Chapter 2

The conversation inside the chamber continued.

Althea stood motionless outside the door, the clay bowl in her hands growing cold. Lysandros spoke again. "The eagle feather token. You're certain there won't be any complications?"

Philocles answered without hesitation. "There won't be. I placed that half of the bronze eagle feather in Ianthe's hands myself. When you were found at the lightning-struck oak grove, the only thing left beside you was that token. As long as the two halves match perfectly, everyone will believe the person who saved your life was her."

Althea slowly closed her eyes. The memory of that oak grove surfaced in her mind.

That year, Lysandros was fourteen. Althea was a year older. While traveling to Dodona with the late king to make an offering, he was caught in a violent thunderstorm. His horse bolted in panic, and he tumbled into a ravine, pinned beneath a fallen tree trunk. It was Althea who hacked through the branches with an axe and dragged him into a cave to wait out the storm. He burned with fever for two days. When he woke, he clutched her hand and asked her name. She did not reveal her bloodline as a daughter of Zeus. Instead, before leaving, she broke a bronze eagle feather in half. Years later, the two of them were reunited in Argos. Lysandros recognized her by the other half of the feather and the old scar on her hand. Her mother, Myrrhine, had warned her time and again: no member of any royal house must ever learn that she was a daughter of Zeus.

Before they had parted, she had snapped the bronze eagle feather at her waist in two, pressing one half into his palm and keeping the other. Later, Philocles had asked her about the token's origin, and she had told him the truth. On the eve of the campaign against Thrace, her foster father had asked to hold her half for safekeeping and taken it from her. It turned out that even then, he had already been weaving a different version of the truth for his own daughter.

Inside the chamber, Lysandros spoke again.

"At first, I always believed the one who saved me was Althea. That's why I shielded her, indulged her, promised to make her my queen. But once I learned the truth belonged to Ianthe, I couldn't keep wronging the person who had truly saved my life."

"Yet everyone had already accepted Althea as the future queen," Philocles said. "If you had simply torn up the betrothal, she would have taken the matter straight to the Council, and Ianthe could never have endured that humiliation."

Lysandros let out a quiet sigh. "She's too headstrong. Letting her spend one winter in Thrace, letting the edges be ground down a little, might not be the worst thing. I've already sent word to Drakon not to let any real harm come to her."

Philocles chuckled softly. "Once the throne is fully secured, Your Majesty can bring her back. She always listened to you above all others. A bit of reassurance, and the whole thing will blow over."

Althea did not push open the door to confront them. She carried the bowl of now-cold broth back to her chambers, step by measured step, in silence.

In their telling, they had merely detained her for a single winter. But she had endured three full years in Thrace. On the day she arrived, Drakon fastened a bronze collar around her neck. Engraved inside was a single cold line: Spoils of Argos.

At the festival of the war god, they forced her to stand in the center of the javelin field with a clay pot balanced on her head. The first spear grazed her ear and drove deep into the post behind her. The second shattered the pot, and wine streamed down her hair, soaking her from head to foot. Thracian nobles lounged on the stands and roared with laughter, joking that the future Queen of Argos was making her offering to Ares.

Later, they tied her to the back of a chariot and dragged her around the entire camp. Gravel shredded her knees, and blood dripped steadily down her shins. In the coldest stretch of winter, she was chained to a ritual pillar. Mountain winds drove ice and snow against her like blades, slicing through clothes already soaked with freezing water.

On countless nights, she told herself, over and over, that Lysandros would come. He had just reclaimed the throne and could not break away. He was being held back by the temple and the legion. He could not possibly know what she was enduring.

Only now did she understand. He knew she had been set up and sent to Thrace. He knew she was alive. He did not know the Thracians had turned one winter of detention into three years of slavery. But after that one winter passed, he had never checked on her himself.

Althea sat alone in the darkness, the thunderbolt mark on her chest radiating a dull heat.

She had once thought of calling out to Zeus for protection. But on her deathbed, Myrrhine had gripped her hand and told her a secret: "A god's claim on you is not always salvation. Mount Olympus could just as easily become another cage."

Myrrhine had forced Zeus to swear an oath upon the River Styx: until Althea made her own choice of her own free will, he was forbidden to publicly claim her as his daughter, forbidden to use divine power to shape her fate, and forbidden to bring her to Mount Olympus. For three long years, Althea had never once called upon her divine father. She feared that escaping the chains of Thrace would only lead to the gods sealing her behind heaven's gates forever.

Hushed gossip drifted from the handmaids outside her window.

"The king is spending another night at Hera's side hall."

"The sacred flame barely flickered, and he went running. In three months since the queen returned, has he ever shown that kind of concern for her?"

"What good is having the golden laurel crown? The Sacred Flame seal, the royal heir, the temple's power... Ianthe holds it all."

Althea listened for a moment, then rose and shut the wooden shutter.

She drew from beneath her garments a palm-sized bronze seal of ancient make. One side bore an oak tree split open by lightning. The other was ringed with fine, archaic script in the language of the River Styx. As a child, she had been unable to read the words. Tonight, every letter was vivid beneath her fingertips.

Only when she calls may I answer.

It was not that Zeus refused to come. She had simply never made the choice.

Althea placed the seal on a ceremonial wax tablet and held it near the candle flame to soften the surface. She pricked her fingertip with a fine needle. A drop of blood fell onto the wax, and faint thunderbolt patterns flared along the seal's edge. Following the method her mother had taught her, she pressed the pattern firmly into the tablet. This script belonged to no city-state. Only the Sacred Oak Guard of Dodona could decipher it.

After Myrrhine's death, Philocles had told Althea that the old Sacred Oak Guard had long since scattered. She could not be sure anyone would answer the call, but this was the only path left that was beyond the reach of Lysandros, Philocles, and the Temple of Hera.

Before dawn broke, she summoned the old servant who tended the temple pigeons. "Deliver this wax tablet to Dodona."

The old servant caught sight of the blood-red thunderbolt pattern on the seal. His expression shifted, but he asked nothing more.

The pigeon took flight over the Lion Gate and vanished into the thin morning mist. Althea watched it disappear. Before, she had always waited passively for someone else to save her.

This time, she would carve out her own path.