Evidently, one man dying of the Dread was something Menelaus could dismiss. A tragedy, yes, but survivable.
Thirteen though?
Thirteen was cause foralarm.
I had once let myself hope, foolishly, that if Menelaus chose me, I could bring him to my village. Show him the withered fields, where the bodies lay rotting around the outside of the walls. I had thought, perhaps, if he saw it with his own eyes, he would understand. He would care.
But the thirteen who had fallen here were not laid out with prayers or weeping. They were taken to the shore, their bodies heaped into a single boat, set aflame, and pushed into the waves. Burned not for honor, but to keep their smoke from staining the palace walls.
It was clear after this week that if he could not face his own dead, he would never lift a finger for mine.
What he would do, however … was hunt.
When he wasn’t closeted away with advisors, he slipped into the forests with a spear and a handful of soldiers, returning long after nightfall. Each time I heard the guards speak of it, a new question gnawed at me. What did he expect to find in those woods? Why hunt now, of all times, when the Dread was back in the palace?
I couldn’t make sense of it. But a thread tugged at the back of my mind, thin and insistent. His hunting had begun the morning after the Dread had first reached our gates.
And now, as the death toll rose, he hunted again.
I had no answer for what connected them. Only the creeping certainty that something did.
It wasn’t as if I could ask him though. Menelaus had ordered I be locked in my rooms.
At first, I had done what I could for the grieving families who lived in the palace, their sorrow spilling into every corner. I sat with them, I offered words, bread, what little comfort was mine to give.
But Menelaus had put an end to that after a day.
Menelaus had been so consumed with his hunting and the Dread that he had also done nothing with Theron. The man had remained locked in the cells beneath the palace, neither freed nor condemned, simply left to languish while Menelaus decided whether to call him weapon, omen, or curse.
Roz twitched against my knees, its fur shimmering faintly in the light, as though it too sensed the weight of that truth.
Alcmene spun toward me, hands on her hips. “Why are you still in bed?”
I shoved hair from my face. “So I can be locked in my rooms for another day?”
She only rolled her eyes, still looking far too cheerful for the circumstances. “Not today. It’s Thesmophoria—and the king has declared it safe to celebrate!”
“What gave him that idea?” I asked, my voice edged with disbelief. With everything that had happened, I had lost track of time.
Alcmene raised an eyebrow. “We both know he does what he wants. And no one, not even the king, wants to miss out on the festival.”
Thesmophoria had once belonged to Demeter and Persephone—rites for the sacred harvest, for fertility, for blessing the land, and for ensuring future lineage. But under Menelaus, their names had been scrubbed away, shorn from the prayers and ceremonies until only what they represented lingered.
In Amyklai, it had always been a time of solemn joy where women carried offerings to the earth, praying that the soil would give back what it had taken. I would have given anything to be there now, walking the fields I knew, kneeling beside the women who raised me, instead of standing in a palace that didn’t feel like mine.
Alcmene leaned on the bedpost, studying me. “You don’t look excited. You’ve been planning the festivities for weeks.”
“I have,” I said slowly. “But it hardly seems the time for such a celebration.” My throat tightened. “And even without all those deaths, how can we celebrate when our people have barely grain enough to eat? When the fields are barren and the Dread lingers like a shadow at every door?”
Roz’s tail curled tighter around my wrist, a strange comfort, as if the little creature agreed.
Alcmene studied me a moment, then softened. “Maybe a celebration is what the mourning need?”
I nodded, trying to think what was going right in Sparta. Every week, a letter still came from Amyklai. Neat lines of thanks, of how Menelaus’s wagons had arrived with sacks of grain or amphorae of oil, proof that he was keeping his word, at least in that way.
Other letters had begun arriving too, from other villages that Menelaus had allowed me to help. Help he hadn’t granted so much as failed to forbid, since I had never asked him first.
Letters from Ptelea, Kynosoura, even wind-scoured little towns along the foothills wrote to say the same thing: that supplies had reached them, that their children had eaten well for the first time in months.
