Chapter3
Istood before the mirror, my breath held, my spine straight. My heart was a storm, but I didn’t let it bleed onto my face.
Anger roiled beneath my skin, untempered and clawing … but my reflection wasflawless. Calismae had somehow managed to scour the red dust and sweat from my body. My hair had been twisted into glossy submission, gold curls tumbling over my shoulders like silk, laced with braids so precise they could’ve been spun by a goddess who’d grown tired of war and turned her hands to beauty instead.
And I wore white.
Not just white—pure, searing white. The dress fell in clean lines, fabric gathered and fastened high at one shoulder, the rest flowing in heavy folds that seemed to shimmer like water when I moved. Across it, a single crimson sash cut from shoulder to hip, a slash of defiance vivid as blood on snow. The only rebellion I let them see.
It made my olive-toned skin glow like gold struck by lightning.
Let the king look. Let him try to ignore me.
He wouldn’t.
I would give him no room to see anyone else.
I stared into the mirror, into emerald-green eyes that had been outlined with kohl and calculation. My lips were tinted the shade I imagined the king’s roses must be—the only flowers left in Sparta. A silent challenge painted across my mouth.
Every line of me had been born to hold his gaze. Every curl, every fold of cloth, every shadow and shimmer was a trap disguised.
The priests had called my beauty a gift when I was still small enough to be cradled. Said Aphrodite herself had marked me with favor before Menelaus had cast her out. I had been called Helena the Beauty for as long as I remembered.
But I knew better.
Beauty was no gift. It was a tool.
It wasn’t meant to be loved. It was meant to be wielded.
Like the poetry I’d choked down until I bled the verses in my sleep. Like the drills I’d run in red dirt, hour after hour, until my muscles obeyed before thought could form, so that I’d be ready no matter what the Trials threw at me.
Amyklai hadn’t raised a girl.
It had sculpted a siren in a drought-struck land.
And tonight, I’d makethemthirst.
Calismae’s voice sliced through the drumbeat of my heart. “Listen to me, child.”
I didn’t turn. I wasn’t sure what she’d see, what she’d call the thing boiling under my skin. The hunger. Not for food or comfort, but forreckoning. For something that burned when it should have bled.
Her hand closed around my chin, fingers firm as a vice as she dragged my face toward hers.
“Nana,” I said, barely a breath. But my voice didn’t waver.
And for one fragile moment, her armor slipped. The harsh lines of her face sagged. The steel in her spine bent. I saw the woman beneath the keeper, the one who’d weathered every year, every offering, every scream. She looked smaller. Frayed.
“You must not show them you’re afraid,” she said urgently. Not a plea exactly. More like a command born from desperation.
Her eyes never landed on mine. They moved over me instead, brow to chin, cheek to lip, as though searching for fractures in a statue.
It felt like inspection. No … like inventory. Like she was counting the parts of me Amyklai had forged into weaponry.
“Since the day I was first brought here,” she murmured in a voice so soft I nearly missed it, “when you were just a babe in your mother’s arms, I’ve wondered whether it was a curse or a blessing.”
My stomach tightened, my breath catching in my throat. “What was?” I asked.
Her fingers trembled but didn’t fall away. “That face, child.”
