“And don’t get me started on the lessons they’ll do to teach us to walk correctly,” she ranted, her hands slicing through the air like an agitated orator before the assembly. “What if I have to float like a swan while balancing a pomegranate on my head and pretending I don’t sweat. I mean, sometimes I trip over air. It will be a disaster!”
A giggle slipped out of me before I could stop it.
She raised her brows. “Go ahead and laugh, but I guarantee I’ll be the one flinging a spoon into the king’s lap by accident before week’s end. I’ll be executed for crimes against silverware.”
I shook my head, still laughing, and muttered, “Gods help us.”
The term had slipped out from habit. I winced, glancing around, unsure if such a thing was even allowed to be said within these walls.
Anysa seemed unbothered by my slip and she clinked her cup against mine like we were already toasting our own doom. “If they’re looking for the next elegant Queen of Sparta, I sincerely hope they have poor eyesight.”
I wasn’t sure the training would be as bad as all of that, but it still had me deep in thought as the noise of the room swelled around us. Murmurs, clinking cups, and the faint rustle of draped fabric. I caught eyes watching us, two girls tucked into a corner, talking like conspirators.
Anysa leaned in close, her voice teasing. “On a more delicious note … what do you think of the captain?”
I glanced at her, wary. “Captain?”
She tilted her chin toward the far end of the room. “Achilles,” she said lightly. “He just walked in.”
Achilles.
The name struck like a dropped goblet, a bright, clean shatter in my mind.
I turned … and stared as he moved through the doors, every step coiled with lethal purpose. Aspolashugged his frame this morning, its leather dark as oil and molded to the kind of body sculptors wept trying to re-create.
A crimson sash cinched his waist, its end brushing the hilt of a sword slung like an afterthought at his hip. His hair had been pulled back in Spartan fashion, revealing a face both terrible and divine, cheekbones like the edge of a drawn bow, a mouth made for commands, and those eyes.
Deep blue and unnervingly familiar. My breath hitched.
It was him … the soldier from last night. Apparently, he hadn’t been just some bored guard with a quick mouth and a quicker smile.
He’d been the captain of the king’s guard.
Achilles. The living myth. Sparta’s most beloved son.
And the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen.
Color flooded my cheeks, crawling down my neck, and I dropped my gaze, fingers tightening around the cool ceramic of my cup.
Achilles cut through the room with a quiet gravity, not speaking, not smiling. Just existing.
But that was enough.
Conversations faltered. Maza stilled halfway to mouths. Every girl watched him, some openly, some from beneath lowered lashes, but none could look away.
I stiffened. Why was he even allowed in here? We weren’t wearing our veils. Weren’t we supposed to be hidden, sacred, until the Trials ended?
I leaned toward Anysa. “Why is he allowed to see us like this?”
She shrugged, her mouth curving around a grape. “He’s the king’s right hand. He fought beside him in the war against the gods. They say there’s no one Menelaus trusts more.”
I pursed my lips, a strange feeling prickling beneath my skin.
He kept walking. Past the tables, past the servants, until the weight of his presence fell across me like a cloak in the desert.
He looked up … and our eyes met. The world stilled … until there was only that impossible gaze pinning me in place.
There was no expression on his face. Not really. Just that same too-still calm I’d seen before the king called my name. But something lived in the way he looked at me now, in the slight narrowing of his gaze.
