.
He shook his head once. Just once. But it was fierce and unmistakably urgent.
Don’t. The word wasn’t spoken, but I heard it anyway. Don’t do it. The world narrowed until there was nothing left but the throb of my pulse and the silent plea in his gaze.
But my limbs moved before my mind could catch up, reaching out to take the chalice from Phoebe’s fear-stricken hands. So this was what it felt like, I thought as I stared down into the cup. To look and not know if the liquid in front of me held life or death.
Iris’s goblet lay overturned nearby, its contents spread across the floor.
The liquid hadn’t hissed when it fell, so whatever verdict it had held, it most likely hadn’t been poison.
That had left only two chalices for Phoebe to choose from, and from the priestess’s earlier words, one of them held poison.
One of the two.
It was terrible odds.
I’d thought I’d meet this moment with cool defiance, or at least a trembling sort of courage.
But I hadn’t known what it would feel like, not at all.
There was a terrible intimacy to it. A silence that pressed in from all sides, so complete it felt like the walls were closing in. The weight of all the girls who had stood here before me hung in the air, faint traces of sweat and fear and prayers half swallowed. The chalice inched closer.
It was so small. Just a cup. A bit of metal and liquid. But it held the power to end everything I was, everything I might be, in a single breath.
My fingers twitched. My stomach clenched. And still I stared, wondering if this was how the others had felt: as if time had narrowed to a single, fragile moment.
I glanced at Phoebe as she held the outstretched cup, wondering if her insides held the same terror as mine did. Anysa’s frightened whisper slipped through the air, my name shuddering out of her as though wrenched from her lungs. “Helena …”
I couldn’t look at her. That was part of the horror of the Trial, right? That it demanded we trade each other’s fates like astragals in a gambler’s hand, tossed again and again with no promise of mercy. Every choice, every cup, carried the power to make us executioners. Or victims. Or both.
Chloé’s face burned behind my eyes, twisted in death with blood pooling beneath her nostrils. Her skin had already begun to lose its glow, a pallor creeping in where life had fled. I could still see her eyes, glazed and distant, staring at nothing. Staring at me.
My chest tightened. I could be her.
My mind offered the image without mercy … my body beside hers, slack and pale on the obsidian floor, tossed aside like an offering that failed to please.
Terror clawed up my spine, but it couldn’t drown the truth rising inside me with ruthless clarity.
This was what I’d been born to do.
My village rose up behind my eyes. Amyklai in drought and dust, its children thin-limbed and silent, their mouths rimmed in red. Filippos stumbling in the field, blood weeping from his ears. Thalessa being dragged away. My mother’s voice ringing clear: You must win, Helena.
Even if it ruins you.
I guessed this was what she’d meant.
I raised the chalice and lifted my veil just enough to drink.
Across the room, I locked eyes with Achilles’s devastated expression, wishing that he could see my face. That I could show him some sort of comfort in this moment.
Yanking my gaze away from his … I drank.
The liquid landed on my tongue heavy and stale, as if it had slept too long in a dark cellar.
My throat pulled tight, rejecting it on instinct.
Heat flared under my skin, and a wild burst of fear tore through me.
This was it, I thought. This was how I would die …
here, on the cold floor of this cursed room, with a stranger’s choice poisoning my gut like a snake.
A startled breath wrenched itself from my lungs, the next one tumbling after it, both dragging through me as if my body were waking from a long, violent dream.
My pulse was a hammer in my ears, but still it beat.
Still, I stood. There were no burning spasms ripping through my veins, no fire climbing my limbs to claim me.
There was only breath, shaky and defiant, and the stunned, trembling understanding that I had survived.
Thank the gods.
The chamber seemed to exhale as one, like it had been holding its breath with me. Relief. Disappointment. Awe. I wasn’t sure which flavor lingered thickest in the air and where they were coming from … but I tasted them all.
I dared a glance at Achilles.
He hadn’t moved. But his eyes … he looked like he might fall to his knees, like breath had been torn from his lungs and shoved back in all at once. The sheer relief in his gaze rattled something deep inside me, something I didn’t have time to name.
Because a deep realization had just settled inside me. Since my cup hadn’t held poison … that meant the last chalice … did.
Anysa’s certain death was on the table in front of me. If she chose not to drink, her family would lose what little they had. Menelaus had arranged it so she was condemned either way.
There was a solemnity filling the room as everyone seemed to come to the same conclusion at once.
The priestess turned her head toward me. “Pick up the chalice,” she ordered calmly, as if she wasn’t ensuring Anysa’s death.
I glanced at Anysa, the blood draining from my face.
She was trying to look so brave. Muttering something beneath her breath.
Probably to Artemis, the goddess she always claimed she wished would watch over her.
Or maybe to her own stomach, which she used to joke growled like a war drum whenever she was nervous.
That morning, she’d made some ridiculous quip about dying with dignity someday—“Or at least,” she’d said, “with my chin up and my breath not smelling like lentils.”
But now her knuckles were white around her skirts. And I could see it, how close she was to crumbling before the poison even reached her lips.
I was frozen where I stood. She wasn’t just the girl whose room shared a wall with mine anymore. She was my friend. My first real friend.
And I was going to kill her.
“It’s okay,” she whispered to me, a crack running through her words. “Just do it.”
A tear slid down my cheek and bile filled my throat. “Bow out,” I whispered to her urgently. “You can’t win if you’re dead anyway!”
She jerked back. “It’s not for sure that it will kill me; I’d rather chance it,” she hissed. “I won’t let them down! At least if I die, they only lose me, not the little that they have!”
My jaw ached from how hard I was clenching my teeth. I would say she was stupid, but we both had that desperation inside us, the one that made you mad … that made you do things that defied logic. We both would do anything to save our people.
I took a deep breath, my fingers still hovering over the cup.
Anysa and I had fallen into step that first night, linked by nothing but proximity. But somehow, between fear and the shared scraps of words we’d given each other through the wall at night, we had become … something more.
She’d made me laugh when laughter felt impossible.
She’d loved figs at breakfast and whispered nonsense under her breath when Nomiki and the High Priestess weren’t watching.
She braided her hair and mine alike after dinner, her fingers nimble and calming, as if she could pull the anxiousness right out of my scalp.
She was a sister I hadn’t known I needed. And now, her life hung in my hand.
Air abandoned me, leaving my lungs stunned and empty. Tears were dripping onto Anysa’s chest, staining the fabric.
“Give me the cup,” she urged, her voice still shaking.
I finally gripped the chalice, feeling like something had overtaken my limbs. I didn’t want this power. Not over her. Not over anyone. This wasn’t what a queen should be. Queens were supposed to protect. To defend. And yet here I was … being forced to kill her.
I couldn’t do it.
Gods help me, I couldn’t.
I loved her. Not in the grand, epic way songs were written about, but in the real, human way that meant I would not trade her for a crown.
I’d thought there wasn’t a line I wouldn’t cross for my village. Evidently, I’d been wrong—I’d found it. I would gladly give up my life for Amyklai … but I wouldn’t give up hers.
No matter what it meant.
The priestess was watching me closely, a frown stretching at her mouth as I delayed. My time was up.
“No,” I said finally, releasing the chalice from my grasp.
The priestess’s head snapped toward me. “What did you say?”
I met her eyes. “No,” I repeated, my voice surprisingly steady.
Gasps tore through the chamber, a collective breath sucked from the room. Faces turned, murmurs stirred the air. Around the king, his court leaned forward, their lips gaping open like hungry fish. And beyond them, half shadowed by the towering columns, Achilles’s gaze was locked with mine.
His shoulders had dropped, just slightly, and a flicker of something soft and unguarded sparked in his eyes—hope, maybe, or something even more dangerous. He thought I was choosing him. That this act of rebellion, of impossible defiance, was for us.
I’m sorry, I thought again. That was all I seemed to be able to say to him of late.
“I will not choose another woman’s doom,” I said, my voice catching on the words even as the decision solidified inside me like cooling bronze.