Chapter 11
Lyssa
This isn’t me. I don’t parade around in front of cheering crowds. I’m a smuggler, for fuck’s sake. I hide. I run.
I can’t do this.
Bile rises in my throat as my feet touch down on the marble, next to the giant. I can’t hear the crowd over the blood pounding in my ears.
“Enjoy this, Captain Lyssa.” Athena’s voice cuts through it. “You are one of their heroes.”
I seek the goddess’s face in the great stone throne across the platform, and I can instantly breathe easier. I take a step forward.
I think the crowd gets a little louder. I drag my eyes from Athena and make myself look around at the faces below me.
A lot of them are not looking at me—they are looking at the more impressive and famous captains beside me, or are still staring in awe at the gods in the opposite direction.
But more than half do have their attention on me.
I am no longer the girl who ran. I am no longer the girl who hides.
“Smile,” says Athena. “It will help your cause if they like you.”
I don’t want, or need, a single one of these people to like me to give this competition everything I’ve got.
But I do want them to hate Hercules. It wouldn’t hurt my chances to have the elite turn on him, would it?
Now that I’m here, I have to play the game. Athena is right. It will help my cause if they like me.
I force a smile onto my face, tentatively raising one hand.
“Well done,” says Athena.
I try to stop my grimace from taking over the fake smile, and wave for another few moments. It’s all I can manage, though, and it’s with a heaving sigh of relief that I take a step back into the shadow of the giant again.
Zeus stands up. “Let me make the rules clear. Each of the twelve gods of Olympus has devised a dangerous and difficult Trial in their own realm. The crew who has won the most of these events at the end of all twelve will be granted immortality.”
He pauses, and hundreds of wide-eyed, silent faces stare at him.
“Eternal life!” he roars with a laugh, throwing his arms up in the air. “What a prize!”
Excitement hums through the audience.
“And, of course, for a prize so unprecedented, we have had to make sure our Trials are impossible for all but the most special heroes.” He gestures at us. “Most of them will die.”
Antaeus twitches next to me.
“The captains shall all receive the same information at the same time, via flame dish,” Zeus continues.
“Only once a Trial has been won will the next be revealed. Heroes, tonight you will dine together, at a feast in my name. Tomorrow, the first Trial will be revealed. Feast now and enjoy what might be your last. If you survive, you will be celebrated. If you win, you will live forever!”
More applause erupts from the crowd.
Tomorrow? Fuck. That leaves barely any time at all to repair the damage we took just a few hours ago, and none to replace our broken longboat or stock up with supplies.
The other ships will already be well stocked, I’m sure.
The Alastor has enough food for maybe a week—less if I listen to my frustratingly loud instinct to keep Lucas on—and the best woodcrafter in the world would struggle to repair what is left of our longboat.
I swallow hard, my head and body aching with unspent power.
What I wouldn’t give to be back on the Alastor, channeling all this energy into the mast of my ship. I want to tear through endless skies, swirling, glittering clouds blasting past me, cool air fresh against the fierce heat of the Rage.
But freedom like that is no longer an option.
I have to be a part of this, no matter how dangerous it will be. I have to save Olympus from Hercules’s unending cruelty. The man who destroyed everything I loved.
A shiver ripples through me, and mercifully it’s the Rage, not the fear.
Athena has awoken the desire for revenge that I buried so deeply, and now I allow it to blossom, to unfurl, to work its way through my system. I absorb it fully, hatred and anger and almighty retribution mingling and merging with the blood and the magic in my veins.
His magic.
Can I kill him?
“Most of them will die.”
I replay Zeus’s words in my mind, and I could swear the king of the gods looks my way.
I turn my head, leaning forward to look down the row, past the giant.
Hercules is doing the same. Leaning out and looking at me.
He smiles, and the fury catches, ignites, surges through me like life itself.
I will kill him. I have to.
Hercules must die.