Chapter 46
I woke to the sound of Alcmene humming.
The brightness of it needled against my skull. She flitted about my chamber like a sparrow, tugging open the curtains, scattering the shadows with an ease that made my teeth clench.
Sunlight spilled in, flooding the floor in a harsh sheen that bled across the walls.
“Up,” she sang, pointing to the tray of food at the foot of my bed. “You’ll miss the morning meal if you keep hiding under the covers.”
I shoved upright, rubbing grit from my eyes, though sleep had once again been a shallow, fractured thing. The sheets clung at my waist. Roz stirred at my pillow, its ribbon-tail flicking against my arm before it slunk into my lap. Its pale blue eyes blinked once, before it curled into itself again.
For the past week, the palace had been under lockdown. The gates sealed. Guards doubled. Even the courtyards were forbidden.
Evidently, one man dying of the Dread was something Menelaus could dismiss. A tragedy, yes, but survivable.
Thirteen though?
Thirteen was cause for alarm.
I had once let myself hope, foolishly, that if Menelaus chose me, I could bring him to my village. Show him the withered fields, where the bodies lay rotting around the outside of the walls. I had thought, perhaps, if he saw it with his own eyes, he would understand. He would care.
But the thirteen who had fallen here were not laid out with prayers or weeping. They were taken to the shore, their bodies heaped into a single boat, set aflame, and pushed into the waves. Burned not for honor, but to keep their smoke from staining the palace walls.
It was clear after this week that if he could not face his own dead, he would never lift a finger for mine.
What he would do, however … was hunt.
When he wasn’t closeted away with advisors, he slipped into the forests with a spear and a handful of soldiers, returning long after nightfall.
Each time I heard the guards speak of it, a new question gnawed at me.
What did he expect to find in those woods?
Why hunt now, of all times, when the Dread was back in the palace?
I couldn’t make sense of it. But a thread tugged at the back of my mind, thin and insistent. His hunting had begun the morning after the Dread had first reached our gates.
And now, as the death toll rose, he hunted again.
I had no answer for what connected them. Only the creeping certainty that something did.
It wasn’t as if I could ask him though. Menelaus had ordered I be locked in my rooms.
At first, I had done what I could for the grieving families who lived in the palace, their sorrow spilling into every corner. I sat with them, I offered words, bread, what little comfort was mine to give.
But Menelaus had put an end to that after a day.
Menelaus had been so consumed with his hunting and the Dread that he had also done nothing with Theron. The man had remained locked in the cells beneath the palace, neither freed nor condemned, simply left to languish while Menelaus decided whether to call him weapon, omen, or curse.
Roz twitched against my knees, its fur shimmering faintly in the light, as though it too sensed the weight of that truth.
Alcmene spun toward me, hands on her hips. “Why are you still in bed?”
I shoved hair from my face. “So I can be locked in my rooms for another day?”
She only rolled her eyes, still looking far too cheerful for the circumstances. “Not today. It’s Thesmophoria—and the king has declared it safe to celebrate!”
“What gave him that idea?” I asked, my voice edged with disbelief. With everything that had happened, I had lost track of time.
Alcmene raised an eyebrow. “We both know he does what he wants. And no one, not even the king, wants to miss out on the festival.”
Thesmophoria had once belonged to Demeter and Persephone—rites for the sacred harvest, for fertility, for blessing the land, and for ensuring future lineage. But under Menelaus, their names had been scrubbed away, shorn from the prayers and ceremonies until only what they represented lingered.
In Amyklai, it had always been a time of solemn joy where women carried offerings to the earth, praying that the soil would give back what it had taken.
I would have given anything to be there now, walking the fields I knew, kneeling beside the women who raised me, instead of standing in a palace that didn’t feel like mine.
Alcmene leaned on the bedpost, studying me. “You don’t look excited. You’ve been planning the festivities for weeks.”
“I have,” I said slowly. “But it hardly seems the time for such a celebration.” My throat tightened. “And even without all those deaths, how can we celebrate when our people have barely grain enough to eat? When the fields are barren and the Dread lingers like a shadow at every door?”
Roz’s tail curled tighter around my wrist, a strange comfort, as if the little creature agreed.
Alcmene studied me a moment, then softened. “Maybe a celebration is what the mourning need?”
I nodded, trying to think what was going right in Sparta. Every week, a letter still came from Amyklai. Neat lines of thanks, of how Menelaus’s wagons had arrived with sacks of grain or amphorae of oil, proof that he was keeping his word, at least in that way.
Other letters had begun arriving too, from other villages that Menelaus had allowed me to help. Help he hadn’t granted so much as failed to forbid, since I had never asked him first.
Letters from Ptelea, Kynosoura, even wind-scoured little towns along the foothills wrote to say the same thing: that supplies had reached them, that their children had eaten well for the first time in months.
One letter had even come from Anysa’s village.
I had to read it twice because the words kept blurring from my tears.
They’d thanked me for sending Anysa’s body back to them so they could give her a proper burial.
They’d thanked me for remembering them when the rest of Sparta would not.
They’d thanked me for caring about a place that had nothing left to offer but prayers.
There were still so many to help … there was still so much devastation and horror in Sparta, but the letters were small symbols of what could be celebrated. They were a start.
You’re risking all of that, a voice whispered. My fingers knotted into the sheets at that reminder, until the linen bit my palms. Roz nosed at my hand with a soft trill, as though warning me to loosen my grip.
I shoved the sheets aside and swung my legs over the edge of the bed.
The floor was cool beneath my feet, reminding me that the world went on whether I wanted to carry its weight or not.
Roz hopped lightly down after me, landing with a soft thump, its glowing eyes fixed on me like a shadow made alive.
Alcmene was already there, bustling with a tray of jars and fabrics. She pressed me onto the stool before the mirror, humming again as though she didn’t have a worry in the world. Roz leapt soundlessly onto the table’s edge, its ribbon-tail draping across the jars as if claiming them.
Her fingers moved deftly over my skin, brushing oil into the hollows of my throat and collarbones and smoothing my hair back from my face as though I were some effigy being polished for display.
I forced my voice steady. “I hope I remember everything today. It’s much different than how Amyklai celebrated.”
“There’s little to not get right. You’ll be seated beside the king during the opening invocation representing his blessing on the season,” she said, her tone matter-of-fact as she reached for the crimson gown.
“There will be feasting, dancing, and the Procession of the White Flame tonight, and you’ll walk in front of the others. ”
I stared at her in the mirror. “Yes,” I murmured, thinking of the other wives and highborn girls promised to Sparta’s nobles.
It was supposed to be symbolic—future bearers of the bloodline walking behind the king’s flame.
“I wonder if we’ll look like lambs trotting toward our butcher,” I mused, and Alcmene snorted.
Roz hissed faintly, ears twitching, and I soothed a hand over its fur. “I’m only jesting,” I murmured, and it squeaked in reply like it didn’t believe me.
I looked down at the gown she’d chosen, a gauzy, layered thing of crimson with draped gold chains at the shoulders and a waist that cinched tighter than any belt I’d ever worn.
“How symbolic,” I muttered.
Alcmene chuckled under her breath as she adjusted the neckline. “Just smile and walk like you believe in all of it. Lift the people’s spirits. That’s all they ask of you.”
She drew my hair back, binding the pale strands until they gleamed against the red silk.
Oil slicked my skin, catching the light, until I no longer looked like a woman at all but something fashioned for display …
an offering sculpted to please Menelaus.
Roz sat upright, watching me in the glass, its gaze unblinking and unsettling …
as if it saw beneath the oils and silk to the fear crouched in my chest.
I forced myself to look at the mirror, and there she was again: not Helena of Amyklai, not the girl who once knelt by cracked fields and prayed for rain. This figure was painted into something else entirely.
As I was reminded every day, soon I would become what the festival represented— the future bearer of the bloodline. A vessel for Menelaus’s heirs.
The sickness that flickered through me at the thought of his hands, his seed, his children—our children—nearly buckled my knees. Roz pressed its head against my arm, comforting me, though its pale eyes never softened.
“Chin up,” Alcmene murmured, her hands firm as she lifted my face from where I’d bowed it. Her dark eyes steadied mine in the glass. “Go be a queen.”