Page 87 of Where Darkness Bloomed
Helen released her and turned toward the garden gate. Time was already bleeding away. If the girl spoke a word to anyone, all of it—any remaining hope—would vanish like smoke in the breeze.
“My lady,” the girl whispered behind her. “You are a stranger in Troy. You will never make it to the gate.”
Helen stopped, then turned slowly.
“You seek to return to the Greeks,” the girl said knowingly. “But I will not tell.”
Her voice was thin, fragile and fearful. But within it, Helen heard a rare quality. Truth. Compassion even. She was faintly surprised she even recognized such things anymore.
The night air was thick with the scent of smoke from dying fires, steeped in sorrow that Helen could feel in her bones.
The women of Troy knew many songs. When Helen had first arrived in Troy so long ago as stolen cargo—a prince’s prize—she had often heard them singing. Songs of celebration, of harvest and unions, of childbirth and feasting.
But those songs had faded into memory. Now, the women of Troy sang only of mourning.
Songs for the widowed.
Songs for the bereaved and the missing.
Songs for the dead.
Helen met the girl’s gaze, her voice worn thin. “How many more will die if I do not go?”
The words were raw as the wailing songs of lamentation, laced with the same quiet despair. The place where hope had once dwelled within her was dry, cracked as a cistern in drought. Anguish had taken its place, rooting in her chest, winding deep into her heart.
When she spoke again, it was more to herself than the servant girl. “I must try.”
The dead haunted her. Soldiers from both sides, their lifeless bodies strewn thick on the battlefield. Too many to burn each day. So they lay,growing bloated, with mottled skin and distended bellies beneath the sun, before meeting the pyre’s cleansing burn.
Paris had struck the sparks. He had lit the war.
And she—she had been its first offering. Stolen. Defiled. Locked in a gilded cage while the flames spread. But she had not understood then the firestorm his actions had started.
Not truly. Not until the ships landed and the earth began to burn.
Had she known, she would have thrown herself into the sea on the voyage. Let it drag her under, fill her lungs, pull her into the deep before she ever set foot on Troy’s cursed shore.
“Even if you make it away from Troy, they will kill you,” the girl said softly, sorrowful. “The Greeks.”
Helen didn’t react.
She already knew this. Of course she knew. Menelaus’s pride would demand blood—her blood. Perhaps it was even a fitting recompense for the devastation that had occurred in her name.
Let it be her life, but hers alone. Not thousands. Not children.
She had watched the countryside burn. Fields turned to ash, black smoke twisting like mourning veils across the sky. She had heard the whispers passed in brittle voices: villages razed to the ground, children massacred, the old cut down mid-prayer. Woman taken—bound and defiled, their bodies passed like spoils from one pair of bloodstained hands to another. As hers was.
Those horrors lived inside her now. Silently anchored to the darkest part of her, dragging her into the crushing depths of guilt.
Her gaze drifted across the moonlit gardens, fragrant with laurel and myrrh. But her eyes were distant, hollow. “I haven’t been alive in a long time,” she said softly.
Not since her face became a banner for war, and her body a battlefield. Even before Troy. Before Paris, something within her had already been fractured by mankind’s merciless appetite.
The girl’s eyes glistened, wet and wide. “You mustn’t say such things, my lady.”
Helen’s attention shifted back. She looked at the girl, young and frightened, and she saw the shadow of herself. A girl long buried to ash and legend.
“Did you know I was taken once before?” Helen asked quietly.
