As the great gate was being hauled open for the first time in over a decade, Helen hurried off the wall and made her way through the city to the temple of the Oracle. If Aeneas were to return to his post now, he would ruin the whole endeavor. Helen had to make sure he stayed occupied and away from the gate, or she would have to do something drastic.
She couldn’t kill him bef
ore dawn. The deal Odysseus had made with Zeus was that Odysseus could get the great gate of Troy open and the entire Greek army into the city in one night without killing a single person before the sun rose. Then, at dawn while the city still slept, the Greeks would slaughter the citizens of Troy in their beds. In exchange for such a speedy end to a war that was turning all of the gods against each other, Zeus had sworn that the gods would not return to Earth unless the Scions united and threatened his rule.
Helen had to make sure that she didn’t kill anyone while she accomplished her end of the deal. That didn’t mean she couldn’t hamstring Aeneas and tie him up, though.
Her body trembled as she clutched her dagger. She didn’t want to hurt Aeneas, who had always been a good and true man, but she would do whatever was needed. There was already so much innocent blood on her hands that adding his wouldn’t make a difference, anyway. For a moment, Helen thought of Astyanax, Hector and Andromache’s infant son, and her eyes filled with tears.
All the women, including Helen, were to be spared—after a fashion. They were to be divided among the Greek kings as the spoils of war. Helen was to go to Menelaus. She shuddered, repressing the memory of him trying to beat her to death, and knew that she would face that over and over in the years to come. He was impotent now, made so by Aphrodite’s curse on his town, and he would be determined to take it out on Helen for as long as she managed to live through his brutality.
Helen felt like this was fair. The women were to be married off to the Greek kings, but apart from Atlanta, all the children of Troy were going to die that night. In comparison, Helen estimated that her suffering was small.
Odysseus had refused to budge on the children, no matter how much Helen had begged for their lives. The Greeks wouldn’t take the chance that the babies would grow into men who might hunt them down to avenge their fathers’ deaths.
The Oracle had warned them that the Greeks could slay all the children of Troy, but blood for blood was still to be the demigod’s fate. Cassandra foresaw that the Furies would not tolerate the killing of children and kin, and that they would punish all the demigods for the slaughter of innocents. But of course, no one believed her.
Helen kept her dagger in its sheath until she needed it, and climbed the steep, rocky hill to the temple where Cassandra lived in solitude. Many times over the years, Helen had stared up at the gleaming pillars of Cassandra’s plush prison and thought that her husband’s little sister was like the moon. She was higher than any of them, remote, and so very alone.
A few steps farther, and Helen heard some unmistakable sounds. Impossible, Helen thought as she heard the two voices cry out in unison.
Helen darted from column to column and made her way through the forest of marble in the interior of the temple, until she was close enough to the inner sanctum to confirm with her own eyes what her ears had already told her.
Aeneas and Cassandra were lovers. And from the surprised look on Aeneas’ face as he lay next to Cassandra, still panting, Helen could see that their intimacy was a new development.
Aeneas sat up in the pile of discarded clothes and torn-down draperies that had served as their bed and ran a hand across his sweaty face like he had no idea what to do next. He looked around at the knocked-over amphorae, the ripped curtains, and the general havoc that their union had wreaked on the now-defiled temple, and then down at Cassandra, completely stunned.
“Did I hurt you?” he asked her urgently.
It amazed Helen that a brutal warrior like Aeneas, who had spent the last ten years of his life shedding rivers of Greek blood, could have such tender emotions. He was more concerned for Cassandra’s well-being than he was for the fact that he had just committed a crime that was punishable by death.
The Oracle was sacrosanct. Helen couldn’t believe that the Fates had allowed this union at all. From what she understood, fate itself stepped in and kept Oracles from finding intimacy with men. Oracles could try, but the man they wanted would inevitably meet a fatal accident, get shipped off to a faraway land and never return, or there’d be some other devastating misfortune before that love could be consummated. For whatever reason, that obviously was not the case here. The Fates either wouldn’t—or couldn’t—interfere with Aeneas.
Cassandra smiled and reached up to touch her lover’s pretty mouth with her fingertips. “I hear that’s to be expected the first time. It was worth it a thousand times over,” she said quietly.
He took her hand in his and turned it so he could kiss the center of her palm. “I’m sorry, anyway,” he whispered, placing her tiny hand over the thick muscles that hid his sensitive heart.
Cassandra gazed at him hazily, her eyes swimming. Aeneas scooped her up, pulled her onto his lap, and kissed her. Cassandra swooned for a moment in his arms, but then seemed to steel herself. She pulled away from his kiss and shook her head.
“You must go,” she slurred, drunk on him. “Now, before anyone discovers us.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Aeneas responded with a low laugh. “I won’t dishonor you by running off to save my own skin.”
Aeneas shifted so that Cassandra could sit comfortably astride him and still see every change of his face as he pledged himself to her.
“I am free to remarry,” he said, smiling softly. “My wife died in childbirth years ago, and my mourning is long over. Your brother may want my life for what I’ve done to you, but I have every right to ask for your hand before it comes to that.”
Cassandra edged away from Aeneas, pushing him back so both of them could see more clearly.
“I am not simply my brother’s sister, and this is not a silly tryst that can be excused with a hasty marriage,” Cassandra said, like he was missing the point entirely. “I am Cassandra of Troy and the vessel of the Fates. You have defiled that vessel, Aeneas. The punishment for you is certain.” Cassandra spoke to him harshly, trying to make him understand the stakes. “You must run. Tonight. Now. Or you will die.”
“I won’t leave you, Cassandra. I’ll take my chances, throw myself on Paris’ mercy. I’ll beg him to allow you to be my wife if I must. But I won’t run.” A pained look crossed his face as a troubling thought occurred to him. “Don’t you want to be my wife? I thought . . . since you gave yourself to me . . . that you loved me.”
Cassandra dropped her head into her hands. Aeneas tried to soothe her. He caressed her, held her, and urged her to look up at him. When she finally met his gaze again, her piercing blue eyes sank deep into his bright green ones, and she spoke with all the authority of Fate itself.
“I couldn’t love you more if you came to me holding the sun in your right hand and all the stars in the sky in your left,” she told him, her voice as final as a funeral dirge. “I could live a hundred lifetimes and never wish for a more perfect man than you. I have loved you since the second I saw you, and unfortunately for me, I know for a fact that I will never love anyone or anything as much as I love you.”
Helen’s heart jumped into her throat. She ducked behind the column that hid her and stuffed a hand over her mouth to keep her heart, and the choked sound that followed it, from leaping out. Cassandra knew Troy was going to fall that very night. She had seduced Aeneas on purpose in order to force him to run away. It was a desperate attempt to save his life.