“I captured their king!” she shot back, pointing at Xander.
“Dolion made it possible for you to take him. And Dolion is the one sharing information of actual consequence. You are dismissed, Artemisia. Leave.”
Enyalios turned back to Xander. “Now, as we were saying, what are you willing to offer?”
“I will not be ignored!” Artemisia declared.
This seemed to make the general finally lose his temper. “Yes, you will! You have no authority or say here! You are a little girl playing with her toy, pretending at war—”
Artemisia picked up the hammer of Arion and flattened Enyalios’s skull with it. I gasped as he fell to the ground.
“Does that seem like a toy to you?” she taunted his dead body. “Now I am the one in charge. I will lead us to victory!”
Xander made a sound and she whirled around on him, hammer grasped tightly in her hand. “Did you want to say something, King Alexandros?”
His expression was nonchalant, as if she hadn’t just murdered a man in front of him. “How do you expect the army to follow you when you’ve killed their general? I don’t think they’ll like that.”
Her chest heaved for a few moments before she answered. “I managed to take a great deal of gold when I left Ilion. From the statue of your goddess. I will pay them for their loyalty.”
“Paid loyalty is not actual loyalty.”
“It’s close enough,” she snapped. “And they all want Ilion destroyed as much as I do.”
That wasn’t what I’d heard from the general before he died, and I could see from Xander’s face that he had come to the same conclusion.
“An army of deer led by a lion is more to be feared than an army of lions being led by a deer,” she said, kicking the general’s body. “They will follow me. It is the women of Caria who have stoked the fires of vengeance and hatred, waiting for this day. The generations of men who came before me were too cowardly to act. They wanted to wait until we were more powerful. Until the army was bigger, until we had more weapons, more money. Now the glory will be mine, and I will not wait for a man to decide whether or not I can take it.”
Someone called the general’s name from outside the tent, looking for him.
“It seems to me that you should go out and do some damage mitigation before your men find out on their own what you’ve done,” Xander said.
A look of unease flashed briefly in Artemisia’s eyes. She lifted the tent flap, as if she intended to leave. But she turned around and said to him, “You should be thanking my god that I still need you alive.”
Chapter Forty-Five
I stayed with Xander all night. There wasn’t anything I could do to help him, and he couldn’t hear me, but I could be there with him. Artemisia had guards remove the general’s body, and she came in to personally administer more poison to Xander.
He didn’t call out but I could see that it was affecting him. I wondered if it was interfering with our connection and that was why I couldn’t feel him.
“Lia?”
I woke up to Zalira shaking me. “You were sleeping so deeply. I was concerned.”
“Because I was night walking. I found Xander.” I shared with my sisters everything that I had seen and heard.
I turned to Io. “Do you have poison antidotes with you?”
“Yes. I overpacked. And we’ll give him some fortification potions, if we need to.” She looked very worried but determined.
“Artemisia killed the general of her army?” Ahyana asked, wrapping her arms around herself.
Without hesitation. As easily as breathing. It didn’t even seem like something she had considered—she had just acted and it had ended in a man’s death.
A man who was trying to come to an agreement with Xander and stop this war before it even started. I nodded.
“Let’s get ready,” Zalira suggested, and we all moved off to change out of our shirts and pants back into our tunics, packing up our bags.
I took the goddess’s sword and put it into the sheath strapped to my leg. I moved my xiphos to my waistband. I wanted to make sure I had access to both weapons when I needed them.
