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“You were a pawn. The goddess of love, the wife of Zeus, and the goddess of wisdom told you to choose which one of them was the most beautiful. How were you going to come out of that a winner?”
I never came to the attention of the gods before that day, not that I was aware of. I had been in the fields outside the palace when a flash of light blinded me. Before me stood three of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. And while, as a prince, I had met many beautiful women, these three were different.
They were goddesses. Angry, jealous ones. Hera. Aphrodite. Athena.
“Choose which one of us is the most beautiful.”Even I—young and stupid as I was—knew I was doomed. And in all honesty, not one was more beautiful than the other. It was like trying to choose which of three perfect roses was the most perfect. They were flawless.
It wasn’t until Aphrodite had spoken with a quiet, clear voice that I had sealed my fate. “If you choose me, Helen will love you.”
And with the power of a goddess, she showed me the wondrous face that would drown my country. Golden hair that looked like silk. Dark eyes that seemed to really, trulyseeme.
Helen.
It didn’t matter that she was already married to Menelaus, King of Sparta. I saw her. I loved her. I had to have her.
“I got Helen.” Beautiful Helen. Wife of another man. Unloved wife of another man. Down-trodden, unappreciated, ignored wife of another man. And I’d loved her with my whole heart. “I wish…”
“What?” he asked when I didn’t finish my thought. “What do you wish? That you never loved Helen? Never met her?”
“I should wish that. Loving her destroyed everything, Achilles. You lost your life. Your best friend. Your country. Helen was returned to the man she never loved, and I let her go. My brother lost his family. Hisson.Astyanax was a baby. I see children now, hands clutched in their mother’s fingers, and I think about him. Children the same age, in this time, are still nursing from their mothers. We expected him to be a little man.”
“Childhood is a new concept.” Achilles’ tone was light, but it didn’t fool me.
Flipping my hair out of my face, I lifted my chin to the sky.What do I wish?I wished I could see the stars. I wished I was brave. I wished I was worthy of the love of Helen, and more than that, the love of my brother, and the trust of my friends.
There.That was it.
But I was still the man who had hidden behind his brother when challenged by Helen’s husband.
When the mortals spoke about heroes, they meant men like Achilles, and Hector. They meant Pollux, and Orestes.
Not me.
Leo
Staring out at the moors, I ignored the brooding man driving me to the train station. Hector was just as quiet. He didn’t even put the radio on. With one wrist propped on the steering wheel, and the other on the gear shift, he smoothly negotiated the muddy, pot-holed roads.
We were far from town, something I hadn’t realized last night, as exhausted as I was.
“What’s your problem with the woman who found the other piece of the seal?” Hector asked.
I rubbed my temple, and touched the corner of my eye. It had started twitching not long after finishing the article and hadn’t stopped. “Like I said, she was my advisor.”
“I’m not part of academia,” he said. “Explain what that means.”
“There’s what it should mean, and what it meant with Diana.” Bitterness seeped out of every pore of my body. “When I was accepted to Harvard, one of the other professors, the one with an area of study close to mine, took on the role of helping me with my research. Guiding me, sort of. I would bring my research to her, talk about what I thought it meant, and then she’d say I was on the right track, or not. Usually not. I was about to be thrown out of the program when I found the piece of the seal in Turkey.”
“Why?”
“Because I wasn’t listening. I wasn’t agreeing. I did what I wanted, and went where the research, where thehistoryled me. I followed my gut. I cared about the work. I was argumentative. Over-confident. Disrespectful. Insubordinate.”
“Were you really?” he asked.
My eye twitched again. Flicking my bangs out of my face, I glanced over at him. “That’s what it said on my evaluation. My thesis was garbage, according to her, and had no place in a respectable institution. After I found the shard, and it was radiocarbon dated, she compared my work to other areas of study—cryptozoology, paranormal psychology. And I was the one who was disrespectful.” I muttered the last part. It pissed me off.
“Cryptozoology?”
“Bigfoot. Loch Ness Monster. Yeti. Stuff like that.” He hadn’t asked, but I went on. “Paranormal psychology is things like telekinesis, moving stuff with your mind, or proof of ghosts…”
