“You?” I sneered. “You wouldn’t have been punished for my actions,princess.”
“I’m not talking about me being punished. I am talking about me being forced to witness your punishment.” Her voice wavered. “I cannot go through that again, Melantho. I cannot see you be—”
She was cut off by a burst of laughter from the street. We both glanced toward the mouth of the passageway, watching the crowds filter past in a steady, bubbling stream.
“We need to go back to the palace,” she said. “Before anyone notices we’re gone.”
“I’m not going back. Not yet.”
Penelope inhaled a delicate breath, nostrils flaring. Without warning, she stepped closer to me, so close I could feel her chest brushing against mine. I pressed myself harder against the wall, willing it to swallow me up, to let me escape from the insufferable heat of her body and how it made my insides squirm.
She stared at me for a long moment, gaze burning not with anger but something equally fierce. Something far more confusing.
I could have sworn the air between us crackled.
Whatever Penelope was going to say, she seemed to think better of it, instead turning on her heel and striding toward the mouth of the passageway.
“Where are you going?”
“If we must wait, I’m not doing it here. It smells awful,” she said over her shoulder.
Unsure what else to do, I followed her.
Penelope cut through the crowd with surprising ease, as if she had navigated these streets many times before. She walked differently here, her usual elegant strides replaced with a casual, bouncing lope. Nobody looked twice at her. With her threadbare attire and her scarf pulled close around her face, she looked like just another slave girl running errands for their master. I glanced at the bustle of bodiesaround us, wondering what any of them would think if they knew their future queen stood among them.
We followed the hill down toward the harbor. Penelope picked her way along the edge until she found a quiet spot.
“What are you doing?” I asked as she sat down on the crumbling harbor wall.
“Waiting.”
“For what?”
She stared at the horizon as she said, “The slaver doesn’t arrive till midday. So we must wait.” Then she produced a small leather pouch from the belt of her tunic and handed it to me.
I felt the weight of the silver inside.
“You forgot these. The ones you spilled onto the table.”
My hand tightened around the second pouch. A heaviness settled over me, and I shifted beneath its awkward weight.
“Why are you giving me this?”
“So you can buy more handmaids,” Penelope said simply.
“But you don’t want any more.”
Instead of replying, she said, “Look there.”
I followed her gaze down to the water’s edge where a group of women were preparing a fishing boat, their shouts falling into chorus with the swooping gulls.
“Those women would have spent their whole lives waving off fathers and husbands as they headed out to fish,” Penelope murmured, a quiet wonder flickering in her voice. “Now they are the ones guiding their own boat, earning their own keep. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
I sat down beside her on the wall. “There’s nothing beautiful about labor.”
“For a slave, no, you are right,” she agreed. “But for women like that, work means independence. It means freedom. That is the gift this war has given Ithaca…space for the women to grow.”
We watched as the fishing boat bobbed out to sea, the women’slaughter dancing over the waves. I found myself smiling at the sound despite myself. But when I glanced back at Penelope, her expression was distant, her thoughts as limitless and unreachable as the horizon taunting us in the distance.
