Chapter 51 #2
He glanced at me, his expression tipping toward insolence. “Of course I healed her. I’m not some village crone with a scrap of willow bark and a hymn to Demeter.”
A scoff slipped out before I could stop it.
Gods, even now, after watching him do the impossible, he managed to grate against every nerve.
I folded my arms tight across my chest, as if I could barricade myself against the smugness in his smile …
and against the treacherous flicker of awe still twisting in my belly.
He slid the ring on his finger with an elegant flick. “Try to keep up, Your Majesty.”
A tic in my jaw jumped. “Try being humble for once.”
“I would,” he said, stretching like he was bored of the drama, “but I’ve found it makes things unbearably dull. Besides—why lie?”
My scowl only deepened, and his grin stretched wider as though my anger fed him.
He tipped his chin toward the bath. “Someone wanted you to die in that water, Helena. To melt from the inside out. If you’d sunk all the way in, you wouldn’t have made it long enough to scream.”
A chill stabbed over my skin, raising the fine hairs on my arms.
He tilted his head, mock thoughtfulness in his tone. “Don’t worry. I’d have mourned you deeply. A whole hour, perhaps two, if I was feeling generous.”
I narrowed my eyes. “And I would have figured out a way to haunt you.”
His eyes glimmered with amusement. “That would have been good. I sleep better with company.”
He rose, dusting his hands against his tunic as though brushing off crumbs. “Hopefully your husband returns from hunting soon so I can tell him about my brilliance. Build all that trust he’s so desperate for.” He snorted, as if the word itself were a joke.
I swallowed, uneasy as I always was about Menelaus’s hunt. The king had vanished into the woods every dawn this week—always hunting, always returning seemingly empty-handed. Would he find anything this time? And if he did … what kind of thing would it be?
Theron strolled toward the door, obviously not reading anything from my sudden silence. At the threshold he paused, half turned as his eyes caught mine.
“Don’t look so troubled, Your Majesty,” he said lightly.
My brow furrowed. “Troubled about what?”
His grin flashed, wicked and bright. “Of me being the only one here who could actually keep you alive.”
I frowned at the barb hidden in his words. My lips parted, ready to answer, but he was already gone, his laughter trailing after him, hovering in the corridor long after the door had shut him away.
The silence snapped back into place as everyone stared at the door. Alcmene broke it first, her trembling fingers softly stroking Lysa’s healed skin. “I can’t believe it,” she whispered, though her voice quavered.
We moved fast after that. Lysa was carried gently to my settee, her blistered hand swaddled in clean linen. The servants avoided the bath as though it might lash out and claim them too. They drained it, careful not to let a drop touch their skin.
Under Alcmene’s clipped orders, they scoured the stone, scrubbing with vinegar and sand until the last of the rose oil and venom was banished from the tub.
The air grew acrid with the sting of it, scraping my throat, but still I breathed it in …
anything was better than the reek of roses clinging to poison.
A scream split the eastern hall just as Alcmene had finished helping me dress. Then another. Then five more, rising like a chorus of terror through the stone.
Alcmene’s hands froze on the sash. Her gaze darted to mine, wide and unblinking. Slowly, her head shook, as if she could deny what her mind already knew. “The poison wasn’t in the tub,” she whispered in a breaking voice. “It’s in the water. All of it.”
My skin crawled with a cold panic. “Go,” I rasped. “Warn them. Tell them to shut off every basin, every cistern, every spring—”
But my mind spun faster than my tongue. Water was already scarce beyond these walls; Menelaus had hoarded most of it here, feeding fountains and baths while the villages thirsted. If the poison touched the palace system, it touched everything. The trickle they were given. The fields. The children.
Gods. It would mean ruin.
By the time I reached the courtyard, the screams had spilled into the open air.
Servants staggered from the halls, clutching scorched arms, blistered hands, their skin bubbling as though cursed by fire itself.
Children wailed, their cries cracking against my ears.
A nurse pitched forward in the colonnade, skirts hissing as steam rose from the soaked hem.
Guards shoved through the chaos, shouting orders no one obeyed.
And in the midst of it … was Theron.
His sleeves were shoved to his elbows, his ring flashing like a captured sun with every movement.
Where the rest of us stumbled, he prowled.
Where others collapsed, he knelt. His voice cut through the din, calm and commanding.
Each time the ring touched blistered flesh, light burst outward, searing bright, and the screaming dulled, their breaths easing and their agony receding.
He moved without pause. Saving one, then the next, and the next.
I rushed forward to help, dropping to my knees beside a woman shaking so hard her teeth chattered. “Here,” I whispered, bracing her shoulders as Theron reached for her.
Only then did I truly look at him.
Exhaustion clung to his face and shadows pooled beneath his eyes. His movements were steady, but his hands were shaking, just enough that I could see the fraying edges of whatever power he’d been bleeding into these people.
He exhaled once unevenly … and then a shape slipped from his wrist.
It was a black snake, thicker than a man’s thumb and slick with shadow, and I watched in horror as it coiled up the length of his forearm.
Its scales gleamed like oiled obsidian, each one catching the light with an eerie, liquid shimmer.
As it lifted its head, two small violet eyes, unnervingly identical to Theron’s, blinked open and fixed on me for a moment before it wound itself higher, disappearing beneath his tunic in a languid glide that left my skin crawling.
I gasped, a hand flying to my throat.
Theron scoffed as energy surged back into him so suddenly it left the air humming. “Oh, relax,” he finally murmured, sounding and looking newly restored. “That’s just my familiar.”
He angled a brow at me, amused by my shock.
“Surely you’ve seen Menelaus’s? I imagine it’s not nearly as impressive as mine, but what can you do?”
I shook my head, still staring at the place where the snake had vanished beneath his robe. “Familiar,” I repeated, the word tasting strange on my tongue.
Theron’s eyes narrowed with interest. “All powerful beings have them,” he said, his tone almost lecturing, almost taunting. “They have to. Power needs balance, or it eats its wielder alive.” His lips curved faintly. “Even the gods had them.”
My pulse stuttered. “Menelaus has a … creature?”
Theron tilted his head, violet eyes intent. “You really haven’t seen anything?” he pressed. “Nothing clinging to him? Nothing shadowing him? Nothing at his heel or shoulder? Nothing that looked … alive?”
I shook my head again, trying to think. “His lion, maybe?”
Theron scoffed softly, a sound full of disdain. “That?” he said. “No. It’s just an oversized pet. Loud, hungry, and entirely ordinary. You wouldn’t mistake Mene laus’s counterweight for something that purrs at his feet.”
I thought of the red smoke, the way his eyes would change. What was it that I’d seen? And what did it mean that I had never seen a creature at his side?
“Interesting,” Theron murmured after a moment, his gaze fixed on my face as if he were beginning to unravel a puzzle, thread by thread.
Before he could say more, a scream tore across the courtyard.
Theron moved instantly, up on his feet in one fluid motion, seeming to be completely renewed as he strode toward the sound.
A second later his ring flared. I watched him for a moment, frozen amid the chaos.
Gods, if only I had more answers. If only I knew what he truly was—and what Menelaus was not.
But another person cried out, trembling and burning, and I forced myself to move. I shoved the questions down, swallowed the fear, and returned to the work in front of me.
By dusk the garden had transformed into a ward of the broken and healing. Cots and pallets littered the paths, the air rank with the stench of charred flesh and bitter herbs.
Theron moved as if the day had only just begun.
He crossed from cot to cot in a steady rhythm.
He didn’t pause. Didn’t stumble. His breath never hitched, his hands never shook.
Even when sweat slid down his temple, he brushed it away with the back of his wrist and kept going, lips murmuring those same strange words that throbbed through the air like a pulse.
His familiar must have been doing his job, because it was as though the endless cries, the endless suffering, only fed him instead of draining him. Where the rest of us sagged and stumbled, he stood unshaken, his eyes gleaming with energy.
The sun had already sunk low, staining the palace in bruised light, when the thunder of hooves shook the ground. I turned as the gates flew wide and soldiers poured in, their horses lathered, eyes rolling. At their head rode Achilles, his face locked tight, unreadable as a mask.
He reined in sharply, gaping as his gaze swept the courtyard littered with bodies. His men faltered behind him, stunned into silence.
Achilles swung down from his horse before it had fully stopped, his sandals hitting the flagstones with a jolt. He shouldered through the crowd, searching, until his eyes found me. His whole body stilled, the frantic edge breaking, relief flaring raw across his face as his gaze devoured me.