I wanted to reach for her. To grip her hand, to calm her. But that too would be watched and then judged.
So I kept still, holding myself as tall as I could while my pulse hammered hard enough to bruise.
This had to be more theater though. A spectacle meant to shake us so the nobles in the room were entertained. The poison had to be symbolic. Maybe it would make us faint … but nothing more.
They wouldn’t really let one of us die.
Would they?
I flicked a glance toward the king. Menelaus was back on his throne, utterly unmoved. A girl in red fed him grapes, her fingers shaking as his tongue slid out to catch the juice dripping down her knuckles.
Lovely.
But it was Achilles who worried me most. He stood behind the throne, arms crossed, but the tension in his body betrayed him. His jaw was locked, browsdrawn just slightly. A pulse beat high in his throat. He wasn’t relaxed. He wasn’t detached.
He was bracing.
The sight twisted something inside me. The air around him felt strained, pulled taut in a way I didn’t have a name for, and my stomach knotted as the silence between each breath stretched thin. I didn’t know if it was dread or something worse … but watchingAchilleslook uneasy made my own fear tighten into something cold and gnawing.
The king shifted. His eyes, dark and pitiless, glinted as he lifted a single hand, and the entire chamber stilled. “Begin,” he said.
The silence stretched as we waited. The High Priestess finally lifted her hand and pointed to the smallest woman at the end of the line.
Even beneath the veil, I recognized Damaris instantly. Small, slight, almost birdlike in her movements. She was a girl who seemed as though a strong wind might lift her clear off the ground. Damaris was barely eighteen, the youngest of us, timid and soft-spoken, yet somehow she’d survived every Trial. I remembered the way she’d told me, in a quiet moment days ago, how she’d learned to read by tracing words in the red ash on her family’s hearthstone. A shy, almost embarrassed confession.
She flinched when the priestess’s finger landed on her, freezing for a single stunned moment.
The priestess pursed her lips in displeasure, and that was enough to force Damaris to step forward to where the line of chalices waited for her, gleaming and identical, each one a sealed fate.
She hovered in front of them, eyes darting from cup to cup until she finally reached out and grabbed one. Liquid sloshed over the edge of the rim as she moved.
Damaris turned and handed her chalice to Naeri, who had been standing beside her in line. Naeri was trying to stand tall, but her hands betrayed her, clenching and unclenching in a steady rhythm of panic. She stiffened as Damaris stopped before her, her shoulders drawing back like a soldier bracing for a blow as Damaris lifted the cup.
Naeri’s trembling hands rose and curled around the chalice. Her grip tightened until her knuckles paled.
“Drink,” the High Priestess ordered.
Naeri’s throat bobbed with a single, visible swallow. She paused, caught in the razor-thin space between movement and paralysis, until slowly, she lifted her veil above her mouth and held the chalice to her lips as she took one measured sip.
The silence in the room swelled, spreading around us like fog creeping over still water as we watched her … waiting. Her shoulders twitched, a quick tremor flicking through her frame, and for one terrible moment, I thought she might fall. But then she exhaled, the breath slipping from her as though she’d only justremembered how. She let out a sob that was half laugh and half wail. “Gods,” she whispered as she staggered in relief.
A shift near the dais pulled my attention. Menelaus adjusted in his throne, a subtle movement, but his jaw had tightened and his fingers were drumming against the armrest in a quiet, clipped beat of displeasure.
I couldn’t tell whether it was because she’d dared to invoke the gods he’d driven out … or because she’d lived when he might have preferred the spectacle of her falling.
Naeri chose a chalice for Damaris, and then Penelope was summoned forward to drink a chalice that Calliope had chosen. And with each round, fear mounted. It slid under my skin … lodged there, refusing to leave. Five chalices had been chosen, and none of them had held poison. The odds for Anysa and me were getting worse.
I glanced at the king and his court, wondering how they could continue to look so amused. I wondered how amused they’d be if a chalice was selected for them.
“Pick that one,” Chloé ordered Iris, who was choosing for her.
“That’s not allowed,” hissed Anysa.
Chloe scoffed and then turned toward the king. “It was never said that we couldn’t,” she said, and even without seeing her face I could picture her arrogance. My gaze darted between Chloé and the king. Had he told her which one was safe while she’d lain with him?
Iris reluctantly picked up the cup Chloé had pointed to and Chloé stepped forward and seized it from her with a flourish. She raised her hand in a small toast to the king. “This is the part where you all bow,” she taunted, her throat working once before she tipped the chalice back.
The liquid brushed her lips and …
