Theron rolled back his shoulders. “Well, that was invigorating. Where’s lunch?” he said as he stalked away.
I shook my head after him and stared at the aftermath of the chaos. Blood slicked the planks, black red where it mingled with seawater. The injured were being hauled across the deck, their weight deadened, their cries muffled by clenched jaws. Broken spars jutted overhead, the sail in tatters and heavy with brine. The ship groaned around us, a wounded beast adrift.
The stench clung thick—salt, smoke, and the reek of serpent gore still smeared across the hull where Achilles’s blade had split it. To my left a man rocked over the remains of a soldier, sobbing into the bloodstained wood. Another knelt with his head tipped back, voice cracking as he cursed the gods again and again.
Oars churned as a broader transport ship pulled alongside, the king’s crimson standard snapping above its sail. I gathered Roz quickly, tucking it beneath my cloak. The king had a taste for collecting powerful things, and I would not see him add this one to his menagerie.
Menelaus appeared at the rail. It was clear his armor had been buckled in haste because one strap was askew and his cloak had been thrown crooked acrosshis shoulder. Sweat streaked his temples, and his hair stuck in unruly clumps as if he’d only just been called from behind the screens that ringed his private deck. His face wasn’t smug this time, only pale and strained, the look of a man desperate to appear courageous.
A few steps behind him stood Hetairis. Her cheeks were flushed, her dark hair tangled, and her shift was sliding off one shoulder. She caught my eye and tilted her chin, a silent boast of what the king had chosen to spend his strength on while we fought for our lives.
But all I saw was the same woman from weeks ago, when one of Menelaus’s advisors took her like a vessel. She’d been taken more times than I could count since that day, and her smugness was only a mask stretched over devastation.
I felt pity for her, and the same fierce, aching relief that I’d felt the first night Menelaus had fallen asleep. For all Hetairis’s talk of power, I knew what it was like in Menelaus’s bed. And there was no power there.
I’d learned that the hard way, over and over again.
Menelaus’s gaze swept the carnage, the torn sailcloth, the broken oars, the blood, the groaning men … and he blinked, as though it were a puzzle rather than a massacre.
“Did you kill the accursed thing?” he demanded. “All I saw was that it disappeared.”
Achilles drew breath as if to answer. I went rigid, apprehension prickling over my skin … he was going to reveal Roz.
But Theron’s voice cut in first. “I sent the beast back to the depths where it belongs,” he said nonchalantly, leaning against the mast, suddenly sporting an unmistakable smudge of serpent blood streaked across one cheek like war paint that had not been there a moment before.
His eyes flicked briefly toward Achilles, daring contradiction, then back to the king. Achilles’s brow furrowed, his gaze flicking between Theron and me. Confusion darkened his features, the truth poised on his tongue … until I caught his eye and sent him a desperate, pleading glance. His jaw tightened, a muscle twitching hard, but he said nothing.
The king looked unimpressed. He squinted at the wreckage again and then scowled. “It disappoints me that my two greatest weapons couldn’t take its head,” he muttered, as though their failure were a personal insult. “I would’ve mounted it on the wall in the throne room.”
My fingers twisted into my skirts, knuckles aching with the effort to hold myself still. Menelaus had just watched dozens of his own men die, ripped apart by a monster from the deepest corners of myth, and all he could summon was mild annoyance that we hadn’t salvaged a trophy for his décor.
Typical.
He glanced at me then, and for the briefest beat, something like relief flickered across his face, relief that I was standing, breathing,usable.
But as his gaze drifted down my body, a yawn overtook him, jarring and sudden, his jaw cracking wide before he could stop it. He blinked, looking confused and irritated as he smothered another yawn with the back of his hand.
Was Theron’s spell getting stronger and now it only took him lustfully gazing at me to go into effect?
Wouldn’t that be perfect.
“You’re still alive, my beauty. Good,” Menelaus finally called to me.
I nodded, watching as he looked around and scowled as he gestured at the splintered timbers and torn sail of our ship. “We’ve no time to waste on mending this hulk,” he barked. “It will only lag behind. The crew will disperse among the other ships. We’re sailing for war, and I’ll not have Sparta slowed.”
He turned, his cloak snapping in the wind. “And if the sea serpent returns,” he called over his shoulder, “kill it properly.” Without waiting for a reply, he strode across the planks and vanished behind the lacquered screens of his private deck.
Theron released a long, exaggerated breath. “Ah, inspiring leadership. Warms the heart, doesn’t it?”
I said nothing. We may have been at sea with beasts in the water, but we had a greater one in the palace.
Roz stirred beneath my cloak. The movement was small but enough to make me tense. Across the deck, Theron’s head tilted, his eyes narrowing as though he had felt it move. I angled my body, shielding what was mine from his gaze.
Achilles barked orders, gathering a knot of men. Planks were thrown out between the ships, lashed tight by ropes to become a narrow bridge swaying over the waves. One by one the soldiers crossed, gear clanking, the wounded carried in careful, stumbling arms. When Achilles glanced back, holding out his hand, I gathered my chiton, drew a steadying breath, and followed him onto Menelaus’s ship.
That night, the sea moaned against the hull of Menelaus’s ship as though it remembered our terror. The moon burned above the deck, its light warping the shadows.
I lingered near the curtained space that passed for privacy, reluctant to shut it away. The wind moved over my face, cool and unconfined, and for the first time in weeks, I was not choking on the walls of the palace as I prepared for bed. Roz nestled against me beneath my cloak, a small, steady weight. I felt safer with it there, even though some part of me knew it could turn into that creature at any moment and devour me whole.
