They moved on his word. Two soldiers seized her by the wrists, the same hands that had held the whip now hauling her forward. Her feet trailed, heels scraping the stone, and for a breath I thought she might fall. But she did not. She kept her chin up, eyes half-closed, as if saving what dignity she had left for something private and stubborn inside her.
They reached the archway and passed out of sight, and for an instant I allowed myself to imagine her standing again, only a little straighter, when the cell door shut. Then I wiped my face with the heel of my hand and looked up at Nikandros.
His jaw worked. His expression was smug and small. Around him, the crowd breathed as if waking from a fever. A few hands clapped, tentative, ashamed. Most of them only watched, as if the act had been a lesson graven into their ribs.
I kept my face still and my voice closed. My eyes locked with Calismae’s again across the crowd, her expression cutting through the haze of dust and fear. There was sorrow there, but something harder beneath it, steady, resolute, the kind of strength that refused to break even when everything else did. Her lips formed a single word.Remember.
“Take that as a warning to all who dare defy the king. He is your god,” Nikandros shouted, his voice slicing through the crowd like the blade had through Thalessa’s tongue. “And this will be your fate if you forget that.”
Nikandros turned to face me, his gaze sweeping over my figure like a man assessing a prize he already owned. “I wish you well, Helena,” he said smoothly. “Go and charm the king. Win his favor, win his crown.” He leaned forward and I had to stop from flinching as his lips brushed my skin. “But hear me now. If you fail … you will be my wife.”
My eyes dropped to thexiphosat his hip, a short, cruel blade polished to a mirror’s gleam. I wondered how long it would take to pull it free, how deep I’d have to drive it to stop the smirk from ever gracing his lips again.
When my gaze rose to meet his, he was already smiling. A knowing curl of the mouth that told me he’d read the thought like an open page. “You’re dismissed,Champion,” he said softly, his breath an insult to my nose.
The words slid over me like grease. My stomach twisted, heat and disgust rising together. I continued to keep my face still and my body rigid, though every muscle still screamed to strike him. Instead, I inclined my head the barest fraction, the motion small enough to pass for respect, and I slowly walked off the platform. I didn’t have the power to stop him today, but someday I would.
I felt his eyes digging into my back with every step.
“Come, child. We must get you cleaned up again and ready,” Calismae said as she hurried toward me. Her voice was barren, stripped of warmth, stripped of grief. As if the horror we’d just witnessed hadn’t reached her at all.
But I saw through it.
I saw the way her jaw clenched too tightly. The glassy sheen in her eyes that never quite blinked away. She wasn’t cold or heartless. She was surviving.
Just like the rest of us. Smothering the scream inside before it could rise. Wearing the mask Sparta demanded.
Calismae pretended not to see the tremor in my body, when usually she wouldn’t allow it. She didn’t flinch when I wiped at the angry tears gathering in my eyes. I would give myself a small moment to feel, but when the moment was gone, all that remained would be sharpened steel.
The Trials were coming. And I would meet them with every ounce of fury and fire they’d tried to bleed out of me.
I turned, but not before I took one last look at Nikandros and the blood that stained the ground where Thalessa had been tortured.
Searing it into my memory, I made a shrine of it in my chest. Let it stand as proof that I would never look away again.
I followed Calismae out of the agora, each step heavy with the weight of what I’d witnessed, what I’d sworn. Eyes tracked me, rimmed red from weeping, shining with fear they dared not voice. The crowd parted, but slowly, like they weren’t sure I wasn’t a specter risen from the dead, and I met their stares head-on and nodded.
Promising … vowing … that I would save them.
The wind swept behind me, erasing every trace of my path as if I’d never walked it. As if I were nothing.
But I was not nothing. I was not gone.
Sparta could try to scrub away my footsteps, bury my name, drown my voice. But I would not be silenced.
Let the wind take my prints. I would carve something greater in stone.
I was going to win.
For Thalessa.
For Calismae.
For everyone in my village who’d been forced to survive a life that should have been lived.
I would become Sparta’s queen.
And I would make it a kingdom worth surviving.
