Menelaus’s laugh drifted after me. “She still looks like Helena the Beauty from where I’m standing, Achilles. The view’s just as fine from the back.”
I walked on, my embarrassment hidden beneath the sway of my skirts. I felt the bars of the cage Theron had named, closing around me with every echo of his laughter.
Chapter49
Iwalked the outer paths of the palace garden with Alcmene beside me. The sun hung pale behind a gauze of clouds, its light washing the stones in a wan glow. The air carried the faint perfume of the king’s roses, stubborn blossoms spilling from trellises that climbed the walls.
For a moment, the quiet almost fooled me into believing in peace. Almost.
And then the spell cracked.
Shouts snapped across the courtyard, rough and harsh, wrong against the hush of the garden. I whipped my head toward the gates.
The butt of a guard’s spear slammed into a woman’s ribs. She staggered back, clutching a child so tightly his small legs dangled. The boy whimpered, and she hunched over him, as if her body alone could shield him from Sparta’s cruelty.
My pulse surged. I was already running, skirts dragging at my legs, before Alcmene’s hand could stop me.
By the time I reached the gates, the woman’s shawl had fallen into the dust. Her arms were wasted thin, the child clinging to her ribs like a shadow. When her eyes lifted and found me, they widened. Hope struck across her gaunt face.
“Please, Your Majesty,” she gasped in a shredded voice. “We’ve come so far. There is nothing left in our village, no grain, no water. My husband died in the fields. I—I cannot make it farther. But he can.”
She pressed her boy forward, shaking with the effort of lifting him. His cheeks were hollow, but his eyes … gods, they still held a spark of something that refused to die.
The soldier at the gate shoved her back. “On your knees,” he barked, then turned toward me. “Your Majesty, she’s not permitted. We don’t let beggars through the gates. She could be carrying the Dread.”
“Please,” she begged once more. “He’s all I have left.” She tried to lift the boy toward me again, and her arms shook with the effort, her body swaying.
I growled at the soldier. “The Dread does not pass through touch,” I shot back, heat rising in my chest. “We all know that.”
The soldier faltered, but another stepped up quickly. “Even so, the king’s orders are clear—”
I rose to my full height, my voice edged in steel. “And am I not queen? Aremyorders not clear?”
Silence. The soldiers shifted, uneasy under my gaze.
I pointed to the boy. “Bring him inside. Now.Gently.”
They hesitated a heartbeat longer, then obeyed, pulling him from his mother’s arms. She kissed his head once, whispering words too soft to hear, and let him go.
Her arms dropped limp. She folded forward until her forehead touched the dust, her body bent in surrender. Alcmene’s hand pressed to my back, guiding me away as the gates clanged shut behind us.
The boy twisted in the soldier’s grasp, his thin arms reaching, his small voice breaking in the air. “Mother! Mother!”
I glanced back. She had not moved. Her body remained folded in the dust, head bowed, arms limp at her sides. Not a supplicant. Not a beggar.
A corpse.
The truth pierced through me. She had used the last of her strength to carry him here, to hand him over. To die at the threshold.
The boy thrashed harder, shrieking for her as I took him from the soldier. My throat burned as I stroked his hair, trying to quiet the panic in his small body. “No,” he sobbed, “no, no, no—”
I cupped his face, forcing his gaze up from the gates, from the lifeless shadow on the other side. “Look at me,” I whispered in a breaking voice. “Look at me. She wanted you to live. She brought you here so you couldlive.”
He tried to twist back again, but I held him as he shook, rocking him against me as his cries tore through the courtyard. “You are here now,” I murmured, even as the words tasted like ash. “Look at the palace, little one. Look forward. She gave everything so you could be here.”
His sobs did not quiet, but he clung to me, fists tangled in my chiton, eyes wet and wild. Behind us, the guards averted their gazes, eager to be rid of the sight, eager to forget the woman already cooling in the dust.
I could not forget.
