When I straightened, swiping my mouth with the back of my hand, Mene laus’s eyes flicked toward me. His expression didn’t falter, it was still in its mask of sculpted arrogance, as if my weakness were beneath his notice.
Theron leaned in slightly, the faint glow of his sigils catching the red light, his gaze burning with the quiet patience of a predator in tall grass. His voice was silken, threaded with amusement that somehow cut deeper than Menelaus’s scorn. “Wars are not won by gods or kings, Your Majesty,” he murmured. “They’re won by the ones willing to become monsters.”
As he spoke, his hands moved in a subtle arc and his fingers trailed sigils that shimmered before dissolving into the air. On the shore, the Karybdis’s tentacles stilled mid-sway, the Cetus lowered its head, and the Skylla slipped back into the surf. One by one, the beasts turned from the slaughter, retreating into the depths until the tide swallowed them whole.
The words moved through me like poison. Before I could shape an answer, a roar rose from the beach—low at first, a guttural rumble, then swelling, rising like a chorus of triumph.
“For Sparta!”
The cry rolled through the carnage, lifting the voices of our soldiers as they rallied amid the slaughter. Spears struck the air, shields rang, and the echoes of the beasts’ departure only seemed to pique their fervor.
The cliffs shook with their roar, and the sea flung it back in answer, a song forged of blood and conquest.
The shore belonged to us now, but the cost was engraved into my soul.
Menelaus descended from the ship first, his torch flaring against the smoke-choked sky. I followed at his heels, my sandals sliding on the gangplank slick with seawater and blood. The surf broke cold around my ankles as we stepped onto the sand. He moved on without hesitation, and I stayed close, the rising smoke of Sidon’s ruin folding over us like a burial cloth.
The ground quivered beneath me, not with battle now but with the death of a city. Smoke coiled upward in heavy spires, smearing the gray sky. Beyond the cliff wall, Sidon smoldered, its rooftops cracked open, halls gutted, and pillars collapsing into heaps of ash. Flames crawled along beams and leapt through shattered windows, racing up torn banners until they crumbled into cinders.
The sea gnawed at the wreckage, dragging blackened stone into its crimson surf as though to swallow the evidence of what we had done. Sparks hissed against the tide, vanishing with the same ease as a life snuffed beneath a knife’s kiss.
We gathered on the beach, Spartans ringed in mud-slick bronze, shields driven into the sand like grave markers. Blood streaked their armor and dust painted their faces as they stood like statues raised from conquest, unflinching and unyielding. Menelaus towered at their center, the torchlight shaping him into a god of war.
Yet he hadn’t done a single thing remotely godlike during the battle. There had been no lightning or impossible strength … no shiver of magic in the air. Nothing but the usual brutality of a man wielding an army.
It was strange the soldiers didn’t seem to notice or care. They looked at him with the same esteem as always, as though the legend of their “living god” mattered more than the truth standing in front of them.
Behind him, they fanned through the ruins, thrusting their torches into cedar beams, into shattered homes, into the bodies of the fallen. Each spark leapt greedily, devouring rooftops and racing up columns until the whole city roared with tongues of fire.
The wind carried it to us, the resinous burn of cedar, the biting tang of salt, and beneath it all the stench of charred flesh, a reminder of the hundreds who had lived here only hours before.
Menelaus admired the burning city for a long moment before thrusting his torch higher. His voice rolled across the waves, drowning out the surf and the screams that still clung to the smoke. “Tonight, we feast on victory!”
The fire seemed to answer him and surged higher.
“Tonight, nothing stands that would defy Sparta!”
Long tables hewn from driftwood were sprawled beneath rough canvas, sagging under platters of spiced meats, pungent cheeses, and amphorae of stolen Sidonian wine. Soldiers crowded in, armor loosened, their faces lit with the fever of victory. Grease dripped from their fingers as they tore into joints of meat with gnashing teeth. Wine spilled red over their hands, and their raucous laughter was an assault on my ears.
Menelaus was nowhere among them. He had already stumbled to his tent, drunk on triumph and wine both, collapsing in a heap on his furs while the rest of Sparta feasted. His torch had burned high enough for him; he had no need to watch the embers of Sidon gutter out.
“Sparta will never hunger again!” one man shouted, raising a dripping haunch into the firelight.
“Not while Sidon burns!” another bellowed back, his mouth full.
Laughter rippled across the benches. A soldier slammed his cup down, sloshing wine across the table. “If we’d known Sidon ate like this, we’d have come sooner!”
“Sooner?” another jeered, tearing a strip of meat with his teeth. “I’d have marched barefoot just for the cheese!”
I lingered in the doorway of my hastily erected tent, my personal cadre of guards a few steps away. My fingers were tight around the wine cup Alcmene had pressed into my hand. The cloak around my shoulders did little to block the chill … or the weight in my chest. Each laugh struck like a blow, each clatter of bronze against wood echoing like a dirge.
Soldiers amused themselves, not with concubines but with the Sidonian women they’d pressed into service. One knelt beside a warrior, her hair tangled and her hands trembling as she lifted a goblet to his mouth.
“Careful, girl,” he sneered as the wine sloshed down his beard. “Waste my drink, and you’ll lick it from the sand.”
The men around him roared with laughter. He caught her chin in his calloused grip, forcing her face up. “Smile.”
Her lips pulled back, brittle and false, and when he shoved a strip of meat between her teeth, she let him tear the other half with his mouth, laughter scraping out of her like a cracked instrument.
