Chapter One
Darkness is coming.
The warning from the goddess echoed in my head as I climbed the temple stairs to rejoin my adelphia. I found them standing near the mass grave we had dug to bury our fellow priestesses and acolytes. The image of those women all lying dead on the temple grounds ...
It was not something I would ever forget.
“How do we go on?” Io asked sadly while sliding her hand into Suri’s. “What do we do now?”
After a few moments of heavy silence, Zalira lifted her chin and turned toward us. “We do what women have always done. We swallow down our pain, endure our heartache, ignore our suffering. We rise. We persevere. We carry on. We put one foot in front of the other because we have no other choice.”
“We are all that’s left,” Ahyana said.
There was one other person, but she couldn’t help. Our temple battle master, Antiope, had barely survived the slaughter. I didn’t know if she would ever wake up. It seemed like she had stayed alive solely to give us a message.
Hammer of Arion.
Was that what had knocked big chunks out of the temple walls? I still wasn’t sure whether the hammer was a person or an object.
“We have to avenge these women. Help protect Ilion,” Ahyana went on, sounding determined. “It has to be us.”
Ahyana was right. This was up to us.
We had to stop Artemisia.
A former fellow acolyte, she had been working for an unknown enemy and somehow managed to wipe out an entire temple of trained warrior women. I kicked at the red dirt beneath my feet. Why did they throw this when they attacked? Would I ever discover what it meant?
The traitorous high priestess had to know who Artemisia was conspiring with. She had refused to say more after our fight, but I intended to question her as soon as I could.
“What were you doing in the temple?” Io asked me.
“I went in to pray. They destroyed the statue of the goddess, broke it into pieces.” We prayed to that statue. Had taken our vows in front of it.
Io’s free hand went over her mouth as she gasped at the blasphemy. “How could Artemisia do that?”
I suspected that she had done it far too easily. “The statue was covered in a thick layer of gold and that’s gone. I’m assuming Artemisia took it.”
“Why would she?” Ahyana asked.
“She could pay for troops. Ships. Make sure her army has enough supplies,” Zalira said.
Artemisia couldn’t have massacred all the people in the weapons quarter and here at the temple alone. She’d had help.
Which could be an issue, as I had begun to suspect that the thousand-year-old high priestess, Lysimache, no longer had the other eye of the goddess.
And that she’d given it to Artemisia.
I didn’t want to have to fight my way through an army to get the eye back. But that relic was the only way to remove the curse that Lysimache had put on Locris.
“There’s another eye,” I said, realizing that I hadn’t shared this information with my sisters.
“How do you know that?” Zalira asked.
I explained to them about the voice I’d heard in my head, that of my Daemonian battle master, Demaratus, asking me how many eyes the goddess statue had and how I’d realized that the Ilionian and Locrian statues each had two eye sockets, meaning that there were four eyes of the goddess and not only two, as I had previously assumed. “One of the Locrian eyes was split up and given to life mages. She used the other Locrian eye to curse the land. Theano used one from Ilion to stay alive and strengthen us. Then she destroyed what was left. Which means there’s one more Ilionian eye, and we have to get it back.”
“Theano was the one that cursed Locris?” Io sounded shocked. Suri’s lips compressed into a thin line. She was the only other member of our sisterhood who knew everything that I did, because she’d been with me when I confronted the high priestess.
In the midst of all this chaos, I hadn’t yet told the others what I knew, and I felt a bit guilty, as I had recently resolved not to keep any secrets from my adelphia. “Her real name is Lysimache. She was Kysandra’s sister.”
