Part I
1
My mother cried when the king of Sparta first summoned me.
I could not understand why.
I remember staring up at her face, familiar features made foreign by emotions too heavy to grasp in my small hands.
Was it not an honor to be called to King Tyndareus’s personal quarters? Should my mother not have been pleased,proudeven?
The only way I could make sense of her tears was by assuming they weremyfault. Perhaps she feared my “sharp tongue” would get me into trouble, as it so often did with the other grown-ups.
“I will be good,” I told her, cupping her damp cheeks between my palms just like she always did when I was sad. “I promise, Mama.”
Confusingly, my words only encouraged more tears to fall.
“Don’t do this,” she begged the woman towering beside us.
This woman was a stranger to me, an unsurprising fact considering she was one of the king’s personal attendants. Her kind rarely visited the lower parts of the palace where I had been born and raised. “Slaves in denial,” my brother called them. I did not know what he meant by that, though I laughed when he said it. Melanthius always liked it when I laughed at his jokes.
“It is already done,” the attendant said.
“She is just a child.”
“I am not!” I interjected. “This is my ninth summer.”
Nine seemed an impressive number to me, far greater and wiser than eight and only three summers shy of twelve, the divine number of the Olympians.
“The girl is old enough.”
I beamed up at the attendant, thrilled that she agreed with me.
She did not smile back. I wondered if she even knew how. She was all angles and edges, not an inch of softness to her. I imagined if we hugged, she would skewer me like a piece of meat. Though the woman’s eyes were by far the sharpest thing about her. They made the remnants of my supper squirm in my belly.
“Acte, please.” My mother tried again. “Don’t make her do this.”
Acte drew in a breath, her expression as cold and unreadable as the stone floor beneath our feet. Her stillness was strange to me, so different from the bustling bodies hurrying around us. Though night was setting in, the palace kitchens remained a hive of activity, a constant swirling current of slaves flitting about their tasks. There was a rhythm to this chaos—knives singing, pots bubbling, spoons scraping, fires spitting. It was the song of my childhood, warm and safe and familiar.
Behind Acte, I spied the water basins being filled and silently prayed the king’s summons would relieve me of my washing-up duties. Whatever Tyndareus wanted would surely be more interesting than scrubbing dirty dishes.
“The girl has been summoned” was all Acte replied. She sounded bored.
“Send me instead.”
I glared at my mother, furious she would suggest such a thing. How could she take away my chance of meeting our master, our king? I had never even seen Tyndareus up close before, having only glimpsed him from a distance on odd occasions, riding his stallions across the palace grounds like Ares, the great God of War himself.
Part of me suspected our masterwasa god. After all, it was said the princes and princesses of Sparta were the children of Zeus, so wasn’t that proof enough that Tyndareus was the Thunder God in humanform? Melanthius had said the Olympians liked their disguises.
“Sendyou? Don’t be absurd,” Acte scoffed. “You know Icarius likes them young.”
My mother’s eyes flared with a rage I rarely ever saw.
“You know what he’ll do to her.”
“As did you when you brought her into this world.” Acte’s smile looked more like an upside-down scowl to me. “Don’t tell me you believed it would be any different for her.”
My mother froze, shoulders sagging as if a great weight had just been dropped upon them.
