My mother’s hands tightened around the hilt of the dagger at her waist. It was small and completely ceremonial. It would be useless against whatever watched us from the trees.
“We’ll be there in just a few hours,” she said, her voice too even, too light. She was trying to sound calm. For my sake or her own, I couldn’t tell.
I didn’t answer. Something sour twisted in my stomach. I turned to the window, needing the distraction and … the trees had changed again.
They bore leaves now, unlike the skeletal ones we’d passed for miles, but not red. Not the way the rest of this cursed forest bled. These were dead-looking instead. Matte and dry, the shade of old ash and crumbled stone, of tombs sealed shut and never mourned. They drank the light. Devoured it. As if the sun had never touched them.
They didn’t move. Not even with the jergins’ passing. The branches should’ve rustled, but they held still. Watching. Waiting.
Helena.
A sound—thin and wet, like mud sucking at a sandal. My head whipped toward it.
“Did you hear that?” I murmured, glancing over to my mother.
She didn’t blink. Her gaze was locked straight ahead, her face unreadable.
Of course she hadn’t heard. Or she had … and she was pretending not to.
I leaned closer to the window. The glass was cold and smudged from my breath. I pressed my ear to it. There. Again.
Helena.
A whisper. A sigh. A breath of a name drawn out like mourning. My name. Over and over again.
Helena … Helena … Helena—
“Don’t listen!”
Mother’s voice crashed through the whispers, like stone cracking beneath a hammer. I flinched, jerking back from the window.
All the color had drained from her face. She was gripping the dagger tighter, white-knuckled and shaking.
“The Griefwillow,” she said, her voice barely more than a breath. “It feeds on it. Our grief.”
I froze.
Once, Sparta had thrived on magic. Not just in myth, but in the marrow of its people. Calismae used to tell me stories from her childhood, about how seers read the wind like scrolls, pulling secrets from its currents. How warriors struck their swords to the earth and lit them with sunfire, flames trailing like banners into war. How healers could close a wound with nothing but a touch and a few whispered words, the flesh stitching itself whole like time rewinding.
But all of that died when Menelaus cast out the gods.
Now, only he held power—whatever kind it was. No one knew what he’d bargained, stolen, or unearthed to keep it, only that it must have been immense. After all, it was strong enough to drive divinity itself from our lands, to silence the voices that had once ruled the skies … to keep his people in check. Whateverpower he wielded, it didn’t just protect him. It remade Sparta in his image, and left the rest of us to live in its shadow.
Even in a land starved of power though, where magic had dried up like the riverbeds of our cursed fields, Menelaus hadn’t been able to get rid of the creatures who still remembered.
Some of them carried the remnants of what once pulsed through the veins of this entire world.
Like the Aetherthorn. And like this creature.
“It’s calling me,” I whispered. The words felt too small, too thin for the way my name had slipped from the trees like it belonged there.
Everyone in Sparta knew about the Griefwillow. But no story could prepare you for a blighted tree that knew your name. They didn’t prepare you for the weight of sorrow that suddenly felt … not entirely your own. Like suddenly I was feeling all of Sparta’s pain. Centuries of it. Pressing in from all sides, fermented so long it had grown sentient.
A tear traced down my cheek before I even realized it had formed. I shrank back against the seat, as if the thin wall of theokhèmacould shield me from whatever was waiting in the trees. Something that knew my name.
Something that seemed to want more from me.
The voice didn’t vanish … it thinned, drawn out like sap from a wounded tree, slower with each breath, until it slipped beneath the silence of the forest. Dusk filtered through the canopy in streaks of dim gold, but the trepidation stayed rooted in my chest.
