She was quiet then, and I realized she was crying, the moonlight turning her tears to bright pearls on her cheeks. I kissed them away, willing my own not to fall.
“Tomorrow, if things do not go as we have planned, I will have a ship ready at the abandoned harbor. I want you to take the handmaids there, Melantho. The crew will take you far away from here, wherever you wish to go.”
“I won’t leave without you.”
“You may not have a choice.”
I shifted so I was leaning over her now, hands pressed on either side of her head, my curls spilling around us.
“Penelope. I am not leaving you.”
Instead of replying, she kissed me. I knew better than to take hersilence as defeat, but I did not want to argue with her. Not tonight.
She reached up to toy with one of my ringlets, tenderly tucking it behind my ear, and I could scarcely breathe for how heavy my heart weighed in my chest.
If I had loved her less, this moment would not have hurt so much. This pain, I knew, was the price of loving her as I did, so completely, so irrevocably, and it was a price I would have willingly paid over and over.
“It has been my greatest privilege to love you, Melantho, and to be loved by you. I want you to know that.”
I pressed my hand to her lips, shaking my head. “Don’t. Please. Don’t do that.”
Don’t say goodbye.
“Melantho,” she whispered against my fingertips.
Despite the tears burning in my eyes, I smiled.
“Say that again,” I breathed.
“Melantho, Melantho, Melantho…”
My lips replaced my fingers, and Penelope continued to whisper my name into my mouth, over and over, like a promise, a prayer, a vow carved from the very depths of her.
And I knew nothing in all the world would ever sound sweeter than this: my name on her tongue, shared between lips in the dark.
58
Jewels glittered like the eyes of beasts drowning in a sea of gold.
The queen of Ithaca stood beside her mountain of gifts, the one we had spent hours assembling the previous day. Now Penelope regarded her treasures with a look of distinct disinterest. Before her, the suitors marveled at their gifts, the cold, glimmering sign of their power. Soon to be the price of their lives.
I suppressed a smile, but the corners faded as soon as I caught sight of Odysseus lingering in the corner of the banquet hall. Still, he kept up his ridiculous disguise, scanning the room with a quiet, contemplative frown. Today, he planned to take back his throne. His confidence in his own ability was something to behold. Odysseus was near sixty summers old now, his body ravaged by the battlefield. Did he truly believe he could defeat a hundred men alone? Had the war so thoroughly inflated his ego? Or perhaps it had eaten away at his sense of reality.
“Are you all right?” Hippodamia whispered beside me. Her voice quivered; she was nervous. We all were.
“I’m fine,” I lied. “I just want this to be over with.”
“Me too,” she admitted, her gaze drifting around the room. “Do you…feel sorry for them? The suitors?”
“No,” I said without hesitating. “I don’t.”
She nodded, jaw set. “Neither do I.”
We had both tended to the slaves the suitors had beaten, the crying girls they had forced themselves on. There could be no sympathy for men like that.
Their deaths would be a weight lifted from this world.
Penelope turned from her treasures to face her suitors for the final time. They fell silent almost instantly. It was strange to think how powerful yet powerless Penelope was in their company; they hung on her every word, yet she was unable to free herself from a single one of them.
