Maia had taught me the answer to this. “The gods are not allowed to directly interfere with our lives. They can’t stop evil things from happening. We all have the ability to choose for ourselves.”
“That’s convenient,” she snapped.
“It’s not,” I disagreed. “Perhaps our lives would be easier if the gods could make all our decisions for us and we didn’t have to struggle and suffer and make mistakes. But we wouldn’t learn anything.”
“Quite the philosopher,” she said sarcastically. “If that’s true, it didn’t stop the goddess from taking Ajax’s life.”
That had happened. The goddess had opened the earth under him and smothered him to death. “Then why didn’t she stop you?”
“After Ajax died I no longer felt her. As if she had vanished completely.”
“But you still tapped into her power when you destroyed Locris.”
“That was the last time,” she admitted. “I didn’t need her magic to help me take over Ilion. I was their princess, the last remaining priestess, and they followed me without question. My younger cousin was only five years old, and as his regent, I was able to start changing everything, to bend this nation to my will.”
“Why would you hurt Ilion? These were your people.” Locris, I understood. But here?
“The weakness of my brother, of the men of this nation, the way they abandoned us to save their own hides, leaving us behind. They hid in the outskirts and mountains while women were taken as concubinesto their enemies and their children made slaves.” She practically spit the words out.
There was somewhere else the men of Ilion had gone—I remembered hearing about it but couldn’t recall the details.
“And I wanted all the goddess’s believers dead. I wanted her power gone. That meant Ilion also needed to be destroyed.”
Just like I’d read in my book. “Then why not destroy the temple? Remove her worship entirely? It’s what you did in Locris.”
“I considered it. But after ruining your nation, I had to make sure that my changes would be permanent. I went to the oracle in Phocis, and she made the prophecy about the savior who would rise up and undo everything I had put into place.”
“How did you expect to find the savior?”
“That was easy enough,” she said. “I took away women’s rights and education and said they were inferior, which, again, the men of Ilion were eager to agree to. Women who wanted a different kind of life, who wouldn’t accept the new status quo, they would join the temple. I knew the savior would be among them.”
“So ... you’ve hurt Ilionian women for over a thousand years to make sure you found the savior?”
“It worked, didn’t it? I also had to be certain that the savior couldn’t access magic by eliminating the knowledge of how to do it. I kept some rituals, reinstituted old ones that other priestesses had done away with, and created some new ones. Although I hadn’t ever considered that the savior would come from Locris.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “I still have a hard time believing that you’re her.”
I pulled down the left shoulder on my tunic to show her the mark of the goddess.
Her eyes widened slightly before her expression of superiority and disdain returned. “I should have slit your throat the first night you arrived.”
“Yes, you should have. Because I’m what you feared. I am going to undo everything you’ve done.”
Lysimache shot me a look of such pure hatred that I could feel the chill of it seeping into my bones.
“Why did you write the prophecy down? Why did you share it?” I asked. Wouldn’t it have been in her best interest to hide it? Io had found it in a book from her mother’s library.
“I wanted the savior to know that she was going to die, that all her efforts would be in vain.”
How was I supposed to respond to that? I had spent so much time worrying about this very thing, and she’d shared it to make sure that I would suffer. That chill inside me grew.
“And it gave the people something to look forward to and distracted them from what else was going on. Whenever there were hard times, they pressed forward because they foolishly thought they were going to be saved.”
She had kept it from Locris. Because she didn’t want us to hope. “Why didn’t you just destroy Locris outright? You had the ability to wipe us out at any time.” They had the wealth, population, control of the blockade.
“That would have been too good for you. Locris deserved to suffer slowly. I preferred giving them a death by a thousand cuts. Every time the economy crashed, every time a tariff was raised, when sickness overtook the entire capital city, I was there. It’s why I instituted the tribute race. Every year I got to put Locrians through incredible pain.”
“You created the race?” It was such a cornerstone of what little belief Locris had left that it felt unreal that this was something else Lysimache had manipulated.
“Oh, yes. Terror campaigns are highly effective. A cowering populace is easier to harm.”
