The crowd began to stir again, hesitant at first, like dancers unsure if the music had truly resumed. But Menelaus smiled, a satisfied thing that crept across his face and tightened the air like a drawn bowstring, and that seemed to be signal enough. Laughter returned. Cups were raised. The gaiety carried on as though fate hadn’t just been reshaped before their eyes.
Around me, the other chosen leaned in, their voices charged with tension beneath the hum of music and clinking goblets.
“She shouldn’t be here,” one hissed.
“The priestess said she was cursed,” another snapped.
“And now the king’s seen her face. It’s not fair.”
Their words were like thorns, their jealousy trying to dig into my skin, but I didn’t react … just like I had been trained. Only the faintest curl of a smile betrayed me, steeped in satisfaction they couldn’t see.
The feast unraveled around us.
Music crashed through the hall in stuttering bursts, lyres straining, drums stumbling to keep up. Dancers in translucent silk twirled between tables, their bare feet smearing crushed figs into the marble. They shrieked with laughter, drunk on wine and eyes. Perfume clung to the air, barely masking the sweat and meat and something rank beneath it—power, maybe, or the hunger for it.
A concubine slithered onto a noble’s lap, pressing a grape to his mouth. He bit into it, juice spilling down his chin. She laughed and then licked it off him.
A crash erupted near the dais. Two men burst apart in a tangle of fists and fury, one already bloodied. The other drove him backward into a brazier, and the firecaught fast, racing up his cloak in a hungry blaze. The man’s scream tore through the hall, high and ragged—but no one moved.
The king tipped his goblet, wine spilling like blood across his hand, and laughed as he watched the flames climb.
For a heartbeat, something cold twisted in my chest, a whisper of foreboding that crawled up my spine. The scent of burning flesh hit and I nearly faltered.
But I forced it down. Now was not the time to be afraid.
A servant emerged from the shadows at our side, her frown etched from decades past and plenty of scorn, judging by the way she was staring at us. Her tunic was plain but spotless, cinched at the waist with a bronze clasp shaped like a pomegranate. Her spine was straight despite her age, and her hair, silver as morning frost, was scraped into a bun so tight it looked like it might snap steel. She wore no veil and no jewelry but the clasp.
One eye squinted more than the other, and a long scar curved up her neck, vanishing beneath the collar of her tunic. But her voice, when she finally spoke, left no room for questions. “Chosen. Follow me.”
She didn’t need to raise her voice to command us. The tone alone was enough, honed by use and all the sharper for it.
Around us, the feast continued to unravel. A concubine shrieked with laughter. A lyre string snapped mid-chord. A noble slapped the thigh of a dancing girl and earned a goblet of wine in his lap for his trouble.
The servant clucked her tongue. “This place stinks of men and spoiled fruit. Move.”
One of the chosen hesitated. The servant turned her head just enough for one narrowed eye to find her.
“You planning to marry that spot on the floor?” she asked dryly. “Or do I need to drag you by your pretty little braids?”
The woman shot forward. We all did. I looked back through the blur of gold until I found my mother. She hadn’t moved from her place at the edge of the hall. She stood like she always did, unsmiling, untouched by the revelry around her.
Her eyes met mine. She mouthed the words.“With it or on it.”
Calismae had said the same before we left the manor. So hearing it from my mother’s mouth, seeing it written in the hard lines of her face … only stoked something already burning inside me.
I took her in one last time. The fine creases beside her eyes. The proud lift of her chin. The way her hands were clasped. She would be returning to the village, back to our broken people and our red dust. Back to the life I was leaving behind. I nodded with a wordless goodbye for a final time.
Maybe if I won, I could heal something inside her too. It wasn’t likely but I had the errant thought all the same.
The laughter around me swelled again. A man shouted something slurred and filthy and someone cheered.
“Keep your skirts out of the wine.” the woman muttered, spinning on her heel. “You’re not concubines—yet.”
My brows lifted beneath the veil, but I bit back the retort that bloomed on my tongue. Not concubinesyet? Gods, she had some gall.
We were shepherded between tables where nobles stuffed themselves on roast boar and citrus-drenched grapes, and hands wandered beneath linens while everyone pretended not to notice.
One of the chosen stumbled on a spilled goblet, nearly falling into a soldier’s lap. He caught her by the waist, grinning up at her veil. “Careful, dove,” he said, laughing as she wrenched free. “You won’t make it to the next round with bruises—unless that’s what the king prefers.”
