The crimson folds of his robe cascaded from his chair like blood spilling down stone. He stepped forward until he stood at the edge of the dais, the platform placing him above the rest of us by design, by declaration. By inevitability.
He didn’t rush. He let the silence gather, let every eye find him, let the hall remember who it belonged to.
“Sparta has been remade,” he said at last.
His voice carried effortlessly, filling the space, pressing against skin and bone alike. It bore the certainty of someone who believed the world had changed because he had willed it so. “We cast out the gods who chained us. We drove their fickle shadows from our land. We chose strength over supplication. Power over prayer.”
I swallowed hard. He wasn’t even pretending our suffering was accidental. He was takingpridein it. Of course he was.
The king who drank rivers of wine while villages wilted. Of course he would call ruin a rebirth.
“You stand here because you endured the world I forged,” he said, letting his gaze slide over the line of candidates. “Because dust did not swallow you. Because despair did not claim you.”
His attention drifted over the veils … then seemed to stop on me. His mouth lifted in a knowing slant.
“Because beneath your beauty lies something far more valuable.” He paused, knowing the room was following his every word. “Fire. Will. Hunger.”
Whether he meant it for me or not, the words hit as if he had spoken them into my ear.
“This Trial is the last. And it will be the hardest. For only one of you will rise. Only one of you will wear the crown beside me. Only one of you will usher in the golden age of Sparta. The rest”—his lip curled—“will return to their homes with nothing but ashes in their mouths.”
My breath burned in my chest.
He lifted his goblet then, the metal catching the firelight as he raised it high. “To the gods we drove out,” he said, teeth glinting. “May they never dare return.”
When he lowered the cup, something in him … shifted. The torchlight caught his eyes strangely, and a cold fear crawled up my spine. For one stunned moment, they weren’t a man’s eyes at all.
A strange gleam lived there, an unnatural shine that prickled across my skin and raised every hair along my arms. It was the kind of wrong that didn’t shout. It whispered. It crept. It knew.
And it called back, unbidden, to what Achilles had called the king one night, something I’d never gotten to ask about.Creature.
I felt it now, felt the truth humming beneath the surface of the king’s smile.
He had driven out the gods … and Sparta had no idea what had taken their place.
We stood in a silent line before a long stone table, its surface draped in crimson cloth. Before each of us sat a single gleaming chalice, ten in total, arranged in a perfect unbroken row.
They were identical. And they glinted like a threat.
The High Priestess moved to the front of the table, her robes rustling. She stopped just behind the row of cups, the gold bands around her throat flashing as she turned to face us. “Now you prove you deserve the crown,” she announced dramatically as she raised her staff in the air.
A wave of tension moved through the room.
“Most of the chalices in front of you are filled with wine, consecrated in the sacred fires of Menelaus’s altar.” She paused. “But two,” she said slowly, “hold poison.”
My heart lurched. All around me, I heard the flutter of veils shifting, the rustle of panic too restrained to be voiced aloud. I could feel Anysa trembling next to me.
“You will each choose a chalice,” the High Priestess said, her voice calm and serene like she hadn’t just announced we could bepoisoned. “But you will not drink it.”
Confusion flickered through the line. What the gods did that mean?
“The woman beside you will choose what you drink.”
A shocked murmur tore down the row. Someone let out a whimper. Another girl hissed in disbelief. I caught the edge of a gasp in my own throat.
“The choice,” the High Priestess said, eyes sweeping over us, “is yours alone. You will not know what is in the chalice. You will have only your instinct. Your faith. And your will. Choose wisely. What you do in this trial not only determines your own fate … but holds the weight of another’s life.” Her voice dropped. “A choice a queen would have to make.”
I turned my head, just enough to find Anysa through the gauze of our veils beside me. Her fingers fluttered around her veil, shaking in panic. Her body was tense, like she might bolt, like she couldn’t breathe beneath the weight of it all. Her chest rose too fast, too shallow, and the veil quivered each time she exhaled. She pressed her hands hard against her sides, as if trying to hold herself together.
