Chapter Text
I was born to silence. But not the kind that soothes the spirit. Not the lull of sleep, not a gentle hush that stills the wings of birds before rain, nor the sacred quiet that descends upon altars before the first prayer is spoken. Mine was another silence altogether: a silence hammered from divine wrath, one that simmered in the waters of spite, and made to fit around me like a too-tight chain.
It was not the absence of sound, but the burden of a voice that was not mine to wield. I was not mute. No, not in the way pitying strangers imagine– not in the tender tragedy they assign to the voiceless. I could speak. My lips formed words, shaped syllables, spat curses. But the truth is crueler than muteness: I could speak only what was true . Not what was safe. Not what was kind. Only what was —and when pressed beyond that, only what will be . The future curled in my throat like smoke, and if I dared to open my mouth, it spilled out in riddles I scarcely understood.
There were times I tried to twist my meaning, to temper it, to soften the sharp edges of truth with honeyed tones—but the gods do not allow for gentleness in the cursed. My tongue would not obey me. Words leapt from it like birds set a flight. I spoke, and the air seemed to thicken, to warp around the sound. People listened. Not to me, no. Never to me– but to what I carried. As if my breath itself were threaded with augury.
I came to hate the sound of my own voice, and yet feared its silence more.
Each breath I drew tasted of prophecy. Not metaphorically—no, the taste was real, and I could not escape it. My tongue knew when a god’s hand had stirred the well of my thoughts. It was there in the tang of metal, in the bitterness of ash. The flavor would change, depending on the weight of the vision. Sometimes it was sour, like spoiled wine. Other times it was sharp, biting, like the sting of lemon on a cut. And sometimes—when the future I was forced to utter brought ruin—I could taste blood. I would swallow, and it would not go away.
Even now, I cannot name all the voices that have passed through me. They leave no memory, only aftertaste. They speak and vanish, and I am left behind with nothing but the echo. I did not want this power. I never sought it. But I was born to it, shaped by it, rendered small beneath its gaze.
My earliest memories were not of laughter, nor of lullabies sung by a tender tongue. There was no softness in my childhood, no mother with idle hands or absent purpose. Lysandra was a storm wrapped in robes of priestly white. Her touch smelled of myrrh, of burnt laurel, of smoke that clung to the folds of her garments long after the sacred fires had died. When she entered the room, the air itself seemed to bow. Not with affection, but with awe. Or perhaps fear.
I never called her “mother.” Not aloud, atleast. She would not allow it. “You were not born for a cradle,” she said to me once, when I had scraped my knee on the temple steps and wept like a child, as children are meant to do. “You were born to stand where others fall.” Then she left me there, bleeding, to learn the shape of pain without her shadow to shield me from it. I wiped the blood with the hem of my tunic and stood. I always stood.
She spoke little to me, save for instruction. “Hold the knife like this.” “Do not flinch at entrails.” “A false reading is worse than no reading at all.” She taught me to interpret the quiver of flame, the flight of birds, the shape of oil in water. I memorized the rites before I learned to write my name. My hands grew callused not from play, but from grinding powders, from drawing sacred circles in ash. The temple was my nursery. The gods were my lullaby. And the city—Troy—was the great trembling beast that roared beneath us all.
Lysandra had no use for softness. She was the gods’ mouthpiece, a seeress with spine and smoke in her gaze. The priests called her hierophant , the Revealer of the Sacred. Kings bent at her word. Soldiers sought omens in the sweep of her hand, and women clutched their wombs as she passed, as though to shield unborn children from divine attention. They said she could turn the sky with a whisper, that her breath summoned thunder. I never knew whether the gods loved her—or simply feared to silence her.
But there was one story my mother would not tell.
It hovered around her like incense never quite burnt away…clinging to the folds of her robes, catching at the base of her throat when she thought herself alone. And though the temple echoed with myths as readily as it did chants, though I was taught a hundred tales of godly wrath and mortal folly before I had shed my first tooth, this one—the story of me —was forbidden.
I asked, once. Just once.
I was eleven, perhaps twelve. Old enough to know that not all silences are empty. Old enough to see how the priests would glance away when I entered, as though I carried smoke in my wake. Old enough to understand that my affliction was not mere fate, but origin.
“Why can I only speak like this?” I had asked her—naïvely, foolishly, with a child's hunger for clarity. “Why am I not like the other children?”
Lysandra did not strike me. She did not raise her voice. But she stilled. Utterly. As though the breath had fled her body, as though even the air feared to move. Then she turned, slowly, and I saw it—the war beneath her composure. A flicker of something old and ugly flashing behind her eyes. She knelt, took my face between her hands. Her fingers were steady. Her voice, quieter than prayer.
“Do not ask again,” she said.
I never did.
But still—there were signs. Cracks in her mask that I learned to trace as others traced constellations. When she looked at me too long, her mouth would twitch. Not with affection, but something like grief. After ceremonies, when her power had been spent and the gods had loosened their grip on her limbs, I would find her in the dark, curled around a cup of wine she never drank, whispering names into her sleeve. Names I never recognized. Names I suspected might never have belonged to mortals.
There were rumors. I heard them first from a kitchen servant, careless with her words and drunk on leftover honey-wine. She spoke of a night when the sky split open. When the great temple doors shattered from their hinges without wind, and Lysandra was found at dawn—barefoot, bloodied, her robes torn as if by talons or teeth. No one dared ask what happened. No one dared speak of the thunder that had howled for hours without a storm.
The priests stopped calling her “beloved of the gods” after that.
Some said she had rejected a divine favor. Others claimed she had been chosen —and punished for resisting. One version, whispered so faintly it barely breathed, said the Father of Gods had taken what was not his to take. That Hera, in her fury, could not strike her husband and so laid the curse upon the woman’s womb instead.
And I—I was what grew there. A child not of love, nor of devotion, but of divine vengeance. A living rebuke. A vessel of truth, hollowed by spite. My voice is the result not of blessing, but war between immortals. My soul is an echo of a crime no one dared name aloud.
But she loved me, I think. In her own way. In the way wild things sometimes love what they birth—distant, unyielding, with a kind of savage pride. I longed for her approval the way some children long for warmth. She taught me strength, but never gentleness. But sometimes, when I speak a prophecy and the gods drag the air from my lungs, I wonder whose hand first set that power in me. I wonder whose voice I echo when I speak.
And I wonder if she ever saw my face and thought:
This is the price I pay .
She named me Themistra—not for beauty, but for balance. For vengeance, too, though she would never have admitted that in daylight. In the long hours before dawn, when the oil lamps guttered like dying hearts, she would whisper truths into my ear that no child should hold: that the gods may curse the innocent to wound the guilty, that silence is not peace, and that being born a woman was to be born with your throat already in a fist.
We lived in the shell of what once had been a villa—marble fractured, mosaic tiles turned to teeth. Vines crept through the bones of the place like memories that would not die. The gods had not forsaken Troy entirely; they simply refused to offer comfort. Omens nested in the corners of our walls. I once watched a sparrow fall dead into our hearth and my mother called it a gift.
And though Lysandra offered prophecy to kings and generals, she would never allow my talents to serve those not born of Troy. "You are a weapon of this city," she told me once, pressing the sacred blade into my hands for the first time. "They will fear you," she whispered, brushing my temple with her hand, voice like smoke from smoldering embers. "And they should. Let them."
But then Odysseus came. Not as a hero, though they sang of him as such, but as a shadow in a man’s shape. The King of Ithaca. A snake wrapped in a man's skin. He came for the truth. Not justice, not peace. Truth. And he paid more gold than the eastern vaults could hold. My mother—who had once spat at the thought of foreign coin—began to tilt her head at the scent of it.
He studied me.
Not like a child. Not really. But then again… something in his gaze hesitated. Flickered. There was sorrow in it. Recognition. As though he saw not just a prophetess, not just Hera’s cursed mouthpiece, but a child. And not just any child.
A boy with sunlit curls and wide eyes. Someone left behind. He looked at me and, for a heartbeat, I believe he saw a son.
That—more than my riddles—unsettled him. Still, he asked for the future. “Tell me what you see,” he said, hands steepled, voice too calm. I did not answer right away. I looked at him, and saw not the lion of war they described, but a man already haunted. Weariness in his shoulders. Distance in his eyes. A yearning so sharp it gleamed beneath his skin.
Then the fire caught me.
It always began like a breath I didn’t take—like the gods inhaled through me. The room dulled, dimmed, blurred at the edges. The heat of the flames leaned close, pressed into my skin like hands. My mouth moved without my permission. My throat opened like a wound. And I—Themistra—I vanished.
What left me was not mine. It was theirs.
“The gates will open, not to fight—
But in the name of gift and night.
Wood will walk, though born of tree,
And from its womb, the end shall be.”
The words tumbled out like smoke from a burning house—slow, curling, final. My tongue stung from them. And in my mouth, the bitter taste of coppery blood.
There was no understanding. No interpretation. Just the lingering taste of something bitter and final. I didn’t know what I’d said. That wasn’t the point. Prophecy is not for the prophet.
I had always hated it. But worse than the hatred was the fear.
Because for some reason, something inside me whispered:
This one will matter. He will matter.
And I didn’t know why.
He blinked. Just once. Ran his hands through his hair, slow and deliberate. Then he left. No questions. No thanks. Only silence.
And I was grateful for it. Because I had needed a moment to remember where I ended and the gods began.
But then came Achilles, bold as dawn, and Patroclus, quiet as dusk. Not together, but in strange succession. And others followed. More and more. My name passed through the Greek camp like smoke—my words, more coveted than armor.
Suddenly, my visions were a currency the gods themselves seemed eager to mint. And as my status swelled, so too did the danger. When word of my influence reached the city gates, Prince Hector himself ordered that I be moved within the city walls. "Let her not speak ruin into our hands," he said, and his tone was less cruel than afraid. I was to be housed in a sanctum near the citadel, where I could be watched and protected.
But fate, as always, had other plans. For war does not love truth. It devours it. Grinds it into dust beneath its heels. And those who survive, rewrite what happened into legends that fit their guilt.
They say Troy burned for ten years, but that is not true. It died in a single night. The long siege was but the fever before the final breath, the gnawing of hunger before the wolf tears through the outer layer of flesh. What truly kills a city is not war—it is the moment hope flees like a sea-nymph dropping into water. And hope died, I think, the night I watched them wheel that horse through the gates.
Even I—cursed as I was, compelled to truth and the riddles of things to come—could not make them listen. I had spoken of fire in the bellies of beasts. I had warned of wood that watched. But riddles are never trusted, not when the lies are dressed as gifts and gilded with the promise of peace.
The priests chanted. The people danced. And the gods…oh, the gods laughed. Some of them, atleast.
I remember the wind that night. It had a strange weight, as though it bore witness. I remember the moon, bruised with clouds. I remember the thud of the trapdoors opening, the low creak of foreign breath entering sacred air.
I was in the temple outside the city when the screams began. My hand had just lit the incense when the first scream peeled down the hill like a strip of torn skin. Then more and more. Rising, ragged, unending.
There is a sound people make when they realize they will die. Not panic. Not fear. But a sort of denial so primal it curdles in the lungs. I heard that sound again and again, as if the city itself was drawing one final breath through a throat full of blood.
And the fire. Gods, the fire.
People tried to run. The alleys filled too fast—bodies crushed against each other like sea foam against rocks. I saw the injured topple over the hills and lay lifeless. I saw men I had seen in passing since childhood with swords lodged in their bellies, twitching like fish. I saw a girl, no older than I, with her braid still woven for festival, her throat opened from ear to ear. I stepped in blood that had not yet cooled.
Lysandra held my hand with the desperation of someone who’d already lost everything once. “Don’t look back,” she hissed. But I did. I saw our roots crumble. I saw our dead. I saw beauty scorched and called it victory. But we ran. We hid. We waited.
However, you cannot hide from history. Troy's name still clung to our skin like the stench of smoke. Looters found us in the ruins of a shrine. I was eleven. My mother stood before me like a lioness, defiant and wild. “Take everything,” she begged. “But not her. The gods speak through her. She is holy. She is magnificent!”
They laughed. Of course they did. “Magnificent?” one scoffed. “She’s just a girl. Pretty, though. We’ll see what her riddles are worth in bed.”
My mother lunged. Her hands became claws. Her voice a roar. She bled and rose and bled again. She looked up to the sky, eyes blazing. "HERA! ZEUS! OLYMPUS! LOOK AT ME! " she bellowed. "You sent me this fate—watch it unfold! Do you delight in this? Is this what satisfies your golden thrones?”
A boot slammed into her ribs. She coughed blood, and still she rose. Feral hisses seeped from her lips. "You punish my womb, and now you steal my heart? Cowards! Fiends! You take what is not yours to take and call it justice!" They beat her. She bled. But she never bowed. “She will be your reckoning,” she screamed, eyes on me even as her blood soaked the stone. “Let her voice be the very thing that ruins you!”
I was dragged away. Kicking. Screaming inside the cage of my cursed throat. I bit. I fought. But I was taken— and so was she.
That night, while the ship rocked beneath the heavy breath of the Mycenaean sails—snapping like whips against the sky—I dreamed in silver and shadow. Moonlight draped over antlers sharp as shattered glass, and a bow pulled taut with raw, unyielding fury. Artemis— at least I think it was her— came to me then. Not the gentle huntress of whispered prayers, but a tempest cloaked in wrath. Her fingers grazed my brow, cold as winter’s edge, and her voice was a thunderclap inside my mind: “Mine.” Was all she said.
And when dawn tore through the horizon, the sea roiled with a strange, electric hunger. A storm was not rising in the heavens—it was rising in me. Artemis had claimed me, not with incense or hymns, but with a savage, sacred fire burning wild beneath my skin. I was hers, utterly and irrevocably, and I would endure whatever fate she wove.
They took us to Mycenae. My mother was given to Agamemnon, a concubine bound in finery and iron. I, to the court, as a prophetess to amuse and terrify. They kept me alive not for mercy, but for profit. My mouth a parlor trick. My skills a novelty.
But I was safe for a while. Safe, and waiting for six years.
Mycenae had caught a whiff of the enduring Queen of Ithaca who was husbandless. Penelope was her name, and she had been holding Ithaca down all by herself for sixteen and a half years now. A feat to be applauded, but for a woman? Never. Many nobles, aristocrats and peasants came crawling to Mycenae’s doors to request for some sort of gift to give Queen Penelope— in hopes of securing her hand.
I had held her in some sort of high regard until Eurymachus came. He arrived like a shadow sliding between pillars, his smile sharp as broken glass. His eyes, ever calculating, lingered on me—not with curiosity, but with ownership disguised as favor. “If I may,” he said, voice as slimy as he appeared, “a token from Mycenae, to honor Queen Penelope’s grace and secure a place among her suitors.”
I had just recently turned seventeen.
My mother’s face twisted with a bitter storm that no prayer could calm. The fire in her that had since dimmed when we arrived on Mycenae now erupted in full force— brought to life like a phoenix. Lysandra, whose voice was usually the temple’s unyielding steel, now trembled—not with fear, but with a fury that scorched the air itself. She stepped forward, her gaze a blaze meant to sear Eurymachus where he stood. And throwing all Greek customs away, she spoke.
“You will not touch her,” she spat, words sharp as a dagger’s edge. “She is no trinket to be bartered in courts drunk on greed and lust.” Her hands curled into fists, knuckles pale. “She belongs to herself, not to your scheming or the hunger of men cloaked in false honor.”
Agamemnon, seated heavily nearby, rose with slow menace. His eyes were cold, unreadable, but his hand struck like thunder across Lysandra’s cheek. The sound cracked the room—a violent punctuation to her defiance.
“Silence,” he commanded, voice a blade cutting through the murmurs. “You forget your place, former priestess. Your daughter is property now. Your will means nothing.”
Lysandra’s hand lifted instinctively to her reddened cheek, but her spirit did not break. The woman who had once bent the will of kings, now forced to bend her pride.
Instead, her eyes flared brighter—an unbowed storm refusing to die. “You may silence me,” she said, voice low and trembling with rage, “but you will not break her.”
I stood frozen, caught between the fire of my mother’s wrath and the cold shadow of our captors. The bitter taste of powerlessness seeped into my bones. Lysandra’s lip bled where his ring had caught her, but she did not flinch again. Her gaze remained fixed on me—an unspoken liturgy, an unbroken tether. She was not pleading. She was commanding. Live. Endure. Do not forget.
I could not speak, not with a voice that men would understand. But within me, beneath ribs pressed in by years of ache, something ancient stirred. I vowed, without words, without sound, as the gods once did when the world was young.
I will not be his gift. I will not bow. I will be flame, and wind, and the arrow loosed in stillness. I will endure.
Even Eurymachus, smiling like rot in bloom, flinched when I looked at him. Artemis— as much as I hated the gods— had not claimed me for quiet suffering. But even so, I was taken to sea.
And the sea has many hungers. Salt, for one. Blood, for another. I gave it both. The Mycenaeans bound my hands like I was a beast, though my only weapon was prophecy. The journey to Ithaca was… uneventful. Sailors called me “ Exophthalmic .” Bug-eyed. A word far too advanced for such simple men. Some joked. Some touched. I snarled at them in response, spitting the truth of my hatred for them right at their feet. One had even said, “I’d beat you, but it’d ruin that face.” Then he did it anyway.
At night, I dreamed of feathers and flame. My mouth a weapon. My words cutting like a sword. Wings black as mourning cloth. In the dream, I screamed—and the sky broke. When I woke, the salt still crusted my skin, but my soul burned. Rage curled in my belly, slow and patient. Ithaca’s cliffs loomed like jagged teeth.
We docked at sunrise. The ship groaned as it kissed the shore, its hull sighing against the pale Ithacan sands as though relieved to release its burden. The planks creaked with weariness, as if they too longed for rest. Sailors leapt overboard with the grace and callousness of men who had danced too long upon the line between sea and soil—unchanged by the storms that marked them, untouched by the lives they ferried.
I remained where I was, curled in a corner of the deck like an omen no one wished to read. The taste of salt clung to my tongue, mingling with the sour tang of bruised fruit and old fear. The sea had not drowned me. Not yet.
I rose, spine aching from the voyage, and stepped forward. Each footfall down the gangplank echoed like a drumbeat in my bones. When my soles touched Ithacan soil at last, a tremor passed through me—not fear, not exactly. Something older. Something deeper. It was ancestral, blood-deep—a fury remembered by the marrow. The earth here was dry, sun-bleached and thirsty, cracked like old hands clinging too long to the illusion of power. And ahead, half in shadow: a house that looked less like a palace and more like a battlefield dressed in wealth. A war memorial still pretending to rule. The House of Odysseus. A flicker of a memory. Of a man.
Eurymachus disembarked last. He’d dressed for the occasion—soft fabrics, gold thread, the swagger of a man who had never heard no as anything but foreplay. He offered me his arm.
I did not take it.
“Come now,” he murmured. “Let’s not sulk. It’s a generous gift I’m giving.” He reeked of confidence that had been steeped in cheap wine and fermented ego.
I turned my face away. Not in shame, but in refusal.
We climbed the winding paths that led to the palace like ants up the neck of a beast. Around us, the island whispered. Olive trees hissing in the wind, goats bleating on distant hills, waves murmuring secrets that even I could not yet hear. My feet ached, but I walked. Head high. Mouth closed. Vow intact.
The courtyard was a carnival of gluttony. The stench of roasted meat and unearned laughter clawed its way into my nose. Fat men lounging on couches where kings once sat, fingers slick with grease, mouths slick with lies. They devoured grapes and girls in equal measure. They mocked the gods even as they drank to them. Wine ran in rivulets across the stone floor, ignored by the musicians who played only for coin, not for glory. There was no music in this place, only noise.
Disgust curled in my belly like a viper. Troy had fallen for less. Ithaca was not a kingdom. It was a carcass. And these were its vultures, squabbling over meat that did not belong to them. They had not built this hall. They had not fought for its walls, nor wept over its stones. Yet here they were, draped in Odysseus’s linens, slurping from his goblets, feasting on the bones of his absence. My lip curled. My fists clenched in the folds of my tattered robe.
“Oi, Eurymachus!” came a voice from the threshold—a man with olives tangled in his beard and the swagger of someone too drunk to feel shame. He raised his goblet high, grinning like a dog who had spotted his first meal. “What’s that you’ve dragged in—a courtesan or a servant?”
“For the Queen,” Eurymachus bellowed, flourishing an arm like an actor mid-tragedy. “A seeress! Straight from the loins of Troy. Blessed by gods, cursed by fate— all that rot.”
Laughter cracked like whips. It echoed through the stone hall, coarse and cruel, slapping against my ears. A chicken bone sailed through the air and struck the ground near my feet with a hollow clack.
“She looks like a cat dragged from the cistern,” someone jeered. “Will she foretell tomorrow’s tide, or just warn us when the wine turns sour?” Laughs erupted around like a chorus of hyenas cackling.
Eurymachus yanked me forward by the wrist, his hand clammy with sweat and entitlement. He puffed up like a rooster preening in a pit of would-be lions.
“She can only speak the truth. And she speaks in riddles, should you ask.” he declared, as though unveiling a prized relic to a room of pigs. “Words wrapped in mystery, kissed by Olympus, trained by priests, broken by the Mycenaeans. The Queen will be thrilled. ”
I did not speak. I had not spoken for days. Not since Lysandra’s lips dripped blood in forced silence. Not since Agamemnon struck her and called it order. Not since Eurymachus traded silver for my silence and called it gallantry. The laughter around me was thick as oil. It clung to the arches, oozed down the walls, soaked into the rushes at my feet. These were not men. They were dogs dressed in gold, snarling over scraps of power and pleasure.
I stood in the center of their mockery, wrists red from rope, sea-salt dried into the corners of my mouth. I had not wept. I would not. That, at least, I could keep from them. They saw a gift. A curiosity. A bauble to impress a queen. But I was no gift.
Inside me, the dream still burned. Feathers black as a starless sky. Fire curled in my ribs, caged but not cold. Artemis had touched me. She had pressed her claim into my marrow.
Themistra. Prophetess. I was both and none of these. I was rage with a human face. So I did what prophets do—I watched. I measured the sneers, the careless sprawl of their limbs. I counted the lies they poured into wine cups, the oaths they twisted into flirtation. I learned them. I named them. And silently, silently, I made another vow—
One day, you will know my name.
And you will speak it with fear.
Eurymachus’s hand still gripped my wrist. I could feel his pulse—fast, eager. He thought himself a clever man. He thought himself safe. I tilted my chin just slightly. Met his gaze with eyes like bitter amber. He did not flinch. But he looked away. Just briefly.
And that was the first victory.
And then, through the colonnade, she appeared. The Queen of Ithaca. A hush fell over the suitors, and they watched, enthralled with her.
Her hair was the color of ash and tawny, streaked with silver like cracks in old stone—lines not of weakness, but of weathering, of wisdom. Her eyes, cold and endless, surveyed the scene with the precision of a woman who had measured every lie told beneath her roof. She walked with grace, but it was the grace of a blade sliding from its sheath. There was no softness left in her. Only calculation. She was her husband’s match—cunning, tireless, and impossibly composed. She said nothing at first. Her gaze passed over the suitors with the weariness of a woman who had seen this performance far too many times. Seen too many clown tricks. Her eyes settled on me. Not with hope. Not even curiosity.
Eurymachus released my wrist with a flourish, like a merchant unveiling spoiled fruit and daring the buyer to object. “A gift,” he announced, his voice puffed with pride, “from the high halls of Mycenae to the honored hearth of Ithaca. A prophetess, Queen. A seer to soothe your waiting heart—or at the very least, amuse it.”
He bowed, too deeply. Theatrics always bored me, but this performance was especially pathetic. A dog pretending to be a courtier. Behind him, the other suitors chuckled like pigs at a feast, wine-drunk and greasy with self-satisfaction. Penelope did not blink. Did not breathe, it seemed. She regarded Eurymachus the way one might regard a dead bird on the threshold. Uninvited, and inconvenient.
“For me?” she said at last. Her voice was low, smooth as olive oil, but sharp enough to slit a throat.
Eurymachus straightened, pleased with himself, not hearing the blade beneath the balm. “To honor your grace,” he said, with a smile too wet at the edges. “A gift worthy of your household, that the gods might look kindly on your suitors—and you might look kindly on one of them.”
He gestured to me like a peddler unveiling a trinket: See, she shines in the light. Exotic, mysterious. Then he gestured to himself. Yours, if you’ll have me.
Penelope raised a brow, a gesture so slight it might’ve been the flick of a knife. “I am not in need of more riddles,” she said. “I have spent years deciphering lies wrapped in hope.”
That silenced even the drunkest of them.
But her eyes had not left mine. They studied me—not my dress, or my posture, or the bruise darkening along my cheekbone. No, she was measuring something deeper. A crack in the earth. A change in the wind. A girl who stood too still, whose silence was not submission, but strain.
Then, at last, she spoke again, softly: “But still. Eurymachus has brought you. And the gods do not send messengers idly.”
No , I thought. They do not. They send warnings. And I am both. That was when it hardened within me: this resolve. The Greeks had stolen my city. My temple. My mother. I would hate them all. Every olive-eating, wine-guzzling, empire-pillaging son of a god. I would hate this place, its sun-drenched arrogance and blood-soaked roots. I would hate the halls of Odysseus, his kingdom of carrion-feeders, and the Queen who bore the same blade-slick cleverness in her eyes.
Penelope turned, and with a nod, summoned an elderly woman forward. The old nurse stepped beside her like a ghost long bound to this house, her hands folded, her expression unreadable.
“Take her to the women’s hall,” Penelope said. “Have her cleaned. Fed. Dressed in something Ithacan.”
Her gaze returned to me for one last moment.
“Then bring her to me.”
The woman Penelope left behind stood tall despite her age, her eyes sharp enough to shave bark. She did not flinch when I looked at her. She simply nodded and led me through the halls, her sandals whispering against the stone. No wasted words. No glances back to see if I followed. As if she already knew I would.
She brought me to a basin carved from cold stone, water steaming faintly within, and she rolled up her sleeves.
“Eurycleia,” she said by way of introduction. “If you’re staying, you’ll learn it.”
I said nothing. But I watched her. Warily. Like the half-wild thing I had become. I let her usher me into the tub. She moved around me like a tide, steady and inevitable. Humming something low and wordless as she fetched the oils and the cloth. When she approached, I snarled—a reflex born of too many bruises, too many hands that didn’t ask—but she didn’t flinch. She dipped the cloth, wrung it out, and she scrubbed my arms with calm determination, as if she were scrubbing a hearth or blood from a garment. Not a girl with teeth still bared.
Not a girl at all.
Just something that needed cleaning.
“You carry a storm in your spine,” she murmured without lifting her gaze. The cloth moved—scrub, scrub—steady, relentless. “The Queen did, once. Before time carved her heart into ice.” I met her eyes, silent. Still as stone. Scrub, scrub. She didn’t pause.
“The suitors, they’ll leer and laugh. That’s all they know how to do. Eat, boast, and rot in fine linen. Odysseus would have gutted them with a glance.” At his name, something in me twitched. Rage, or memory. Perhaps both.
Eurycleia didn’t miss it. The scrubbing ceased.
“Ah. You know the name, don’t you? Everyone does.” She sighed wearily. “But I knew him when his hands were small enough to wrap around my finger. Raised that boy like my own.” She whispered wistfully.
“Stubborn as an ox. Heart full of trickery and grief.”
She smiled at something distant, then dipped the cloth again.
“And his son—Telemachus. Just a babe when his father sailed away. Grew into his shadow quietly, quickly. A good heart, though he buries it deep. Just like his mother.”
The name rippled across the surface of my mind. The son. The boy Odysseus so dearly missed. Where was Odysseus now? Alive? Dead? Lost?
I said nothing. My eyes traced her hands moving, washing away the grime. Not as mercy, but as a reckoning. I listened. To her words. To the silence that lingered after. To the storm rising slowly beneath my skin. When she had finished scrubbing the dirt from my limbs, she fetched fine linen, softened by time and many washings. Her hands were gentle but sure as she helped dress me, muttering about skinny hips and half-starved shoulders. She worked oil into my skin with slow, practiced movements, murmuring to herself about how the salt would dry me to scales if left too long.
Her touch was neither indulgent nor detached—it was the touch of someone who had spent her life tending wounds that should not have existed. She combed my hair with a bone-toothed comb, catching at the knots with patient fingers. Her touch was firm, never cruel. She worked from root to end with the same care one might give to an ancient tapestry—preserving what was there, smoothing the frayed parts.
“Your hair is like seaweed,” she said gently, not unkind. “Knotted with curses, tangled in storms. But if you let it, it will catch the light… and shine.”
She oiled it too, and began to twist small braids near my temples. Her fingers wove faster than thought. Her humming changed—now a lullaby in a tongue I didn’t recognize, older than Greek. Finally, as she smoothed the hair down my back, she asked, “And what do they call you, girl?”
The silence stretched, thick and heavy—like the weight of all the words I’d swallowed, all the breath I’d held since that night my mother had been struck by Agamemnon’s hand. Names had become ghosts, and my voice a locked door. But now, under Eurycleia’s steady gaze, her hands weaving through my tangled hair, something fragile stirred.
“Themistra,” I said at last, the word barely more than a whisper.
Eurycleia froze, fingers tightening for a heartbeat, then softened, as if she’d been holding her own breath too long.
“Themistra,” she echoed, reverent and low, “a name carried on wind and fire. You carry it still. You are not lost.”
She did not ask for more. She did not press. Only resumed her braiding, slower now, as though each twist of hair were a stitch sewing my soul back into my skin. I sat still beneath her hands, but something in me shifted. My name had been a wound for so long. Now it lived again, like a flame rekindled in the ash. Outside, I could hear the clatter of goblets and the slurred boasts of men who thought themselves kings.
Their world was one of noise and hunger, and I would not belong to it. But I had spoken, and the silence was shattered..
There would be no going back.