The red doors groaned open and the palanquin swayed with each step as we moved inside, its silk curtains rippling around me as all eyes turned. The music faltered. Conversations cut off. Even the laughter died.
A voice rang out, clear and ceremonial: “Behold. Helena of Sparta.”
The name struck through the silence like a bell toll. It was my name … and yet, it felt like someone else’s. Someone made from marble and crowned in poppies. Someone I didn’t quite recognize.
Gasps rippled down the long hall, wonder and curiosity crackling like static in the air. I lifted my chin, my back locked despite the tremble in my stomach as the palanquin halted and the curtains were drawn back. Light spilled over me, and the hall seemed to exhale as one.
Dozens of eyes stared. Then narrowed. Then lingered.
They looked atme.
Not the glyphs. Not the crown of poppies clinging to the braids coiled at my temples.Me.
The hush fractured into a hum of whispers.
“She’s even more beautiful than they said—”
“Like a statue come to life—”
“No, not a statue. A goddess—”
“That skin … those eyes—”
“No wonder he chose her.”
“Does she know what she’s walking into?”
The heat of it found me, gazes crawling across my skin like fingers too bold to lift. Eyes raked over my face, my throat, my waist. I sat straight-backed, hands in my lap, trying to look as much like a queen as I could.
I thought I’d known what it was like to be stared at. But somehow the eyes in this room felt like a different animal.
I had never felt moreexposed.
The silk of my chiton clung to freshly oiled skin, and though the priestess had painted me in red and black and sacred symbols, nothing could mask what I was beneath it all.
A woman wrapped in poppy petals and uncertainty.
I stared forward, unblinking, even as the whispers thickened.
“She doesn’t look afraid.”
“She should be.”
I searched the crowd for anyone I recognized, but there was no one. Of course not. I nodded to myself, swallowing around the tightness in my throat. Everything had happened too quickly for my mother or Calismae to reach the palace, too quickly for word to travel and feet to follow. For a moment, I swore I saw a flicker of copper hair, a shape that might have been Anysa. But when I blinked, it was gone.
There were no familiar faces. No safe eyes to meet. Only the weight of strangers. Hungry and awed. And I wondered—when would it start to feel like I was a queen? When would I stop feeling like something to bedevoured?
The throne room was a vision of decadent madness.
Light poured from a thousand suspended oil lamps, their flames encased in colored glass that fractured the air into shards of red, gold, and sapphire blue. New silk banners draped the vaulted ceiling, stitched with Menelaus’s sigils. Cushioned lounges flanked the path to the throne, each one occupied by guests reclined in sheer fabrics and dripping with jewels. Fingers stilled mid-toast.
A rustle moved through the crowd, and I felt Menelaus before I saw him … it wasalwaysthat way with him. A pressure in the air, like thunder crouched behind the clouds.
The king strode forward from his throne, crimson-robed and gold-crowned, a lion among jackals.
The silk of his garment glinted with ruby-colored threads, the same shade as the blood that stained the sands outside Amyklai. His shoulder was once again covered by a lion’s pelt … and that smile was back, the one that was wide and full of appetite.
It gave me the same sense of misgiving as it had before I’d seen his gentler one.
