Page 13 of The Ruin of Eros

The king wets his lips. I can see the guilty conscience he carries, as surely as if it were a fog around him. But I know what he’ll say before he opens his mouth.

“If it’s mercy you want, Kirios Andreos, pray to the goddess.”

And yet if Aphrodite had wanted to strike me down dead, or cause the earth to cave beneath my feet, she could have. She does not need my countrymen to act for her. She’s just doing what gods do: testing her power, testing how afraid we mortals are. Seeing what that fear will make us do.

Well, she has her answer.

In the east, the darkness is starting to lift. Threads of grey criss-cross the sky. Far on the horizon is a sickly little hint of light. Above us, the ravens are beginning to leave their nests. They fly out from the rock face, single shapes darting out from the shadows. Ravens aren’t like crows. They fly alone—solitary birds.

Wise creatures. A crowd does not protect you.

Your own tribe will not protect you.

The thickset man steps toward me, and fastens the shackle around my ankle. I feel the cold metal; I feel the click that signals no going back. He withdraws, and I try to breathe.

The councilman clears his throat.

“You make this offering, Psycheandra, daughter of Andreos, as penance for the offense to the goddess…”

Suddenly the anger is boiling in me. How dare he?

“It isyouwho did this,” I say, and hear an intake of breath through the crowd. I let my eyes travel over them one by one.

“People of Sikyon, it is you who praised me, who comparedme as no mortal should be compared.You,not I, spoke the foolish words. You made me something for the gods to destroy.”

My flood of accusations surprises me almost as much as it surprises them. Until now I’d been feeling a strange sort of calm, but listening to this smug, spineless councilman has unleashed the rage of injustice.

I never tried to be more than what I was.

I told them not to speak so foolishly.

Theymade a god of me. And now they make a monster of me.

There is stirring and murmuring; they hear me clearly, despite the wind, and they are affronted. I am supposed to be humiliated, after all. I am supposed to be below them now.

“Disrobe her.”

The councilman speaks, and I whip my head around toward him.Disrobe? We shear our animals when we offer them to the gods, but…

“A sacrifice must be without covering or adornment.” The councilman’s voice is stony. He wants to humiliate me now. This is a reward for my impertinence.

“Disrobe, unless you want my men to do it for you.”

He’s afraid. They have decided I’m a monster now, and monsters are reviled but also feared.

I think about refusing—I feel strangely bold now, bold enough for anything—but suddenly it doesn’t matter much. What use has modesty now? It is only a custom among mortals. Something I’ll soon have no more need for.

I take off my cloak, unfasten mychiton. A girl scurries up to me at the councilman’s behest, and gathers the garments into a small pile. She looks at me with a wordless stare and backs away.

My breasts sit against my skin, and I look down at my body, the wonder of it. Is this what it takes—the brink of the unknown, the brink of death—to see ourselves this way? Suddenly Iunderstand why the boys and men of Sikyon, and a few of the women, too, have fought like dogs over me. I understand their hunger, their need to put their hands on me. My body is beautiful—as all mortal bodies are.

I never saw it this way before.

I take a breath, and draw my head up. The waves are lashing at the base of the cliff, so very far below. Now theauskalospipe is reaching a crescendo, its chilly drone seeming to grow with the wind. Or maybe it’s the wind itself that’s getting louder.

“The light,” I hear a voice in the crowd. “See the light, how strange it is!”

They’re right. There’s a greenish tint to the sky, one that does not usually belong to the dawn hour. And the more I watch it, the more it seems to grow.

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