The sun refuses to shine on us the next morning. The rain has slowed, but still persists. A mere drizzle now, and not so much a welcome respite from battle as the rain was before. Because, where first I enjoyed my brief pause in bloodletting, I’m now filled with dread for each day.

Our resources are dwindling, as are our numbers. How much longer can this war drag on?

Hippolyta leads us back outside to the arena, despite the drizzle.

“The plains will still have patches of mud for weeks,” she barks at us all, with special focus on my bowed head. “Might as well practice fighting in it.”

We turn as one to collect our dulled weapons for training.

“Golgotha,” Hippolyta says, and the head of the largest in her number snaps up. A narrow face looks up next when she says, “Xene.”

I know her next words before they even fall from her mouth. “You two will train with Daphne. Her head was in the mud yesterday.”

Anger flares through me. It prickles along my very nerves. Even the shadows that haunt me retreat. My fingers wrap around a dory, the weapon of my kingdom, and that anger blooms into something more.

I spin around. “No.”

“Ne?” There’s a bite in her voice that even the language of her homeland can’t hide. She yanks a dory from the hands of the nearest woman and strides toward me. I brace my legs wide and stare her down each marching step of the way until the point of that dory rests against my collarbone.

“Do I need to swipe those legs from underneath you, again?” Hippolyta’s eyes are wild. She steps right up to me, her arm raised with the spear high and pressed against my skin.

Everyone in the arena stops what they’re doing to watch us.

I dig my toes into the mud. “You can try.”

Her nostrils flare. “Get your worthless ass in that pit before I throw you in there myself.”

I incline my head. “After you.”

I barely have time to duck. Her swing is so fast a viper would envy it. I catch the fist, my palm going to bruise later from the blow, and inch by stubborn inch, I force her hand back down to her side. She allows not even a flicker of surprise in her face.

Biting back a curse, she turns and stomps toward the arena. I follow at a distance and stop across the muddy circle from her.

“I hope your secrets don’t weigh you down too much, Daphne of No Kingdom,” Hippolyta says, tossing her dory from hand to hand.

“Don’t say things you don’t mean.” I smile sweetly. “You very much want me to be weighed down.”

She leaps across the space, lance raised. I swipe it aside. Another jump toward me and I deflect. She chases me around the arena, and I let her. She puts every ounce of Ares’s blood into each swing. My arms and legs burn within minutes. Sweat drips from my brow and glazes my shoulders.

“Quit fighting like a coward,” Hippolyta says. “No wonder Sparta wants nothing but your head.”

“Have you forgotten our conversation on the Aegean so soon?” I hit aside another lash of her dory.

“Gone with the breeze,” she says, bending her knees. Her chest heaves. “Why would I hold on to such fruitless conversations?”

“Not fruitless, exactly.”

She leaps forward and I toss aside my weapon to meet her in the air, past her dory and colliding directly with her body. Surprise flashes across her features. Her eyes flare wide, mouth opening, so taken aback that my blow is successful. We fall to the earth.

Using my legs as Hermes taught me, I wrap them both around her hips. I grab both her fists and slam them to the mud. She drops her spear and bucks. I’m thrown onto my own back, Lyta collapsing on top of me. I nearly lose my grip, the wet clay making her arms slick. A grin replaces her shock.

I unhook one leg and use it to shove. We flip over and over, wrestling for control until I slam her again into the ground. She bucks, but the leg around her waist tightens. Like a snake, I squeeze and squeeze until—

“I yield.” She drops her head back with a sigh. “I bloody yield.”

“One small misstep can bring down an entire army,” I say, only loud enough for her to hear. “Do you remember that?”

She doesn’t answer, only stares at me with those bottomless dark eyes.

I stand and offer her a hand that drips with mud. She takes it, nails digging into my palm as she climbs to her feet.

Wordlessly, she turns her back on me to stride from the arena.

Hector knew exactly who I meant when I asked for Aeneas, and where to find him. As a nephew of King Priam, he has a palace of his own in the heart of the city. Though not as monumental as Priam’s, it’s still fit for royalty.

I stand at the base of the palace steps, which are tiled and painted with seashells. The lower floor is for servants and the kitchen, the top two for guests and the man himself. Inside is just as resplendent as the stairs outside.

Silk klines surround a pool in the center of the main floor. It smells of rose oil as I walk around it. Pink tiles cover the floor, and frescoes depicting the sea cover opposite walls. The palace is empty, though, with not even a servant treading in the hallways.

Curiosity tugs at me. I’m walking around the pool toward the dark archway in the back of the room when a sweet voice says from behind me, “You won’t find him.”

Aphrodite lounges on one of the klines. She wears a sheer emerald dress that leaves nothing to the imagination. She tilts her head, ruby-colored hair catching in the sunlight that filters through the open palace doors.

“I haven’t been able to persuade him to leave the city just yet,” she says. “He’s out there, likely training, as you should be.”

I ignore the judgment dripping from her words and take a seat opposite her. “It’s a good thing I came here looking for you, then.”

She glares and tosses her hair over a shoulder, the locks changing color with the movement from rich auburn to a deep, endless black. Aphrodite notices my attention.

“I’m sure you’ve heard, rightfully so, that I am the most beautiful woman in the world,” she says. “Well, beauty is fluid, is it not? What you might find beautiful is much different than what your brother finds beautiful.”

“And can you apply this gift to someone else?”

“No need to dandy around words.” She waves a hand. “Get to your point, Daphne.”

“I need you to cause chaos in the Achaean camp.” I lean forward. “Your particular flavor of lovely, romantic chaos.”

“Why would I do that?” she asks, though a wicked smile creeps up her face.

“Because you don’t want to see this city fall.”

“It won’t fall.” She sniffs. “Apollo’s wall ensures that.”

“You also don’t want to watch your son die on the battlefield.”

She stills, inhumanly. Almost a marble statue. “Are you threatening my son?”

Something in me whispers that I should have a dagger in my hands at all times around this viper.

“No.” My hands tremble. The stories of Aphrodite’s vengeance are nothing to take lightly. “But the Achaeans are. His life is at risk just as any other soldier on that battlefield, especially at Hector’s side.”

“Ares would never allow it,” she says quickly. “He loves me.”

“Ares killed his own daughter,” I say, voice low. “He wouldn’t know love if it bit him in the ass.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure.”

We watch each other. A breeze carries over her scent, of roses and musk, cedarwood and spice. Everything I desire.

“Fine,” she finally says, voice curt. Aphrodite unhooks her long legs from under her and stands. Her dress truly leaves nothing to the imagination. “I will do what I can. For Aeneas.”

She strides past me toward the entryway, but turns beneath the curved arch. “Remember that I can make you wish you were dead, should you do anything I might consider unwise.”

She strides directly into the sunlight streaming through the doorway, then disappears.

Evening has settled upon Troy, oil lamps lit around the city and hearths blazing. I find Helen playing petteia with Lykou in a grand room at the center of Priam’s palace. A large pool fills the space, the bottom tiled with jade and lavender. Plants I do not recognize hang from the ceiling and climb the walls. This room is a nymph’s dream.

“I need to talk with you both,” I say, clenching my peplos. “Hippolyta as well.”

Lykou’s mouth opens and closes, eyes as dark as a raging sea at night, but then he says, “Lead the way, Daphne Diodorus.”

We find Lyta, still caked in dried mud as she sits on the end of Penthesilea’s bed. The furs are tangled, as though Hippolyta has slept there recently or they were never made after her sister fell to Hades’s realm.

“Persephone was there,” I say, sitting beside her. “When we set the pyre on fire. Persephone herself came to take your sister to Elysium.”

A harsh laugh, almost a cough, bubbles up from the back of my friend’s throat. “Penthe always said that she would end up there one way or another.” She looks to Lykou and Helen. “I should have known that time would come too soon. My warriors are not exactly afforded longevity with our life choices.”

A moment of silence passes, broken only by the swirling whisper of a breeze.

“I did not mean to keep anything from you,” I finally say, pressing my palm against the rock-hard gold coating my abdomen. “My life is so intertwined with the gods at this point that their secrets have become my own.”

She nods. “With a father like Ares, I should have known.”

I release a great, shuddering sigh. Despite my sanctimonious attitude toward Apollo, I’ve become just as bad as him. Too many secrets from the people I love.

Perhaps telling them might lay a curse upon their shoulders, and perhaps such a curse is what Apollo has been protecting me from all along.

They want to know my secrets, though, and I have to trust that they understand what the full price of knowledge is.

And so I tell them.

I start first with the beginnings of my dealings with the gods, Artemis’s bargain, and then my journey across Greece, how Theseus died after we left Hippolyta on the plains, and what happened to me in the depths of Tartarus.

I tell them of Zeus’s command, the fateful words of the Moirai, and the tangled web of feelings between Apollo and me.

By the time I finish, my throat is dry. Lykou wordlessly hands me a goblet and I take a hearty gulp of the pomegranate juice within.

Helen breaks the silence first. “Why didn’t you”—her sinuous voice cracks and she gulps—“why didn’t you tell any of us all this before?”

I place my hands palms up on my knees. “Because I am so entangled in the gods’ web that I can’t differentiate my own lies.”

And because I’ve become the very thing I despised all along.

I meet Lykou’s unflinching gaze. The wolf of last summer lingers there, baring its teeth at me. “I have been leaving you out, my dearest, oldest friend,” I say, “because every time I look at you, all I remember is how lifeless you felt in my arms and how it was my fault.”

I turn to Hippolyta, still sitting on her dead sister’s bed. “And you, Lyta. You knew of my involvement with the gods, and have known it all along. Just as Lykou has. But not to the full extent. You did not know of Zeus’s command, nor the prophecy of the Moirai. Would you have still taken up my cause if you did?”

I meet Helen’s eyes. Something inside me skitters along my heart. Perhaps shame or fear, maybe even pride. “I wasn’t honest with you because I was afraid. Of so many things. Of you removing me as your Shield. Of your hatred for my affiliation with your father and his command to protect you.”

Silence fills the room, broken only by the crackling oil lamps in each corner. A whirlwind of emotions stir within me as I look to each of my closest confidants, but especially to my queen. The one I am to protect and the one from whom I crave the most validation.

She bites her lip and turns away, wrapping her arms around herself. “I need—I need to be alone. This is a lot to process right now.” She looks at me askance. “You do realize that my father never gave a damn about me my entire life, right? Not when men tried to steal me away in the night, or when I was sold like cattle to the highest bidder, when I made perhaps the stupidest choice of all in accepting Menelaus’s bid?”

She stomps over to the doorway and braces a hand on the tan stone. Her back is to me as she says, “Or was my stupidest choice following you across the Aegean when I should have returned to my daughter?”

Her absence is like a gaping wound. Each breath leaves a sharp pain in my side. I’m gasping, breathing harder and faster by the second. Hippolyta lays a hand on my bare knee and squeezes.

All my fears and pains and regrets leave me in one great sob. “I’m so sorry. To all of you.”

Especially my queen.

“You can make it up to us.”

I look up to Lykou. His arms are crossed over his broad chest, voice rough as he says, “Let’s get revenge. For the Amazons dead and their queen. Against the gods playing my king like a lyre.”

“Yes.” Lyta quickly stands and begins pacing. “They will expect an attack soon, once the plain dries. They will expect the full force of Troy’s might.”

My hands curl into fists. “But they might not expect a few foolish warriors who find that vengeance tastes sweeter than wine.”