I knew exactly what he meant, and it caused me to stumble over my own feet. Thankfully he caught me, but that meant I was now pressed up against him with all the images he’d just painted running throughmy mind. His gaze again dropped to my lips and I was about to push up on my toes and kiss him when we were interrupted.
“Forgive the intrusion, but Prince Alexandros, may I speak with you privately?” Stolos, one of the archons on the council, waited for Xander’s response.
“Certainly.” He somehow managed to get me back on my feet while he moved away. “I will find you later,” he promised. “We can finish our dance.”
My neck felt like it was on fire. I reached up to make sure that I was not actually burning. Finish our dance?
It was supposed to end in surrender.
Yield to me.
Couples twirled around me as I stood on the dance floor watching Stolos and Xander walk away.
“Lia!” Io called, waving me over. I didn’t quite feel in control of my body yet, so I was relieved when I managed to walk to her without tripping over my own feet again.
“Zethus is in listening to the bard,” she said. “We should go try to talk to him.”
Speaking to Zethus felt like a waste of time. He was an archon devoted solely to his own hedonistic pleasures and seemed to vote whichever way the wind blew. His only allegiance was to himself.
But I would welcome the opportunity to get away from the dancing and focus on something else besides my husband and how he made me feel.
Io and Suri walked with me to a smaller antechamber where the bard was performing. I realized that I recognized him—it was the same one I had seen in the Golden Lamb, the night I had sneaked out of the temple with Xander.
The bard was singing a song about other nations that Ilion had faced in battles. I hoped I had already missed the Locrian portion.
“He’s over there,” Io said, and I heard the disgust in her voice. Zethus was, once again, being inappropriate with a young hetaera. Iwas so glad Io had escaped a possible betrothal to him by joining the temple. “We should wait until the bard is done before we try approaching Zethus.”
I still thought it was pointless but stayed to humor her and because I needed the distraction.
We sat down with the other people who were all listening intently to the bard, something Zethus was not doing.
I forced myself to pay attention to the bard singing instead of thinking about dancing with Xander. The bard spoke of fighting with Thrace, with the Sasanians. I wondered how many times Ilion had gone to war.
The bard moved on to the Carians and sang:
“The men have fled and gone
The others work and toil
The Carians, now rich,
Rule upon iron soil.”
Iron soil? I tried to picture it. Did that mean that it was a silvery-gray? Like steel? That couldn’t be right. I thought of what rust looked like on iron, and my heart began to drum inside my chest. “Io, what color is iron soil?”
“Red,” she whispered in shock, apparently having come to the same conclusion that I had.
The Carians. We were fighting the Carians.
My grandmother had been right. All the answers I needed were in books, scrolls, poems, and songs.
I tried to remember what the bard had said at the inn near the docks all those weeks ago, when he had told stories about the Carians. After being defeated in the Great War, many Ilionian men had abandoned their nation and gone elsewhere. Some of them went south to Caria to seek refuge, but they were turned away. Those Ilionians tunneled theirway into the city and slaughtered the men. They forced the women to marry them and bear their children, which upset the goddess.
The Carians did not share the men’s belief in the goddess and the Ilionians missed their homes, so after ten years, the Ilionians abandoned their new families and went back to Troas, making the walls higher and thicker and creating the labyrinth so that no one could ever defeat them again.
The way they had treated the Carian women was why men were not allowed on the temple grounds. All Ilionian men had to take on the punishment and shame of what their ancestors had done.
But the bard had also said that Caria had been wiped out within a single decade and was only spoken of in song. Something wasn’t adding up.
