He tipped his chin toward the bath. “Someone wanted you to die in that water, Helena. To melt from the inside out. If you’d sunk all the way in, you wouldn’t have made it long enough to scream.”
A chill stabbed over my skin, raising the fine hairs on my arms.
He tilted his head, mock thoughtfulness in his tone. “Don’t worry. I’d have mourned you deeply. A whole hour, perhaps two, if I was feeling generous.”
I narrowed my eyes. “And I would have figured out a way to haunt you.”
His eyes glimmered with amusement. “That would have been good. I sleep better with company.”
He rose, dusting his hands against his tunic as though brushing off crumbs. “Hopefully your husband returns from hunting soon so I can tell him about my brilliance. Build all thattrusthe’s so desperate for.” He snorted, as if the word itself were a joke.
I swallowed, uneasy as I always was about Menelaus’s hunt. The king had vanished into the woods every dawn this week—always hunting, always returning seemingly empty-handed. Would he find anything this time? And if he did … what kind of thing would it be?
Theron strolled toward the door, obviously not reading anything from my sudden silence. At the threshold he paused, half turned as his eyes caught mine.
“Don’t look so troubled, Your Majesty,” he said lightly.
My brow furrowed. “Troubled about what?”
His grin flashed, wicked and bright. “Of me being the only one here who could actually keep you alive.”
I frowned at the barb hidden in his words. My lips parted, ready to answer, but he was already gone, his laughter trailing after him, hovering in the corridor long after the door had shut him away.
The silence snapped back into place as everyone stared at the door. Alcmene broke it first, her trembling fingers softly stroking Lysa’s healed skin. “I can’t believe it,” she whispered, though her voice quavered.
We moved fast after that. Lysa was carried gently to my settee, her blistered hand swaddled in clean linen. The servants avoided the bath as though it might lash out and claim them too. They drained it, careful not to let a drop touch their skin.
Under Alcmene’s clipped orders, they scoured the stone, scrubbing withvinegar and sand until the last of the rose oil and venom was banished from the tub. The air grew acrid with the sting of it, scraping my throat, but still I breathed it in … anything was better than the reek of roses clinging to poison.
A scream split the eastern hall just as Alcmene had finished helping me dress. Then another. Then five more, rising like a chorus of terror through the stone.
Alcmene’s hands froze on the sash. Her gaze darted to mine, wide and unblinking. Slowly, her head shook, as if she could deny what her mind already knew. “The poison wasn’t in the tub,” she whispered in a breaking voice. “It’s in the water. All of it.”
My skin crawled with a cold panic. “Go,” I rasped. “Warn them. Tell them to shut off every basin, every cistern, every spring—”
But my mind spun faster than my tongue. Water was already scarce beyond these walls; Menelaus had hoarded most of it here, feeding fountains and baths while the villages thirsted. If the poison touched the palace system, it touched everything. The trickle they were given. The fields. The children.
Gods. It would mean ruin.
By the time I reached the courtyard, the screams had spilled into the open air. Servants staggered from the halls, clutching scorched arms, blistered hands, their skin bubbling as though cursed by fire itself. Children wailed, their cries cracking against my ears. A nurse pitched forward in the colonnade, skirts hissing as steam rose from the soaked hem. Guards shoved through the chaos, shouting orders no one obeyed.
And in the midst of it … was Theron.
His sleeves were shoved to his elbows, his ring flashing like a captured sun with every movement. Where the rest of us stumbled, he prowled. Where others collapsed, he knelt. His voice cut through the din, calm and commanding. Each time the ring touched blistered flesh, light burst outward, searing bright, and the screaming dulled, their breaths easing and their agony receding.
He moved without pause. Saving one, then the next, and the next.
I rushed forward to help, dropping to my knees beside a woman shaking so hard her teeth chattered. “Here,” I whispered, bracing her shoulders as Theron reached for her.
Only then did I truly look at him.
Exhaustion clung to his face and shadows pooled beneath his eyes. His movements were steady, but his hands were shaking, just enough that I could see the fraying edges of whatever power he’d been bleeding into these people.
He exhaled once unevenly … and then a shape slipped from his wrist.
It was a black snake, thicker than a man’s thumb and slick with shadow, and I watched in horror as it coiled up the length of his forearm. Its scales gleamed like oiled obsidian, each one catching the light with an eerie, liquid shimmer. As it lifted its head, two small violet eyes, unnervingly identical to Theron’s, blinked open and fixed on me for a moment before it wound itself higher, disappearing beneath his tunic in a languid glide that left my skin crawling.
I gasped, a hand flying to my throat.
