Page 33 of Where Darkness Bloomed
“Priam loves his sons.”
“And Troy will bleed for it.”
Eudorus’s lips twitched. “Perhaps the Spartan queen bewitched them both.”
Achilles snorted. “Paris is young—led by his cock, bewitched by open thighs.”
“You think the queen went willingly?”
He tilted his head, considering. “A fool’s gamble, if she did. Trading a king for a second-born prince who hides behind his brother’s sword.”
Eudorus’s gaze shifted again. “You have an audience.”
Achilles followed his gaze back to the terrace, where another figure had joined Priam on the balcony.
The morning sun wove gold into her hair, falling in loose curls down her back. A young woman draped in deep blue, her chiton gathered at the shoulder with a pin of glittering abalone.
Helen.
The rumors had not lied. She was no mortal beauty.
She was a spark born of the gods—a flame so bright it had set the world on fire.
Even from across the battlefield, Achilles could feel her beauty like a pullin his blood. Otherworldly, ethereal, untouchable. Like witnessing a constellation wrenched from the heavens and cast down to earth.
He’d heard the stories in his youth. Tales passed around campfires and training fields, the legend traded between warriors starved for a woman’s touch. A girl—sired by Zeus himself, touched by Aphrodite’s hand. A beauty so radiant she bent kingdoms to their knees. A prize sought by kings and warriors alike, courted by a legion of suitors.
Back then, he had been sequestered on Mount Pelion with Patroclus, sweat-soaked and pressed hard by Chiron’s grueling training. He’d dismissed the tale as a bard’s embellishment—a pretty myth to pass the long nights.
Yet now, she stood before him. No longer a girl of myth, but flesh and blood. The woman whose very existence had torn kingdoms apart.
Achilles’s eyes narrowed as he watched her. Though it scarcely mattered, Eudorus’s question lingered like a thorn in his flesh: had the woman above truly chosen this? Traded brutish Menelaus for the untried Trojan boy?
And if she had—gods, had she known the cost?
The thought coiled in his mind, dark and bitter as poison.
Between them, the battlefield burned. As it had every day since the Greeks first set foot on Trojan soil, so many months ago.
She stood apart from Priam on the terrace, fingers knotted in the hem of her chiton. Her stunning face was shadowed, her gaze lingering over the charred bodies burning among ladders, smeared with sticky tar.
Achilles watched as her head turned, eyes closing briefly as if to block out the carnage. A slow, shuddering breath expanded her chest. When her gaze lifted again, it swept the field. The earth and torn banners, the rising smoke, and Agamemnon’s canopy.
Then her eyes found him. And stopped.
“The face that launched a thousand ships,” Eudorus murmured, a rare note of awe threading his voice.
Achilles’s reply was scornful. “The face that brought thousands to die.”
Eudorus still watched the balcony. “She admires you,” he observed.
Above them, Helen’s gaze was still fixed in his direction. But he knew better.
“No.” He folded his arms, his feet braced against the earth. “She fears me. She fears what I am.”
Lust and fear were different beasts, and he knew their scents well. The woman above him kept the company of fear. It clung to her like a dark veil,lived in her rigid shoulders, her guarded gaze. He could read it on her body as plainly as he could smell it in the air before battle.
“What are you, my lord?”
