Chapter 31 #2
My hands curled into fists at my sides. The paint cracked across my knuckles.
Tradition. The word lodged in my throat like a shard of bone, jagged …
unmovable. My gaze drifted to the statue of Menelaus—no, not Menelaus.
It just had the king’s face. That statue had once been Apollo, the god whose place the king now claimed.
He loomed in shadow and firelight, formed from marble veined faintly with gold, taller than any living man.
His bow rested across his back, fingers poised as if he might draw an arrow at the slightest provocation.
His face was all serene beauty shaped around cold, effortless violence.
A god who could compose hymns with one hand and end bloodlines with the other.
And for a breath, I wondered … would Apollo have been any better?
Would any god?
A cold tingle slithered down my spine and the hall suddenly reeked of blood even though none had been spilled tonight. As Anysa knelt before him, her lips moving in a feverish prayer, I could have sworn the statue’s mouth curled. Not in cruelty. In appetite.
Anysa bowed so low her forehead touched the stone. Her shoulders trembled, her chest rising and falling in shallow, uneven gasps.
I took a step forward. My voice caught in my throat—then broke loose. “End this.”
Menelaus lifted his brows in surprise, like what I was suggesting was shocking.
I forced strength into my voice. “What you offered her was no choice at all. Her village is starving. The crops failed. The river’s drying up. She’s a young woman, not a warrior, not a priestess. If you offered them bread instead of death, they’d bow to you all the same.”
He didn’t respond so I pushed forward. “We can help them,” I said, my heart slamming against my ribs. “Without this. Without her.”
The words scraped out of me like blood from a wound. I could feel the room watching, weighing, waiting.
“This—this isn’t a sacrifice,” I added, quieter now, but still standing tall. “It’s a woman who thinks dying is the only way to save the people she loves.”
Anysa still hadn’t moved. She still knelt in front of the statue like she belonged there, like this was what she wanted. Offering herself up like a lamb in a borrowed ceremony that stank of power, not piety.
I stepped forward again, every instinct in me bracing for the king’s rebuke. “Please,” I said, locking eyes with Menelaus. “There’s still time to stop this. You don’t need these blood sacrifices like the old gods did. You’re better than them, more powerful!”
There was steel in my voice, but underneath it—desperation. Because this was my only chance.
I leaned in, my fingers brushing against Menelaus’s chest, letting my touch linger, trying to use my beauty to do what my voice could not. His breath hitched, just faintly, and he stared at me, his pupils dilating with lust.
For one second, I thought he might listen.
Menelaus’s gaze shifted though, cooling into something that held no warmth at all, something that was shaped like pity, but was thin and cutting as a blade. “I gave you the choice,” he said at last, his tone maddeningly calm. “During the Trial. I didn’t take it from you.”
He nodded toward Anysa’s shaking form, as if presenting evidence. “And I won’t take it from her either.”
The words hit like a physical blow, stealing the air from my lungs. I swayed where I stood, my nails biting half-moons into my palms.
He called this a choice.
He didn’t understand the choices women like us had.
None.
I shook my head, the motion small, helpless. “But you know why she’s doing this. Her village—”
“She is doing it,” he said firmly, as if that settled everything. “And you—” His voice curved slightly, the faintest trace of a smile at the edge of it. “You should be proud.”
He lifted his goblet. “It’s an honor, my beauty. Your friend will be remembered. She’ll be a hero.”
My lips parted, but no sound came out.
He turned away and lifted his hand, two fingers crooking in the air, so slight a motion, so unhurried, that it didn’t register as the beginning of the end.
The High Priestess’s voice rang out. “Bring forth the sacred hand.”
From the far edge of the hall, a man stepped forward.
White robes swept the marble, a single strip of crimson paint marking his shaved head from crown to nape like an unhealed wound.
Charms rattled at his throat—sun discs dulled with age, feathers, and small bones still tinted with what looked like the stain of old blood.
In his hands he bore a blade curved like the crescent moon, black iron with a tip kissed in gold, gleaming as if it already salivated for what it would taste.
The High Priestess lifted her chin toward the assembled court, her robes pooling around her feet.
“Before Menelaus, our god and king, we offer this gift. This woman gives herself freely so that this union will be blessed with fruitfulness, victory, and a golden age of peace.”
I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Blessed by whom? Him?
The idea that these people believed a sacrifice was needed so their king would bless his own union was absurd, so unlikely that it scraped against every instinct I had, every lesson I’d ever learned.
“Anysa,” I called again desperately, like my utterance of her name would do something. Her head turned as if it pained her, and her gaze found mine.
Gods.
Her eyes were wide and wet, nothing like they’d been yesterday, when she had sat in my chambers, laughing softly about the wedding and thanking me for saving her life. There was no laughter now. Just fear, pure and choking, as the man in white closed the distance, his blade gleaming menacingly.
I bit down on my tongue in panic, coppery blood filling my mouth. My mind tripped over itself, scrambling for words, for a way to stop this before it was too late. If I lunged now, if I screamed … if I threw myself between them—
“Then you would dishonor her,” Menelaus said. I glanced at him, not sure if I’d spoken out loud or if he’d just read my mind, but either way there was clear reproach … and warning in his voice.
Apparently, a queen’s life could only be offered once … and that right was already spent.
I turned back to where the High Priestess’s “sacred hand” had stopped in front of Anysa. He turned and gazed devoutly up at the dais. At us.
The firelight danced across his pale face, and when he smiled, it was the kind of smile that I imagined belonged in a battlefield. Exultant and wild and drenched in blood.
“Your Majesty,” he said, his voice calm, sonorous, and far too gentle for the blade he carried.
“All omens point to favor for this union. The sacrifice satisfies our ancestors.” His gaze slid to me, heavy and invasive, like something sick and crawling had been dropped down my spine.
“May your marriage be marked by strength, fire, and unquestioned obedience.”
I fought the urge to retch all over the floor.
“Proceed,” Menelaus said.
The word obedience rang in my ears like the snap of a collar. I stepped back, just a fraction, my fingers twitching at my sides as the sacred hand turned his attention back to Anysa’s shaking form.
I tried to move. I did. My legs tensed, but the king’s fingers clamped around my wrist, dragging me down into the throne beside him. My body hit the cushion hard, and I barely caught myself from falling.
“You will not disgrace this moment,” he said soothingly. “This is what is required. This is what she wants.”
I forced myself to look.
Anysa wasn’t crying anymore. I watched as she lifted her chin, not to the throne, not to the king, but to the statue above her bearing his face.
Her gaze locked on that sculpted likeness with a steady, unsettling defiance …
as if daring it to crack, to soften, to reveal even a flicker more mercy than the living man seated before her.
But as the sacred hand lifted his blade, I knew, deep in the marrow of me, that gods didn’t save women like us. We were not daughters worth plucking from the altar. We were pawns, set on the board by other hands, moved where it pleased them, sacrificed when the game demanded blood.
The blade climbed higher, catching the torchlight, bending it into a sickle-shaped gleam—a sliver of moon sharpened for slaughter. The torches themselves seemed to recoil, their flames shuddering in the thick air.
My lungs ached, my throat burned, my pulse battered at the base of my skull. The air closed in until it felt like I was drowning.
I opened my mouth, desperate to tear the hall apart with my voice, but all that slipped out was a sound too small, too human to stop anything. “Please.”
“For the God of Sparta,” the sacred hand said in a clear voice. “For the blessing of favor upon this sacred union.”
Anysa’s hands stayed pressed to the ground.
Something cracked inside me as the blade swept down in one practiced arc, catching the torchlight, then her throat.
The sound of her dying wasn’t loud. It didn’t end in a scream, or a final gasp, or anything monumental that might have marked her passing. She died with a wet, muted slice, small enough to be swallowed by the murmur of the crowd.
Anysa’s body slumped forward onto the marble, her white gown blooming red so fast it looked like it had caught fire from the inside out. A fan of crimson spread beneath her, bright and slick, seeping across the marble in an uneven creep.
The silence that followed wasn’t reverent … it was expectant. Watching. Like everyone in the hall was holding their breath, waiting to see if some sign of Sparta’s good fortune would appear.
None did.
Only Anysa’s blood, and it kept moving, pooling, reaching as if trying to finish the prayer her lips would never speak.