My attention snapped toward my friend.
Her spine straightened, just barely. Her head tilted like she was whispering something to herself. Then she stepped out of line. Even veiled, I could feel the effort it took for her to look steady, confident. Her hands stayed clasped at her sides, but the smallest tremble ran through her fingers.
Her partner had a wrap the color of pomegranate skins and rings lining every finger. She stepped up to Anysa and whispered something. Anysa gave a tiny nod. Then followed.
One by one, the girls around me disappeared … until it was just me waiting to be paired off.
“Helena,” the High Priestess called. My name struck the air, and the floor seemed to tilt beneath my feet.
I stood, heart thudding, and scanned the room … only to find one woman still unclaimed.
Hetairis.
Her mouth was still glossy from her lover’s cries, and she lifted one finger, beckoning me.
I walked toward her, aware of the heat climbing up my neck, of the subtle ache between my thighs, still singing from earlier. Her gaze swept over me like a knowing touch, appraising and amused.
“You’ll be mine, little petal,” she murmured. “Try not to embarrass yourself.” She turned and glided ahead, hips rolling with dangerous ease. The room felt smaller with each step I took behind her, the torchlight dimmer. The thick carpet muffled the sound of my hesitation.
We moved through a maze of low lounges and flickering lamplight, the air laced with oil and sweat and something more primal. Girls filled the space like living sculptures, each in … training.
One knelt near a basin, practicing how to pour water over her arm with fluid, seductive grace. Another crawled across a length of carpet on her hands and knees, her movements languid, hips swaying in an exaggerated rhythm. A pair near the far column rehearsed a dance, their veils fluttering as they arched and spun, bodies bending like reeds in the wind, their gestures languid but precise.
Every movement was purposeful. Controlled. Sensuality without touch.
I spotted Anysa across the room, stiff-backed and awkward as she tried to mimic a deep bend. Her concubine stood nearby, arms folded, offering murmured corrections and an arched brow of clear judgment. Anysa’s form wasn’t bad … but she looked like she’d rather be charging into battle than moving her hips in time with the drumbeat echoing faintly from somewhere deeper inside.
The High Priestess was watching from the shadows beyond. She sat perched beside a scroll-laden table, herkalamosglinting as it scratched across parchment. A servant crouched beside her, murmuring into her ear as she noted something down. Her gaze swept the room slowly, not missing a twitch or tremble. It paused on Anysa. Then lingered on me. My stomach clenched.
Hetairis led me through it all without pause, until we reached a shadowed alcove veiled in wine-red curtains. In the center waited a single settee, its wooden legs glinting, its cushions lush as sin.
She didn’t sit. She reclined. Poured herself into the seat like spilled honey, one leg tucked beneath her, the other dangling lazily over the side. She plucked a grape from a silver bowl and bit into it, juice catching on her lower lip. Only then did she fix her gaze on me.
“Well,” she said, her voice sweet and edged like glass. “Go on, then. Begin.”
My brain scrambled, grasping for a script that didn’t exist. “I—begin what, exactly?” I asked, the words thinner than I meant them to be.
Her eyes skimmed over me, unhurried and merciless. “Show me your dancing. Or did you think you were above trying because you happen to have a pretty face?” she said disdainfully.
Heat crawled up my neck.
Hetairis laughed, like she could see my blush, her eyes rolling as she popped another grape into her mouth. Chewing with leisurely disdain, she swallowed before sighing like the whole affair bored her. “Gods, what a waste.”
My jaw clenched hard behind the veil. She had no idea what I was capable of. She had no idea I would do whatever it took to win.
Hetairis leaned forward, the silver streaks in her hair catching the light and flaring like moonfire. “I saw you at the choosing ceremony,” she said, her voice softening into something crueler. “All that beauty, and you carry it like a sack of grain. Cold. Clumsy. Utterly unaware of the power leaking through your pores.”
Her tone may have been silk, but her eyes betrayed her. There was no softness there … only the glint of teeth behind a smile, the satisfaction of a wolf dressing its hunger in gentility. She was lying, trying to knock down my confidence before the Trial.
I aimed for nonchalance, pretending to pick an errant thread off my dress. “Yet somehow I caught the eye of the king.”
“Oh, petal,” she said, resting her chin on her knuckles, studying me like she felt sorry for me. “It was only because he could see your face. If you had been veiled, that awkward gait, those twitchy hands … he never would have looked even once.”
The words slithered under my skin before I could stop them.
Part of me knew she was only trying to wound … but another, quieter part twisted in doubt. I remembered the weight of the veil over my face, the High Priestess’s horror, the snap of rejection that had cut through the hall.
What if Hetairis was right? What if beauty was all I had, and without it, I was nothing worth seeing at all? What if I’d been wrong about the king recognizing me even with a veil? What if I got lost in the crowd of chosen because I had nothing else to offer?
