One of the two.
It was terrible odds.
I’d thought I’d meet this moment with cool defiance, or at least a trembling sort of courage.
But I hadn’t known what it would feel like, not at all.
There was a terrible intimacy to it. A silence that pressed in from all sides, so complete it felt like the walls were closing in. The weight of all the girls who had stood here before me hung in the air, faint traces of sweat and fear and prayers half swallowed. The chalice inched closer.
It was so small. Just a cup. A bit of metal and liquid. But it held the power to end everything I was, everything I might be, in a single breath.
My fingers twitched. My stomach clenched. And still I stared, wondering if this was how the others had felt: as if time had narrowed to a single, fragile moment.
I glanced at Phoebe as she held the outstretched cup, wondering if her insides held the same terror as mine did. Anysa’s frightened whisper slipped through the air, my name shuddering out of her as though wrenched from her lungs. “Helena …”
I couldn’t look at her. That was part of the horror of the Trial, right? That it demanded we trade each other’s fates like astragals in a gambler’s hand, tossed again and again with no promise of mercy. Every choice, every cup, carried the power to make us executioners. Or victims. Or both.
Chloé’s face burned behind my eyes, twisted in death with blood pooling beneath her nostrils. Her skin had already begun to lose its glow, a pallor creeping in where life had fled. I could still see her eyes, glazed and distant, staring at nothing. Staring atme.
My chest tightened. I couldbeher.
My mind offered the image without mercy … my body beside hers, slack and pale on the obsidian floor, tossed aside like an offering that failed to please.
Terror clawed up my spine, but it couldn’t drown the truth rising inside me with ruthless clarity.
This was what I’d been born to do.
My village rose up behind my eyes. Amyklai in drought and dust, its children thin-limbed and silent, their mouths rimmed in red. Filippos stumbling in the field, blood weeping from his ears. Thalessa being dragged away. My mother’s voice ringing clear:You must win, Helena.
Even if it ruins you.
I guessed this was what she’d meant.
I raised the chalice and lifted my veil just enough to drink.
Across the room, I locked eyes with Achilles’s devastated expression, wishing that he could see my face. That I could show him some sort of comfort in this moment.
Yanking my gaze away from his … I drank.
The liquid landed on my tongue heavy and stale, as if it had slept too long in a dark cellar. My throat pulled tight, rejecting it on instinct. Heat flared under my skin, and a wild burst of fear tore through me.This was it, I thought. This was how I would die … here, on the cold floor of this cursed room, with a stranger’s choice poisoning my gut like a snake.
A startled breath wrenched itself from my lungs, the next one tumbling after it, both dragging through me as if my body were waking from a long, violent dream. My pulse was a hammer in my ears, but still it beat. Still, I stood. Therewere no burning spasms ripping through my veins, no fire climbing my limbs to claim me. There was only breath, shaky and defiant, and the stunned, trembling understanding that I had survived.
Thank the gods.
The chamber seemed to exhale as one, like it had been holding its breath with me. Relief. Disappointment. Awe. I wasn’t sure which flavor lingered thickest in the air and where they were coming from … but I tasted them all.
I dared a glance at Achilles.
He hadn’t moved. But his eyes … he looked like he might fall to his knees, like breath had been torn from his lungs and shoved back in all at once. The sheerreliefin his gaze rattled something deep inside me, something I didn’t have time to name.
Because a deep realization had just settled inside me. Since my cup hadn’t held poison … that meant the last chalice … did.
Anysa’s certain death was on the table in front of me. If she chose not to drink, her family would lose what little they had. Menelaus had arranged it so she was condemned either way.
There was a solemnity filling the room as everyone seemed to come to the same conclusion at once.
The priestess turned her head toward me. “Pick up the chalice,” she ordered calmly, as if she wasn’t ensuring Anysa’s death.
