Ekdosiswas the moment a woman was passed like property from one house to another, her name and loyalty struck clean from her father’s hearth and bound to her husband’s instead. It was the moment her life ceased to belong to her. I would drive a chariot by myself three times around the palace, each turn sealing me deeper into that fate.
The hall stirred, silks swaying and bronze greaves shifting, as if the sound itself had set every body in motion. Priestesses moved in from the edges as they took their places. Guards closed in, sealing the aisle ahead.
Achilles was swallowed by the movement, lost to me.
The horns called again and the path yawned before me, red and gold and inescapable. Every step I took now would carry me from the life I had known … straight into the king’s bed to face whatever lived inside of him.
Chapter34
The moment was nearly upon me.
That was all I could think as the nobles surged down the palace steps ahead of me, their laughter ringing sharp as cymbals. Women waited with baskets of dried fruit and nuts, tokens of fertility, of abundance … of the body I would give the king.
My gaze lifted again despite myself, skimming the edges of the courtyard, the clusters of faces, the places a familiar presence might have been allowed to stand. Just once more. But there was still nothing. The realization settled quietly, final as a door closing, and I let my eyes fall away. I wouldn’t look for my mother again.
The chariot crouched in the courtyard, gleaming as its wheels caught the blood-tinged light of dusk. Two white horses stamped the earth, their manes woven with olive branches, bridles strung with ribbons that trailed like veins.
I climbed in without help as the king stood at the entrance of the palace doors and watched with those otherworldly eyes, his fingers still twitching at his sides like he was trying to hold whatever was in him back.
Thehymenaiosbegan, soft at first, and then it rose. A marriage hymn. A farewell song. A chorus for the woman I once was and the queen I was about to become.
My fingers tightened around the reins. My gaze stayed forward as the chariot wheels turned slowly beneath me, creaking under the weight of ritual. The music shifted again, deeper, falling to a near chant as the torches burned lower.
At the top of the palace steps, the High Priestess lifted her hand, the golden beads at her wrist catching the dying light. The crowd hushed at once, the hymn falling into silence, as if all of Sparta held its breath as she signaled the start of the final rite.
The Triad.
Three full revolutions around the palace, each one a sacred symbol: birth, life, death. A bride’s passage through time before she crossed the threshold into a new name. A new fate.
The horses snorted and pawed at the stones, their breath steaming like ghosts in the cooling dusk. It said much about the situation that I couldn’t even admire them. The bite of the reins bit into my palms, the sting pulling me back to the words Calismae had left me.We are saved.
I forced those words into my chest, tasting iron where I had split my lip. Even with Anysa’s blood still staining my thoughts, even with the memory of what flickered behind Menelaus’s eyes … I had to keep moving.
If this crown was poison, then I would drink it. If this throne was a cage, then I would sit in it. If lying with Menelaus was the price, then I would pay it. I had sworn, long before today, that I would save Sparta. And a vow like that had to be heavier than any fear.
Someday I wanted all of Sparta to say …We are saved.
The wheels groaned as the chariot began its first circle around the castle, and the crowd parted in devoted silence as the torchbearers lit my path.
The first turn was for birth.
Women threw handfuls of almonds and dried pomegranate seeds. They struck the sides of the chariot, caught in the folds of my gown, and dusted my shoulders like offerings flung at a shrine.
A shrine that bled. A shrine that burned.
Somewhere in the crowd, a lyre plucked a single aching note that cut clean through the dusk. My body locked around it. Eyes fixed, lungs tight, I held myself rigid, already more monument than woman, as if I’d been changed into stone to bear witness.
I hoped as they stared at me … as they admired the red paint slashed across my skin, the black sigils spiraling down my arms … that they saw a queen. That they saw Helena the Beauty—Sparta’s daughter, Sparta’s promise. That they didn’t see the fear clamped tight across my ribs.
The second turn was for life.
The procession closed in on the chariot. The nobles’ faces blurred as we passed. The sky darkened overhead, and torchlight caught in my veil, bathing me in its glow.
And then, the final turn.
Death.
By now the air was thick with silence. Even the offerings had stopped. The palace towered, vast and light-starved in the dark, and I realized how much it resembled a tomb.
