A tribute for the beauty they expected to save them … who wouldsave them.
For me.
She rejoined the group, and their feet left bloodied footprints that seeped into the earth behind them as they left, dark and ruddy, sinking into soil desperate for rain. They didn’t look back. Just walked on, shadows trailing behind them like smoke from an already burned house.
My eyes stung as I stared after them, their bodies too thin. I felt guilt that they’d walked all this way just to leave me an offering, but I would accept it, like I did all the others. Because it was the least I could do.
A sudden gust clawed at the shutters and red dust lashed my skin, hot as sparks. I closed my eyes and turned my head, used to it by now. The dust was just Sparta falling apart one heartbeat at a time.
And I—I had only ever watched as it did so.
Something was shifting inside me though, rising like a spark caught to kindling. A fire gathering in the hollow place where despair had only lived.
Because after tonight, I would no longer be a woman on the balcony watching my village fade and die.
Tonight … everything would change.
Thump. Thump.
The pounding on my door echoed through the room, and I braced myself for the onslaught about to happen. Letting out a long sigh, I kept my gaze fixed on the sea of red dust building in the distance that signaled an oncoming storm. Calismae would come in whether I told her to or not.
She wasn’t exactly one to wait for permission.
A second later, she did indeed sweep in like the gathering storm, her crimson robes whispering against the floor—thoughrobeswas too gentle a word for the structured folds of fabric she wore like armor. Everything she owned was red, dyed that way or stained beyond salvation. There was no use dressing in anything else, beyond our few special occasions. Not here. Not anymore.
“Gods help me,” she muttered, eyes already narrowing like I’d personally offended Olympus by existing. “You’re filthy.”
I turned toward her slowly, trying to keep in my mirth. Although under the circumstances, maybe I’d be able to get away with a little disrespect without her threatening to box my ears. The fact that it was me she called dirty in a village caked in grime had to be at least a little amusing.
The sunlight caught the fine web of lines across her face, what she called her “wisdom marks,” as if the universe had etched truth into her skin and forgot to tell the rest of us. Her sharp blue eyes, watery but never weak, met mine with all the softness of a whetstone.
She’d been my nursemaid since I was born, although her primary role in my life the last ten years had been that of a nagging hen.
“Off the ledge, girl,” she snapped. “I swear if I have to scrape mud from your fingernails again, I’ll shave your head and call it penance.”
I snorted, I couldn’t help it, and I completely forgot to hide the smile that followed. Too late. Her brows arched like drawn blades, glinting with the promise of consequences.
“You think it’s funny?”
“I thinkyou’refunny,” I murmured, stepping back into the room, away from the sight of the cursed land and the threat of a storm.
“You’ll be laughing less when the king sees you and thinks you’ve been rolling with the pigs.”
“What pigs? They starved to death last spring.”
Her eyes narrowed further, as if my smart mouth was the reason for their death and not the famine that left the ground so barren that all the rain could do was run across it and leave floods and ruin in its wake.
“Let me look at you.” Calismae’s fingers dug into my arms, not cruelly but insistently.
“What are you going to do,” I asked, “when I leave today and you realize you can’t order me around anymore?”
Her mouth pursed like I’d said something obscene.
“What makes you think I won’t still boss you around after today? Queen or not, you’ll still need to listen to me,” she said, sniffing once, deeply, dramatically, like she’d caught the scent of my defiance and found it distasteful.
I rolled my eyes because I’d been adreamof a ward, but I didn’t retort. There was a tension around her eyes that wasn’t usually present.
“Everything alright, Nana?” I asked, the old nickname rolling off my tongue.
