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She didn't comment on your tardiness, but she did glance at your sandals—the same ones from yesterday, still faintly stained with berry juice—and her mouth made a shape that could have been a smile or could have been a prayer for patience.

The harbor master was a man named Demetrios. He was enormous—barrel-chested, weathered, with a voice like rocks grinding together and a beard so thick and grey it looked like he'd glued a small thundercloud to his face. He had been running the harbor for twenty-three years, he told you, and in that time he had seen exactly four queens and approximately sixteen thousand barrels of grain.

"Seventeen thousand," he corrected himself, scratching the thundercloud. "Possibly eighteen. I lose count when the autumn shipments overlap."

You liked him immediately.

Penelope walked you through the docks—past the stacked crates and coiled rope, past the merchants arguing about prices and the sailors mending sails, past the fishing boats with their silver catches laid out in glittering rows on the stone.

She explained tariffs. She explained quotas. She explained the delicate, precarious math of feeding an island kingdom that produced barely enough grain for its own people and imported the rest.

You retained approximately forty percent of this.

The forty percent you retained was: the harbor master's wife was named Photini and she made excellent cheese. That the autumn grain shipments came from the mainland and cost twelve percent in tariff fees. That if the tariff was too high, the merchants would sail to a cheaper port; if it was too low, the treasury would suffer. And that the fish with the silver scales—the ones laid out in rows on the stone—were called kalamari, which was a word you loved so much you said it six times in a row until Demetrios stopped explaining trade routes and just stared at you.

"Kalamari," you said again, tasting the syllables. "Ka-la-MA-ri. That's such a good word. It sounds like a dance."

"It's a squid," Demetrios said.

"It can be both."

The sixty percent you didn't retain was gone by lunchtime, absorbed into the general swirl of your thoughts like sugar dissolving in water. But the forty percent that stayed was anchored—hooked to Demetrios' face, to Photini's name, to the feel of the rough stone beneath your sandals and the sharp, briny smell of the morning catch.

It was there. It was real. It was yours.

And then Penelope said something that stuck harder than all the rest.

You were standing at the end of the main dock, watching the merchants negotiate a shipment of Cretan oil, and you'd asked—genuinely, with the slightly panicked tone of someone staring at the sheer scope of what they didn't know—"How do you keep track of all of this? The tariffs and the rotations and the—the grain math and the—how do you hold all of it in your head?"

Penelope looked at you. Then at the harbor. Then at Demetrios, who was currently bellowing at a dock worker about a misloaded crate with the casual authority of a man who had been bellowing about misloaded crates for two decades.

"I don't," she said.

You blinked.

"A queen doesn't need to know everything, ____." Penelope's voice was steady—not lecturing, not condescending, just stating a fact the way you'd state that the sky was blue or that Cornelius was a problem. "She needs to know who knows everything. Demetrios knows the harbor. Photini knows the merchants. The harbor master's records are more accurate than any scroll in the palace library, because they're written by the man who counts the barrels himself."

She turned to you, and her gaze was direct—not sharp, but clear. Expecting nothing but attention.

"Your job is not to memorize every number. Your job is to know who holds the numbers, and to make sure they trust you enough to share them. People don't give their knowledge to crowns. They give it to people."

You stood on the dock, the wind pulling at your scarf, the salt air stinging your cheeks, and you felt the words settle into you—not into your head, where they would have gotten lost among the swirl of half-remembered facts and beautiful Cretan words for squid, but deeper. Into the place where things that mattered lived.

You nodded.

Penelope studied you for a moment. Then, with the ghost of a smile:

"Good. Now tell me what kalamari is."

"A squid," you said promptly. "And a dance."

"It is not a dance."

"It could be."

Penelope walked ahead without responding, but her shoulders had a looseness to them that hadn't been there that morning, and you were fairly certain—not completely certain, but fairly—that she was hiding a smile.

☆

☆

The gathering happened after lunch.

You hadn't known it was going to happen—nobody had told you, or if they had, you'd been thinking about squid at the time and missed it. But when you returned from the harbor, windswept and salt-crusted and happier than you'd been in days, Eleni was waiting in your chambers with a clean chiton, a comb, and the particular expression she wore when she was about to deliver news you weren't going to like.

"The visiting princesses have been invited to the queen's garden for afternoon refreshments," Eleni said, already untangling your hair with practiced fingers. "All of them. Including you."

"All of them?" You turned in the chair, your eyes wide. "How many is all?"

Eleni's hands paused mid-stroke. "...Several."

"Several like three? Or several like five?"

"Several like... you should probably just come and see."

This was, you would later realize, Eleni's way of being kind. Because if she had told you the actual number, you would have climbed out the window.

The queen's garden was not the same as the little overgrown patch behind the kitchens that you had claimed as your own. The queen's garden was formal. Intentional. A walled enclosure on the western side of the palace, with trimmed rosemary hedges and stone benches arranged in a semi-circle around a central fountain.

The fountain didn't work—hadn't worked in years, Eleni had told you, something about damaged pipes—but the basin was full of collected rainwater, and someone had placed a bowl of floating flowers on the surface, which was a level of decorative effort that made you feel underdressed despite having just changed.

And the princesses.

Oh, the princesses.

There were eight of them.

Eight visiting princesses, seated around the garden in various configurations of poise, each one more intimidating than the last.

They were arranged like a living tapestry—rich fabrics in jewel tones, hair pinned and braided in styles you'd never seen, jewelry that caught the afternoon light and threw it back in tiny, accusatory sparkles. They sat with straight spines and crossed ankles and cups of wine held at exactly the right angle, and they were all, without exception, beautiful.

The kind of beautiful that made you acutely, viscerally aware of the berry stain still faintly visible on the hem of your chiton.

You hesitated at the garden entrance, your fingers finding the end of your scarf and twisting it—a habit you fell into whenever you wanted to turn around and leave but knew you shouldn't.

"Go," Eleni whispered behind you. "You'll be fine."

"What if I'm not fine?"

"Then you'll be memorably not-fine, which is still better than being forgettable."

"That's terrible advice."

"I know. Go."

You went.

"Hello!" you announced, sweeping into the garden with a smile so bright it could've powered a lighthouse. "I'm ____. Princess of—well, I'll be living here now, so I guess I'm Princess of Here? Princess of Ithaca. I'm the one who—yes. Hello."

Silence.

Eight pairs of eyes found you. Eight expressions cycled through their respective assessments—some quick, some slow, all thorough.

And then a voice, warm and musical, floated up from the nearest bench:

"Is that a wool scarf?"

You turned. The speaker was sitting slightly apart from the others—a young woman with auburn hair that fell in loose waves over one shoulder, the kind of red-gold that looked like autumn had gotten tangled in it.

Her face was soft—not in the delicate, polished way of Thais, but in the genuine, slightly-sad way of someone who had been looking at something far away and had only just turned back. Her eyes were hazel, flecked with green, and they were fixed on your scarf with an expression that hovered somewhere between curiosity and wistfulness.

"Yes!" You brightened, touching the scarf. "It's from Kythra—my mother made it. She's an incredible weaver. The wool is from our goats—well, not our goats specifically, the communal goats, but some of the wool might be from Cornelius—"

"It's lovely," the woman said, and she meant it. You could tell she meant it because she wasn't smiling the performance-smile that most of the others were wearing—the kind that looked right but felt wrong, like a door that was shaped correctly but didn't lead anywhere. Her smile was small and real, and it reached her eyes.

"I'm Korinna," she said. "Nestor's granddaughter. From Pylos."

"Pylos!" You dropped onto the bench beside her with the graceless enthusiasm of a puppy discovering a new friend. "That's—oh! Nestor! The wise one! My mother told me stories about him—he's the one who always knows what to say, right? The one who gives really long speeches?"

Korinna's smile widened, and something fond and slightly tired passed across her face. "He does give very long speeches, yes. Especially at dinner."

"That's so sweet. I love long speeches. Well—I love listening to other people give long speeches. I give long speeches too, but mine are about birds, so they don't really count."

A laugh—soft, genuine, surprised out of her—and you felt yourself settle. One friendly face. One real smile. You could work with that.

A servant offered you wine. You took it, sipped, and turned to face the rest of the garden.

The other princesses were arranged in two loose clusters, with Thais at the center of the larger one—not sitting on a throne, not presiding, not doing anything so obvious as leading. She was simply there, and the space around her had organized itself accordingly, the way iron filings arranged themselves around a magnet without being asked.

She caught your eye and smiled. The same warm, polished smile from the corridor. The same crinkled corners and gentle tilt of the head.

"____," she said, and her voice carried across the garden with the effortless projection of someone who never needed to raise it. "We were just talking about you."

"Oh no," you said, and several of the women laughed.

(You weren't sure why that was funny, but you were glad it was.)

Thais introduced them. Each name came with a title, a kingdom, a descriptor—delivered with the ease of a woman who had memorized every political map on the continent and used them as bedtime reading.

The Spartan sisters: Kassandra and Phyllis. Daughters of a high-ranking military family, descended from the same bloodline that produced commanders and strategists the way other families produced children.

They were dark-eyed and sharp-jawed, with the particular brand of beauty that came from a kingdom where physical fitness was a civic obligation—lean, angular, precise. They sat side by side with identical postures and nearly identical expressions: cool, assessing, faintly amused. Like they were watching a play and hadn't yet decided whether the leading actress was any good.

The Dorian princess: Melantha. Tall, fair-haired, with cheekbones that could've been carved from cliff faces and a laugh like a cracked bell—bright but brittle.

She was draped in green silk that probably cost more than your entire island's annual textile output, and she held her wine cup with one hand, the other resting on her knee in a pose so deliberately casual it must have taken practice.

Two noblewomen from Argos: Daphne and Ione. Political allies, not princesses by birth but elevated through marriage and maneuvering.

They were older than the rest—late twenties, maybe—and they watched the younger women with the patient, knowing expression of veterans observing recruits.

And then, at the far end of the garden, seated on a stone bench near the dormant fountain—

The Cretan girl.

She was quiet. That was the first thing you noticed—the quietness of her, the way she sat slightly outside the circle's gravity, her body angled toward the group but not quite part of it. She was small—shorter than you, and you weren't overally tall—with dark, curling hair that fell past her shoulders and skin the color of warm sand. Her chiton was simple but well-made, a soft ivory with embroidery along the hem, and her earrings—

Her earrings were extraordinary.

Delicate gold, shaped like pomegranates, each one no larger than a thumbnail. They caught the light every time she moved her head, sending tiny flares of gold dancing across her jaw.

She hadn't spoken since you'd arrived.

She hadn't smiled, either.

But she'd looked at you when you'd stumbled on the garden path, and the look hadn't been judgment. It had been recognition. The quick, instinctive recognition of someone who also stumbled, who also didn't quite fit, who also sat at the edge of circles and wondered whether the edge was where they belonged or just where they'd ended up.

You filed it away.

You always filed things like that away. Not in the organized, labeled way that people who were good at strategy filed things—more in the way you stored memories of kind faces and gentle touches, tucked into the soft, cluttered corners of your heart where you kept everything that mattered.

"So," Kassandra—or was it Phyllis? The one on the left, the one with the slightly sharper jaw—leaned forward, her dark eyes glinting with something that was technically curiosity and was functionally a blade. "You're the lucky scroll Prince Telemachus picked."

"I am!" you said, smiling.

"From Kythra."

"Yes."

"The goat island."

The words were delivered lightly—so lightly that they could have been a joke, could have been friendly ribbing, could have been the kind of playful teasing that happened between women who were comfortable with each other. But the emphasis was on goat, and the slight tilt of her head was not playful. It was measuring.

"We prefer 'Island of Flowers and Wine and Also Goats,'" you said. "But yes. The goat island."

Melantha laughed—the cracked-bell laugh, too loud and too quick. "I heard Kythra's royal fleet is three fishing boats and a raft."

"Two fishing boats," you corrected pleasantly. "The third one sank. We are in discussions about the raft."

Another laugh—this one from Daphne, or maybe Ione, the sound warm and genuine. Melantha's smile thinned slightly, the way a smile thinned when the person laughing wasn't laughing at the same thing you were.

"It must have been quite a shock," Phyllis said—the other sister, the one on the right. Her voice was softer than Kassandra's but carried the same undercurrent. "Coming here. Ithaca is... rather different from what you're used to, I imagine."

"Oh, definitely," you agreed, pulling your feet up beneath you on the bench. "Everything's stone here. At home, everything's flowers. You can't walk three steps without stepping on a daisy. Our goats eat them. Our cats eat them. My sister Calla ate one once, but she was going through a phase."

"And the prince?" Kassandra said.

The question landed differently. Not the same casual-sharp tone—this one was direct. Pointed. Her dark eyes met yours with the frankness of a woman who did not waste words on things she didn't intend to cut with.

"How is the prince?" she continued. "We've heard he's quite... serious."

"He is serious," you said, and your voice did something it didn't usually do—it softened. Not the performative softness of someone trying to be demure, but the real kind. The kind that happened when you talked about things that lived close to your chest. "He's the most serious person I've ever met. He has this face—you know the face?—where his eyebrows do the thing and his jaw does the thing and you can practically see the thoughts happening behind his eyes, like, individually, one at a time, in order—"

You were gesturing now, your hands framing an invisible version of Telemachus' expression in the air.

"—and he frowns a lot, but it's not a mean frown. It's a thinking frown. A working frown. Like he's always solving something, even when there's nothing to solve. And his ears—" You stopped. Your cheeks warmed. "His ears turn pink when he's embarrassed. Which is—it's very—"

You took a sip of wine.

"He's wonderful," you finished, simply. "He's grumpy and serious and wonderful."

The garden was quiet.

Not uncomfortable-quiet—something else. The kind of quiet that happened when someone said something so unguarded, so genuinely felt, that the room didn't know what to do with it. You'd just laid your chest open in front of eight women who were trained, from birth, to keep theirs shut, and the contrast was so stark it practically had a sound.

Melantha recovered first.

"He is rather handsome," she said, and the way she said it—leaning back, her green silk rustling, her eyes half-lidded—was deliberate. Not subtle. Not trying to be subtle. The words came out slow and savoring, like she was tasting them. "I saw him at the morning training. With the practice sword. I have to say—Ithaca certainly knows how to produce a prince. All that tension in his arms, the way he moves—"

She trailed off, her lips curving.

Kassandra picked up the thread without missing a beat. "The Spartan delegation requested a demonstration of Ithacan combat techniques. For diplomatic purposes, of course." Her smile was razor-thin. "It would be a shame not to see the prince in his element."

"His element being shirtless and sweating, presumably," Melantha added, and several of the women laughed—sharp, appreciative, the kind of laughter that had edges.

You looked between them, your brow furrowing slightly—not in offense, not quite, but in the confused, blinking way of someone trying to work out why a conversation that should have been fine was making the air feel different.

And then you did the thing.

The thing you always did, which was to take something at face value and respond to it honestly, without strategy, without awareness that your honesty might be the sharpest weapon in the room.

"Oh, he's gorgeous," you said, nodding earnestly. "Like, genuinely. I didn't realize how much until—okay, this is embarrassing, but yesterday he gave me his tunic—"

Every head in the garden snapped towards you.

"—because I was in this creek, and my clothes were wet—it's a long story, there were berries involved—and he took off his shirt and handed it to me, and I—" You pressed a hand to your chest, your eyes going wide at the memory. "I nearly passed out. I had no idea. He wears those big loose tunics all the time and you think 'oh, he's a prince, he's probably fine under there,' but no. No." You shook your head slowly, with the solemnity of someone delivering important scientific findings. "He's not fine. He's incredible. There are muscles I didn't know existed. He has this scar on his ribs that's—and his shoulders are—and when the light hit his—"

You stopped. Took a breath. Your face was very warm.

"Anyway," you said. "The tunic was really comfortable."

The silence that followed was cavernous.

Eight women stared at you.

Melantha's mouth had parted slightly, her rehearsed, lounging composure cracking at the edges. Kassandra's razor smile had gone still. Phyllis' eyebrows had risen to a height that suggested they were considering permanent relocation to her hairline.

Because you hadn't just told them he was handsome.

You hadn't just agreed with their assessment, matched their tone, played their game.

You'd told them he took his shirt off for you. That you'd seen what they were trying to imagine. That he'd given you the clothes off his back in a private clearing in the woods, and that the body underneath those loose tunics—the body they were performing interest in, the body they were using as a barb—

Was yours.

You'd claimed it without claiming it. Staked a flag without knowing you were planting one. Walked into the middle of their carefully constructed provocation and disarmed it by simply, obliviously, telling the truth.

And you had no idea.

You sat there with your wine cup in your hand and your berry-stained sandals, and your mother's scarf and the dazed, half-dreamy expression of a girl who was still thinking about her betrothed's shoulder blades, completely unaware that you'd just shut down the most pointed social offensive any of them had launched all afternoon.

Korinna, beside you, made a sound into her wine cup that was either a cough or a laugh or both.

"He sounds... lovely," she managed, her hazel eyes bright.

"He is," you said. "He really, really is."

Thais, who hadn't spoken during this entire exchange—who had sat in her chair with her ankles crossed and her green eyes steady and her wine untouched—took a very slow, very deliberate sip.

Her expression hadn't changed.

But something behind it had. A recalculation. Not the first—you'd noticed that she seemed to recalculate often around you, the way a navigator adjusted a course when the wind shifted—but this one was different. Deeper. Less about what you were and more about what you might become.

She set her cup down.

"How charming," she said.

The same words from tea with Penelope. The same warm tone, the same polished smile.

But she said it quieter this time.

Like she was revising the definition.

☆ ✩ ☆

The conversation shifted after that—away from Telemachus, away from the pointed, testing probes that Melantha and the Spartan sisters had been lobbing like javelins.

Thais steered it, smoothly and without apparent effort, toward safer territory: the upcoming formal dinner, the decoration of the great hall, who was wearing what, who had brought gifts and what those gifts signified.

You contributed where you could—mostly in the form of enthusiastic questions ("What's a ceremonial fibula?" "Is chartreuse a color or a food?" "How many forks is too many forks?") that the other women answered with varying degrees of patience and condescension.

Daphne, the older Argive noblewoman, turned out to be unexpectedly kind. She explained fork etiquette with the steady, good-humored patience of a woman who had taught younger women before and didn't mind doing it again.

When you asked whether it was true that Argos had a palace made entirely of gold—"I heard that from a sailor once, and he seemed very trustworthy, but he also told me that fish could sing, so I'm open to being wrong"—she'd laughed, genuinely, and told you that the palace was stone with gold leaf accents and that fish could not, in fact, sing, but that she appreciated your willingness to believe in possibilities.

You liked her.

Ione, the other Argive, was quieter—watchful, more measured—but not unkind. She offered you a fig from the platter with a small nod that felt like acceptance, or at least the absence of rejection, which at this point you were learning to take as a win.

Melantha continued to circle like something with wings and teeth—not attacking directly, but swooping close enough that you could feel the air move. She asked you about your education, "We had a wonderful academy in Thessaly—where did you study?";  your hobbies, "Do you hunt? Ride? Play the lyre?"; and your family's political connections, "Your father must have quite the network to secure a match with Ithaca—who brokered the arrangement?" Each question being a polished stone with a sharp edge hidden inside.

You answered all of them honestly. "I had tutors, but they kept quitting." "I can ride a donkey! Does that count?" "I don't think anyone brokered it—I think my father just wrote a letter? Letters are how things work, right?"

And each honest answer seemed to confuse Melantha more than the last, as if she'd prepared a map for a territory that turned out to be a completely different country.

But it was the Cretan girl who surprised you.

Her name was Ariadne.

Not the Ariadne—not the mythological one, the princess of Crete who'd given Theseus the thread that saved him from the Labyrinth and been abandoned on Naxos for her trouble. (You knew that story. Your mother had told it to you, and you'd cried so hard you'd given yourself a stomachache.) This was a different Ariadne. A lesser cousin of the Cretan royal house, sent as a diplomatic representative because the actual princess was ill and someone needed to fill the seat.

She told you this in a quiet voice, during a lull in the larger conversation, when the other women had broken into smaller groups and the garden had softened into something less like a stage and more like a room.

"I'm not really supposed to be here," Ariadne said, and her fingers were fidgeting with one of those beautiful pomegranate earrings—twisting it gently, the way someone fidgeted when they were nervous and didn't want anyone to notice. "Thekla was supposed to come. She's the proper princess. I'm just—I'm a cousin. A minor cousin. I'm only here because she caught a fever and someone needed to go."

She said it the way you might say the sky is grey today—not complaining, not seeking pity, just stating a fact. But there was a thinness to her voice that you recognized, because you'd heard it in your own. The thinness of someone who knew, with certainty, that they were the second choice.

"I like your earrings," you said.

Ariadne blinked. Her hand stilled on the gold pomegranate.

"They're really beautiful," you continued. "Are they Cretan? The detail is—can I see?" You leaned closer without waiting for an answer, tilting your head to get a better look at the tiny, perfect fruit hanging from her earlobe. "Oh, that's incredible. Are those little seeds inside? They put seeds inside? That's so—how do they even do that? Do they use a tiny hammer? Is there a tiny goldsmith somewhere in Crete with very small hands?"

A laugh escaped Ariadne—quick, startled, like a bird flushed from a bush. She clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes wide, as if the sound had surprised her as much as it had surprised you.

"My grandmother made them," she said, through her fingers. "She's a jeweler. She taught me—I make earrings too, but not like these. Mine are simpler."

"You make jewelry?"

"Just earrings. Small ones. It's not—it's not a real skill, not like weaving or—"

"It's absolutely a real skill. Are you kidding? You take metal and turn it into tiny pomegranates that people wear on their faces. That's practically magic. That's—you're basically a sorceress."

Ariadne stared at you.

You stared back.

"Do you have any with you?" you asked. "The ones you made?"

A pause. A hesitation—the particular hesitation of someone who wasn't used to being asked, who had learned to keep their small, precious things hidden because the world rarely cared enough to look.

Then, slowly, Ariadne reached into the small pouch at her belt and pulled out a pair of earrings.

They were tiny. Delicate. Two small golden leaves, each one veined with impossibly fine lines, curved slightly as if caught in a breeze.

They were simpler than the pomegranates—less ornate, less complex—but there was something about them that made your breath catch. A care. An intention. The unmistakable mark of something made by hands that loved what they were doing.

"These are gorgeous," you whispered, holding them in your palm. "Ariadne. These are—you made these?"

She nodded, her cheeks darkening.

"Can I wear them?"

"You—what?"

"Can I wear them? Right now? I want to wear them." You were already reaching for your own earrings—small, plain pearls, nothing special—and pulling them out. "Trade me. You wear mine and I'll wear yours. A swap. A cultural exchange, if you will. A diplomatic jewelry initiative."

Ariadne's mouth was open. "You want to wear my earrings."

"I want to wear your earrings at the formal dinner," you corrected. "So that when people ask me 'where did you get those stunning golden leaf earrings,' I can say 'my friend Ariadne made them, she's from Crete, she's a genius, you should commission her immediately.'"

The word friend landed in the space between you like a stone dropped in still water, and the ripples spread outward—slow, quiet, reaching.

Ariadne looked at you. Her dark eyes were very bright—not with tears, not exactly, but with something close. Something that lived in the same neighborhood as tears and visited often but preferred not to be named.

"We just met," she said.

"I know."

"You don't know anything about me."

"I know you make beautiful earrings and you fidget when you're nervous and you're here because someone else couldn't be, and you're trying really hard to be brave about it." You held the golden leaves up, watching them catch the light. "That's enough for me."

Ariadne was quiet for a long moment. Then she reached up—carefully, gently—and began removing the pomegranate earrings from her ears.

"You can borrow them," she said. "But I'm not trading. Your pearls are too plain for me."

"Rude."

"Honest."

You grinned. She grinned back—tentative, fragile, new.

And something settled between you—small and warm and unfinished, the way all the best things were at the start.

☆

☆

You left the garden an hour later, Ariadne's golden leaves swinging from your ears and a warm, fizzing feeling in your chest that you recognized as the particular joy of making a friend.

Not a political contact. Not an alliance. A friend—the real kind, the kind that happened in the cracks between formalities, in the shared language of nervousness and small, handmade things.

The afternoon had begun to cool. The light was going amber, the way Ithacan light always did in the late hours—not the warm, honeyed gold of Kythra, but something cooler, bluer, filtered through the grey stone and the salt air until it looked like light that had been thinking.

You were crossing the courtyard—the large, open-air space between the main hall and the western wing, where the stone was worn smooth by centuries of feet and the olive trees grew in a crooked line along the southern wall—when you saw him.

Alexios.

He was sitting on the low stone wall that bordered the courtyard, one leg drawn up, the other hanging, his blue tunic bright against the grey. He was doing something with a piece of rope—tying it, untying it, retying it, his fingers moving in quick, practiced patterns that looked like the rope equivalent of Telemachus' weaving. A sailor's habit. Something to keep the hands busy while the mind wandered.

He looked up as you crossed the courtyard—not because you'd made a noise, not because you'd called his name, but with the same easy, instinctive awareness he'd shown at the harbor. Like he had a compass that pointed toward people rather than north.

His face broke into a smile.

Not the careful, measured kind. The big kind. The whole kind. The kind that was so immediate and so warm that it hit you like a gust of wind—not unpleasant, not disorienting, just there, suddenly, filling the space.

He waved.

You waved back.

Big. Bright. Both hands, because one hand was never enough, because you had two hands and both of them wanted to say hello.

"Nice earrings!" he called across the courtyard, and his voice carried—warm and rich, the words tossed to you casually, easily, like a ball thrown between friends who had known each other for years rather than days.

"Thank you!" you called back, touching one of the golden leaves. "My friend made them! She's from Crete! She's a genius!"

Alexios laughed—that full, open, belly-deep sound that you remembered from the dock—and gave you a thumbs-up with the hand that wasn't holding the rope.

You gave him a thumbs-up back.

And then you kept walking, because you were heading to the kitchens you'd finally memorized, mostly, and because the interaction was exactly what it appeared to be: simple. Easy. Two people who liked each other saying hello across a courtyard with the uncomplicated warmth of people who didn't have agendas.

You didn't think about it.

You didn't need to.

Thirty feet above you, in the second-floor corridor that overlooked the courtyard, Telemachus' hand tightened on the windowsill.

He'd been walking. Just walking—from his chambers to his father's study, a route he could have navigated blindfolded, a route he had navigated blindfolded once, at age eleven, on a dare from a servant's son who had since moved to the mainland.

He'd been thinking about the tariff adjustments his father wanted to discuss, and about the Spartan delegation's request for a combat demonstration, and about whether the weaving he'd started—the scarf, the teal-and-blue one, the one he was absolutely not going to admit he was pouring more effort into than any diplomatic correspondence he'd ever written—needed another two inches on the fringe or whether that would look excessive.

And then he'd glanced down.

And there you were.

Walking in the courtyard with the late light in your hair and new earrings catching gold against your jaw, your scarf trailing behind you like always, your face tilted up toward the Thalassean prince with a smile so big it was visible from the second floor.

And the Thalassean prince was smiling back.

Not standing close. Not touching. Not doing anything that could be catalogued as improper or even particularly noteworthy. Just sitting on a wall, tying rope, smiling at you with the easy, effortless warmth of someone who had nothing to hide and nothing to prove, and that—

That was the part that made Telemachus' knuckles go white against the stone.

Because Alexios wasn't threatening. Wasn't calculating. Wasn't playing a game or angling for an advantage or doing any of the things that Telemachus could have identified and countered and dismissed.

Alexios was just... there. Being himself. Being warm and open and charming in the uncomplicated way that Telemachus had never, in his entire life, managed to be.

And you responded to it.

You responded to it the way a flower responded to sunlight—immediately, instinctively, with your whole self.

You waved with both hands, because you always waved with both hands. You called across the courtyard, because you never lowered your voice when you were happy. You touched your earrings and said "my friend made them," with the unthinking pride of someone who collected people the way other people collected coins, and the Thalassean prince laughed, and you laughed, and it was easy.

Easy.

The word sat in Telemachus' chest like a splinter.

Because nothing about him was easy.

Nothing about the way he loved—the way he was learning to love, the way the feeling was growing inside him like something planted without permission—was easy.

It was tangled and thorny and frightening, and every time he got close enough to touch it, every time he felt the warmth of it against his fingers, something old and trained and deeply, deeply scared in him recoiled.

The suitors had taught him that.

Taught him that love, displayed openly, became a weapon. That affection, visible and unguarded, became a target. That the things you cared about most were the things your enemies would reach for first, and if they saw you reaching too—if they saw you wanting, needing, caring in a way that had a shape and a name—

They would take it.

Like they'd taken everything else.

His jaw flexed. His hand pressed harder into the stone. He watched you cross the courtyard, watched the Thalassean prince's gaze follow you for a moment before returning to his rope, and something in Telemachus' chest tightened—a slow, constricting ache that he couldn't identify and refused to name and was absolutely, definitely not jealousy.

(It was jealousy.)

(He hated that it was jealousy.)

"Careful," said a voice behind him. "You'll leave finger marks in the marble."

Telemachus' hand jerked off the sill.

Peisistratus was leaning against the opposite wall of the corridor—arms crossed, one ankle hooked over the other, his posture the carefully curated casualness of a man who wanted you to know he'd been watching you for a while and had opinions about what he'd seen.

"I'm not leaving finger marks," Telemachus said, his voice flat.

"You are. There are literally finger marks." Peisistratus pushed off the wall and strolled to the window, glancing down at the courtyard with the idle, appreciative gaze of someone surveying a pleasant view. "Ah. The Thalassean. He seems friendly."

Telemachus said nothing.

Peisistratus' gaze drifted. Found you—already disappearing through the far doorway, your scarf catching on the edge of the frame, your hand reaching back to untangle it. Found the golden leaves at your ears. Found the bounce in your step.

"She seems happy," Peisistratus observed, his voice light.

Telemachus said nothing.

Peisistratus waited. Patient, unhurried, the silence between them comfortable in the way that only old silences could be—worn smooth by years of use, shaped by the particular intimacy of two people who had learned each other's languages long ago.

Then he straightened. Clapped Telemachus on the shoulder—once, firm, the kind of contact that said I see you without requiring a response.

"Come on," he said. "Your father wants to talk about the Spartan trade proposal. Something about olive oil quotas."

Telemachus turned from the window.

His face was composed. Neutral. Every line in its proper place, every muscle held in its assigned position.

But his ears were pink.

And Peisistratus—who noticed everything, who said nothing until the saying mattered—filed it away.

In silence.

For now.

☆

☆

That evening, you sat cross-legged on your bed with your writing desk pulled onto the mattress and Ariadne's golden leaf earrings resting on the pillow beside you like two tiny treasures, and you wrote.

Not to your mother—not tonight. Tonight the letter was for you. Written on a scrap of parchment that was too small for a proper letter and too crumpled to be official, in the enthusiastic, slightly uneven handwriting that Calla had once called "spirited" and your father had called "concerning."

You wrote:

Things I learned today:

Kalamari is a squid and a dance (Demetrios disagrees but he's wrong).A queen doesn't need to know everything. She needs to know who knows everything.

You paused. Chewed your lip.

There are eight visiting princesses. Two of them might be mean. One of them definitely is. One of them makes earrings. Telemachus is gorgeous when he's shirtless and I told everyone and I don't think that was the right thing to do but also I don't know what the wrong thing would have been because it's true. Alexios waves with his whole arm. Telemachus waves with his fingers. I can't decide which one I like better, so I'm choosing both. Penelope chose me. Not because she had to, but because she wanted to.

You looked at the list. Read it over.

Then, at the bottom, in smaller letters:

I think the Cretan girl is going to be important to me. I don't know why. I just do.

You folded the parchment. Tucked it into the little book your mother had given you—the one with the blank pages, the one she'd said you should fill with "memories worth keeping."

The thyme was still there, pressed flat between the first two pages.

Memory number one.

You closed the book, blew out the lamp, and pulled the covers up.

The golden leaves caught the last thread of moonlight before the darkness took them, glinting once—warm, small, precious—before going still.

You fell asleep smiling.

But then again, you almost always fell asleep smiling.

It was one of your best qualities.

Walking into the palace, wearing nothing but the prince's tunic. Shirtless prince beside you. Bare feet. Damp hair. A bundle of berries and the distinct look of someone who had been doing something they should not have been doing.

The whispers had probably reached Penelope before you'd even made it to the second floor.

The princess was in the woods. She was naked. The prince found her. He gave her his clothes. They came back together. Together.

You imagined the words building like a wave—each retelling a little taller, a little more dramatic, a little further from the truth—until the story that reached the queen's ears bore only a passing resemblance to what had actually happened.

This is it, you thought, following Maia down the corridor with the leaden steps of a woman walking to her own execution. This is where she tells me I'm being sent home. This is where the engagement ends. This is where I become the princess who got kicked out of Ithaca for skinny-dipping.

Your mother would understand.

Your father would not.

Penelope's sitting room was the same as before—the same high-backed chair, the same window, the same soft light. But this time there were no other guests. No Thais, no visiting dignitaries, no carefully arranged social observation.

Just the queen.

And tea.

And a silence that could have crushed bone.

You sat in the chair across from her—back straight, hands folded, smile firmly in place—and said nothing. Which was, for you, an achievement roughly equivalent to holding your breath underwater for ten minutes.

Penelope poured the tea. Handed you a cup. Set the pot down.

You waited.

She sipped.

You sipped.

The silence grew teeth.

"So," Penelope said, setting her cup down with a soft click. "I hear you had quite the adventure today."

Here it comes, you thought. The dismissal. The disappointment. The gentle, queenly version of "you are a disaster and we are sending you back to your goats."

"I—" you started, but your voice came out wrong. Too small. Too careful. Nothing like the bubbly, chattering cascade that usually poured from your mouth without permission. "I'm sorry, Your Majesty. I didn't mean to—I know it looked—I wasn't trying to—"

You stopped.

Swallowed.

And then, because the silence was worse than any scolding, you folded your hands tighter in your lap and did the thing you almost never did.

You gave a short, polite answer.

"It won't happen again," you said quietly. Simply.

Penelope studied you.

Not the quick, surface-level study of someone making a judgment—the deep kind. The kind that looked past the chiton and the tiara and the carefully maintained smile and searched for whatever was underneath.

She asked you another question—something about your journey, your impressions of the palace—and you answered. Shortly. Politely.

The way you'd been taught. The way your father expected. The way princesses were supposed to answer when they were sitting across from a queen and trying very, very hard not to ruin anything else.

You didn't ramble.

You didn't gush.

You didn't tell a single story about goats, or birds, or dolphins, or the exact shade of pink that constituted "aggressive."

You were careful.

And it was miserable.

The conversation limped forward—question, answer, question, answer—and each exchange felt like pulling teeth.

Not because Penelope was unkind—she wasn't. Her questions were gentle, her tone measured, her eyes patient. But you were so afraid of saying the wrong thing that you'd stopped saying anything real at all.

The silence after your last answer stretched.

Penelope set down her cup.

And then, with the quiet precision of a woman who had spent twenty years reading the spaces between words, she said:

"What do you think of my son?"

Something cracked.

Not loudly—not visibly. More like a seal being broken, a jar being opened, a door swinging wide on hinges that had been rusted shut.

The question wasn't political. It wasn't strategic. It wasn't testing your knowledge of trade routes or mythological accuracy or the proper way to address a crown prince in a formal setting.

It was a mother's question.

And you—you, who had spent the last thirty minutes clamping down on every instinct, every impulse, every bright and bubbly and too-much part of yourself—couldn't hold it anymore.

Your eyes brightened.

Your hands unfolded.

And the dam broke.

"He's amazing," you breathed, and the word came out like it had been trapped inside your chest and was finally, finally free. "He's—okay, I know he's kind of intense, and he does this thing where he stares at you like he's calculating whether you're a threat, which is terrifying but also weirdly attractive—but he's sweet, Your Majesty. He is. He checks in on me, though he likes to pretend he doesn't—did he tell you that? He probably didn't tell you that, because he's the kind of person who does nice things and then pretends they didn't happen, which is infuriating but also so endearing—"

You were leaning forward now, your tea forgotten, your hands moving in animated gestures.

"And he's making me a scarf! An actual scarf! With his hands! On a loom! He knows how to weave, Your Majesty—which I know you know, because you taught him, but do you know how rare that is? A prince who can weave? That's—that's not just a skill, that's a—it's a love language, is what it is. He learned it because of you, because he loves you, and I think that's the most beautiful thing I've—"

You caught yourself. Sucked in a breath. Your cheeks were warm, your eyes bright, and somewhere in the middle of the monologue, you'd pulled your feet up onto the chair and tucked them beneath you like a child settling in to tell a favorite story.

"Sorry," you said quickly. "I'm—sorry. That was a lot. I'm—I'll be quieter—"

"Don't," Penelope said.

You blinked.

The queen's expression had changed. Not dramatically—Penelope didn't do dramatic. But something in her face had shifted, the careful composure loosening at the edges like fabric slipping from a loom. Her eyes, dark and watchful as ever, held a warmth that hadn't been there before—not wide or bright, but deep. The kind of warmth that lived at the bottom of a well.

"Don't be quieter," she repeated, softer. "Continue."

You stared at her for a moment, uncertain. Then, cautiously—the way a bird returns to a hand that hasn't grabbed it—you relaxed.

And you talked.

You told her about the scarf from home—how your mother had made it, how you wore it everywhere, how the wool was starting to thin at the edges but you couldn't bring yourself to replace it.

You told her about the weaving lesson—how Telemachus' hands had moved like water, how he'd caught yours when the thread tangled, how his ears went red when you complimented him.

You told her about the berries, and the creek, and the doe, and how Telemachus had screamed—you did an impression, which made Penelope's mouth twitch dangerously—and how he'd given you his tunic without being asked and walked you back without a single unkind word, even though you could tell he wanted to strangle you.

"And—oh!" You sat up straighter, a new thought surfacing. "I also met the Thalassean prince. At the harbor. Yesterday. Alexios—that's his name. He's really nice."

You said it brightly, casually, the way you might mention that you'd seen a pretty cloud or found a nice rock—information delivered without weight, without agenda, without any awareness that the name might carry significance in this room.

"He has a beautiful ship. And he told me about his brother who wrestled a dolphin, which—I have questions about that, honestly, because Pericles would never tolerate being wrestled, so I think it might be a regional thing—but anyway, he was really warm? Like, easy to talk to. He laughed at my jokes. Not everyone laughs at my jokes."

You paused. Frowned slightly.

"Actually, he might have been laughing at me. Is there a difference? I feel like there's a difference, but I can't always tell—"

Penelope held up a hand—gently, not sharply—and you stopped, mid-ramble.

"You went to the harbor," Penelope said. Her voice hadn't changed. Still measured, still calm, still the same quiet-water tone she used for everything. But something in her eyes had sharpened—not suspicion, not alarm, just... attention. The particular, focused attention of a woman who was watching a new thread enter her weave and needed to decide, carefully, where it belonged.

"To meet a foreign prince," Penelope continued. "Alone. Before the formal reception."

You winced. "...Yes?"

"Without informing Telemachus."

"...Also yes."

A pause.

"He waved," you offered, weakly. "From the ship. He waved and I waved back and then I kind of just... went down to say hello. It was an instinct thing. Like the berries."

"You do seem to follow your instincts quite readily," Penelope observed, and the words were dry but not unkind.

"It's a gift," you said. Then, quickly, "Or a flaw. It might be a flaw. The jury is still out."

Penelope regarded you for another moment—long, measuring, the gaze of a woman who had survived two decades of suitors by learning to see the shapes forming before they finished forming.

Then, whatever she'd been searching for, she seemed to find it—or, perhaps more accurately, to confirm its absence. She nodded, once, and the sharpness in her eyes softened back to its usual watchful warmth.

"The Thalassean delegation is here for the treaty discussions," she said evenly. "Prince Alexios is a representative of his father's court. He is a guest—as you are. I trust you will treat the relationship accordingly."

"Of course!" you said, nodding vigorously. "He's just nice. That's all. He's nice and he has a nice ship and he's nice."

"You said nice three times."

"Because he is! Three times worth of nice!"

Penelope's mouth twitched.

She let it go.

The conversation eased back—gently, like a river resuming its course after a stone has been navigated—and you settled deeper into the chair, the tension bleeding out of you in slow degrees.

"He's good," you said, and your voice was quieter now. Simpler. You were talking about Telemachus again, and you knew Penelope knew, even though you hadn't said his name. "I know I'm not—I know I'm not what you expected. Or what he expected. I know I'm not smart the way Thais is smart, or serious the way he needs someone to be serious. I know I eat with my fingers and I can't weave and I got lost in the woods and I said the thing about the horses—"

You winced again.

"—but he's good, Your Majesty. And I—I just want him to be happy."

The room was quiet.

Penelope regarded you for a long time—long enough that the silence should have been uncomfortable, but wasn't. It was the kind of silence that held space. That let things settle.

Then Penelope said, slowly, as if choosing each word with the same care she chose each thread on her loom:

"Do you know that when I first began sending marriage proposals for Telemachus, only one kingdom accepted?"

You blinked.

"It was the year he turned eighteen," Penelope continued, her voice measured. "The suitors were still here. Ithaca was... what it was. A kingdom in crisis, ruled by a queen most had written off and a prince no one believed would survive. I sent letters to every major house, every allied kingdom, every court that had ever shared a treaty with us."

She paused, her fingers, resting on the arm of her chair, curling slightly.

"Most responded with silence. A few with apologies. Some with thinly veiled insults—offers to 'reconsider' once I had been married off to one of the suitors and produced a child for their bloodline." Her voice didn't waver, but something tightened beneath it—an old wound, scarred over but still tender. "They would wait, they said. Wait to see how it ended."

Your chest ached.

"But one kingdom in particular responded immediately," Penelope said. "A small island off the port of Gytheion. An island known for flowers, wine, and—"

"Goats," you whispered.

Penelope's mouth curved. Just barely. "Goats."

You sat very still, your hands folded in your lap, your breath held. Something was shifting—in the room, in the space between you and this woman who held her kingdom together with thread and will. Something important.

"I was surprised," Penelope admitted. "Such a small kingdom. Such limited resources. Such little to gain from allying with a doomed house. I assumed your father was desperate, or foolish, or both."

You huffed a quiet, rueful laugh. "Probably both, honestly."

"Perhaps." Penelope tilted her head. "But I later learned something interesting. Your father, initially, intended to decline."

Your eyebrows rose. "He did?"

"He did. But then his youngest daughter—a girl, I was told, who was sitting in on the council meeting because she'd wandered in looking for the kitchens—said something."

You stared.

A memory—hazy, half-formed—surfaced.

You'd been... fourteen? Maybe fifteen? You'd walked into the wrong room—your father's council chamber, not the pantry—and found a group of very serious men having a very serious discussion about a letter from some island called Ithaca.

You'd stood in the doorway, confused and slightly hungry, and listened to them debate whether to accept a marriage proposal from a kingdom that everyone seemed to think was falling apart.

And you'd said—

What had you said?

"Something about soldiers," Penelope prompted gently. "Something about how a kingdom with that many problems must have built up a very strong army to compensate?"

Your eyes went wide.

"I—I said that?" You pressed a hand to your mouth. "I don't—I think I was trying to say something else. I think I was talking about how—I mean, I was hungry, and I was thinking about how when our goats get stressed they get stronger, and I said something about how maybe the same thing works for people—"

"Your father," Penelope said, "heard it differently. He realized that Ithaca—struggling as it was—had been forging soldiers and veterans for decades. That allying with a kingdom built on survival meant allying with people who knew how to fight. He accepted the proposal that same evening."

You sat there, stunned. Blinking. Your hand was still pressed to your mouth.

You'd... done that?

By accident?

"I don't tell you this to flatter you," Penelope said, and her voice carried the weight of someone who did not waste words. "I tell you because I want you to understand something."

She leaned forward—just slightly, just enough that the distance between you shrank and the air grew warmer.

"You remind me," she said quietly, "of women people liked to forget. The ones who smiled while everyone else schemed. The ones who were dismissed, underestimated, overlooked—and who survived anyway. Not because they were clever in the way that clever people want you to be, but because they understood something that clever people often don't."

She held your gaze.

"That the world runs on people. On hearts, not heads. On trust, not strategy. And the woman who can make a servant laugh, or calm a frightened prince, or say something accidentally brilliant while looking for the kitchens—"

Her mouth curved again—fuller this time, warmer. A real smile. The first one you'd ever seen from her.

"—that woman is far more dangerous than anyone gives her credit for."

Your eyes were stinging.

You didn't trust your voice, so you didn't use it. Just sat there, in the queen's private sitting room, with your tea gone cold and your heart too big for your chest and Penelope—the Penelope, the queen who had waited twenty years, who had woven and unwoven and endured—looking at you like you were something worth keeping.

"Thank you," you managed, and it came out thick. Wobbly. Not the polished gratitude of a diplomatic response, but the messy, honest kind. The kind that meant it.

Penelope nodded.

Then, after a pause:

"I approve of you, ____."

Four words. Simple. Quiet.

And they settled into your chest like warm stone, heavy and permanent, in a place you hadn't known was empty until it was filled.

You smiled—shaky and bright and a little bit broken around the edges—and Penelope returned it.

Small.

Steady.

Real.

The silence between you held. Not the crushing, toothed silence from before—this was different. Softer. Full of something that hadn't been there when you'd walked in.

You were reaching for your tea—cold now, but it gave your hands something to do—when Penelope spoke again.

"Which is why," she said, setting her own cup down with the precise click that you were starting to recognize as her way of anchoring a sentence, "I'd like to begin your lessons."

You paused.

Your cup hovered midway to your lips.

"My... lessons?"

"Queen's training," Penelope said. The words were matter-of-fact—delivered with the same calm, measured weight she applied to everything, as if she were announcing the weather or the time of day rather than something that made your heart lurch sideways in your chest. "Household management. Diplomacy. Treasury. Religious observance. Protocol. The full scope of what a queen of Ithaca would be expected to know."

She folded her hands in her lap—steady, unhurried.

"If you are to be my son's wife," she continued, "you will need to be more than charming. Charm opens doors. Knowledge keeps them open. And there are a great many doors in this palace that will test whether you belong behind them."

You stared at her.

Your mouth was open. You were aware of this. You couldn't seem to close it.

"You want to... teach me?" you said, and your voice came out small—not the polished smallness of earlier, not the careful, restrained quiet of a girl trying not to take up space.

This was genuine. Stunned. The smallness of someone who had been offered something so far beyond what they expected that their voice didn't know what size to be.

"I want to prepare you," Penelope corrected gently. "There is a difference."

"But I—" You swallowed, setting the cup down because your hands were shaking slightly and you didn't want to spill. "Your Majesty, I'm—I can't even weave. I got lost looking for the kitchen. I called a duke a 'friend' at the feast—"

"You did do that."

"—and I confused Hector with Heracles yesterday—"

"Also true."

"—and I still don't know what a fiscal year is." You said this last part with the desperate honesty of someone confessing a crime, your eyes wide, your hands gripping the fabric of your chiton. "Are you sure? Are you—because I don't want you to offer this out of obligation, or politeness, or because you feel like you have to because I'm marrying your son, because if it's any of those things I would rather you just tell me and I'll figure it out on my own—I'll try, I'll really try, I'll read every scroll in the library if I have to—"

"____."

You stopped. Closed your mouth. Your chest was heaving slightly from the effort of holding everything in. The hope. The terror. The desperate, aching want to be enough, which was the same want you'd carried your entire life—the want that lived at the bottom of everything you did, everything you said, everything you were.

Penelope held your gaze.

"I am offering," she said, "because I see something worth teaching. Not because I must. Because I choose to."

The words landed like hands cupping your face. Gentle. Firm. Inescapable.

"We will not do this the way your old tutors did," she continued, and her voice shifted—still measured, but warmer now, shaped by the particular precision of a woman who had already been planning this and was simply waiting for the right moment to lay out the pieces. "I've watched you, ____. Your mind doesn't move in straight lines. It moves in circles—in leaps, in connections that other people miss because they're too busy following the map. We will work with that, not against it."

She leaned back in her chair.

"We'll start with the harbor. The tariffs, the trade routes—you'll meet the harbor master, walk the docks. You'll learn the numbers by learning the people behind them. Then household management—I'll take you through the kitchens, the storerooms, the supply chains. You'll understand provisioning by touching the grain and counting the barrels, not by reading a ledger."

Your eyes were wide. Your hands had gone still in your lap. You were listening—really listening, with the full-body focus that only happened when something had grabbed your attention and held it—and something in your chest was unclenching, slowly, like a fist learning to open.

"Protocol we'll build through practice," Penelope continued. "Dinner etiquette, formal address, greeting customs. We'll do it through repetition—not drills, but live practice. You'll attend functions beside me. You'll watch me work. And when you're ready, you'll begin handling small responsibilities on your own."

She paused. Studied you.

"It will not be easy," she said, and the honesty in her voice was neither harsh nor apologetic. It simply was. "There are areas where you are significantly behind. I will not pretend otherwise. But I've raised a boy whose mind moves like yours, and I learned a long time ago that the traditional methods don't work for minds that see sideways."

Your throat was tight. Your eyes were burning. You were holding yourself very, very still, because if you moved—if you breathed too hard, or blinked too fast, or let even one crack show—the whole thing was going to come flooding out, and you were going to cry in front of the Queen of Ithaca, and it was going to be ugly, and you were an ugly crier—

"Yes," you whispered. Then, stronger. "Yes. Please. I want—yes."

Penelope nodded.

"We start tomorrow," she said. "Harbor first. Wear comfortable shoes."

A beat.

"And ____?"

"Yes?"

"If you wander into the forest naked again, I will personally escort you back and the entire palace will hear about it from me rather than from the gossip chain. Is that understood?"

Your face went hot.

"...Understood."

"Good." Penelope picked up her tea, took a long, final sip, and set it down. "Now go eat those berries before they go soft. You've been clutching them since you walked in."

You looked down. You were, in fact, still holding the bundled chiton of berries in one hand, slightly crushed, juice staining the fabric.

You laughed—a wet, shaky, too-bright thing that cracked at the edges—and stood, dipping into the deepest, most sincere curtsy you had ever attempted.

"Thank you, Your Majesty," you said. "For—for all of it. For the tea and the story and the—the teaching. And for not sending me home."

Penelope's gaze softened.

"I considered it," she said.

Your face fell.

"For approximately three seconds," she added. "And then I remembered the woman who accidentally changed Ithaca's future while looking for a snack."

She waved you toward the door.

"Goodnight, ____."

"Goodnight, Your Majesty."

You turned. Walked to the door. Paused with your hand on the frame.

"Queen Penelope?"

"Yes?"

"You're the best queen I've ever met."

"I'm the only queen you've ever met, besides your mother, dear."

"Then it's a really easy competition."

Penelope's mouth curved—small, steady, real—and she shook her head. "Go."

You went.

And you went smiling—big and bright and wet and uncontained—and the berries were crushed in your hand and the juice was staining your chiton and you didn't care, because the Queen of Ithaca had looked at you and seen something worth keeping, and you were going to spend every single day proving her right.

Eleni was busy—the influx of guests had every servant in the palace running double shifts. You'd caught a glimpse of her that morning, hauling a basket of linens so tall it nearly eclipsed her, and she'd mouthed "tomorrow" at you with an apologetic grimace before disappearing around a corner. You'd mouthed back "I love you" and she'd turned bright pink, which you considered a victory.

And Telemachus was... somewhere. Training, probably. Or brooding. Or training while brooding, which seemed to be his preferred state of existence.

You'd heard the distant thwack-thwack-thwack of a practice sword hitting wood earlier and known, instinctively, that it was him—nobody else hit things with that specific combination of precision and personal grievance.

So it was just you.

You, and a very persistent sweet tooth.

You'd considered ringing the bell by the door—the one Maia had told you about on your first day, the one that would summon a servant to bring you whatever you needed. But the thought of bothering someone—of pulling a tired, overworked palace attendant away from their actual responsibilities just because you wanted candy—made something uncomfortable squirm in your chest.

You weren't used to being a burden.

At home, you'd been a lot of things—silly, loud, occasionally the reason an entire diplomatic function went sideways—but you'd never been a burden.

Your mother had made sure of that.

She'd taught you, quietly and by example, that the people who served you were people, not furniture, and that asking for things you could get yourself was a kind of laziness that had nothing to do with legs and everything to do with character.

So: no bell.

You'd find a snack yourself.

The kitchen, however, proved elusive. You'd been to it once—on your second day, when Eleni had given you a partial tour that had been interrupted by a delivery of fresh fish and a minor crisis involving a cracked amphora—and you thought you remembered where it was.

Down the main corridor, past the hall with the tapestry of Poseidon (or was it Zeus? The man in the tapestry had a trident, but he also had a beard, and honestly all the gods looked the same to you when they were angry and half-naked), then left at the—

No.

Right at the—

...Maybe straight?

You passed two princesses in the eastern corridor—new arrivals, judging by the unfamiliar colors of their chitons and the slightly overwhelmed way they were studying the stone walls.

One was tall and fair-haired, the other shorter with a crown of braids, and they were whispering to each other in a dialect you didn't recognize. They looked important. They looked composed. They looked like they knew where the kitchen was.

"Hi!" you called, waving. "I love your braids! Do you know where the kitchen is?"

They stared at you.

You pointed at your mouth and mimed eating. "Kitchen? Food? Bread?" You made a chewing motion. "Nom nom?"

The taller one said something to the shorter one in their language, and the shorter one's eyebrows rose, and then they both pointed in opposite directions.

"...Thank you," you said. "That was very helpful."

(It wasn't.)

Twenty minutes later, you were lost.

Not palace-lost, where you could still hear the distant clatter of the kitchens and knew you were close. Actually lost. Outside lost. Standing at the edge of the tree line behind the palace, your sandals dusty, your chiton slightly snagged on a thornbush you didn't remember walking through, squinting at the dark tangle of woods ahead like it had personally offended you.

"How did I get here?" you asked no one.

No one answered.

You looked left. Trees.

You looked right. More trees.

You looked behind you. The palace sat on the hill above, its grey stone walls just visible through the canopy, looking very far away and very judgmental.

A smart person would've turned around.

A sensible person would've retraced their steps, found their way back to the corridors, rung the bell, and asked for a honey cake like a normal princess.

You were neither of those things.

Because directly in front of you, just past the first line of trees—close enough to see, close enough to smell—was a bush absolutely bursting with berries.

Dark, plump, glistening berries, the kind that grew wild on the hillsides back home, the kind your mother used to pick with you in the mornings before the sun got too high. They hung in heavy clusters from the branches, their skins taut and shining with the particular ripeness that said eat me now or regret it forever.

Your stomach growled.

Your brain said: Don't.

Your feet said: Already walking.

"Just a few," you told yourself, stepping off the path and into the underbrush. "Just enough for a snack. I'll grab a handful and go right back."

The bush was generous. The berries came off in your fingers like they'd been waiting for you—soft, sweet, bursting with juice that stained your fingertips a deep, satisfying purple.

You ate three on the spot, eyes closing in bliss, and then plucked more, dropping them into the fold of your chiton like a makeshift basket.

But the bush led to another bush.

And that bush led to a cluster of bushes, just a little further in.

And that cluster was growing beside a narrow path—not a real path, more of a deer trail, thin and winding—that cut deeper into the woods, and you followed it because the berries were there and your brain had fully surrendered to the part of you that operated on instinct and sugar.

You walked. You picked. You ate. You hummed a little song—something tuneless and happy, the kind of melody that existed only in the space between thoughts—and let your feet carry you forward without much input from the rest of you.

At some point, the sound of water crept into your awareness.

Faint at first—a whisper beneath the birdsong and the rustle of leaves. Then louder, clearer, the unmistakable murmur of moving water. Running water. Clean water, from the sound of it—not the sluggish, brackish kind that pooled in ditches, but something brighter.

Something alive.

You pushed through a curtain of low-hanging branches, thorns catching at your hair—

And stopped.

"Oh," you breathed. "Oh."

The clearing opened up before you like a secret the woods had been keeping.

A small cove, carved into the hillside by centuries of water and patience, its edges lined with smooth, flat stones and tufts of wild grass.

The water was beautiful—clear, impossibly clear, the kind of clear where you could see every pebble on the bottom, every flicker of light as the surface caught the afternoon sun. A small cascade of water spilled down from the rocks above—not a waterfall, exactly, but a steady, bubbling pour that splashed into the pool below with a sound like quiet laughter.

Ferns grew along the edges. Moss clung to the stones in patches of emerald. The air smelled like wet earth and pine and something sweet—wild mint, maybe, growing between the cracks.

It was, without exaggeration, the prettiest place you had ever seen.

You set your berries down on a flat rock and crouched at the water's edge, dipping your fingers in. Cool. Not cold—not the bone-aching, teeth-chattering cold of deep rivers—but cool, the way shade felt on a hot day. Refreshing. Inviting.

You looked at the water.

The water looked back.

You shouldn't.

But what if you should?

You definitely shouldn't.

But it was so pretty.

But what if someone sees—

Who was going to see? You were in the middle of the woods. There was literally no one here. It was just you, the water, and a bush full of berries. This was the safest you'd been since you got to Ithaca.

The argument was flawless. Airtight. The kind of logic that would've made Athena herself nod in reluctant approval.

(It would not have, but you didn't know that.)

You looked around one more time—left, right, behind you—and confirmed what you already knew: the clearing was empty. Silent. Nothing but trees and stones and the soft, steady music of the water.

You kicked off your sandals.

Then your chiton.

Then, with the giddy, breathless freedom of someone doing something they knew was slightly ill-advised and didn't care, you waded into the pool.

The water rose around you—ankles, knees, thighs, waist—and every inch of it felt like a sigh. Like your body had been clenched for days and was only just now remembering how to let go. You sank until the water reached your shoulders, your toes brushing the smooth pebbles at the bottom, and let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-groan.

"Oh," you whispered, tilting your head back. "Oh, this is divine."

Not divine-divine. Not actual-gods-divine. But close.

You swam.

Not gracefully—not the elegant, arm-over-arm stroke that trained swimmers used. More of a happy paddle, arms moving in wide, enthusiastic circles, your legs kicking up small bursts of spray.

You dipped underwater and came up gasping and laughing.

You floated on your back and watched the canopy above you, the leaves forming a patchwork of green and gold against the sky.

You dove down and touched the bottom, your fingers skimming the pebbles, then surfaced with a gasp and a grin.

At one point, you pretended to be a siren.

This involved swimming in slow, dramatic circles near the waterfall, your hair trailing behind you, your chin tilted up, your lips pursed in what you imagined was a "hauntingly beautiful and mysterious" expression but was, in reality, closer to "someone who ate something sour."

You held the pose for a full thirty seconds before dissolving into giggles.

Your chiton, which you had draped over a rock, had gotten splashed during your siren performance. It was now damp. Not soaked—not ruined—but damp enough that wearing it would be uncomfortable, so you'd spread it out on a sunlit stone to dry, alongside your sandals and your undergarments, all arranged in a neat little row that would've made your mother proud.

You were naked.

In the woods.

In a foreign kingdom.

Alone.

And this didn't concern you even slightly.

At home, you'd bathed in rivers and tide pools since you were old enough to walk. Nudity wasn't scandalous on Kythra—it was practical. Bodies were bodies. Water was water. You washed, you swam, you dried off, you went about your day.

Your mother used to take you and your sisters to the tide pools at dawn, and you'd all strip down and wade in and nobody blinked because there was nothing to blink about.

The fishermen bathed in the harbor. The farm workers washed in the creek. Old Yiannis next door hung his laundry and himself out to dry in the same sun, and the only scandal was that he snored while doing it.

The idea that bare skin was something to be ashamed of had always struck you as odd—like being ashamed of having elbows.

So you floated. And you swam. And you let the cool water wash away the tension you hadn't realized you'd been carrying—the loneliness of the palace, the confusion of the feast, the subtle sting of Thais' polished words, the constant, low-grade anxiety of trying to be enough in a place that hadn't decided you were worth keeping yet.

The water didn't care about any of that.

The water just held you.

You were mid-float—arms spread, eyes closed, face turned toward the dappled sunlight—when a rustling sound came from the tree line.

You opened one eye.

A doe.

Small, young, its brown coat dappled with fading spots. It stood at the edge of the clearing, one foreleg slightly raised, its enormous dark eyes watching you with the calm, liquid curiosity of an animal that had never learned to be afraid.

You held your breath.

The doe lowered its head, stepped delicately over a fallen branch, and made its way to the water's edge. It dipped its muzzle into the pool and drank, its ears swiveling gently with each sound.

You didn't move. Didn't breathe. Just floated there, barely an arm's length away, watching the doe drink with a reverence that most people reserved for temples.

Then, very slowly—very slowly—you extended your hand.

The doe's ear flicked toward you. Its head lifted. Dark eyes met yours.

You waited.

The doe took one step forward. Then another. Its nose—soft, warm, impossibly gentle—pressed against your outstretched fingers.

You scratched behind its ear.

The doe closed its eyes.

And for a single, perfect, golden moment, the world was just this: you, and the water, and a wild thing that had chosen to trust you.

The doe lingered for another minute—letting you scratch its ear, its cheek, the soft dip between its eyes—and then lifted its head, blinked once, and turned away, disappearing back into the trees with the soundless grace of a shadow returning to its source.

You watched it go.

Smiled.

And then went back to floating.

☆

☆

𓆩⚝𓆪 ⋆｡˚TELEMACHUS P.O.V˚｡⋆ 𓆩⚝𓆪

Telemachus was going to kill someone.

Possibly you. Probably himself. Definitely whatever servant had been assigned to keep track of you and had clearly, spectacularly failed.

He'd been in his father's study—one of the interminable strategy sessions that Odysseus insisted on holding now that delegations were arriving, all trade routes and defense budgets and the slow, tedious machinery of putting a broken kingdom back together—when a servant had knocked, pale-faced and stammering.

"The princess is missing, my prince."

Missing.

Missing.

MISSING!?!

He'd asked, with a calm he did not feel, what exactly they meant by "missing."

The servant had explained: you hadn't been seen since late morning. You weren't in your chambers. You weren't in the weaving room. You weren't in the morning hall, the garden, the kitchens, or any of the six corridors that connected them.

Someone thought they'd seen you near the eastern wing around midday—apparently chatting with two visiting princesses who had just arrived with the Dorian delegation—but that was hours ago, and since then: nothing.

Telemachus had excused himself from the study with a politeness so strained it could've snapped, and then he'd moved.

Not walked. Not strolled. Moved—long strides eating up the stone corridors, his jaw locked, his hands clenched at his sides, his mind spinning through every possible scenario with the relentless efficiency of someone who had been raised in a household where missing meant taken, and taken meant dead.

He checked the eastern wing. Empty.

The weaving room. Empty.

The garden. The kitchens. The alcove near the window where, yesterday, you'd been feeding a sparrow.

All empty.

His pulse was climbing. Not out of worry—he refused to call it worry, because worry implied caring, and he didn't—he didn't—but out of responsibility. You were his betrothed. You were under Ithacan protection. If something happened to you on his watch, in his palace, the political fallout alone would—

It was worry.

He knew it was worry.

He hated that it was worry.

"Has anyone checked the woods?" he asked a guard, his voice clipped.

The guard's face went tight. "The woods, my prince?"

"The woods. The forest. The large collection of trees behind the palace—has anyone looked there?"

The guard hesitated. And in that hesitation, Telemachus saw something flicker—not fear, exactly, but awareness. The kind of awareness that came from knowing things about the land that visitors didn't.

"My prince," the guard said carefully, "the western wood isn't... advisable. The Iiona boar have been spotted closer to the palace grounds this season. They've killed livestock in the outer settlements. If the princess wandered in there alone—"

Telemachus didn't hear the rest.

He was already running.

The Iiona boar weren't normal boar.

They were massive—twice the size of their domesticated cousins, with tusks like curved daggers and a temperament that made rabid wolves look sociable.

They'd been a problem on Ithaca for generations, driven closer and closer to inhabited areas as their territory shrank, and they were aggressive—territorial, fast, and entirely uninterested in the distinction between "threat" and "trespasser."

A full-grown boar could gut a hunting dog with a single toss of its head. Their tusks punched through leather armor. They charged low and fast, angling upward, and by the time you heard the underbrush cracking you were already too close to run.

Hunters who went after them carried boar-spears with crossbars—not to kill the animal at a distance, but to keep its body from sliding up the shaft and reaching you even after it had been impaled.

If you had wandered into their territory—

If you were out there alone—

No. He told himself, crashing through the underbrush at the edge of the tree line, branches whipping at his arms. Don't think about that. Just find her. Find her and bring her back and then yell at her for being so stupidly, recklessly, impossibly—

He followed the deer trail.

He didn't know why—instinct, maybe, or the faint, irrational sense that a girl who named sparrows after war gods would be drawn to the prettiest, most inconvenient, most dangerous part of the forest.

The trail wound deeper. The canopy thickened. The light went from gold to green to shadow.

And then he heard it.

Water.

He pushed through a wall of low-hanging branches, stumbling into the clearing with all the grace of a man who had been sprinting uphill through dense woodland in leather sandals—

And there you were.

In the pool.

In the water.

Smiling.

Relief hit him so hard it nearly buckled his knees.

You were alive. You were fine. You were right there, floating in a woodland spring like some kind of forest nymph on holiday, your hair fanning around you in the water, your face turned toward the sky, completely and utterly oblivious to the fact that half the palace was looking for you.

"____!" he called, his voice cracking through the clearing like a whip.

You startled—not badly, just a flinch, your head whipping toward him, water sloshing around your shoulders as you found your footing on the pebbled bottom.

"Telemachus!" Your face broke into a grin so wide and so genuine that it almost—almost—made him forget he was furious. "You found me! How did you find me? Did you follow the berries? I left a trail of berries—well, not on purpose, I was just eating them while I walked, but—"

"Where the Hades have you been?!" His voice came out louder than he'd intended—the fear he'd been swallowing for the past hour finally breaking through the dam of his composure. He was breathing hard, his chest heaving, his tunic damp with sweat, and he stood at the edge of the clearing with his hands clenched at his sides and his eyes blazing.

You blinked. "I was—"

"Everyone's looking for you." He took a step closer, then another, his jaw working. "Do you have any idea—you could've been kidnapped. You could've been killed. You could've—" He stopped. Swallowed. His voice dropped, but the intensity didn't. "Do you know what's in these woods? Do you have any concept of—"

"I was just picking ber—"

"The Iiona boar, ____." He said it like a curse. Like the name itself could draw them out. His eyes darted to the trees—left, right, behind him—scanning the shadows with the kind of sharp, practiced vigilance that came from growing up in a place where danger didn't announce itself. "They're in these woods. They've been spotted less than a mile from the palace walls. They've killed livestock. They've killed people. Full-grown men. Hunters with spears and dogs, torn apart because they wandered too deep."

His voice was shaking. Just slightly—just enough for you to notice, beneath the anger, something else. Something that sounded less like fury and more like—

Fear.

Not of you. For you.

"They're fast," he continued, the words tumbling out faster now, less controlled. "Faster than you'd think. Their tusks can gore through—a single charge, and you wouldn't even—if you'd been out here and one of them had found you before I—"

He stopped.

His jaw locked.

He was looking right at you now—really looking, his eyes sweeping over you with the frantic, assessing gaze of someone cataloguing injuries, checking for blood, making sure everything was whole—

And that's when he noticed.

The chiton draped over the rock. The sandals lined up beside it. The undergarments spread out to dry in the sun.

His gaze dropped to the water. To your shoulders—bare, glistening. To the waterline, which hit just above your collarbone. To the very obvious, very undeniable, very inescapable fact that—

You were naked.

Completely, entirely, spectacularly naked.

The color drained from his face. Then rushed back in—not pink, not flushed, but a full, catastrophic red that started at his ears and flooded downward like a dam breaking, staining his cheeks, his neck, the tops of his shoulders above his tunic collar.

His mouth opened.

No sound came out.

His eyes went wide—wider than you'd ever seen them, wider than when you'd called him a handsome storm cloud, wider than when you'd eaten fish with your hands—and for one terrible, beautiful, frozen moment, Telemachus, Prince of Ithaca, Son of Odysseus, Heir to the Throne, Student of Athena, stood at the edge of a woodland pool and short-circuited.

His brain rebooted. Failed. Rebooted again. His mouth formed shapes that were not words.

His hand came up—palm out, like a man trying to halt an advancing army—and then dropped. Came up again. Dropped again.

He looked like a man who had been struck by lightning and was trying to remember how arms worked.

"You—" he managed. One word. Just the one. And then it abandoned him.

You tilted your head.

"You can join me, if you want!" you offered brightly, entirely missing the reason for his sudden paralysis. "The water's really nice. I think it's fed by a spring or something—it's so clear. Like, I can see my toes. Can you see your toes in the baths here? Because at home, our baths are always a little cloudy, which my mother says is from the minerals, but I always thought it was because Cornelius—that's the goat, I told you about Cornelius—he sometimes gets into the—"

Telemachus made a sound.

It wasn't a word. It wasn't a sentence. It wasn't, by any reasonable definition, a human sound.

It was a screech.

High and sharp and so startled it cracked in the middle—the kind of sound you'd expect from a man who had just stepped on a snake or witnessed a ghost or discovered that his betrothed was standing naked in a pool thirty feet away from him with zero apparent awareness of why this was a problem.

The screech echoed across the clearing, bouncing off the stone walls of the cove and scattering a flock of birds from the nearest tree.

You jumped, dropping lower into the water, your head whipping around in alarm.

"What?!" you gasped, your eyes darting to the tree line, the rocks, the shadows. "What's wrong?! Is it the boar? Are they here? Where—"

Telemachus had already spun around.

Not turned. Spun—a full, violent one-eighty, his back to you so fast it was like he'd been yanked by an invisible string. His hands came up—one clamped over his eyes, the other held out behind him in a rigid stop gesture, as if warding off something unholy.

"Why—" His voice came out strangled. Wrecked. "Why are you NAKED?!"

You stared at his back. (It was a nice back.) (Now was not the time.) (It was still a nice back, though.)

"I'm... taking a bath?" you said, and the confusion in your voice was genuine—the pure, undiluted confusion of someone who truly, honestly, in the deepest most sincere part of their soul, didn't understand the question. "Baths are... you take them without clothes? That's—that's how baths work?"

"In a CREEK?!"

"It's more of a cove, really—"

"In the WOODS, ____! You're naked in the WOODS!" His shoulders were rigid, his back a wall of tension, and even from behind, you could see the tips of his ears blazing like torches. "Where are your CLOTHES?!"

"They got wet," you explained, with the patient reasonableness of someone who'd clearly thought this through. "I got a little carried away—I was pretending to be a siren, and the splashing kind of—anyway, they're on the rock. Drying. It's fine."

"IT IS NOT FINE."

"Why not?" You genuinely didn't understand. You were in water. The water covered everything important. He was facing the other direction. What, exactly, was the crisis?

"Because—because you're—" His hand raked through his hair, his voice climbing to a register he would later deny existed. "Because you are unclothed in an open forest with no protection and anyone could have—I could've been anyone, do you understand that? A soldier, a traveler, a—"

"But you're not anyone," you said softly. Simply. Like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "You're you. You're—I'm with you."

Telemachus went silent.

His hand, still tangled in his hair, stilled. His shoulders, rigid as iron a moment ago, dropped—just slightly. Just enough to notice.

The anger was still there, still simmering, still very much alive in the set of his jaw and the tension of his spine. But something else had crept in beneath it—something quieter, something that made his breath catch and his pulse trip and his traitorous, useless brain replay the words I'm with you in a voice that shouldn't have mattered as much as it did.

He stood there for a long, silent moment, his back to you, his face hidden, his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides.

Then, without turning around, he reached up and pulled his tunic over his head.

He held it behind him, arm extended, still facing away. His voice was low. Rough. Carefully, carefully controlled.

"Put this on," he said.

"But—"

"Put. It. On."

"Telemachus, I don't understand why you're upset—back home, this is completely normal." You hadn't moved from the water, and your voice had taken on the earnest, slightly baffled quality of someone explaining a cultural practice that they assumed was universal. "On Kythra, everyone bathes outside. The tide pools are communal. Old Yiannis from the goat farm dries himself in the sun every afternoon—he's been doing it since before my mother was born. Nobody cares. It's just skin."

"This is not Kythra," Telemachus said through his teeth.

"And the river past the vineyards—we swim there all summer. Whole families. Kids, grandparents, everyone. My sister Calla used to do handstands in the shallows, and Phoebe would float on her back and read, and my mother would sit on the bank and mend clothes while we—"

"____—"

"And it's not like nudity is some strange foreign concept, Telemachus—don't wrestlers wrestle in the nude? Or is that only in Sparta?" Your head tilted, genuinely curious, your brain already chasing a new thread. "I've always wanted to visit Sparta. Is it really as scary as everyone says? Because I heard the boys train from the time they're seven, which seems excessive, but also they have really nice architecture—"

"Please—"

"Oh! And speaking of Sparta—did you know there was a prince there named Hyacinthus? He was supposed to be incredibly beautiful. Apollo fell in love with him, which—I mean, when a god falls in love with you, that's either the best or worst thing that's ever happened to you, and for Hyacinthus it was kind of both, because he died and then Apollo was so sad he turned his blood into a flower—"

"____."

"—and the flower is gorgeous, by the way—deep purple, with these markings that supposedly spell out Apollo's grief? Which is so poetic it makes me want to cry. Flowers are really amazing when you think about it—they're so temporary, you know? They bloom and they're beautiful and then they're gone, and yet people keep planting them anyway, because the beauty is worth the brevity—"

"____. Please." Telemachus' voice cracked. Actually cracked—splintered down the middle like dry wood. "Please. Just—put on the tunic."

The please stopped you.

Not because it was a command—it wasn't. It was the opposite. Stripped of authority, stripped of composure, stripped of every shred of princely dignity until it was just a word, raw and ragged and undone.

He was asking.

He was asking.

You waded to the edge of the pool, the water sluicing off your skin as you climbed onto the flat stones. You grabbed your damp clothes—your chiton was still too wet to be comfortable, but you used it to pat yourself dry as best you could, wringing water from your hair and squeezing it from your skin. Then you reached for his tunic.

It was warm.

His warm.

The kind of warmth that came from a body, not a fire—from skin and muscle and the particular heat that Telemachus seemed to carry with him like a second heartbeat.

The fabric was soft—well-worn linen, washed a hundred times until it had gone butter-soft—and it smelled like him. Not perfume, not oil. Something earthier. Olive soap, maybe. Clean sweat. A hint of bronze.

You pulled it over your head.

It was enormous on you.

The hem fell to your knees, and the shoulder seams dropped to your upper arms, the neckline gaping wide enough to show your collarbones and a generous slice of everything between. You had to roll the sleeves twice just to free your hands.

But it was warm. And it was his. And when you looked down at yourself—swimming in linen, your hair dripping, your feet bare on the moss-covered stone—a giggle escaped you before you could stop it.

"It's like a dress," you said, delighted. You grabbed the hem and swished it back and forth, watching the fabric swing around your legs. "A really big, really comfortable dress. This is fashion, Telemachus. This is—"

"Are you done?" His voice was tight. Strained. The voice of a man clinging to his dignity with both hands.

"Almost—" You swished once more. Giggled again. "Okay. Done."

He turned around.

And you froze.

Because Telemachus was shirtless.

And you had known, intellectually, that removing his tunic would result in him being shirtless. The logic was sound. Tunic goes off, torso goes visible. This was basic cause and effect.

But knowing and seeing were two very different things.

He was—

Oh.

He was built.

Not in the ostentatious, look-at-me way of the warriors who used to visit your father's court—all bulging, over-oiled muscle designed to impress.

This was different. Functional. The lean, defined physique of someone who trained because it was necessary, not because it was performance.

His shoulders were broad without being bulky, tapering to a firm waist, and the muscles of his arms and chest moved beneath his skin with a quiet, understated power that you were absolutely not prepared for.

There was a scar. Low on his ribs, on the left side—a thin, pale line, maybe three inches long, healed but still visible. And another one on his forearm, shorter, rougher, the kind that came from a blade that hadn't been sharp enough to cut clean.

The scars didn't diminish anything. If anything, they made the rest of it more real—less statue, more person. More proof that the body you were staring at had been used, tested, pushed, and had survived all of it.

You were staring.

You were absolutely staring.

And your staring must have been noticeable—must've been, in fact, blatantly, painfully, embarrassingly obvious—because Telemachus' face, which had just begun to recover from the previous shade of red, flushed all over again.

His arms crossed over his chest—not casually, not the confident, deliberate arm-cross he used when he was being princely. This was defensive. Shy. One arm pressed across his torso, the other hand gripping his own bicep, his body angling slightly away from you like he was trying to make himself smaller.

"Stop staring," he muttered, not meeting your eyes. "It's rude."

The words that came out of your mouth were not the words of a princess.

They weren't diplomatic, or demure, or remotely appropriate for a betrothed woman addressing her future husband in a woodland clearing while wearing his clothes.

What came out of your mouth was:

"Zeus' blazing balls—you're RIPPED!"

Telemachus' jaw dropped.

His arms tightened, his ears went from red to crimson, and his expression—mortified, incredulous, and approximately seventeen other emotions colliding simultaneously—was the single greatest thing you'd ever witnessed in your entire life.

"STOP—" He whipped around again, presenting you with his back—which was also very nice, you noted with a kind of helpless, hysterical appreciation, because of course it was.

Broad across the shoulders, the muscles defined but not showy, tapering down to a narrow waist, and the way the late light hit the planes of his shoulder blades made the skin look warm and golden and—you needed to stop. You definitely needed to stop right now.

You didn't stop.

"Have you always been like this?!" You were already hurrying after him as he began to march—march, not walk—back toward the deer trail, his strides long and rigid and radiating a mortification so intense it had its own gravitational field. "Like, always? Or is this a recent development? Because those loose tunics you wear are very misleading—"

"I am not having this conversation—"

"When did you get so muscular? Is it the training? The sword thing? Because I've seen you hit that wooden post and I thought 'oh, that's nice form,' but I didn't realize—"

"____, stop talking."

"—why do you even wear those big, baggy tunics?! It's like hiding a sculpture under a bedsheet! It's—it's art crime, Telemachus. You're committing art crime—"

"ENOUGH, PLEASE."

"And you have scars! Those are so—" You caught yourself just in time. The word attractive had been right there, sitting on your tongue like a bird on a branch, ready to fly, and you bit down on it hard enough that you tasted copper. "—interesting," you finished, weakly. "Very... historically interesting. Good for you."

Telemachus made a noise that was somewhere between a groan and a prayer for divine intervention.

You caught up to him—which required a small jog, because his legs were considerably longer than yours and his pace was that of a man fleeing an active disaster—and fell into step beside him, slightly breathless, your (his) tunic billowing around your knees.

You were quiet for approximately four seconds.

Then you reached over and squeezed his arm.

Your hand barely wrapped around his bicep. Barely. Your fingers curled against the muscle—firm and warm and unyielding—and you felt it tense beneath your palm, his whole body going rigid at the contact.

"Okay," you said softly, and there was laughter in your voice but also something else—something warmer, something that made his jaw tighten for an entirely different reason. "I'll stop."

Telemachus didn't respond.

But he didn't pull away, either.

And when you let go—your fingers sliding off his arm, your hand dropping back to your side—the muscle flexed.

Just once.

Just barely.

You didn't mention it, but you absolutely filed it away for later.

"Oh—wait!" You stopped suddenly, spinning on your heel. "My berries!"

"Your what—"

"My berries! I left them on the rock—the ones I picked—I'm not leaving without them, they're perfect—"

You were already scrambling back toward the clearing before he could protest, your bare feet padding over moss and dirt, his tunic flapping around your legs. You scooped the berry-filled fold of your damp chiton off the rock, bundling it up like a pouch, and trotted back to him with the satisfied air of someone who had rescued something precious.

When you turned around, berries cradled against your chest, Telemachus was standing exactly where you'd left him.

Shirtless. Arms crossed. Face pink.

Looking at you with an expression that he would've called exasperation and that anyone with eyes would've called something significantly more complicated.

You grinned up at him.

He shook his head—slowly, the way someone shook their head when they were giving up on something and hadn't decided whether to be sad or relieved about it.

"Let's go," he said.

You fell into step beside him, your shoulder brushing his arm.

Neither of you mentioned it.

Both of you noticed.

☆

☆

The walk back to the palace took twenty minutes—twenty minutes of you chattering about the berries, the doe, the water, the pretend-siren thing ("—and I did a really good dramatic arm reach, like this—"), while Telemachus walked beside you in stony silence, his jaw working, his eyes fixed ahead, his shirtless state growing more conspicuous with every passing servant they encountered.

And they were encountering servants.

The palace was busy. Busier than it had been that morning, with attendants and guards and visiting dignitaries crisscrossing the corridors in a steady stream of bodies. And every single one of them—every single one—did a double-take as the prince of Ithaca strode past, bare-chested, tight-jawed, with his betrothed trotting beside him wearing nothing but his tunic and a smile.

One guard's mouth fell open so far you could see his back teeth.

A serving woman carrying a tray of goblets stopped dead in the corridor, stared, and then very carefully turned around and walked the other direction.

Two visiting noblemen from a neighboring island pressed themselves against the wall as you passed, exchanging a look so loaded it could've sunk a ship.

A cluster of newly arrived attendants—women in rich fabrics who must have come with one of the delegations for the formal dinner—stopped mid-conversation and stared in open, undisguised astonishment.

One of them pressed her hand to her mouth. Another one's eyebrows climbed so high they disappeared into her hairline. A third one looked at Telemachus' bare torso, then at you swimming in his tunic, and her expression cycled through shock, confusion, and what appeared to be deeply reluctant admiration in the span of two seconds.

Telemachus noticed all of it.

He said nothing.

His ears said everything.

By the time he deposited you at your chamber door—with a terse "Stay here" and a look that suggested he was one more comment away from jumping off the palace walls—you were already thinking about what to write your mother next.

Dear Mama,

He's RIPPED.

One guard, a broad-shouldered man with a scar across his chin who looked like he hadn't smiled since the fall of Troy, actually nodded at you, and you considered it the greatest diplomatic achievement of your career.

You were heading back to your room—or what you thought was your room; the corridors all looked the same to you, and you'd been navigating primarily by landmarks—when you spotted Eleni.

She was hurrying down a perpendicular corridor, a fresh basket of linens balanced on her hip, her dark hair escaping its knot in wispy strands around her temples. She looked tired—not exhausted, but busy-tired, the kind that came from a long day of work with no breaks.

"Eleni!" you called, your voice carrying down the hall with the subtlety of a trumpet blast.

She jumped, nearly dropping the basket, and spun around. When she saw you, her face did something complicated—panic first, then recognition, then relief, then a cautious, almost shy smile that made your heart squeeze.

"Your High—"

"Don't you dare finish that sentence."

Eleni bit her lip. "...____."

"Better." You trotted over, grinning. "Are you done with your chores? Is it bird o'clock? I've been thinking about Ares all day—do you think he remembers me? I feel like we had a connection. A spiritual connection. Like we're bonded now. Like he's my familiar. Do birds have familiars? Or am I his familiar? How does it work?"

"I'm—" Eleni shifted the basket on her hip, looking apologetic. "I still have a few more rounds. The new guests need fresh linens, and there aren't enough of us to—" She caught herself. Shook her head. "I'm sorry. I know I said I'd come find you, but—"

"That's okay!" You waved it off instantly, brightly, without a trace of disappointment. The disappointment was there, of course—it always was—but you'd gotten very good at folding it up small and tucking it somewhere it couldn't be seen. "You're busy. That's important. Go—do your linen things. We'll do birds when you can. I'll bring extra seeds. I'll bring a feast for Ares. He deserves a feast; he's a warrior."

Eleni laughed—a soft, startled thing, like she still wasn't used to you being you.

"Tomorrow," she promised, adjusting the basket. "For sure."

"For sure for sure?"

"For sure for sure."

You squeezed her free hand—quick, warm, there and gone—and let her go.

Then you stood in the corridor alone, your hand still tingling faintly from the contact, and felt the quiet settle back in around you like water filling a hole.

Tomorrow. That was okay. You could wait until tomorrow.

You could always wait. You'd been waiting your whole life. For your father to notice. For your sisters to stay. For someone—anyone—to come find you without being asked.

You were very, very good at waiting.

You just wished you didn't have to be.

You turned—and nearly walked directly into Thais.

"Oh—" You stumbled back, catching yourself against the wall. "I—sorry! I didn't see you—"

Thais stood in the corridor like she'd been carved from marble and placed there by design. Her hair was perfect; her posture was perfect; her shoes—those gorgeous shoes—were somehow still immaculate despite a full day of walking on stone floors.

She smiled at you.

It was a kind smile. A warm smile. The kind that reached her eyes and crinkled the corners and made you feel, instinctively, that you were in the presence of someone who liked you.

"I didn't mean to startle you," Thais said, her voice gentle. "I was just heading to my chambers and I saw you in the hall. I wanted to say—" She paused, and the pause felt rehearsed, though you couldn't have known that. "I had such a lovely time at tea. You're... refreshing."

"Refreshing?" You perked up. "Like a breeze?"

"Like a breeze," Thais agreed, and there was something in her smile—something you couldn't name, something buried so deep beneath the warmth that you'd have needed a shovel and a map to find it.

"It's rare, in courts like these, to meet someone so unburdened by expectation. Most princesses I've met are so tightly wound—so concerned with saying the right thing, wearing the right thing, being the right thing. But you..." She tilted her head. "You just... are."

"Aw." You pressed a hand to your chest, genuinely touched. "Thank you. That's—wow. That's so sweet. You're really sweet, you know that?"

"I try."

"Well, you succeed."

Thais laughed—light and musical and perfectly pitched—and reached out to touch your arm. Just a brief contact, warm and deliberate.

"We should have tea again," she said. "Just us. I'd love to learn more about Kythra. About your dyes." She said the word with a smile that could've meant anything.

"Oh, I would love that!" you gushed, already bouncing on your toes. "I can tell you everything about the dyes—the indigo process alone takes days, but it's so worth it because the color is—"

"I can't wait," Thais said, and squeezed your arm once before letting go. "Sleep well, ____."

"You too! Goodnight! Love your shoes!"

She turned, her dark hair swishing behind her like a curtain falling after a performance, and disappeared down the corridor with the unhurried grace of someone who never needed to rush because the world waited for her.

You stood there for a moment, smiling to yourself.

She was so nice.

She was really, really nice.

And then—as if the gods themselves had looked at your evening and decided it needed exactly one more thing—a horn sounded.

Not the short, sharp blast of a guard signal or the rhythmic pattern of the watch change. This was different. Long, deep, resonant, rolling across the palace grounds like a wave and bouncing off the stone walls.

It vibrated in your chest, in the soles of your sandals, in the stones beneath your feet, and it kept going—two full tones, one after the other, the second lower and longer than the first.

You turned toward the sound.

"What was that?" you said, to no one, because the corridor was empty and you were alone and talking to empty air was just a thing you did sometimes.

A servant hurried past, and you caught her sleeve. "Excuse me—that horn—"

"Harbor horn, miss," the woman said, barely slowing. "Ship coming in. Foreign sails."

"Foreign sails?"

But she was already gone, swallowed by the hallway, and you were left standing there with the echo of the horn still buzzing in your bones and a feeling in your chest like the air before a thunderstorm—charged, expectant, alive.

You should've gone to find Telemachus.

You knew this.

If there was one protocol Doros stressed on your journey to Ithaca, it was this: when a diplomatic vessel arrived, the prince (or, if the prince was unavailable, the king) should be the first member of the royal household to appear at the harbor.

It was etiquette. It was tradition. It was the kind of thing that mattered to the kind of people who cared about things mattering.

You should've turned around, walked to Telemachus' chambers, knocked politely, informed him of the arrival, and then waited—patiently, decoratively, with good posture and a pleasant expression—for him to handle it.

That was what you should've done.

What you did was take off running toward the harbor.

Not elegantly. Not with the measured grace of a princess descending toward the sea. You ran the way you did everything—enthusiastically, chaotically, with your scarf streaming behind you and your sandals slapping against the stone and your tiara sliding sideways until you ripped it off entirely and held it in one hand like a lit torch

The corridors blurred. The stairs appeared, and you took them two at a time—or tried to; the third stair caught your toe, and you stumbled, grabbed the wall, righted yourself, and kept going with the determination of someone who had never once in their life let a minor physical setback slow them down.

The harbor opened before you.

It was alive.

Not the usual, quiet, daily-operations kind—the buzzing kind. The kind that came with extra bodies and extra noise and the particular, contagious energy of something new arriving in a place that didn't get new things very often.

Dock workers moved with urgency, ropes were being secured, and a small crowd of onlookers had gathered near the water's edge—fishermen and merchants and children who'd climbed onto stacked crates for a better view.

The ship was—

Beautiful.

You stopped at the top of the stone steps that led down to the harbor and stared.

It was sleek. Long and narrow, built for speed rather than cargo, its hull painted a deep, striking blue-black that caught the light like polished obsidian.

The sail—furled now, as the ship eased into its berth—was a vivid, almost electric blue, emblazoned with a silver emblem that you couldn't quite make out from this distance but that looked like some kind of sea creature.

"Is that a kraken?" you whispered to yourself, squinting.

(It wasn't a kraken, it was a breaking wave beneath a constellation, but you didn't know that yet, and honestly, a kraken would've been cooler.)

The gangplank was being lowered. Figures were moving on the deck—sailors, mostly, their movements quick and practiced, but there was one figure that stood apart.

Not because of his clothing—though his clothing was noteworthy—or his position on the ship. It was the way he moved.

Easy.

That was the word that came to mind.

The way he stepped from the deck to the gangplank, the way his body adjusted to the shift in footing without a hitch in his stride, the way his hands hung loose at his sides instead of bracing or gripping or doing any of the things that people's hands did when they were nervous.

He moved like the sea was his. Not owned, not conquered—familiar. Like the way you moved through a garden, the way Telemachus moved through a training yard.

He reached the dock and paused—hands on his hips, chin tilted up, surveying the harbor and the hillside and the palace above with the unhurried, appreciative gaze of someone who was seeing something for the first time and wanted to enjoy it.

He was tall. Not Telemachus-tall—slightly shorter, slightly broader, with a build that was less lean and more solid, the kind that came from hauling rope and pulling oars and living on the deck of a ship for months at a time.

His skin was a deep, sun-burnished bronze, warm in the fading light, and his hair was dark and tightly coiled, cropped shorter on the sides but fuller on top, catching the wind in a way that suggested he'd stopped trying to tame it a long time ago.

He wore a tunic in that same vivid blue—lighter than the ship's hull, brighter, almost playful—with a silver clasp at one shoulder shaped like a breaking wave.

And his face—his face was open.

That was the first thing—the openness of it. Not guarded, not measured, not the careful, revealing-nothing mask you'd grown accustomed to seeing on Ithacan faces.

This face was readable. Expressive. His dark eyes moved quickly, bright with curiosity and something that looked, from a distance, suspiciously like amusement, as if the world were a joke he was in on and he wanted to make sure everyone else was having as much fun as he was.

He had a wide mouth. The kind built for laughter. The kind that sat naturally in a half-smile, as if the muscles had been trained by years of use and simply defaulted to happy when left to their own devices.

He looked like someone who'd never, in his entire life, struggled to say what he felt.

And then—as if sensing your gaze, which was entirely possible because you were standing at the top of a staircase staring at him with the subtlety of a lighthouse—he looked up.

Directly at you.

Your eyes met.

His half-smile became a whole smile.

Not the polished, political kind.

Not the careful, calibrated curve of a diplomat meeting a new contact.

It was spontaneous—wide and warm and immediate, the smile of someone who saw a person standing alone at the top of a staircase and thought oh, someone to talk to and was genuinely, uncomplainedly delighted about it.

He raised a hand. Waved.

Not a formal, restrained, palm-forward acknowledgment of a visiting dignitary. He waved enthusiastically, almost boyishly, his fingers spread, his whole arm moving.

Like he knew you.

Like you were already friends.

Your brain—which had attempted to run the standard observe-assess-determine sequence your tutor had spent years painfully drilling into you—promptly abandoned the entire process and defaulted to its factory settings.

You waved back.

Big, bright, both hands. Your tiara still clutched in one of them, glinting in the last of the daylight.

And then—because you were you, and the universe had clearly decided that your life should be a series of increasingly improbable social encounters—you shoved the tiara back on your head at an angle that was somehow worse than before, picked up the hem of your chiton, and half-jogged, half-stumbled down the steps to meet him before anyone from the palace had even been notified that the ship had arrived.

"Hi!" you said, arriving in front of him slightly breathless, with wind-tangled hair and a crooked tiara and the flushed, incandescent energy of someone who had just run down forty stone steps for no reason other than that a stranger on a boat had waved at her. "That's a really pretty ship."

The man looked at you.

Down at your sandals—one of which had come half-unbuckled again during the run. Up to the scarf knotted haphazardly around your neck. At your face—bright-eyed and beaming with the particular, irresistible warmth that you radiated at everyone, all the time, whether they asked for it or not.

His smile widened.

"Thank you," he said, and his voice was warm. Deep and warm, with a richness that reminded you of honey poured over warm stone. The accent was different from what you were used to—not Ithacan, not Kythran, something smoother, rounder, with a cadence that rose and fell like the swells of a calm sea. "She took three years to build. Fastest ship in the Thalassean fleet."

"Thalassea," you repeated, the word rolling off your tongue with the instinctive pleasure you got from all pretty words. "That's—I've heard of Thalassea. You're the naval kingdom, right? With the—" You gestured vaguely at the sea. "—the boats."

He laughed.

It was a good laugh. Full-bodied and unrestrained, the kind that came from the belly and moved through the whole person, shaking his shoulders and crinkling the corners of his eyes and making the air around him feel warmer.

Not mocking. Genuine. The laugh of someone who found things funny because they were funny, not because laughing was socially advantageous.

"We do have boats," he agreed, his eyes sparkling. "Many boats. Some of them even bigger than this one. But yes—Thalassea. 'The kingdom that never left the water,' as my mother likes to say." He extended his hand—not formally, not with the stiff, elbow-locked precision of court etiquette, but naturally. Casually. The way you extended a hand to someone you wanted to meet.

"Alexios," he said. "Son of King Theodoros. Envoy and, unfortunately, the least impressive of three brothers."

"Oh, I'm sure that's not true—"

"It is, actually. My oldest brother can hold his breath for twenty minutes underwater, and the middle one once wrestled a dolphin. I can't compete with that."

You gasped. Actually gasped—the full, hand-to-chest, eyes-wide-open kind. "He wrestled a dolphin?"

"Unsuccessfully," Alexios clarified. "The dolphin won, decisively. My brother won't talk about it, which means the dolphin definitely won."

"Was the dolphin okay?"

Alexios blinked. Then his grin cracked wider, surprised—not at the question, but at the fact that you'd asked it. That your first thought, upon hearing about a man wrestling a dolphin, was whether the dolphin was all right.

"The dolphin," he said, "is thriving. It still lives in the bay. We think it did it on purpose. For sport."

"Dolphins are so smart," you said, nodding with the solemn certainty of someone delivering scientific testimony. "I named one once."

"You named a dolphin?"

"Pericles." You said the name with weight, like you were introducing a dignitary. "He had a scar on his fin—right here—" You drew a line across the back of your hand before pointing to your shoulder. "On the left side. Like a little lightning bolt. And his eyes were really... aware, you know? Like he was looking at you and actually seeing you, not just—processing you the way fish do. Fish have dead eyes. No offense to fish. But Pericles had alive eyes."

Alexios' eyebrows had risen steadily throughout this speech, and by the end they were nearly at his hairline.

"When did you meet Pericles?" he asked, and the way he said the name—carefully, respectfully, like it mattered—made something warm bloom behind your ribs.

"On the boat ride here! From Kythra." You tucked a strand of windblown hair behind your ear, your smile going softer at the memory. "I was really seasick. Like, embarrassingly seasick. My attendant Doros kept telling me to focus on the horizon, but the horizon kept moving, which felt like a design flaw. And I was leaning over the side of the boat trying not to—you know—and then Pericles just... appeared."

You paused. Looked out at the harbor—at the water, silver-blue in the late light, the gentle lap of waves against the dock.

"He swam alongside us for almost an hour," you said, quieter now. "He kept coming up to the surface and looking at me. And I was so miserable—I was green, Alexios, genuinely green, it was humiliating—but every time he surfaced, he'd make this little... this little clicking sound. Like—" You made a sound with your tongue. A small, rapid click-click-click that was, objectively, nothing like what a dolphin sounded like, but was delivered with such earnest commitment that it transcended accuracy. "Like he was checking on me. Like he was saying 'you're going to be fine, you ridiculous land creature. Just keep breathing.'"

Alexios was staring at you.

Not the way Thais had stared.

Not the way Telemachus stared.

This was different—openly fascinated, the way someone stared at a sunset they hadn't expected or a song they were hearing for the first time.

His head was tilted, his half-smile had gone full, and there was a light in his dark eyes that wasn't assessment or calculation or any of the sharp, political things you'd been surrounded by since you arrived.

It was delight.

Pure, uncomplicated, unfiltered delight.

"So I named him Pericles," you finished. "Because he was wise and he was brave and he had a very dignified fin. And also because that was the only Greek general's name I could remember at the time. I've learned more since then," you added quickly, in case this reflected poorly on your education. "I can name at least... four now. Five if you count Achilles, but I don't think he was technically a general. He was more of a—what's the word—a situation."

Alexios laughed again.

This time it was louder—bigger, the kind that turned heads on the dock, that made the nearby sailors glance over with curious half-smiles. He laughed with his whole body, the sound rolling out of him like a wave, warm and bright and so easy that it made your own chest feel lighter just hearing it.

"Pericles," he said, shaking his head. "That is, without question, the best thing I've heard all month. And I've been at sea for three weeks, so the bar is admittedly low—but still."

You beamed.

He beamed back.

And for a moment—a brief, warm, uncomplicated moment—you felt something you hadn't felt in days.

Easy.

Not the strained, effortful ease of performing at a dinner table. Not the careful, slow, grinding work of becoming someone you weren't yet. Just easy. The simple, natural, unforced ease of being around someone who matched your energy. Who talked the way you talked—fast and bright and without filters. Who laughed the way you laughed—openly, fully, with their whole body.

Who made it easy.

"I'm ____," you said, and then—because you did sometimes pay attention to your tutor sessions—you added: "Princess of Ithaca. Well—Princess Consort, I think that's the right term? Wait, no, Princess of Kythra, actually, since we haven't married yet. But soon of Ithaca? Princess-to-be? Future Princess? I'm still learning the titles. There are honestly just way too many titles."

Alexios' expression shifted—not dramatically, not the sudden, face-altering realization of oh gods, I've been casually chatting with royalty. More like a gentle recalibration—a flicker of recognition, a slight adjustment in posture that acknowledged the information without making it the point.

"Ah," he said, and his smile turned knowing. "The woman who named a dolphin is also the woman who will marry the prince. I should've guessed—that's exactly the kind of story that follows a person."

"It follows me everywhere," you confirmed. "I think Pericles would be proud."

"I think Pericles is eating fish somewhere and has no idea he's famous."

"He deserves to be famous. He was a very brave dolphin. He had a scar and everything. Scars mean you've survived something. That's what my mama says."

Alexios' gaze softened, just slightly—a shift in the eyes, the way light changes when a cloud moves. He looked at you, and whatever he saw—the windswept hair, the crooked tiara, the girl who named dolphins and talked to sparrows and ran down forty stairs in loose sandals to greet a stranger because he waved—it made him nod. Once. Slow.

"Your mama sounds wise," he said.

"She's the wisest person I know." You said it immediately, without hesitation, with the kind of certainty that didn't need supporting evidence because it was simply, fundamentally, unshakeably true. "She taught me everything important. Like—how to talk to goats. And how to get stains out of linen. And how to smile when you don't feel like smiling. The useful stuff."

Alexios tilted his head, that half-smile returning. "You don't seem like someone who needs to be taught to smile."

"Everyone needs to be taught to smile," you said, and the words came out lighter than they lived inside you. "The trick is learning which smile is for you and which one is for everyone else."

A beat.

The wind moved between you—salt-scented and warm, carrying the creak of rope and the distant call of a gull. The last of the daylight was pooling at the harbor's edge, turning the water into liquid bronze.

Alexios looked at you for a long moment. Not assessing. Not measuring. Just looking, the way someone looks at a person they've just met and already decided they want to know.

"I think," he said, "that Ithaca is going to be far more interesting than I expected."

You laughed. "Oh, you have no idea."

"I'm starting to get one." He grinned—wide, warm, uncomplicated—and offered you his arm. "May I walk you back to the palace, Princess? Before someone notices you've escaped and sends a search party?"

"Oh no—am I going to get in trouble?"

"Almost certainly."

"...Is it too late to pretend I was here for official reasons?"

"With that tiara?" He glanced at the crooked crown sitting at a solid twenty-degree angle on your head. "Probably."

You adjusted it, it didn't help.

Alexios laughed, and you laughed, and the sound of it—both of you, laughing together on the dock in the dying light—carried up the hill toward the palace on the back of the salt-scented wind.

.☆.     .✩.        .☆.

𓆩⚝𓆪 ⋆｡˚TELEMACHUS P.O.V˚｡⋆ 𓆩⚝𓆪

Telemachus stood at the cliff overlook—the narrow stone terrace that jutted from the palace's western wall like a jaw set against the sea. He'd come here the way he always came here: deliberately, purposefully, seeking the particular silence that this ledge offered.

Below, the harbor spread in a crescent of stone and wood and water.

Behind him, the palace hummed with the low-grade chaos of arriving delegations. He'd needed a moment between the two.

He'd gotten the report about the Thalassean ship from a guard—curt, efficient, the relevant details delivered in the clipped cadence of military shorthand. A diplomatic vessel. The Thalassean seal. A prince among the delegation.

He should've gone down immediately, he knew that. Protocol dictated that the prince of Ithaca be the first to receive a foreign envoy at the harbor. His father had told him that. His mother had told him that.

Every lesson, every lecture, every carefully worded instruction about the duties of a host kingdom had drilled it into him until it was less knowledge and more reflex.

But he'd stopped here first. Just for a moment. Just to—

He heard you.

His hands, which had been resting on the stone ledge, went still, his eyes snapping down near the port.

You were on the dock. At the bottom of the stairs. Standing in front of the Thalassean envoy—a man in a blue tunic with a silver clasp and a build that spoke of rope and oars and years at sea.

Your scarf was trailing. Your tiara was crooked. You were gesturing with both hands, the way you always gestured—big and bright and uncontained, your whole body involved in whatever you were saying, as if the words alone weren't enough and your arms needed to help carry them.

And the man was laughing.

Not the polite, measured kind. The real kind. The kind that moved through the body like a wave, that tipped the head back and shook the shoulders. He was laughing at something you'd said, and his face was open and warm and easy in a way that Telemachus recognized because it was everything he wasn't.

You were laughing too.

Your face was tilted up toward the stranger, flushed with the kind of light that you carried everywhere—that impossible, exhausting, relentless brightness that turned every room you entered into something warmer and every person you spoke to into someone who wanted to keep listening.

The stranger said something. You laughed harder—a sound Telemachus could hear from here, faintly, carried on the wind.

You touched the man's arm. Brief. Casual. The kind of touch you gave everyone—Eleni, the servants, the guard with the scar—without thinking, without calculating, because touching people was just something you did, the same way breathing was something you did.

But Telemachus' jaw tightened.

It was a small thing. Involuntary. The muscles along the hinge of his jaw flexing once, hard, before going rigid.

His fingers pressed into the stone ledge—not gripping, not clenching, just pressing, the way a man pressed his feet into the ground when he felt the earth shift beneath him and needed to make sure it was still there.

He watched you take the stranger's arm.

He watched you walk up the stairs together, side by side, your laughter trailing behind you like a ribbon.

He watched the way the stranger bent his head toward yours—not close, not intimate, just attentive. Interested. The body language of a man who was enjoying a conversation and didn't see any reason to pretend otherwise.

Something moved in Telemachus' chest.

Something he didn't have a name for—or, more accurately, something he refused to name, because naming it would mean acknowledging it, and acknowledging it would mean admitting that the arrival of a charming stranger who made you laugh shouldn't matter to him, but did.

He didn't know this man. Didn't know his name, his rank, his purpose.

But he knew the laugh.

He knew the way you looked when you were happy—really happy, not performing-happy, not just-smile-my-love-happy, but the deep, unselfconscious, full-body kind of happy that you wore so rarely that most people probably didn't realize there was a difference.

And he knew that the man on the dock had drawn it out of you in minutes.

Minutes.

It had taken Telemachus days to earn an almost-smile from you that wasn't part of the performance.

He'd woven thread. He'd endured bird monologues. He'd sat in his mother's weaving room and let you see something he'd never shown anyone, and the reward had been one moment—one single, shimmering moment—where the distance between you had narrowed by a fraction.

This stranger had gotten your whole laugh in minutes.

Telemachus' ears burned.

Not from the cold. Not from the wind.

He turned from the ledge.

His footsteps were measured. His posture was straight. His face was composed—neutral, controlled, arranged into the careful, princely blankness that he wore the way other men wore armor.

But his ears were red.

And behind him, the last of the light disappeared beneath the harbor's edge, and the sea went dark, and somewhere below, the sound of your laughter lingered in the salt air like a promise he hadn't made and wasn't sure he wanted to keep.

☆

☆

You didn't find out about Telemachus watching until later.

You didn't find out about a lot of things until later—the political significance of the Thalassean delegation, the fact that Alexios was not merely an envoy but the youngest prince of a naval empire that controlled half the western shipping lanes, the fact that your impromptu harbor reception had violated approximately six different protocols that Penelope would certainly hear about by morning.

What you knew, as you walked back to your chambers with the evening breeze in your hair and the salt still clinging to the hem of your chiton, was this:

Thais had beautiful shoes and a smile that felt like a locked door wrapped in silk.

Alexios had a beautiful ship and a laugh that felt like an open window.

And somewhere in the palace, in a room you hadn't been invited to, Telemachus was standing at a loom with his mother's thread between his fingers, his jaw set and his ears burning, choosing colors for a scarf he'd promised to weave for a girl who had just laughed with another man the way she'd never quite managed to laugh with him.

Teal.

And blue.

The deep kind—not the sad kind.

The regal kind.

He pulled the first thread tight, and the loom clicked, and the room was very, very quiet.

You crawled into bed that night with your sandals still half-buckled and your scarf still wound around your neck and the tangled yarn bracelet—the one for Eleni, the one that looked like a bird's nest after a storm—tucked beneath your pillow.

You fell asleep smiling.

And if your last thought before the dark took you was not of the boy with the good wave or the girl with the good shoes, but of the quiet, solemn-faced prince in the weaving room who had looked at your terrible knot-cloud and said it's a start—

Well.

That was nobody's business but yours.

Not immediately badly—the first few twists had actually looked promising, and you'd spent a full thirty seconds admiring your work with the satisfaction of a master artisan before the whole thing had begun to unravel in slow motion, like the yarn itself had decided it didn't respect you.

By the time you'd finished wrestling with it, the bracelet looked less like jewelry and more like something a bird would reject for its nest on grounds of structural inadequacy.

You'd cried. Just a little. Just enough to make your eyes puffy and your nose tender, which was the kind of crying that didn't count because it was born from frustration rather than sadness, and frustration-crying was basically exercise for the face.

Then you'd fallen asleep with the yarn still tangled around your fingers, and now here you were—rushing through the corridors with the urgency of someone who had somewhere to be and no idea how to get there, your scarf trailing behind you like a distressed flag and your tiara sitting at an angle that could generously be called "rakish" and accurately be called "wrong."

You rounded a corner. Took a wrong turn. Doubled back. Nearly collided with a bust of someone very important-looking whose nose you almost knocked off—and then corrected your trajectory using your patented landmark navigation system (the crack in the wall that looked like a fish, the hallway where the breeze smelled like oregano, and the window that showed the olive tree with the weird branch).

You arrived at the morning hall breathless, flushed, and deeply committed to pretending you'd been awake for hours.

The morning hall was smaller than the great hall used for formal dinners—cozier, if a room built entirely from stone could be called cozy.

A long table ran its length, set with simple clay plates and bowls of fruit and bread, pitchers of watered wine and goat's milk, and platters of olives and cheese. Morning light slanted through the high, narrow windows, casting pale columns across the stone floor.

Penelope was seated at the head of the table, a cup of something warm—tea, probably, the herbal kind that always seemed to be within arm's reach of the queen—resting near her hand.

Odysseus was absent; you'd learned quickly that the king kept strange hours, appearing and disappearing from meals like a cat who acknowledged no schedule but his own.

And at the table, seated to Penelope's right in the chair that was usually empty—

There was a girl.

You slowed in the doorway, your half-buckled sandal scuffing against the threshold.

The girl was striking. The kind of striking that didn't ask for your attention so much as command it, the way a blade caught light—sharp, deliberate, impossible to ignore.

She sat with the posture of someone who had been raised on a spine of iron: shoulders back, chin level, hands resting on the table with a controlled stillness that made every one of your own fidgeting habits feel like a personal failing.

Her hair was dark—deep, ink-black, falling in a sleek curtain past her shoulders, the kind of hair that looked like it had never tangled in its life. It caught the light in blue-black flashes, glossy and immaculate, framing a face that was all clean angles and quiet intensity.

Her skin was a warm olive, sun-touched in the way that spoke of a kingdom where the heat didn't visit—it lived. And her eyes—

Her eyes were extraordinary.

A pale, crystalline green, like sea glass held up to morning light. Not warm. Not cold, exactly. Just clear. The kind of eyes that saw everything and gave away nothing, that watched the world with the measured precision of someone taking notes.

She was beautiful.

Not the way you were beautiful—not soft and bright and flushed with warmth. Beautiful the way a temple was beautiful: elegant, austere, designed to make you feel small without ever saying a word.

And she was talking to Telemachus.

He was seated across from her—closer than you'd ever seen him sit to anyone voluntarily—and his body language was different. Not relaxed, exactly—Telemachus didn't do relaxed, not really, not the way other people did—but engaged.

He was leaning forward, just slightly, his forearms resting on the table, his expression attentive in a way that you hadn't seen directed at anything other than a loom or a practice sword.

He was listening.

Not the polite, glazed-over kind of listening he did when you rambled about birds or scarves. The real kind.

The kind where his brow was slightly furrowed and his jaw was set and his eyes were focused, tracking her words like they mattered.

Something in your chest tightened.

It wasn't a big something. Not a crack, not a fracture—more like a thread being pulled, gently, from somewhere deep in the weave. A sudden, prickling consciousness that the space between Telemachus and this stranger held a tension that the space between Telemachus and you had never held.

They were speaking about something important. Something serious. Something with weight and substance, and the image of them—two serious people having a serious conversation about serious things—looked so natural, so symmetrical, so right, that it made you feel, for just a moment, like you'd walked into a room where you weren't the main character.

You shook it off.

(You were always the main character.)

"Good morning!" you announced, sweeping into the room with a brightness that was only forty percent forced. You scooped up the trailing end of your scarf, flipped it dramatically over one shoulder, and slid into the nearest empty chair with a gracelessness that made the wooden legs screech against the stone floor.

Every head turned.

The girl's green eyes found you first—quick and assessing, the flick of a gaze that took in your wrinkled chiton, your half-buckled sandal, the pillow crease still faintly visible on your cheek, and your slightly askew tiara in approximately one and a half seconds.

Then she smiled.

It was a good smile. Warm. Polished. The kind of smile that arrived pre-assembled—all the right parts in all the right places, not a single tooth out of order.

"You must be the princess of Kythra," she said, and her voice matched her eyes: clear, measured, lovely. Like glass chimes in a steady breeze. "I've heard so much."

"Only good things, I hope!" you chirped, reaching for a bread roll. "I mean, probably not only good things—I did eat fish with my hands at the engagement feast, so that's probably made the rounds by now—but hopefully the ratio is in my favor."

A small, precise laugh. "How charming."

You beamed.

Telemachus, who had been watching this exchange with the rigid stillness of a man hoping the ground would swallow him, cleared his throat.

"This is Thais," he said, gesturing stiffly. "Princess Thais of Solaris."

"Solaris," you repeated, the word rolling around your mouth like a candy you hadn't tasted before. "That sounds beautiful. Where is that?"

Thais tilted her head, the gesture elegant and unhurried. "It's a kingdom to the southeast—on the Peloponnese mainland, along the Lakedaemonian coast. Our lands sit in the basin between two mountain ranges, which traps the heat year-round. The temperature rarely changes—it is always warm, always dry." A pause, perfectly timed. "Rather different from an island like Kythra, I'd imagine."

"Oh, so different," you agreed, nodding vigorously. "We get rain. So much rain. Our goats are basically amphibious at this point."

Thais' smile didn't waver. Not even a millimeter.

"How delightful," she said.

Penelope sipped her tea.

You pulled your bread roll apart with your fingers—no knife, because old habits died hard and also because you kept forgetting the knife was there—and chewed happily while Telemachus gave you the abbreviated version of why, exactly, there was a new princess sitting at your breakfast table.

The short answer: politics.

The longer answer: Thais and her entourage had arrived from Solaris early that morning—part of a larger diplomatic delegation that had been traveling for weeks.

Her kingdom had a complicated history with Ithaca—centuries of complicated history, actually, the kind that involved wars and blood feuds and generational grudges that had been passed down like heirlooms.

There had been battles. Betrayals. Entire decades where Solarian and Ithacan soldiers couldn't occupy the same port without someone losing a limb.

But recently—very recently, in the grand scheme of things—a treaty had been signed. A tentative, carefully brokered peace agreement that had taken years to negotiate and was still so fragile that a strong wind could probably shatter it.

The treaty was significant enough that Solaris had been a top contender for the marriage alliance—a match between Telemachus and Thais would have solidified the peace between both kingdoms in a way that mere parchment never could.

It hadn't happened, obviously, since Telemachus had pulled your scroll instead.

But Thais was here now. As a "diplomatic observer." As a "guest of the crown." As a representative of her kingdom's goodwill and continued commitment to the treaty.

And she was impressive.

You could see it in the way Penelope watched her—not with suspicion, exactly, but with the careful attention of a woman who recognized competence when she saw it. Thais spoke about the treaty with fluency and precision, referencing specific clauses, dates, historical precedents.

She knew the names of Ithacan generals.

She knew the trade routes between their kingdoms.

She knew—somehow, impossibly—the exact tonnage of grain that Ithaca had exported in the last fiscal year, and she cited it casually, mid-sentence, like it was common knowledge.

You didn't know what a fiscal year was.

(You thought it might be a type of calendar, but you weren't going to ask right now.)

While Thais spoke, you ate. And while you ate, you looked.

Not at Thais' face, or her posture, or her command of geopolitical minutiae—though all of those were impressive and slightly terrifying. No, you were looking at her shoes.

And they were gorgeous.

Delicate leather sandals with thin, crisscrossing straps that wound up the ankle in an intricate pattern, the leather dyed a deep, rich amber and stamped with tiny geometric designs along the edges. The soles looked flexible—not the stiff, flat kind that turned every step into a slap against stone—and the way the straps hugged the foot suggested a fit that was equal parts secure and comfortable.

They were, without question, the prettiest shoes you had ever seen.

And you couldn't stop staring at them.

"—which is why the continued maintenance of the naval corridor between our ports remains essential to both kingdoms' economic—"

"Where did you get those shoes?"

The question burst out of you like a bird from a cage—sudden, startling, and completely unrelated to everything that had been said for the past ten minutes.

Thais stopped mid-sentence.

Telemachus closed his eyes.

Penelope set down her tea.

You, blissfully oblivious to the conversational whiplash you'd just inflicted on the room, were leaning sideways in your chair, your head tilted at nearly a forty-five-degree angle, your eyes fixed on Thais' feet with the unblinking intensity of an art critic examining a masterwork.

"The shoes," you repeated, in case the question had been unclear. "Those sandals. They're stunning. Is that—is that tooled leather? With the stamping? And the straps—how do they stay like that? Are they molded? They look molded. I've never seen straps sit like that—at home, our sandals always bunch up around the ankle, which is so annoying, and I've been saying for years that someone should figure out a better design, and then you walk in wearing those and I'm like—" You pressed both hands to your chest. "—vindicated."

Silence.

Thais looked at you, her expression was controlled—very controlled—but something shifted behind those pale green eyes—a recalculation, maybe. The subtle click of a mechanism adjusting.

Her smile returned, but it was different now. Slightly wider. Slightly sharper—though not in a way you noticed, because sharp things had to actually cut you before you acknowledged they existed.

"They're Solarian-made," Thais said, her voice smooth as poured oil. "Our craftsmen are quite renowned for leather work. The design is traditional—passed down through generations of artisans." She paused, crossing one ankle over the other in a way that made the shoes catch the light perfectly. "But I imagine Kythra has its own... traditions?"

"Oh, definitely," you said, still admiring the sandals. "We're really big on textiles. Dyed wool, mostly. And pressed flowers in wax—that's a thing we do, for decoration. It's pretty! Not, like, shoe-pretty, but—"

"But Kythra is quite a small island, isn't it?" Thais said, and her tone hadn't changed—still warm, still pleasant—but the words angled. Like a blade being turned, slowly, to catch the light from a different direction. "A trade island, primarily? Off the port of Gytheion?"

"Yes!" You nodded, brightening. "We're right off the—"

"And you trade primarily in... flowers? Wine? Goats?" The last word came out with a delicate emphasis—not mocking, exactly, but aware. Thais tilted her head, those green eyes glinting with something that was technically curiosity and was functionally something else entirely. "I'm surprised such a small, niche economy could sustain a royal household. You must be very... resourceful."

"We are!" you said proudly. "My mother says we make up in charm what we lack in acreage."

"How sweet."

"Thank you!"

"And you dabble in clothing? Accessories?"

"Oh, yes—our dyes are famous! Well, famous locally. Well, famous with us. The port merchants know about them. We make this gorgeous indigo from—"

"Fascinating." Thais' smile was flawless. Immaculate. A perfectly constructed wall of politeness that you walked face-first into without even feeling the impact. "I've always admired kingdoms that make the most of limited resources. There's a certain... pluck to it."

You blinked.

Then smiled wider.

"Aw, thank you! That's so nice. You're so nice."

Thais took a sip of her wine. "I try."

Across the table, Telemachus' jaw had tightened, his eyes moving between you and Thais during the exchange with the sharp, tracking focus of someone who wasn't quite sure what he was watching but knew it was significant.

His fingers had curled slightly around the edge of his cup, and there was a subtle tension in his shoulders—the kind that came from recognizing a game being played while one player didn't know they were on the board.

He looked at you—oblivious, beaming, happily tearing bread apart with your fingers and dipping it into olive oil.

He looked at Thais—composed, smiling, her gaze calm and steady and ever so slightly satisfied.

Something uncomfortable settled in his chest.

He pushed it aside.

Penelope, seated at the head of the table with her tea growing cold, watched the entire exchange without expression. Her dark eyes moved between you and Thais with the patience of a woman who had spent twenty years reading the silences between words.

She didn't intervene.

She didn't need to.

Not yet.

☆

☆

The morning unfolded into afternoon, and the palace—which had been so achingly quiet since your arrival—began to breathe.

Delegations had been trickling in for days, but today the pace had quickened. Carts clattered up the stone path.

Voices echoed in the corridors.

Servants moved with renewed urgency, carrying linens and polishing bronze and sweeping floors that hadn't been swept in weeks.

The kitchens hummed with the particular kind of controlled chaos that preceded important meals, and the air smelled like roasting meat and rising bread and the faintly anxious sweat of people trying very hard to make everything perfect.

The formal dinner—the real one, the one Telemachus had been dreading—was still a few days away, but the arriving guests needed to be housed, fed, and attended to, and the palace was stretching itself thin to accommodate them.

You helped where you could—which mostly meant getting in the way with such enthusiasm that the servants eventually gave you a task just to keep you from wandering into restricted areas.

You'd nearly walked into the armory twice. Not because you were interested in weapons, but because the door was "interesting-looking" and you wanted to see what was behind it.

The guard stationed outside had looked at you with the weary resignation of a man who had survived a decade-long war only to be defeated by a princess with boundary issues.

But by late afternoon, the energy in the palace had shifted again—quieter, more measured, as if the building itself was holding its breath.

Because Penelope had called for tea.

Not the casual, morning-table kind. This was tea. In the queen's private sitting room, with cushioned chairs and fresh flowers and the kind of delicate ceramic cups that cost more than most people's annual income. The kind of tea that was less about the tea and more about the watching.

You'd been summoned.

So had Thais.

And when you arrived—freshly dressed in your cream chiton with the rose sash back in place, your tiara adjusted three times in the mirror before you declared it "perfect"—you found the sitting room already arranged like a quiet battlefield.

Penelope sat in a high-backed chair near the window, the light falling over her in a way that made her look both regal and unreachable. A small table before her held the tea service—two cups, a pot, a plate of figs and honey cakes that you clocked immediately and had to physically restrain yourself from lunging toward.

Thais was already seated across from the queen, legs crossed at the ankle, her posture so flawless it could've been measured with a carpenter's tool. She held her cup with two hands—elegant, steady—and was mid-sentence when you entered.

"—and my mother sends her personal regards, Your Majesty. She speaks highly of your resilience during the years of—"

"Honey cakes!" you breathed, spotting the plate.

Thais' sentence evaporated.

You caught yourself. Pressed your lips together. Dipped into a quick curtsy. "Your Majesty. Sorry. Good afternoon. Those honey cakes are—sorry. I'm—sitting down now."

You sat.

Penelope's expression didn't change, but there was a quality to her stillness that felt attentive. She wasn't just watching you. She was studying you, the way a weaver studied a new thread before deciding where it belonged in the pattern.

"Tea?" she offered.

"Yes, please—thank you—" You accepted the cup with both hands, mirroring Thais without realizing it. The ceramic was warm against your palms, and you wrapped your fingers around it, grateful for something to hold.

The next twenty minutes were educational.

Penelope asked questions. Simple ones, at first—surface-level inquiries about your respective kingdoms, your families, your upbringing. Conversational prodding, disguised as casual interest, and Thais navigated it like a woman who had been trained in the art of royal discourse since birth.

She was good.

Not just good—devastating.

Every answer was measured, polished, perfectly pitched. She referenced her kingdom's military history with the ease of someone reciting a favorite poem. She discussed trade agreements with nuance and precision.

When Penelope mentioned the ongoing tensions with a neighboring island, Thais offered a thoughtful analysis of maritime law that made even the queen pause for a moment—not in disagreement, but in recognition. The way one chess player recognized another.

And you—

You sat with your tea cooling in your hands, your honey cake half-eaten on your plate, and tried to follow along.

You really tried.

But the conversation was full of words like tariff negotiations and border sovereignty and precedent-setting jurisdictional authority, and every time you thought you'd found the thread, it slipped between your fingers like silk.

You nodded a lot. Smiled a lot. Said "mmhm" at what you hoped were the right moments.

At one point, you offered a comment—something about how your father had once resolved a trade dispute with a neighboring island by inviting the other king to a feast and getting him so drunk he agreed to everything—and the room had gone quiet in a way that you thought was impressed silence but might have been something else.

Thais' smile had widened, just slightly.

Then the conversation shifted. Penelope, with the surgical precision of a woman who had spent two decades navigating the subtleties of court politics, steered the topic toward mythology—specifically, the Trojan War. The event that had taken her husband, defined her generation, and left half the Greek world in ruins.

Thais, of course, had opinions.

"The strategic failure at Troy," she said, setting her cup down with a soft click, "was fundamentally one of intelligence—not martial skill. The Greeks had the armies. They had the resources. What they lacked, for ten long years, was the willingness to think laterally. To use deception as a weapon rather than a last resort."

Penelope inclined her head. "And the horse?"

"A masterwork," Thais said simply. "Arguably the single most effective use of psychological warfare in recorded history. Odysseus understood something that most commanders never learn: the greatest victories aren't won on the battlefield. They're won in the mind of the enemy."

She said this in Odysseus' own house, to Odysseus' own wife, and she said it the way you might compliment someone's curtains—with appreciation, with authority, and without a single ounce of deference.

Penelope's expression didn't change, but her fingers paused on the rim of her cup—just for a second, just long enough to mean something.

You were chewing a fig.

The conversation paused, naturally, as Penelope's gaze drifted toward you—and Thais followed, both of them waiting with the quiet patience of women who had been sharing intellectual space and were now, politely, making room.

You swallowed the fig. Looked up. Noticed both pairs of eyes on you.

"Oh—" You blinked. "Right. The horse." You sat up a little straighter, your brow furrowing with genuine thought. "I... okay, so, I have a question."

Thais tilted her head, encouraging.

"They built a giant horse," you said, slowly, like you were walking through the story one footstep at a time. "A big one. A really big one. Out of wood."

"Yes."

"And then they left it outside the gate."

"Outside the walls, yes."

"And the—the people inside the city—the..." You snapped your fingers, searching. "The Trojans. Right. The Trojans looked at this giant wooden horse just sitting there, and their first thought was 'let's bring it inside?'"

Thais nodded. "They believed it was a divine offering. A gift to—"

"But who leaves a gift outside a door and doesn't knock?" you asked, your nose scrunching. "That's weird. If someone left a giant horse outside my door without explaining it, I wouldn't bring it inside—I'd think I was being pranked. Or haunted. One of the two."

A beat.

"It wasn't... exactly a casual gift," Thais said, her voice carrying the careful patience of someone recalibrating mid-conversation. "There were inscriptions. Dedications. The Greeks left it as an offering to Athena—"

"To Athena?" You perked up. "The goddess? Why would the Greeks make a gift for Athena if they were leaving? If I were going home, I wouldn't stop to make a present for someone else's god. I'd be on the boat. I'd be so on the boat."

Penelope's cup paused again, midway to her lips.

"The offering was strategic," Thais explained. "It was designed to—"

"And it was a horse," you continued, your head tilting further. "Not a, like—an owl? Athena's thing is owls, right? And olives? If you're making a fake gift for Athena, wouldn't you make a giant owl? A horse is more of a... isn't that more of a Poseidon thing?"

Silence.

Thais' mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"The horse," she said, with the deliberate tone of someone selecting each word from a very small, very curated shelf, "had multiple layers of symbolic meaning. Horses were associated with Trojan military might—the Trojans saw themselves as master horsemen. By constructing a horse, Odysseus was speaking the Trojans' own language back to them. It played on their pride."

"Oh." You chewed your lip, considering this. "So it wasn't about Athena at all. It was about them."

A pause.

"...In a manner of speaking, yes."

"That's mean." You said it simply, without judgment, the way you might note that it was raining. "Not the strategy part—the strategy part is smart, but the using-their-pride-against-them part. That's mean. Like—it only worked because they loved horses so much that seeing one made them stop thinking. He used the thing they loved to destroy them."

You reached for another fig.

"That's the saddest part, I think," you said, mostly to the fig. "Not the war. Not the fighting. The part where someone figured out exactly what you loved and turned it into a door."

The room went very quiet.

The kind of quiet that wasn't empty—it was full. Full of something you'd said without meaning to, the way you always said things—casually, lightly, like dropping a pebble into water without checking how deep the pool was.

Thais stared at you.

Her cup was on the table. Her hands were in her lap. Her expression was—controlled. Very controlled. But something had shifted behind those pale green eyes. A recalculation. Not the same as before, at breakfast—that had been a small adjustment, a minor repositioning of a piece on a board.

This was different. This was the look of someone who had built a model of a person in their head and just discovered a room they hadn't accounted for.

You stared back, completely unaware that you'd said anything worth staring about.

"That's..." Thais said, and for the first time—the very first time since you'd met her—her voice lost its polish. Just for a second. Just a flicker, a hairline crack in the glass, before the surface smoothed again. "That's an interesting perspective."

"Thank you!" you chirped.

Penelope, seated at the far end of the room in her high-backed chair with the light falling over her like a veil, said nothing.

But her mouth twitched.

Not a smile. Not a laugh. Something close—the tiniest, most controlled crack in the queenly composure, a flicker of something warm and sharp and almost amused that appeared and vanished so quickly you'd have missed it if you blinked.

She brought her cup to her lips and took a slow, measured sip.

The tea continued.

Penelope didn't rush it. She let the conversation flow—or stumble, depending on who was talking—and watched with the patience of a woman who had learned that the most revealing moments weren't the rehearsed ones. They were the unguarded ones. The moments when people forgot they were being observed and let something real slip through.

And you—you kept slipping. Not in ways you noticed. Not in ways you could've controlled even if you had noticed, because the things that slipped out of you weren't calculated or crafted or placed with strategic intent. They were just... there. Living in the gaps between your thoughts, falling out of you like coins from a pocket with a hole in it.

When Thais mentioned Achilles—his rage, his invincibility, the way he'd been dipped in the River Styx as an infant to make him immortal—you'd tilted your head and said, "But his mom had to hold him by something, right? To dip him? So the part she was holding didn't get the river water."

"His heel," Thais confirmed. "His mother, Thetis, held him by his heel."

"That's so sad," you'd said, soft. "She was trying to protect him. She was holding on so tight because she loved him, and the part of him she held the closest was the part that killed him."

Another silence. Longer, this time.

Thais had looked at you the way one looked at a garden that turned out to have a well hidden beneath the flowers.

Then you'd asked whether Achilles' friend Patroclus—whose name you pronounced "Potato-clus" twice before Thais gently corrected you—had also been dipped in a river, because "it seems like the kind of thing a good friend would suggest," and the moment had dissolved into something lighter.

But Penelope had seen it.

She'd seen all of it.

The way you stumbled through names and dates and got your mythologies tangled—confusing Hector with Heracles at one point, asking whether the Amazons who fought at Troy were the same as "the really tall women from the stories my mama told me about who rode giant lizards" (they were not)—but then, in the spaces between the stumbling, you said things that landed.

Not like arrows. Not like the precise, targeted insights that Thais delivered with surgical accuracy. More like seeds. Small and unassuming and easy to miss, dropped into soil without ceremony, and by the time you realized they'd taken root, something was already growing.

Thais was a sword—elegant, precise, designed for a specific purpose and devastating when wielded correctly.

You were something else. Something harder to name. Something that fumbled through etiquette and ate with your fingers and confused Hector with Heracles and then—without warning, without trying—said something that made the room go quiet in a way that had nothing to do with embarrassment.

The part of him she held the closest was the part that killed him.

Penelope sipped her tea and said nothing.

But she kept watching.

Also—I made a FRIEND. Her name is Eleni. She's a servant here, which I know Father would have opinions about, but Father isn't here and his opinions are wrong anyway. She feeds birds from her hands, Mama. BIRDS. From her HANDS. I tried it too, and a little red sparrow ate from my palm, and I named him Ares because he looked like a warrior (a very small, round warrior, but still). Eleni laughed at me, which I think means we're bonding. She asked me if I was sure I wanted to be friends with her. She said it three times, actually. Three! Like she thought I'd change my mind if she gave me enough chances. I won't. I told her that. I think she believed me by the third time, but I might tell her again tomorrow just to be safe.

You paused, your quill hovering over the parchment, a small drop of ink gathering at the tip like a held breath.

You were sitting cross-legged on your bed—shoes off, hair loose, the pale yellow chiton wrinkled from the day's adventures—with the writing desk pulled onto the mattress beside you because the actual desk was too far from the window and you wanted the breeze. The afternoon light filtered in at an angle, warm and golden, dust motes drifting lazily through the beam.

You chewed your lower lip, thinking before continuing, the quill scratching softly against the parchment.

The formal dinner is in less than a week. I'm nervous. Not the fun kind of nervous—the stomach kind. The kind where your insides feel like they're doing that thing laundry does when the washerwomen wring it out. I keep thinking about what you said before I left.

You stopped writing.

Your mother's voice echoed in your head—soft and warm and a little bit sad, the way it always sounded when she was giving you advice she wished someone had given her.

"Just smile, my love. A smile is the only armor they can't take from you."

It was such a simple thing. Such a small thing. And yet it was the only weapon your mother had ever been given, and she'd wielded it her entire life—through a marriage she hadn't chosen, through a husband who called her simple and meant it as a leash, through years of being underestimated and overlooked and quietly, persistently dismissed.

She'd smiled through all of it. And she'd survived.

You weren't sure if that was brave or heartbreaking.

Maybe both.

With a sigh, you finished up your letter before your mind could drift off any further.

I'll smile. I always do. You taught me well. I love you, Mama. I'll write again soon. Tell the goats I miss them. (Yes, all of them. Even Cornelius. ESPECIALLY Cornelius.) Your favorite daughter (don't tell the others), ____

You set the quill down and blew gently on the parchment, watching the ink dry. Then you read the letter over, your eyes tracing the looping, slightly uneven handwriting that Calla had once described as "enthusiastic" and your father had described as "barely legible."

It was a good letter, you decided. Cheerful. Light. Full of birds and goats and the kind of breezy optimism that would make your mother smile and not worry.

You hadn't mentioned the silence of the palace. Or the way the halls felt like something had been scraped out of them. Or how the servants flinched when doors opened too quickly. Or how Telemachus looked at you like you were a problem he hadn't budgeted for.

You hadn't mentioned any of that.

Because your mother would worry. And your mother had worried enough for one lifetime.

You folded the letter carefully—once, twice, three times, pressing each crease with your thumb—and tucked it into the small stack of parchment on the desk. You'd find someone to send it tomorrow. Maybe Eleni would know how.

Eleni.

The thought of her made something warm settle in your chest.

She'd been so cautious. So careful—the way people were careful when they'd learned that kindness usually came with conditions.

When you'd asked her to be your friend, she'd looked at you like you'd offered her something with a hook hidden inside it, and the wariness in her eyes had made your heart ache in a way you couldn't quite explain.

"Are you sure?" she'd asked, for the third time, her fingers fidgeting with the hem of her tunic. "I mean... I'm just a servant. I'm not—I'm not like the women you're probably used to spending time with."

And you'd wanted to say: What women? The handmaidens who kept their distance because my father made them nervous? The ones who whispered behind their hands when they thought I couldn't hear? The sisters who were married off before I was old enough to know them?

But you hadn't said any of that. You'd just smiled—big and bright and real—and told her you were sure. That you'd never been more sure of anything. That you were, in fact, aggressively sure, and if she asked one more time you were going to start crying, and nobody wanted that because you were an ugly crier—like, really ugly, the kind that made small children stare—and that would ruin the whole vibe of this beautiful bird-feeding friendship you were building.

Eleni had laughed at that.

And when she'd left—reluctantly, the basket of linens finally hoisted onto her hip—she'd promised to come find you after her chores. "I'll knock," she'd said, hovering in the doorway with a small, uncertain smile. "If that's... okay?"

"Yes!" you'd practically shouted. "Knock! Knock as many times as you want! I love knocking!"

She'd blinked. Then shaken her head, that bewildered almost-smile tugging at her mouth again, and disappeared down the corridor.

You were still thinking about it—about her smile, about the sparrow, about whether birds could eat cheese and how to test this hypothesis ethically—when a knock came at the door.

You shot upright.

Eleni!

A grin split across your face so fast it nearly pulled a muscle. You scrambled off the bed, tripping over the hem of your chiton, kicking your sandals out of the way, and half-ran, half-stumbled to the door. You grabbed the handle and yanked it open, already talking before it was fully ajar.

"Eleni! Perfect timing—I was just thinking, for the picnic, do you think the birds would come if we set up near the olive grove? Because I saw this really pretty spot near the eastern wall that has these little wildflowers growing between the stones and I think Ares would love it, and also—can birds eat figs? What about cheese? Can they eat—"

Your sentence crumbled to dust.

Because the person standing in your doorway was not Eleni.

It was Telemachus.

He stood with one hand raised, mid-knock, the other hanging stiffly at his side. He was wearing a clean tunic—darker than the one from the other day, the fabric finer, though still simple in the way that everything about him seemed deliberately, stubbornly un-royal. His hair was slightly damp, like he'd washed recently, and there was a faint flush along the tops of his ears that might have been from the sun or might have been from something else entirely.

He looked...

Awkward.

Not uncomfortable-awkward. Caught-awkward. Like he'd been standing outside your door for a moment too long, working up to the knock, and you'd swung the door open and hit him with a wall of bird-related enthusiasm before he'd had time to arrange his face into something appropriately princely.

His mouth was slightly open.

His eyes were slightly wide.

And he was staring at you with the expression of a man who had just been asked about cheese-eating birds and was trying—very, very hard—to process it.

You stared back.

A beat passed.

"...You're not Eleni," you said.

"No," Telemachus confirmed. His voice was careful, measured, like he was picking each word up and inspecting it before putting it down. "I'm not."

"Right." You blinked. "Obviously."

Another beat.

Telemachus cleared his throat. It was a deliberate sound—controlled, practiced, the kind of throat-clearing that was less about phlegm and more about recalibrating. He straightened his posture, which was already straight, and squared his shoulders, which were already square, and looked somewhere just above your left eyebrow instead of directly into your eyes.

"My parents," he began, in a tone that suggested he was reading from a script he'd only half-memorized, "feel that it would be... beneficial... for us to spend time together. Before the official dinner. To better... transition to..."

He paused. Visibly searched for a word.

"...Marriagehood," he finished, and the word came out like it had been dragged from him by force.

You blinked.

Then blinked again.

Then—because you were you, and your brain operated on a frequency that no amount of royal training had ever been able to tune—you just said, "Okay!"

Telemachus' mouth closed. Then opened. Then closed again.

He'd expected resistance. You could see it—the way his shoulders had been braced, the way his jaw had been pre-set for an argument he'd already scripted in his head. He'd been ready. Ready for you to protest, or pout, or ask a dozen follow-up questions, or launch into a speech about how you barely know each other and shouldn't they let things happen naturally and what kind of transition involves forced hangout sessions—

But you'd said okay.

Just... okay.

Like it was simple. Like he'd asked and you'd answered, and there was nothing complicated about it.

He faltered. Just for a second. A tiny crack in the composure—a blink that lasted a beat too long, a slight loosening of his jaw—before he recovered and nodded once, sharp and efficient.

"Good. I'll—we'll go to the—just..." He gestured vaguely down the corridor. "Give me a moment to—"

"Oh! Wait—hold on—" You held up a finger, already spinning on your heel. "I need to grab my scarf."

You disappeared behind the door before he could respond.

Telemachus stood in the hallway, staring at the closed door.

Scarf?

He heard rustling. A thud—something falling, probably a sandal. A muffled "oops." More rustling. Then—

The door burst open, and you bounded out with the energy of a small, excited animal being released into a field. Around your neck, draped with the careless elegance of someone who thought everything looked good on them (and was, irritatingly, not always wrong), was a scarf.

A wool scarf.

It was simple—handmade, clearly, the weave a little uneven, the edges slightly frayed. The color was a warm, earthy tone, somewhere between sand and honey, and it looked soft in the way that well-loved things always looked soft, like it had been worn a thousand times and washed in lavender water and folded with care.

Telemachus looked at the scarf.

Then at you.

Then at the scarf again.

"What are you doing with a scarf?" he asked, and for the first time since you'd met him, his voice held something other than distance—a note of genuine, bewildered curiosity, like you'd just done something so unexpected that his carefully constructed walls hadn't been built to account for it.

"Wearing it," you said, as if this were obvious.

"It's not cold."

"I know."

"It doesn't get cold in Ithaca. Not—not like that. We barely get a chill."

"I know." You adjusted the scarf, flipping one end over your shoulder with a flourish. "But have you felt the wind here? It's—" You closed your eyes for a moment, as if savoring something invisible. "It's incredible. Like, the wind at home is just... wind. It blows, it's fine, whatever. But the wind here—"

As if the gods themselves were conspiring to prove your point—and honestly, they might have been, because your life had that kind of energy—a gust of wind swept through the open window at the end of the corridor.

It caught your scarf perfectly.

The fabric lifted, fluttered, and streamed behind you like a banner—like a tiny, woolen flag declaring your arrival to the world. Your hair moved with it, your chiton rippled, and for one brief, absurd, utterly cinematic moment, you looked like the heroine of a story that hadn't been written yet.

You opened your eyes. Turned to Telemachus with a grin so triumphant it bordered on smug.

"See?" You gestured at the scarf, still floating behind you in the dying breeze. "It's giving royalty."

Telemachus looked at you.

He looked at the scarf.

He looked at the window, as if personally offended by the timing of the wind.

And then his face did something it hadn't done since you'd arrived: it struggled. His lips pressed together—hard—and the muscle in his jaw twitched once, twice, and there was a moment—a single, shimmering, barely-there moment—where it could've gone either way. Laugh or frown. Amusement or exasperation. The battle played out across his features in real-time, and you watched it happen with the innocent, wide-eyed fascination of someone who had no idea they were the cause.

The frown won.

Barely.

"...Let's go," he said, shaking his head. He turned on his heel and started walking, his stride long and purposeful, his hands clasped behind his back.

But you'd seen it.

That almost.

That tiny, treacherous almost-smile that he'd swallowed before it could escape.

You hugged the scarf tighter around your neck and followed him, practically skipping.

☆

☆

He took you to the weaving room.

It was on the second floor, tucked at the end of a corridor you hadn't explored yet—a small, warm space with a single window that looked out over the western hillside. The light came in soft and amber, filtered through the leaves of a fig tree that grew just outside, and the room smelled faintly of wool and oil and something floral you couldn't place.

A large wooden loom sat against the far wall, its frame worn smooth by years of hands. Beside it, a smaller table held baskets of yarn and thread—deep blues, rich burgundies, soft creams, and pale greens—arranged with a care that suggested they belonged to someone who took this seriously. A stool sat before the loom, and another was tucked beneath the table.

"This is where my mother weaves," Telemachus said, stepping aside to let you enter. His voice had returned to its usual measured neutrality, but there was something careful in the way he gestured at the room—almost protective, like he was showing you something private.

"It's beautiful," you breathed, and you meant it.

You drifted forward, fingers trailing over the baskets of thread, touching the colors like they were alive. The blues felt cool beneath your fingertips. The reds, warm. You picked up a skein of cream-colored wool and brought it to your cheek, rubbing it softly.

"So soft," you murmured, half to yourself.

Telemachus watched you from the doorway, arms crossed, expression unreadable.

"The idea," he said, "is that we'd... practice weaving. Together. My mother suggested it as a way to—" He paused, clearly reciting something he'd been told. "—build shared domestic skills."

You set the wool down and turned to him, eyebrows raised. "Your mother wants us to weave together?"

"She wants us to do something together. Weaving was... the suggestion."

"Oh." You looked at the loom. Then at the baskets. Then at your own hands. "That sounds nice!"

You pulled the stool out, sat down, and positioned yourself in front of the loom with the eager, determined energy of someone about to conquer a mountain.

Then you stared at it.

The loom stared back.

It was... complicated. More complicated than you'd expected, which was already not a high bar because you had expected it to be basically impossible.

There were threads going in multiple directions—up and down and across and through—and wooden bars and tension rods and something that looked like a comb but wasn't a comb, and the whole thing reminded you vaguely of a very organized spider's web, except the spider had a degree in engineering.

You sat there for a long moment, your hands hovering in the air above the threads, fingers wiggling uncertainly.

Then you cleared your throat.

"Um." You looked up at Telemachus, who was still standing in the doorway, watching you with an expression that had gradually shifted from neutral to suspicious. "How exactly do I... weave?"

The silence that followed was thick enough to spread on bread.

Telemachus' arms uncrossed. His head tilted. Very slowly, very deliberately, he said, "You don't know how to weave."

It wasn't a question.

"I..." You smoothed your hands over your lap, suddenly fascinated by the pattern of your chiton. "I know the concept. Thread goes... over things. And under things. And then you have fabric. I understand the... the theory."

"The theory."

"Yes."

"You're a princess."

"Yes."

"And you can't weave."

"...Well—"

"Every princess learns to weave. It's—it's fundamental. It's one of the first things—" Telemachus' hand came up to pinch the bridge of his nose, his eyes closing briefly. "How do you not know how to weave?"

Your voice went small. Not defeated—not quite—but softer. Quieter. The volume of someone who was used to this particular conversation and had never enjoyed it.

"It was boring," you admitted. "I tried. I swear I did try. My tutor spent three months on it and I just... couldn't focus. My hands would do the wrong thing, and the thread would tangle, and I'd get frustrated, and then I'd start thinking about other stuff, and then the thread would tangle more, and then my tutor would sigh—she sighed a lot—and eventually my father said it wasn't worth the effort and reassigned her."

A pause.

"I can tie a very good knot, though," you offered hopefully. "Like, a really good knot. Ship-quality. A sailor taught me once."

Telemachus stared at you with the expression of a man confronting the full, unvarnished reality of his future.

He rubbed his face with both hands. Drew them down slowly. Exhaled a breath that seemed to come from somewhere deep in his ribcage—somewhere old and tired and so profoundly resigned that it practically had its own weather system.

"Fine," he said.

You perked up. "Fine?"

"I'll teach you the basics."

It was your turn to stare.

"You..." You blinked, head tilting. "You know how to weave?"

Telemachus' jaw tightened. His eyes cut to the side—just for a second, just long enough to be noticeable—before returning to you with a flatness that dared you to comment.

"I wouldn't offer if I didn't, now would I?"

The words came out sharp. Clipped. The verbal equivalent of a door being shut, firmly, before anyone could peek inside.

But you didn't hear the door. You never heard doors—you walked through them, around them, sometimes directly into them, but you never heard them close.

"That's so cool," you said, completely genuine, and Telemachus' eyebrow twitched.

He didn't respond. Just walked over, pulled the second stool out from beneath the table, and sat down beside the loom—not across from you, not facing you, but beside you, close enough that you could see the calluses on his fingers and the faint scar across his left knuckle and the way his jaw flexed when he was concentrating.

He reached for the thread.

And then he wove.

It was seamless. Effortless. His fingers moved with a fluidity that you wouldn't have expected from hands that you'd seen grip a sword—strong, precise, each movement deliberate and unhurried. The thread slipped through his fingers like water, over and under, over and under, the shuttle passing back and forth with a soft, rhythmic click that filled the room like a heartbeat.

You watched, transfixed.

He wasn't just competent—he was good. Really, genuinely, surprisingly good, the kind of good that came from years of practice, not days. His hands knew the loom the way a musician's hands knew an instrument—instinctively, intimately, with the kind of muscle memory that couldn't be faked.

"You're really good at this," you said, and the awe in your voice was entirely unfiltered.

Telemachus' hands faltered. Just barely—a half-second hitch in the rhythm, the shuttle pausing mid-pass before resuming as if nothing had happened.

"It's just weaving," he muttered.

"It's not just weaving. That's—your hands are doing like four things at once. I can barely do one thing with my hands without setting something on fire." You leaned closer, watching his fingers with the kind of wide-eyed intensity usually reserved for watching a master swordsman or a really good street performer. "Is this... normal? For princes? Do other princes know how to weave?"

His hands faltered again. This time, the pause was longer—a full beat, the shuttle hanging in the air between passes.

"No," he said, and his voice had changed. Still flat, still measured, but tighter. Like something was being held behind it. "Most princes don't. It's... traditionally a feminine skill."

"Then how do you—"

"My mother."

The words came out before you could finish the question—blunt and quick, like ripping off a bandage. Telemachus' jaw worked. His eyes stayed fixed on the loom, his hands moving again, but slower now. More deliberate. Less fluid.

"My father..." He started. Stopped. Cleared his throat.

His shoulders had shifted—drawn inward, just slightly, in a way you doubted he even noticed. It was the posture of someone approaching a door they usually kept locked.

"My father was gone for twenty years," he said. "I never knew him. Not—not really. Just stories. Just his name. He left for Troy before I could walk, and he didn't come back until..." He trailed off, the shuttle clicking softly against the frame. "Until recently."

The room was very quiet.

"Growing up, it was just my mother and me," he continued, his voice dropping lower. Not softer—lower, like the words were heavy and he was setting them down carefully. "The suitors were here. They were... everywhere. Always in the hall, always eating, always watching. My mother couldn't leave me alone with them, so she kept me close. By her side."

His fingers moved through the thread—over, under, over, under.

"Other boys my age were training. Learning combat, strategy, sailing. The things princes are supposed to learn. And I was..." He paused. A muscle in his jaw jumped. "I was sitting in this room. Watching my mother weave. Handing her thread. Learning stitches when I should've been learning sword forms."

He said it like it was a confession. Like the words tasted wrong in his mouth—bitter and embarrassing and small, the kind of thing a prince should've outgrown years ago but hadn't quite managed to shed.

"It wasn't—" He cleared his throat, harder this time. His ears were red. "It's not something I talk about."

Silence settled between you like dust in sunlight.

You sat on your stool, your hands still in your lap, the scarf draped loosely around your shoulders. You'd gone quiet—really quiet, in a way that you almost never did. Your usual chatter had drained away like tide retreating from shore, leaving something quieter underneath. Something still.

Telemachus didn't look at you. He kept his eyes on the loom, his hands on the thread, his jaw set like stone. He was bracing, you realized. Waiting for the reaction. The pitying smile. The soft, condescending oh, that must have been so hard for you that people always gave when they heard stories like this—stories about boys who didn't fit the mold. About princes who learned thread before they learned steel.

You didn't give him that.

Instead, you said, very gently, "I think that's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard."

Telemachus' hands stopped.

Completely stopped—shuttle frozen, thread suspended, the entire rhythm breaking like a snapped string. His head turned toward you, slowly, and the look on his face was one you hadn't seen before—not cold, not guarded, not exasperated. Just... open. Confused and open, like you'd said something in a language he didn't know and he was trying to translate it on the fly.

"...What?"

"The weaving," you said, and your voice was soft—not performatively soft, not trying-to-be-gentle soft, but the real kind. The kind that came from somewhere you didn't usually let people see. "Your mother kept you close because she loved you. And instead of resenting it, you learned from her. You sat with her, and you picked up her craft, and now you can do this—" You gestured at the loom, at the neat, even rows he'd already completed. "—and it's hers. It's something she gave you. Something nobody else can take away."

You paused. Fidgeted with the edge of your scarf.

"Most boys would've been embarrassed. Most boys would've hid it, or stopped, or pretended they never learned. But you didn't. You kept it. And that means..." You trailed off, your brow furrowing slightly as you searched for the right words. "That means you love her enough to carry the things she taught you, even when the world says they're not meant for you. And I think... I think that's not a weakness, Telemachus. I think that's the bravest kind of love there is."

The silence that followed was enormous.

It filled the room like water—slow and steady and all-encompassing, pressing into the corners and the spaces between breaths. The loom sat between you, half-woven and waiting, and the late afternoon light through the fig tree made everything glow amber and gold.

Telemachus didn't speak.

He didn't move.

He just looked at you—really looked, maybe for the first time since you'd arrived—and something behind his eyes shifted. Not cracked. Not broken. Shifted. Like a window opening in a room that had been closed for a very long time, and the fresh air rushing in was startling, and cold, and good.

His lips parted. Closed. Parted again.

"...Thank you," he said.

It was quiet. So quiet you almost didn't hear it. But it was real—stripped of the careful neutrality, the measured distance, the princely composure that he wore like armor. Just two words, honest and raw and a little bit stunned, like he hadn't expected to say them and was surprised to find he meant it.

And then—barely, almost invisibly—he smiled.

Not a grin. Not the bright, easy kind that came naturally to people like you. It was a small thing—a softening of the mouth, a loosening of the jaw, a warmth that reached his eyes for just a moment before he caught it and pulled it back.

But you saw it.

And your heart did something stupid.

Not a flutter—no, this was worse. This was a full-body lurch, the kind that started in your chest and radiated outward like ripples in a pond, leaving you warm and breathless and suddenly, horribly aware of how close you were sitting.

Close enough to count the threads of gold in the light catching his hair. Close enough to see the way his lashes cast tiny shadows on his cheekbones.

You weren't used to this.

Being seen.

People looked at you all the time—at your smile, at your clothes, at the gap between what they expected you to be and what you were. But they didn't see you. Not like this. Not the way Telemachus was looking at you right now, like you'd said something that mattered and he was turning it over in his hands, feeling the weight of it.

It made your throat tight.

So you did what you always did when things got too real, too close, too much—you deflected. Smiled wide. Reached for the light.

"Okay!" You clapped your hands together, the sound breaking the silence like a snapped twig. "So. Teach me. Before I accidentally weave my scarf into the loom and create a diplomatic incident."

Telemachus blinked, the spell fracturing. He looked at you, then at the loom, then at your hands—which were hovering over the threads with the delicate uncertainty of someone trying to defuse a bomb.

"...Right," he said. He cleared his throat. Straightened on his stool. Pulled the mask back into place—neutral, composed, safe.

But the edges were softer now. Just slightly. Just enough.

"Watch my hands," he said, picking up the shuttle again. "It starts with the warp threads—these ones, the ones going up and down. You separate them with the heddle—this piece here—and then pass the shuttle through the gap."

You watched. Nodded. Absolutely didn't retain a single word.

"Then you pull the beater forward—this bar—to press the weft thread tight against the last row. Like this."

Click. The bar slid forward, and a new row appeared in the weave—neat, even, perfect.

"Now you try," he said, holding the shuttle out to you.

You took it like it was made of glass.

"Okay," you whispered, positioning yourself in front of the loom. "Okay. Separate the—the warp things. Pass the shuttle. Pull the... beater?" You looked at him for confirmation.

He nodded.

You took a breath.

And you tried.

The first pass went... badly. The shuttle caught on a thread, your hand jerked, and three rows of Telemachus' perfect work buckled like a startled horse. You gasped, tried to fix it, and somehow made it worse—tangling the thread into a knot that looked less like weaving and more like a bird's nest after a storm.

"Oh no—"

"Stop pulling," Telemachus said, leaning forward. "You're pulling too hard—just ease it—"

"I'm trying—"

"You're yanking—"

"Because it's stuck!"

He reached over and caught your hands—both of them, his fingers closing around yours before he seemed to realize what he'd done. The contact was brief—a beat, maybe two—but enough for you to feel the warmth of his palms, the rough texture of his calluses, the steadiness that lived in his grip like second nature.

He let go immediately. Pulled back. Cleared his throat.

"Gently," he said, his voice a fraction rougher than before. "Like you're guiding it, not forcing it."

You nodded, slightly dazed, and tried again.

The second attempt was marginally less catastrophic. The third was worse. The fourth produced something that Telemachus looked at for a long time without speaking, his expression cycling through several emotions before settling on a very diplomatic "...it's a start."

"It looks like a cloud," you said, tilting your head at the lumpy, uneven patch you'd created.

"It looks like a mistake," Telemachus corrected, but his voice was lighter now. Not warm—not quite—but lighter. Like something heavy had been set down.

"Clouds are mistakes," you said thoughtfully. "They're just water that didn't know where to go."

He looked at you.

You looked at him.

"That doesn't make any sense," he said.

"It makes perfect sense."

"It absolutely does not."

"It does. Think about it. Clouds are just—"

"I am not debating meteorology with you."

You grinned. He didn't grin back, but his mouth did that thing again—that tiny, involuntary twitch, the almost-smile that he kept swallowing like a secret.

You went back to weaving. Or attempting to weave. Or, more accurately, creating increasingly abstract textile art while Telemachus sat beside you and quietly fixed every row you ruined.

It was companionable, in its way. The silence between you wasn't heavy anymore—it was warm. Filled with the soft click of the shuttle and the rustle of thread and the occasional murmured instruction from Telemachus ("No, the other way—yes, that way—no, not THAT way—").

And then, because you were you, and your brain was a garden where ideas bloomed at random and without permission:

"Can you weave me a scarf?"

Telemachus' hands stilled.

He turned his head. Looked at you. Looked at the scarf currently draped around your neck—the warm, honey-colored one from home that you'd worn like a crown all day.

"You have a scarf," he said.

"I know, but this one's from home. I want one from here." You pulled at the end of your current scarf, running it through your fingers. "An Ithaca scarf. In Ithaca colors. So I can match."

"Match what?"

"Match you."

The words came out simple. Earnest. Without strategy or subtext or any of the layers that most people wrapped around their intentions.

You just said it—match you—like it was the most obvious thing in the world, like of course you'd want to wear his colors, of course you'd want something that tied you to this place, to him, because why wouldn't you? You were going to marry him. You were going to be his. And you wanted that. You actually wanted that.

Telemachus stared at you.

His expression was—hard to read. Not blank, not exactly. More like full—too many things happening at once behind his eyes, too many thoughts trying to surface, each one getting pulled back down before it could break through.

He looked like he was going to say no.

His mouth even started to form the shape of it—the slight downward pull, the tightening of the jaw, the way his gaze cut away toward the window like he was looking for an exit.

But then he looked back at you.

And you were just... sitting there. Hopeful. Open. The scarf from home draped around your shoulders like a hug, your eyes wide and bright and completely, disarmingly, impossibly sincere.

He sighed.

Not the sharp, frustrated sigh from before. This one was different—longer, slower, the kind of sigh that came from a man who was losing a battle he hadn't realized he was fighting.

"...Fine," he said.

"REALLY?!"

Your squeal was immediate. So loud and so sudden that Telemachus actually flinched, his hand jerking against the loom frame. You grabbed his arm—both hands, fingers curling around his bicep—and bounced in your seat, your face incandescent with joy.

"You're going to weave me a scarf! An Ithaca scarf! From the prince! That's—oh my gods, that's the most romantic thing anyone's ever—thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you!"

Telemachus sat rigidly in your grip, his arm going stiff, his ears blazing red. His mouth opened—to protest, to correct, to tell you that weaving a scarf was not romantic, it's just thread, stop reading into everything—but you'd already released him, already spinning back to the loom, already chattering about colors.

"Can it be teal? Like the sea? Or—no, wait—what about teal and blue? Like the deep kind of blue, not the sad kind. The regal kind. Is there a regal blue? There should be a regal blue. We should invent a regal blue—"

"I'll pick the colors," Telemachus said firmly.

"But—"

"I'll pick them."

You pressed your lips together, suppressing a grin that was fighting its way onto your face like a sunrise refusing to be held back.

"Okay," you said sweetly. "You pick."

He turned back to the loom.

You turned back to the loom.

And for a little while, neither of you said anything. Just sat there, side by side, in a room that smelled like wool and fig leaves, the late afternoon light pooling around you like something warm and heavy and good.

Your weaving was still terrible.

But you were smiling.

And if you noticed the way Telemachus' hands had grown steadier—the way the tension in his shoulders had loosened, the way his breathing had evened out into something calm and unhurried—you had the grace not to mention it.

(You noticed.)

(You always noticed the things that mattered.)

You looked around the room. Your chiton from last night was draped over the back of the chair where you'd left it, the rose sash folded—impressively neatly, actually, you'd been half-asleep—on the writing desk.

The clay pitcher had been refilled at some point during the night, and a small plate of bread and cheese had been left on the table near the door, covered with a cloth.

You swung your legs off the bed, toes curling against the cold stone, and padded over to the window.

Ithaca's morning was grey and soft, the sky pale as old linen, the sun hidden behind a thin veil of cloud. Below, the palace grounds stretched out in patches of dusty courtyard and low stone walls, and beyond them, the dark tangle of woods that climbed the hillside.

A cool breeze drifted through the open window, carrying the smell of salt and pine and something earthier—wet stone, maybe. Damp soil.

It was beautiful, in the way that a sigh was beautiful. Quiet and understated and a little bit sad.

You took a deep breath, held it, and then exhaled slowly through your nose.

Then you went to get dressed.

The selection was... limited. Your chest of belongings had been brought up the night before—your entire wardrobe, such as it was, folded into a single trunk that Calla had packed with military precision.

You had exactly four chitons (two white, one cream, one pale yellow), two pairs of sandals, a woolen shawl, one lightweight scarf from home that you adored, and the small leather pouch that still sat unopened on the bedside table.

You chose the pale yellow chiton because it made you feel like a sunbeam and you desperately needed to feel like a sunbeam today.

You pinned it at the shoulders with your simplest clasps—small bronze circles, nothing fancy—and ran your fingers through your hair until it fell in a way that you deemed acceptable. (Calla would've called it "a mess." Calla wasn't here. So it was intentional.)

Your tiara—a delicate, thin thing, more decorative than functional, woven gold with tiny floral detailing—went on last. You adjusted it carefully in the bronze mirror, tilting it left, then right, then left again.

"There," you murmured, satisfied.

You didn't know what you were supposed to do today. Nobody had told you. No schedule had been left, no attendant had knocked, no instructions had been slipped beneath the door.

You were just... here. In a palace that wasn't yours, in a kingdom that wasn't yours, wearing a tiara in your room alone because it made you feel slightly less like a stray animal that had been dropped off at someone's doorstep.

So you did what you always did when you didn't know what to do.

You went for a walk.

.☆.     .✩.        .☆.

The palace was emptier than it had any right to be.

You'd noticed it last night—the absence, the too-wide hallways and too-quiet corridors—but in the daylight, it was even more apparent.

The halls stretched out like veins drained of blood, long and grey and echoing with nothing but the soft slap of your sandals against stone.

You passed doors that were closed, rooms that were dark, alcoves that might have once held vases or small statues but now stood bare, their surfaces scrubbed clean.

You tried not to think about why it was so empty. The stories had reached even your little island—fragments, rumors, whispered retellings that got more dramatic with each version.

The suitors. The massacre. The servants who'd been—

You stopped that thought before it could finish.

Don't think about that, ____. Think about something nice. Think about flowers. Think about the bread you had this morning—it was actually pretty good for not having honey on it. Think about how Telemachus' ears turned pink yesterday when you—

You smiled to yourself.

There. Better.

You wandered without direction, turning corners at random, peering into rooms when the doors were cracked open, running your fingers along the stone walls just to feel the texture—rough and cool and ancient beneath your fingertips.

The palace was a labyrinth in miniature, corridors branching off into corridors, staircases leading to half-levels you hadn't known existed, and more than once you turned around only to realize you had absolutely no idea where you were.

This didn't bother you.

At home, you got lost in your own palace at least twice a week, and that one was a quarter the size of this. Getting lost was practically a hobby. An involuntary one, but still.

You were rounding yet another unfamiliar corner—this one narrower than the rest, the stone walls closer together, the light dimmer—when a sound caught your attention.

Not a voice. Not footsteps.

A chirp.

You stopped.

It came again—bright and quick and impossibly cheerful for a place this quiet. A bird. Somewhere close.

You followed the sound, your steps quickening, and turned one more corner to find yourself in a small alcove where the corridor widened near a high, arched window.

Pale morning light spilled through the opening, casting a column of dusty gold across the floor, and there—sitting on the wide stone windowsill with her legs folded beneath her and a small brown sparrow perched on her outstretched finger—was a girl.

She was young. Close to your age, maybe a year or two younger, with warm brown skin and dark hair pulled back in a loose, practical knot. She wore the plain linen tunic and roughspun belt of a palace servant, and at her feet sat a basket of folded linens that she was very clearly supposed to be delivering somewhere.

She wasn't delivering them.

She was talking to a bird.

Not talking talking—not words. But making these soft, low clicking sounds with her tongue, her head tilted at the same angle as the sparrow's, her fingers impossibly still as the tiny thing hopped from her knuckle to her wrist and back again.

There were seeds in her palm. You could see them—tiny, dark specks scattered across her skin, and the sparrow pecked at them with the delicate precision of someone being served a meal they'd been waiting for.

It was adorable.

"Hey!" you called out.

The effect was immediate and catastrophic.

The girl jolted like she'd been struck by lightning. Her hand jerked, the seeds scattered, and the sparrow launched itself off her finger with an indignant chirp, its tiny wings a blur as it shot through the window and disappeared into the grey sky.

The girl spun around on the windowsill, eyes wide as dinner plates, her face cycling through approximately fourteen emotions in the span of two seconds. Fear landed first—sharp and unmistakable—followed quickly by recognition, which brought a fresh wave of panic.

Because the girl recognized you.

And being caught slacking off by a visiting princess—the prince's betrothed, no less—was, apparently, the worst possible thing that could happen.

"Y-Your Highness!" she stammered, scrambling off the windowsill so fast she nearly toppled the basket of linens. She dropped into a bow—too deep, too fast, almost clipping her forehead on her own knee. "I—I'm so sorry, I was just—I was on my way to the—I was delivering the—"

She gestured wildly at the linens, then at the window, then at the empty space where the bird had been, as if physically pointing to each piece of evidence in her defense.

"I wasn't—I mean, I was, but I was about to—I'm going right now, I swear—"

"How did you do that?"

The girl froze mid-flail, one hand still pointed at the window.

"...What?"

"The bird thing." You stepped closer, genuine fascination radiating off you like heat from a brazier. "How did you get it to sit on your hand like that? I've been trying to do that for years. Birds hate me. Well, not hate—I think they're suspicious of me, which is honestly worse because at least hate is a strong emotion, but suspicion is just—" You waved your hand vaguely. "—lukewarm rejection."

The girl stared at you.

You stared back, eyebrows raised expectantly, head tilted, completely unbothered by the fact that you'd just derailed this poor woman's entire morning.

"I..." The girl blinked. Then swallowed. Then, very slowly, as if testing whether the ground beneath her feet was real, said, "I... keep seeds on me. In my belt pouch. The sparrows around the palace are used to me now, so they... come."

"Seeds," you breathed, as if she'd just revealed the location of Atlantis. "That's genius. That's—oh my gods, that's so simple. I've been trying whistling. I read somewhere that if you whistle the right pitch, birds think you're one of them, but I think I've just been scaring them because I can't actually whistle—I sort of just blow air and hope for the best."

To demonstrate, you attempted a whistle.

What came out was a sound that could generously be described as "a gentle breeze through a crack in a wall" and less generously described as "nothing."

"See?" You gestured at your own mouth, defeated. "Nothing. Not a single bird has ever responded to that."

The girl's mouth twitched.

Not a smile—not yet. She was still too rattled for a full smile, still too caught between the instinct to run and the slowly dawning realization that you were not, in fact, here to report her. But it was close. A tremor at the corners of her lips, a softening in her wide, dark eyes.

"Do you..." You hesitated, and for once—for once—something almost like shyness crept into your voice. Softer. Smaller. Less like a performance and more like a girl who didn't know many people and was hoping, very badly, that this one would say yes. "Do you think... I could try? With the seeds?"

The girl blinked again. "You... want to feed the birds?"

"If that's okay? I don't want to get you in trouble or anything—I know you have your..." You nodded at the basket. "Your linen... situation. But just for a minute? I just want to see if they'd come to me. Just once."

Something shifted in the girl's expression. The fear didn't vanish—it was still there, low and banked, like embers waiting for a gust of wind—but it moved aside, just enough to make room for something else. Curiosity, maybe. Or the particular kind of bewilderment that came from watching a princess beg to hand-feed sparrows in a hallway.

"...Sure," the girl said, after a pause that lasted just long enough to be uncertain. She reached into the small pouch at her belt and shook a few seeds into her palm, then carefully—gingerly, like she was handing over something fragile—tipped them into your waiting hands.

You cupped them like treasure.

"Okay," you whispered, positioning yourself near the window. "Okay, okay, okay. How do I—should I hold my hand out? Like this? Or flatter—wait, is flatter better? What if I hold it too high? Will they think I'm trying to grab them? I don't want them to think I'm a predator, I want them to think I'm a friend—"

"Just... be still," the girl said, her voice a little steadier now. "Hold your hand flat, don't move, and wait."

You held your hand flat.

You didn't move.

You waited.

For approximately eight seconds, which was, for you, a Herculean feat of patience.

And then—

A flutter. A rustle. A tiny, feathered blur that shot through the window so fast you almost flinched, circled once around the alcove, and landed—light as a whisper—on the edge of your fingertips.

It was a sparrow. But not the brown one from before. This one was smaller, its feathers a dusty, ruddy red, like clay or dried roses, with a pale belly and bright, dark eyes that blinked at you with the cautious assessment of something deciding whether you were a food source or a threat.

You held your breath.

The sparrow cocked its head.

Then—with the daintiest, most delicate little motion—it hopped forward, dipped its beak into your palm, and began to eat.

The sound that came out of you was not dignified.

It was a giggle—high and bright and so genuine it seemed to startle the bird for half a second before it decided, apparently, that you were harmless and went back to eating. Your whole face lit up, cheeks aching from the size of your grin, your eyes sparkling with the kind of pure, uncomplicated delight that most people stopped feeling around age seven.

"Oh my gods," you whispered, barely able to contain yourself. "Look at him. He's eating. From my hand. He's so tiny. He's so red. I love him. I love him immediately. Does he have a name? Can I name him? I'm naming him. His name is Ares."

"...Ares?" the girl repeated, a small, bewildered smile finally breaking through.

"He looks like a warrior," you said matter-of-factly. "A very small, very round warrior. Look at him. He's fearless."

Ares, the sparrow, was currently pecking at a seed that was slightly too big for his beak with the quiet intensity of someone working through a personal challenge.

You watched him with the kind of adoration usually reserved for firstborn children and then—abruptly, without warning, as if the thought had just materialized in your brain and immediately demanded to be spoken aloud—you turned to the girl.

"Do you think this tiara makes me look too powerful?"

The girl's smile faltered. Not from offense—from sheer confusion. Her eyes darted up to the thin gold band on your head, then back to your face, then back to the tiara, as if trying to decipher whether the question was genuine, rhetorical, or some kind of elaborate royal test.

You waited, expression open and earnest and completely, alarmingly sincere.

The girl's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"Um..." She glanced at the tiara one more time. "...Absolutely powerful?"

Your face exploded into a grin.

"Thank you!" You pressed your free hand—the one not currently serving as a sparrow buffet—to your chest. "That's exactly what I was going for. Powerful but approachable. Like a queen, but one you'd want to have lunch with. My mother always said a tiara should make a statement, not a threat, and I think this one says—" You tilted your head, considering. "—'I am in charge, but I would also like to know where you got those shoes.'"

The girl stared at you.

You stared back, still grinning.

The sparrow ate another seed.

"I'm sorry," the girl said slowly, shaking her head as if to recalibrate her entire understanding of how princesses behaved. "Are you... are you always like this?"

"Like what?"

"Like..." She gestured at all of you. "...this."

"Hmm." You considered the question genuinely. "Yes. Pretty much. Is that a problem?"

"No, I—no. It's just..." A small, breathless laugh escaped her—surprised, like it had slipped out before she could catch it. "You're not what I expected."

"I get that a lot," you said cheerfully. "What's your name?"

The shift was so quick—so seamlessly natural—that the girl answered before she could think to hesitate.

"Eleni."

"Eleni," you repeated, savoring it. "Eleni. That's a beautiful name. It sounds like a bell. Eleni." You said it one more time, just because you liked the way it felt in your mouth. Then, with the kind of abruptness that would've given any etiquette tutor a heart attack, you turned to face her fully, the sparrow still balanced on your other hand, and said:

"Will you be my friend?"

Eleni's eyes went wide.

"I—what?"

"My friend," you repeated, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. "I don't know anyone here. I don't have any of my handmaidens from home—they all stayed behind—and I don't really know how anything works in this palace, and I've already gotten lost four times this morning and it's not even midday, and—"

You paused. Took a breath. Noticed the look on Eleni's face—something between shock and the kind of cautious hope that came with being offered something too good to believe—and softened.

"I know you're... I know you work here," you said, your voice gentler now. Quieter. "I'm not trying to—I don't want to make things weird for you or get you in trouble or anything. And I promise—I promise—I won't treat you like staff. I mean, not that there's anything wrong with being staff! Being staff is great. It's just that I don't want a servant, I want a..." You waved your hand, searching. "A fashion consultant. A gossip partner. A person who can tell me which hallway leads where and also whether my sash clashes with my sandals. A friend. An actual friend."

You said it plainly. Openly. Without any of the pretense or strategy that usually accompanied royal relationships—because you didn't have pretense or strategy. You had earnestness, and too much of it, and you wielded it the way other princesses wielded daggers: clumsily, relentlessly, and with zero self-preservation.

Eleni looked at you for a long time.

The kind of long time that stretched and breathed and held space for all the quiet things that lived beneath the surface of a question like that.

She was a servant—she knew what that meant in a palace like this. She knew what the risks were, what the whispers would say, what happened to girls who got too close to the wrong people.

But you were looking at her with those bright, open eyes, and the sparrow was still eating from your hand, and you'd asked about her name like it mattered—like she mattered—and no one in this palace had done that in a very, very long time.

Eleni smiled.

It was small. Cautious. But real.

"I... yeah," she said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. "Yeah, okay. I'll be your friend."

Your reaction was instantaneous and devastating.

You squealed—actually squealed, loud enough that the sparrow finally had enough and launched itself off your hand with an offended chirp, disappearing out the window in a blur of red feathers.

You didn't even notice. You were too busy bouncing on your toes, hands clasped together, beaming at Eleni like she'd just handed you the moon.

"Really?! Oh, this is going to be so good. We're going to be best friends. I can feel it. I have a very strong intuition about these things—Calla says it's just wishful thinking, but Calla also said I'd hate the boat ride and I only threw up twice, so clearly she's not always right—"

Eleni was laughing now. Not loudly—carefully, like she was still testing whether this was allowed—but laughing, her hand pressed over her mouth, her shoulders shaking.

"Oh!" You spun back to her, grabbing her free hand with both of yours. "And we should have a picnic. With the birds. Can birds eat cheese? We should find out. That feels like important scientific research."

"I... don't think birds eat cheese," Eleni managed between laughs.

"We won't know until we try, Eleni."

☆ ✩ ☆

𓆩⚝𓆪 ⋆｡˚TELEMACHUS P.O.V˚｡⋆ 𓆩⚝𓆪

The training yard sat at the back of the palace, tucked behind the kitchens and partially hidden by a low stone wall covered in creeping ivy.

It was nothing impressive—a flat stretch of packed earth, a weapons rack that had seen better decades, and a few wooden posts scarred with the evidence of years of abuse. The kind of space that existed purely for function—no spectators, no ceremony, just dirt and steel and sweat.

Telemachus liked it here.

He liked the simplicity. The honesty of it. In the training yard, everything was exactly what it appeared to be: a sword was a sword, a target was a target, and when you swung wrong, the impact in your wrists told you so without diplomacy or subtext.

Unlike, say, an engagement feast.

He drove his practice sword forward—a blunted bronze blade, heavy enough to build strength—and struck the wooden post with a crack that echoed across the yard. His muscles burned. Good. He struck again. The post shuddered. Again. The vibration rattled up his arms, his shoulders, his teeth.

"You know that post can't fight back, right?"

The voice came from behind him—lazy, amused, dripping with the particular brand of casual irreverence that belonged to exactly one person.

Telemachus didn't turn around. "I'm aware."

A laugh. Footsteps on packed earth. Then Peisistratus appeared at the edge of his vision, leaning against the stone wall with his arms folded, his dark hair still damp from his own training session earlier. He was grinning—the kind of grin that meant trouble, or commentary, or both.

Peisistratus was Telemachus' closest friend. Had been since they were boys—back when "friendship" meant stealing each other's food and pretending to be heroes in the olive groves.

He was the son of Nestor, raised in Pylos, and he'd come to Ithaca at Odysseus' invitation to help rebuild after the slaughter. Smart, capable, and annoyingly perceptive in the way that only people who genuinely cared about you could be.

He was also, unfortunately, incapable of keeping his mouth shut.

"So," Peisistratus said, drawing the word out like taffy. He picked at a loose thread on his tunic, deliberately casual. "I hear your betrothed named a dolphin."

Telemachus' grip tightened on the sword. "Don't."

"Pericles, wasn't it? Cute name. Distinguished. I hear the dolphin had a scar—very heroic. A real veteran of the sea."

"Peisistratus."

"I also hear she told you that you look like a—what was it?" He tapped his chin, pretending to think, and Telemachus could feel the grin widening behind him without even looking. "A 'handsome storm cloud'? Is that right?"

Telemachus drove the sword into the post so hard the wood splintered.

He stood there for a moment, breathing hard, the muscles in his arms twitching with exertion, before slowly—slowly—pulling the blade free and letting it drop to his side.

"Are you done?" he asked flatly, still not turning around.

"Not even close." Peisistratus pushed off the wall and sauntered over, plucking a waterskin from the rack and tossing it to Telemachus, who caught it without looking. "Come on. Cool off. You've been hacking at that thing since dawn."

Telemachus didn't want to cool off. He wanted to hit something until his brain stopped replaying the image of his betrothed picking up a fish with her bare hands in front of the entire Ithacan court.

But his body was starting to disagree with his pride, so he uncapped the waterskin and drank deeply, water spilling down his chin and onto the front of his sweat-damp tunic. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and leaned against the post, chest heaving.

Peisistratus settled beside him on the low wall, one leg swinging, his expression sliding from teasing into something more genuine. He studied Telemachus for a moment—the tension in his jaw, the rigid set of his shoulders, the way his eyes stared straight ahead at nothing in particular.

"You know," Peisistratus said, softer now, "all jokes aside... she's pretty."

Telemachus exhaled through his nose. "Is that supposed to help?"

"I'm just saying. Could be worse. I've seen the marriage matches some kingdoms send—half of them look like they were assembled by committee, and the other half have the personality of a tax ledger." He shrugged. "At least yours has... spirit."

"Spirit," Telemachus repeated, and the word came out sharp enough to cut. He set the waterskin down and crossed his arms, his jaw working in the way it always did when he was trying to find the right words for something that was eating him alive.

"She's..." He stopped. Started again. "She called me pretty, Peisistratus. In front of my parents. In front of the guards. She ate fish with her hands. She knocked over the salt—twice—she doesn't know how to use a proper greeting, she introduced herself to me before my parents, which is a breach of protocol so basic that children know better, and at one point during the feast she asked my mother if Ithaca had 'the fun kind of olives or the boring kind,' and I—"

He dragged both hands down his face, his voice muffled behind his palms.

"I cannot do this."

Peisistratus watched him, expression neutral.

"She seems... sweet," he offered.

"She seems oblivious," Telemachus corrected, dropping his hands. "I don't need sweet. I need someone who can hold a conversation with a foreign dignitary without asking them about their shoes. The engagement feast is one thing—that was just us, just Ithaca. But the formal dinner is in less than a week. There are already delegations arriving. Representatives from half a dozen kingdoms, and they are going to be watching, and judging, and if she—"

He stopped himself. Clenched his jaw. Looked away.

"If she what?" Peisistratus asked quietly.

Telemachus was silent for a long moment. The wind moved through the training yard, stirring dust and the faint scent of olive blossoms from somewhere beyond the wall.

"I wanted a partner," he said, finally. Quietly. Like admitting it cost him something. "Not a—a crown accessory. Not a pretty face that smiles at the right time and says the wrong thing. I wanted someone who could stand beside me and make people think. Someone sharp. Someone serious. Someone who understands what this kingdom has been through and what it's going to take to hold it together."

He swallowed hard.

"She's... pretty. I'll grant her that. She's very pretty. But pretty doesn't run a kingdom. Pretty doesn't earn respect from men who watched my family nearly fall apart. Pretty doesn't—"

He cut himself off again, the words tangling in his throat.

Peisistratus let the silence sit for a moment. Then, in a tone that was careful but pointed, he said: "Why did you pick her scroll, then?"

Telemachus went still. "...What?"

"Her scroll." Peisistratus raised an eyebrow. "Out of the whole basket—all those marriage proposals your mother collected—you picked hers. Why?"

The silence that followed was so thick you could've choked on it.

Telemachus' eyes dropped to the ground. His jaw shifted. Once. Twice. His fingers curled and uncurled at his sides.

"I..." He cleared his throat. "I just... picked one."

A beat.

"You just picked one," Peisistratus repeated, slowly.

"My mother told me to choose," Telemachus said, and the defensive edge in his voice did absolutely nothing to help his case. "She dumped an entire basket of scrolls at my feet and told me to choose, and I was tired, and I didn't want to—I wasn't going to sit there and read through every single—I just—"

He stopped. Closed his eyes.

"I grabbed one," he admitted, very quietly. "Without looking."

The silence lasted exactly two seconds.

Then Peisistratus howled.

It wasn't a chuckle. It wasn't a polite laugh. It was a full-bodied, head-thrown-back, chest-rattling howl of laughter that echoed across the training yard and startled a flock of birds from the nearby olive tree. He doubled over, one hand braced on his knee, the other slapping the stone wall as tears gathered at the corners of his eyes.

"You—" He gasped. "You—a student of Athena—goddess of wisdom—"

"Shut up—"

"—chose his future wife—the woman he'll spend the rest of his life with—"

"I swear to the gods—"

"—by grabbing blindly into a basket like a child fishing for sweets at a festival?!"

Peisistratus collapsed sideways against the wall, wheezing. His face was red. His shoulders shook. Every time he seemed close to composing himself, he'd look at Telemachus' murderous expression and dissolve all over again.

"I will end you," Telemachus said, his voice low and deadly and completely, utterly ineffective against a man who was currently crying with laughter.

"Oh gods—" Peisistratus wiped his eyes, still shaking. "Oh, that's rich. That is the funniest thing I have heard in my entire—no, no, wait—" He held up a hand, forcing himself upright, his lips pressed together in a visible, trembling effort to be serious. "Wait. I'm done. I'm serious now. I'm—"

He looked at Telemachus.

Telemachus glared back, arms crossed, jaw tight, ears pink.

Peisistratus snorted—a single, traitorous burst of laughter that he immediately tried to disguise as a cough.

"I'm done," he insisted, holding up both hands. "I'm done, I promise. I'm—okay." He took a deep breath. Then another. Then pressed his fist to his mouth and nodded. "Okay. I'm serious now."

"I doubt that."

"I am." Peisistratus straightened, rolled his shoulders, and—miraculously—managed to rearrange his expression into something approaching solemn. The laughter was still there, banked behind his eyes like coals, but he was trying. He was genuinely trying.

"Look," he said, his voice leveling out. "You're lucky, you know that?"

Telemachus raised an eyebrow. "Lucky."

"You are. You blindly pulled a scroll from a pile, and you got a girl who's beautiful, clearly kind, and—from what I can tell—doesn't have a malicious bone in her body." He tilted his head. "Do you know how many princes would kill for that? Most arranged matches come with ambition attached. Scheming fathers. Political strings. You got a girl who names dolphins and worries about the politics of pink."

"That is not reassuring—"

"I'm not trying to reassure you. I'm trying to tell you to wait." Peisistratus' voice sharpened—not unkind, but firm. The teasing was gone now, replaced by something steadier. "You've known her for less than a day, Telemachus. One day. And you've already decided she's not enough. Don't you think that's a little premature?"

Telemachus opened his mouth. Then closed it.

"Most of us don't get to choose," Peisistratus continued, quieter. "Most princes marry whoever their parents decide, and they spend the rest of their lives learning to live with it. Our fathers did. Our grandfathers did. It's the way of things. And yeah, maybe she's not what you pictured—but since when has anything in your life gone according to plan?"

The question landed like a stone in water.

Telemachus didn't answer. He just stood there, jaw tight, staring at the scarred practice post like it held the answers to questions he wasn't ready to ask.

Peisistratus watched him for a moment longer, then pushed off the wall and clapped him on the shoulder—solid, grounding, the kind of contact that said I'm on your side even when you're being an idiot.

"Give her a chance," he said simply. "You might be surprised."

Telemachus said nothing.

Peisistratus sighed, shook his head, and walked off toward the kitchens, muttering something about breakfast and idiots who deserved each other.

.☆.     .✩.        .☆.

Telemachus lingered in the training yard for another few minutes, though he couldn't have said why. He wasn't training anymore. He was just... standing. Stewing. Turning Peisistratus' words over in his head like a stone he couldn't put down.

Give her a chance.

Easy for Peisistratus to say. He wasn't the one sitting next to a girl who'd called olives "boring or fun" in front of the queen. He wasn't the one whose future wife had introduced herself out of order and eaten with her fingers and looked up at him with those wide, bright, impossibly earnest eyes and said—

"You're so much more handsome than I thought you'd be."

He shook his head. Hard.

Stop thinking about that.

He grabbed the practice sword, sheathed it on the rack, and left the yard.

The corridors were cooler inside the palace, the stone walls leeching the warmth from the air and replacing it with a dim, muted quiet.

Telemachus walked without purpose—or at least that's what he told himself. His feet carried him toward his chambers, then past them, then down a corridor he didn't usually take, the one that wound past the eastern wing where the guest rooms were.

Where her room was.

Not that he was going there. He wasn't. He was just walking. Clearing his head. Doing the very normal, very rational thing of taking a long, aimless route through his own palace for no reason whatsoever.

And that's when he heard it.

Your laugh.

Not the nervous, too-bright laugh from the feast. Not the performative giggle of a princess trying to charm. This was something else—something unguarded. Open. The kind of laugh that bubbled up from somewhere deep and couldn't be held back, the kind that sounded like sunlight looks when it hits water.

Telemachus stopped walking.

His feet just... stopped. On their own. Without his permission.

He was near the eastern corridor, the one with the high arched windows, and the sound was coming from just around the next corner. Close enough to hear clearly. Close enough that if he took three more steps, he'd be in full view.

He didn't take three more steps.

He took one—just enough to peer around the edge of the wall, half-hidden in shadow, his shoulder pressed against the cool stone.

And there you were.

Standing near the window, your pale yellow chiton catching the grey morning light, your tiara slightly askew. Your hand was extended, palm flat, and perched on your fingertips—impossibly, delicately—was a small red sparrow, pecking at seeds with the focused intensity of someone who took their meals very seriously.

You were glowing.

Not literally—not in any divine or metaphysical sense. But the way you stood there, head bowed toward the bird, your whole face soft with a kind of wonder that most people grew out of and you clearly hadn't—it made the air around you feel different. Warmer, somehow. Lighter.

Beside you stood one of the palace servants—a young woman Telemachus vaguely recognized from the laundry rotation, though he couldn't recall her name. She was laughing, too—quietly, almost shyly—and the basket of linens she was supposed to be delivering sat forgotten on the ground between them, the folded cloths slowly unfolding.

You were keeping her from her work. That was the first thing Telemachus noticed, and the strategist in him—the prince, the heir, the boy who'd been raised on duty and discipline and the quiet, grinding weight of responsibility—flagged it immediately.

She should be working. You're distracting her. This is exactly the kind of—

"—and I told him, I said, 'Father, if the goat doesn't want to wear the garland, you can't force it, that's just bad diplomacy—'"

The servant burst out laughing, and the sound mixed with yours, two different tones weaving together in the quiet hallway like an accidental harmony.

Your laugh crinkled your nose.

He hadn't noticed that before.

Telemachus stood there, half-hidden behind the wall, and watched you feed a bird and tell a story about a goat and make a servant laugh like the world wasn't heavy, and something in his chest did a thing that he didn't have a name for and didn't want to examine.

He should interrupt. He should step around the corner, clear his throat, tell the servant to get back to her duties, tell you to stop wandering the palace unsupervised.

That would be the responsible thing. The princely thing. The thing a man who wanted order and discipline and a kingdom that ran like a well-oiled machine would do.

He didn't.

He stood there for another moment—just one more, just long enough to watch the sparrow hop from your hand to your wrist and back again, just long enough to hear you whisper "Good boy, Ares" to a bird you'd named after the god of war—and then he turned on his heel and walked the other way.

His steps were quieter than usual.

He didn't know why.

The island rose from the sea like a clenched fist—all jagged cliffs and dark stone, the coastline rough and salt-bitten and wild in a way that felt less like a kingdom and more like something the ocean had tried to swallow and failed. Cypress trees clung to the hillsides in stubborn clusters, their dark branches cutting sharp silhouettes against a sky that couldn't seem to decide between blue and grey.

The harbor below was small but functional, lined with fishing boats and trade vessels that rocked gently in the tide, their hulls stained with salt and age.

Beyond the harbor, the land climbed—steep, rocky paths winding upward through wild brush and olive groves, cutting between low stone walls that had clearly been there longer than anyone alive remembered.

And at the top, barely visible through the morning haze, sat the palace.

It wasn't grand. Not in the way you were used to—not the sprawling, whitewashed estates dripping in bougainvillea that dotted the wealthier islands.

Ithaca's palace was sturdy. Built from the same grey-brown stone as the cliffs themselves, it looked less like a home and more like something that had grown out of the earth, stubborn and ancient and refusing to be moved.

You leaned over the railing of the ship, squinting.

"It's very..." You searched for the word. "...pointy."

Beside you, the captain of your escort—a broad-shouldered man named Doros who had been assigned by your father to deliver you safely and, presumably, quietly—let out a breath that could've been a sigh, a prayer, or both.

"It's Ithaca, Your Highness."

"I know it's Ithaca." You tilted your head, trying to find a different angle. "I just thought it would be more... pink."

Doros said nothing.

You took that as agreement.

The ship docked with a heavy groan of timber and rope, and the process of unloading began almost immediately—not that there was much to unload.

Your father, ever the pragmatist, had been clear: this wasn't a relocation. This was a delivery. You were being sent with a modest dowry, a chest of personal belongings, and exactly zero handmaidens.

That last part still stung.

Not because you were spoiled—well, not entirely because you were spoiled—but because Calla had been with you since you were nine. She'd braided your hair before every feast, talked you down from every tantrum, held your hand through every nightmare. And now, standing on the deck of a foreign ship in a foreign harbor, watching your escort prepare to leave you behind like a parcel dropped at the right address, you felt her absence like a missing tooth.

Your fingers curled around the small leather pouch at your hip—a going-away gift from your mother. Inside were three things: a dried sprig of lavender from the garden outside your bedroom window, a small clay pot of your favorite lip tint (berry-rose, the good kind, the kind that lasted through meals and didn't smear when you inevitably touched your face), and a folded piece of linen with your mother's handwriting on it.

You hadn't read the note yet.

You were saving it. For when you needed it.

(You had a feeling that would be soon.)

"Your Highness." Doros appeared at your side, his expression the careful, professional blankness of a man who had been explicitly instructed to get you to Ithaca in one piece and was deeply relieved to have accomplished it. "The receiving party is assembled at the base of the path. We should disembark."

You nodded, straightening your chiton and running your fingers along the rose sash one last time. You'd managed to keep it unwrinkled through the entire two-day voyage, which you considered a personal triumph of discipline and willpower. (Noura would've called it obsession. Noura wasn't here.)

"How do I look?" you asked.

Doros glanced at you. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"...Presentable, Your Highness."

"Presentable?" You gasped, hand flying to your chest. "Doros. I have been sitting in rosewater-scented silk for two days. I have gold on my cheekbones. I'm not presentable—I'm a vision."

A muscle twitched in Doros' jaw. "Of course, Your Highness. A vision."

"Thank you." You smoothed your sash. "Was that so hard?"

He didn't answer. He simply turned and led the way to the gangplank, his shoulders set with the rigid determination of a man counting down the minutes until he could board his ship and sail far, far away.

You didn't blame him. You were a lot.

You knew you were a lot.

You just didn't think that was a bad thing.

.☆.     .✩.         .☆.

The receiving party was... small. Smaller than you'd expected, anyway.

Back home, when foreign dignitaries arrived, there were processions—musicians and flower girls and at least three people whose entire job was to throw rose petals on the ground so no one had to walk on bare stone like a peasant. Your mother had once organized a welcoming ceremony so elaborate that the visiting ambassador had actually wept. (Whether from joy or overwhelm was still debated.)

But this wasn't your mother's kingdom. And Ithaca, it seemed, didn't throw petals.

A small cluster of figures waited at the base of the stone path—guards, mostly, their faces impassive, their postures stiff and watchful in a way that reminded you, with a small jolt, that this was a kingdom that had only recently been through bloodshed. A few attendants stood off to the side with your luggage already being carted up the hill, and ahead of them—

You saw him.

And every thought in your head—every worry, every fear, every carefully rehearsed greeting your father had drilled into you for the past week—evaporated like morning dew on hot stone.

Because oh.

Oh, gods.

He was standing at the front of the group, slightly apart from the guards, arms crossed over his chest in a way that managed to look both regal and deeply, profoundly annoyed.

He was tall—taller than you'd imagined, and you'd imagined quite a bit during those two days at sea—with a lean, sharp-angled build that spoke of training and discipline and probably not enough meals.

His jaw was set, his posture rigid, and his dark hair—loose, slightly wind-tossed, curling just barely at the ends—framed a face that was...

Oh.

Oh no.

He was beautiful.

Not pretty. Not handsome. Beautiful, in the way that dangerous things were beautiful—storms and cliffs and the edge of a blade catching light. His features were sharp but not unkind, all clean lines and strong bones, with dark brows drawn low over eyes that were—

You squinted.

—gorgeous. Warm and brown and deep and currently staring at you with an expression that could only be described as I would rather be literally anywhere else on earth.

And you thought: I am the luckiest princess alive.

"Your Highness," Doros muttered beside you, low enough that only you could hear. "Protocol dictates that you greet the King and Queen first—"

But you were already moving.

Your sandals hit the stone path, and your feet carried you forward with a momentum that had nothing to do with protocol and everything to do with the fact that Telemachus, Prince of Ithaca, Son of Odysseus, Heir to the Throne, was standing right there and he looked like that and you were simply not equipped—emotionally, mentally, or spiritually—to be a rational person about it.

You crossed the gap between the gangplank and the receiving party in what felt like three steps, your chiton swishing around your ankles, your rose sash fluttering behind you like a tiny, very enthusiastic flag.

A few of the guards blinked. One shifted his weight. Another's mouth twitched in something that might have been confusion or might have been horror—it was hard to tell.

You stopped directly in front of Telemachus.

He looked down at you.

You looked up at him.

Up close, he was even worse. The kind of face that made your brain do that thing where all your thoughts tried to leave through the same door at once and ended up in a pile on the floor. There was a faint scar near his temple—thin and pale, barely visible—and his eyelashes were unfairly long, and his mouth—

"Hi," you breathed.

Telemachus stared at you.

His expression didn't change. Not even a little. His arms stayed crossed, his jaw stayed set, and those beautiful, terrible eyes stayed fixed on you with an intensity that you—in your infinite optimism—interpreted as captivation but was, in fact, closer to bewilderment.

A beat passed. Then two.

"...Hello," he said, finally.

His voice was low. Measured. Cool in a way that wasn't quite cold but wasn't warm either—like the surface of still water that you couldn't tell was shallow or deep.

And you, a girl who had once described a Spartan general's homeland as "near the pretty beach," looked up at the crown prince of Ithaca—a man raised on war and suspicion and twenty years of waiting for a father who might never come home—and said, with every ounce of sincerity in your entire body:

"You are so much more handsome than I thought you'd be."

Behind you, somewhere in the middle distance, Doros made a sound. It was small. Strangled. The kind of sound a man made when his soul briefly left his body.

Telemachus' brow twitched.

Just—twitched. The barest, most microscopic movement, like a crack forming in stone. His arms tightened across his chest, and something flickered behind his eyes—surprise, maybe, or discomfort, or the very specific kind of alarm that came from having a stranger beam at you like you'd just handed them the sun.

"I—" he started.

"Because I was worried," you continued, completely unbothered by his lack of response, already barreling ahead with the enthusiasm of someone who had never once in her life read a room correctly. "My father didn't send a portrait, and I kept asking and he kept saying it 'wasn't relevant,' which is a terrible answer because of course it's relevant—I'm going to have to look at you for the rest of my life, and if you'd turned out to be, like... unfortunate-looking, I would've had to learn to love you with my eyes closed, and that just seems impractical—"

"Your High—" Doros tried.

"—but you're not!" You clasped your hands together beneath your chin, your eyes practically sparkling. "You're, like... really, really pretty. In a broody sort of way. Like a storm cloud, but in a good way. A handsome storm cloud." You paused. Tilted your head. "Do people tell you that? That you look like a handsome storm cloud? Because they should."

Silence.

Complete, absolute, ear-ringing silence.

The guards weren't even pretending to look straight anymore—half of them were openly staring, eyes wide, mouths slightly parted, in the universal expression of did that just happen. One guard in the back turned to his companion and mouthed something that looked suspiciously like what the fuc—

And Telemachus—

Telemachus, who hadn't asked for this. Who hadn't asked for any of this. Who had picked a scroll from a basket without reading it because his mother had ordered him to choose and he'd been too tired and too angry and too done to care—

Telemachus felt something he absolutely did not want to feel.

His ears went warm.

Not his face—gods, no, he had more control than that. But his ears, the traitorous things, flushed a shade of pink that he was desperately, furiously grateful his hair mostly covered. His jaw tightened. His arms pressed harder against his chest, like he was physically trying to hold himself together.

Handsome storm cloud, his brain repeated, completely against his will.

She called you a handsome storm cloud.

He blinked. Hard.

"...Thank you," he said, and the words came out so flat, so devoid of emotion, that they could've been carved into a tombstone. "That's... very kind."

Your smile only grew wider.

"I'm ____," you said, extending your hand in a way that was technically correct but entirely too casual for a first meeting between two betrothed royals. You were supposed to bow. You were supposed to offer a formal greeting. You were supposed to address him by his full title and acknowledge his lineage before even thinking about physical contact.

You did none of those things.

You just stuck your hand out and grinned like you were meeting a new friend at a festival.

Telemachus looked at your hand. Then at your face. Then back at your hand.

He didn't take it.

Instead, he gave a single, curt nod and said, "I know who you are."

Your hand lingered in the air for a beat—long enough to be awkward, but not long enough for you to register why it was awkward—and then you dropped it, entirely unbothered, and turned on your heel to face the two figures you should have addressed first.

Way first.

At least ten minutes ago first.

King Odysseus and Queen Penelope stood just behind and to the right of their son, and the fact that you hadn't only bypassed them entirely but had also spent the last ninety seconds telling their heir he looked like weather was... well.

It was a choice.

Odysseus stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his expression unreadable in the way that only a man who had spent twenty years lying, surviving, and outwitting gods could manage.

He was shorter than you'd expected—not short, exactly, but compact. Dense. Built like a weapon that had been used a thousand times and never dulled. His eyes, sharp and blue-grey like the sea itself, tracked you with a stillness that would have been unnerving if you'd been paying enough attention to notice.

You were not.

Penelope stood beside him, one hand resting loosely in the crook of her husband's arm. She was striking—not in the loud, obvious way, but in the quiet kind, the kind that crept up on you.

Her features were elegant, composed, her dark hair threaded with grey and pinned neatly back. She wore the weariness of a woman who had spent two decades holding a kingdom together with thread and silence and the sheer, stubborn refusal to break.

She was watching you the way someone watched a moth fly too close to a candle—not with cruelty, but with a kind of patient, measured curiosity.

Let's see, her expression seemed to say. Let's see what you do.

And what you did was this:

You gathered your skirts, dipped into a bow that was—admittedly—a little too quick and a little too bouncy, and launched into the greeting your father had made you memorize word for word, drilling it into you until you could recite it in your sleep. (You had, in fact, recited it in your sleep. Calla had confirmed this.)

"Your Majesties," you began, your voice pitched with a brightness that was equal parts nerves and genuine enthusiasm, "it is with the deepest honor and the most sincere gratitude that I stand before you today, humbly representing my father, King Leander of Kythra, and our people, who rejoice in this blessed union between our great houses."

So far so good. The words came out clean and practiced, almost musical in their cadence. You straightened from your bow, chin lifted, eyes bright.

"On behalf of the Kingdom of Kythra, I extend our thanks for your generosity in welcoming me into your noble household," you continued, hands clasped neatly in front of you, "and I vow to uphold the values of both our kingdoms with dignity, grace, and—"

You paused.

Your brow furrowed. The next word was supposed to be devotion. Or was it dedication? Your father had used both at different points, and you'd asked him to pick one, and he'd said "they mean the same thing," and you'd said "but they don't sound the same," and then he'd rubbed his face and told you to just say whatever came to mind—

"—and enthusiasm!" you finished, beaming.

Silence.

Behind you, Doros closed his eyes.

Odysseus' expression didn't change. Not a twitch, not a blink. He simply watched you with those sea-grey eyes, quiet and assessing and completely, maddeningly still.

Penelope, however—

Something shifted in her face. Not a smile, not exactly. But the faintest softening around her eyes, the tiniest easing of the careful composure she wore like armor. Her head tilted just slightly, barely perceptible, and for a single, fleeting moment, she looked...

Amused.

Not mockingly. Not cruelly. Just... amused. The way someone looked when they were handed something unexpected and hadn't yet decided what to do with it.

"Welcome to Ithaca, child," Penelope said, her voice smooth and measured. A queen's voice—warm enough to be gracious, cool enough to maintain distance. "We hope the journey was not too taxing."

"Oh, not at all!" you chirped. "The waves were a little much on the first night—I may have, um, returned my dinner to the sea—but after that it was lovely! The dolphins followed us for almost an hour yesterday. I named one. His name is Pericles. I don't know if he knows that, but I feel like he does."

Another beat of silence.

One of the guards coughed.

Penelope's mouth twitched.

Odysseus finally spoke, his voice low and dry and giving away absolutely nothing. "Pericles. The dolphin."

"Yes! He had a little scar on his fin—right here—" You pointed to your own shoulder, demonstrating. "So I thought he deserved a distinguished name. You know, for his battles."

Odysseus looked at you for a long, measured moment.

Then, without expression, he turned his gaze to Telemachus—who was standing rigidly beside his mother, jaw locked, eyes fixed on some middle-distance point above your head with the desperate intensity of a man trying to astral project out of his own body.

Something passed between father and son. Not a word. Not a look, exactly. Just... a frequency. The kind of silent, loaded communication that existed between people who had recently killed a room full of men together and were still figuring out how to have a normal conversation.

This is her? Telemachus' rigid posture seemed to scream.

This is her, Odysseus' blank stare confirmed.

Telemachus' jaw tightened another fraction.

Penelope, either unaware of or entirely indifferent to this silent exchange, gestured gracefully toward the stone path leading up to the palace. "You must be tired. We've prepared chambers for you. Tonight, there will be a feast to formally celebrate the engagement."

Your eyes went wide. "A feast?"

"A modest one," Penelope added quickly, though there was something in her tone that suggested she was already recalibrating her definition of "modest" based on the girl in front of her.

But you were already clasping your hands together, practically vibrating. "I love feasts. Are there going to be pastries? At home we have these little honey cakes with rose petals on top and they're divine—well, not divine divine, not like actual-gods divine, that would be blasphemous—but they're really good, and if you don't have them here, I can describe them to your baker because honestly they're very simple, it's just honey and almond flour and a little bit of—"

"We should walk," Telemachus cut in.

His voice wasn't harsh. But it was firm—a door closing on a conversation that had been left open too long. He didn't look at you when he said it. Just turned on his heel and began walking up the path, his strides long and purposeful, his back straight, his hands clenched at his sides in a way that might have been tension or might have been restraint or might have been both.

You watched him go for a moment, head tilted.

Then you turned to Penelope and whispered—not quietly enough—"Is he always this intense, or is that a special-occasion thing?"

Penelope's composure held. Barely. "...Walk with us, dear."

You fell into step beside the queen, matching her pace with a little skip that made your sash bounce. Behind you, Doros lingered at the base of the path, watching your retreating figure with the hollow expression of a man who had fulfilled his duty and would now like to go home and lie in a dark room for several days.

The walk up to the palace was steep—steeper than it looked from the harbor—and within minutes, your calves were burning in a way that your body was deeply offended by.

Your kingdom was flat. Blissfully, wonderfully, mercifully flat. The most rigorous physical activity you engaged in on a daily basis was walking to the garden and back, and even that sometimes required a rest stop and a cold drink.

But you didn't complain. Not because you were brave or stoic or any of those admirable things, but because Telemachus was walking ahead of you, and the view was—

Well.

You were motivated.

The path wound through groves of twisted olive trees and low stone walls covered in lichen, the air growing cooler and sharper with altitude. You could smell the sea from here—not the warm, perfumed salt of your home but something rawer, wilder, laced with pine and earth. Birds called from somewhere in the canopy, and the wind moved through the cypress branches with a low, constant sigh that sounded almost like breathing.

It was beautiful, in its way. Stark and serious and nothing like the soft, sun-drunk paradise you'd left behind—but beautiful. The kind of place that didn't ask you to love it. The kind that dared you to.

You liked that.

You liked it more than you expected to.

By the time you reached the palace gates—your breathing only slightly heavier than dignified—the sun had climbed to its midpoint, casting everything in harsh, white light. The stone walls of the palace rose up around you, thick and imposing, and as you passed through the main entrance, the temperature dropped like a held breath.

Inside, the palace was... quiet.

Not peaceful-quiet. Not restful-quiet. Empty-quiet. The kind of quiet that filled spaces where noise used to live.

Your sandals echoed against the stone floors, and the sound bounced off walls that seemed too bare, too scrubbed, too clean in a way that felt deliberate. Like someone had scoured not just the dirt but the memory of what had come before.

You didn't know about the suitors. Not the details, anyway—not the blood, not the screams, not the bodies dragged out under cover of night.

You knew the story the way most people knew it: Odysseus returned, the bad men were dealt with, the kingdom was restored. A happy ending. A hero's welcome.

But the halls remembered what the stories left out.

And even you—bright, bubbly, dizzyingly cheerful you—felt it. Something in the air that made your skin prickle. Something in the shadows that clung a little too tightly to the corners.

You shivered and pulled your sash closer around your shoulders.

An attendant—a quiet, thin-faced woman who introduced herself as Maia—led you to your chambers on the second floor.

The room was modest but clean: a carved wooden bed frame dressed in pale linen, a small writing desk near the window, a bronze mirror that was probably older than your entire kingdom. A clay pitcher of water sat on a low table beside a bowl of figs and olives, and someone had placed a sprig of wild thyme on the pillow, which you found immediately, devastatingly charming.

"If you need anything, Your Highness, you may ring the bell by the door," Maia said, her voice barely above a murmur. "The feast begins at sundown."

You thanked her—warmly, genuinely, with the kind of full-beam smile that made Maia blink twice before retreating—and then you were alone.

For the first time since leaving home.

Truly alone.

No Calla adjusting your pins. No Noura muttering under her breath. No mother waiting at the end of the hall with open arms and a knowing look.

Just you.

And a room that didn't smell like yours.

You stood in the center of it for a long moment, your hands hanging at your sides, your breath slow and careful. The silence pressed in from all directions, thick and cottony, and for just a heartbeat—one single, treacherous heartbeat—your smile faltered.

Your lower lip trembled.

Your eyes stung.

And then you blinked, exhaled sharply through your nose, and marched over to the pillow. You picked up the thyme sprig, brought it to your nose, and inhaled deeply.

"Okay," you whispered to no one. "Okay, okay, okay."

You tucked the thyme behind your ear.

You smoothed your sash.

You reapplied your lip tint.

And then you sat on the edge of the bed, pulled out the leather pouch from your hip, and cradled it in your lap like a small, precious animal.

You didn't open it.

Not yet.

Instead, you looked out the window—at the rocky hills and the dark trees and the silver line of the sea in the distance—and thought about pink sashes and handsome storm clouds and the way Telemachus' ears had turned red when you called him pretty.

He liked it, you decided, with absolutely no evidence to support this claim.

He definitely liked it.

.☆.     .✩.        .☆.

The feast was held in the great hall.

"Great" was perhaps generous—it was large, certainly, and old, and full of the kind of heavy wooden furniture that looked like it had been carved by people who took sitting very seriously.

Long tables ran the length of the room, flanked by benches and scattered cushions, and the walls were lined with torches that cast everything in flickering amber light.

At the head of the room, a raised platform held the royal table, where Odysseus and Penelope were already seated.

You'd been escorted in by Maia, who walked beside you with the careful attentiveness of someone who had been specifically told not to let you get lost, distracted, or sidetracked by anything shiny. (A wise precaution. There was a particularly interesting-looking tapestry in the hallway that you'd nearly wandered toward before Maia had gently steered you away by the elbow.)

The hall was fuller than you'd expected. Not packed—Ithaca didn't have enough people left for packed—but there were bodies.

Nobles from nearby estates, a few traveling merchants, some of the higher-ranking palace staff, and a scattering of foreign faces that belonged to the small diplomatic party that had accompanied your dowry. They sat in clusters along the lower tables, drinking and murmuring and casting curious glances toward the royal platform.

Toward you.

You were seated at the high table, between Telemachus and an empty chair that belonged to some advisor who had apparently been called away on "urgent business," which you suspected was code for "didn't want to sit next to the foreign bride." That was fine. It gave you more room to arrange your sash, which had gotten wrinkled during the walk up and was starting to bother you.

Telemachus sat to your left, straight-backed and silent, staring ahead at the hall with the focused intensity of a man who was trying very hard to pretend the person next to him didn't exist.

It wasn't working.

Mostly because you kept talking.

"Is that lamb?" you asked, leaning forward to peer at the platter being set down in the center of the table. "Oh, it is lamb. I love lamb. Well, I love most meat, but lamb is top three. Top three, easy. After chicken and whatever that thing is that they serve at the summer festival back home—Calla says it's goat but I'm not convinced because it tastes like—"

"It's lamb," Telemachus said, without looking at you.

"Right!" You beamed, entirely undeterred by his tone. "And is that—" You pointed at a bowl of dark, thick liquid. "—is that a sauce or a soup? Because it's in a bowl, which says soup, but it's very thick, which says sauce, and I don't want to make the wrong assumption because at home I once drank a sauce thinking it was soup and my sister laughed so hard she fell off her chair—"

"It's a dip," Telemachus said.

"A dip!" You said it like he'd just revealed the secrets of the universe. "Oh, that's smart. A bowl for dipping. Genius. Is it olive-based? It looks olive-based."

Telemachus finally turned his head—just slightly, just enough to look at you from the corner of his eye. His expression was the carefully composed mask of a man whose patience was being tested by forces beyond his comprehension.

"Yes," he said, in a voice that suggested he was answering not because he wanted to, but because he feared you'd keep guessing if he didn't.

"I knew it." You dipped a piece of bread into the bowl with the confidence of a woman who had absolutely not known it. "I'm very good at identifying dips. It's one of my skills."

A sound came from Telemachus' direction. Not a laugh—definitely not a laugh—but something closer to a sharp exhale through the nose, the kind that happened when your body wanted to react and your pride refused to let it.

You pretended not to notice.

The feast continued.

And it became, very quickly, apparent that you had... a complicated relationship with formal dining.

It started with the wine. A servant leaned in to pour from a ceramic pitcher, and you—distracted by the pattern on the pitcher, which featured tiny painted fish that you found delightful—turned to comment on them at the exact moment the wine hit your cup, resulting in a splash that sent a thin arc of red across the white linen tablecloth.

"Oh—!" You grabbed your napkin and dabbed at the stain, then realized the napkin was supposed to be in your lap, not on the table, and tried to discreetly move it back while the servant mopped up the spill.

"Sorry," you whispered to the servant, who gave you a look that was half-sympathetic and half-terrified.

Two minutes later, you reached for the bread basket at the same time as a nobleman seated to Telemachus' left, and instead of yielding—which protocol demanded, since he was older and higher-ranked—you held on, gave a cheerful "Oh! After you!" and then didn't let go, resulting in a brief, deeply uncomfortable tug-of-war over a bread roll that ended only when the nobleman surrendered it with a stiff smile and what appeared to be a silent prayer.

You ate the bread roll without noticing.

Then came the fish course. You'd been served a beautiful piece of grilled sea bream, arranged delicately on a bed of herbs with a drizzle of oil and a scatter of capers. It looked elegant. It looked refined. It looked like something that required a knife and careful, measured bites.

You picked it up with your fingers.

Not rudely—not like a barbarian, not with grabbing or tearing. You just... picked it up. Delicately, even, pinching the edges of the fillet between your thumb and forefinger and lifting it to your mouth like it was the most natural thing in the world. Because at home, that was the most natural thing in the world. Your kingdom's dining customs were relaxed, communal, hands-on—meals were meant to be shared and touched and enjoyed, not performed.

But this was not your kingdom.

And the look on the face of the noblewoman seated across from you—the silent, wide-eyed, mouth-slightly-open look of someone watching a princess eat fish with her bare hands at a royal engagement feast—told you everything you needed to know.

You froze mid-bite, the fillet hovering near your lips.

You looked left. Then right.

Everyone at the high table was using utensils.

Everyone.

Including Telemachus, who was holding his knife with the kind of precise, practiced grip that suggested he had been raised to eat like a prince even when his father wasn't there to watch.

Your eyes dropped to your own hands. To the fish. To the oil now glistening on your fingertips.

"...I'm... tasting it," you offered weakly. "For... quality."

Nobody said anything.

Penelope, seated at the far end of the table, took a slow sip of her wine. Her expression revealed nothing. But her eyes—dark and watchful and infinitely patient—lingered on you for just a moment longer than necessary.

You set the fish down. Wiped your fingers on your napkin. Picked up your knife with a sheepish smile and began cutting the fillet into tiny, careful pieces, each one smaller than the last, as if sheer precision could somehow erase the last thirty seconds from everyone's memory.

It couldn't.

The rest of the feast passed in a blur of small disasters.

You knocked over a salt dish while gesturing.

You asked what a dish was called and then immediately forgot and asked again three minutes later.

You complimented a servant's earrings so enthusiastically that the woman blushed and nearly dropped an entire platter of figs.

And at one point, during a toast to the engagement—a solemn, formal affair involving Odysseus raising his cup and saying something measured and grave about the joining of houses—you clinked your cup against Telemachus' so eagerly that wine sloshed over the rim and onto his wrist.

"Sorry!" you whispered, grabbing your napkin again.

"It's fine," Telemachus said, pulling his hand back. His voice was flat, but his jaw had tightened, and there was a tension in his shoulders that hadn't been there at the start of the evening.

Or maybe it had. Maybe it had always been there—that wound-tight, rigid control, like a bowstring pulled too taut. Like a man who was holding everything together by sheer force of will and could feel the threads starting to fray.

You watched him for a moment—just a moment, between the chaos of your own fumbling—and something in your chest shifted.

Not a thought. Not a smart thought, anyway. Nothing you could've put into words or written in a letter or explained to Calla over morning tea.

Just... a feeling.

A quiet, warm, instinctive little feeling that said: he's tired.

Not annoyed. Not angry. Not disgusted.

Tired.

You recognized it because you'd seen it before—in your mother's eyes, in the set of her shoulders on the days when your father was especially cruel with his words, when the weight of smiling through it all pressed down so hard that even her laughter sounded thin.

Telemachus wasn't your mother. He wasn't anything like her, actually. But that particular kind of exhaustion—the kind that had nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with carrying something too heavy for too long—that, you understood.

You understood it better than anyone would ever give you credit for.

So instead of apologizing again, instead of fumbling through another awkward excuse or filling the silence with chatter, you simply reached over, very gently, and dabbed the wine from his wrist with the corner of your napkin.

Your touch was light. Brief. So quick it barely registered.

But Telemachus' hand stilled under yours.

His eyes flicked to you—sharp, startled, like he'd been expecting another ramble and had been caught off guard by the quiet instead.

You just smiled at him. Small this time. Not the blinding, full-wattage grin you'd been wielding all day, but something softer. Warmer. The kind of smile that wasn't performing anything—it was just... there.

"The lamb is really good," you said quietly. Simply. Like that was all that needed to be said.

Telemachus looked at you for a long, strange, unreadable moment.

Then he swallowed, pulled his hand back, and turned to face the hall.

"...Yeah," he murmured. "It is."

And for the rest of the feast, he didn't move his chair away.

Calla exhaled through her nose, slow and measured, the way someone breathed when they were choosing between responding and walking directly into the sea. She'd been your handmaiden since you were nine—since you'd tried to "improve" a visiting diplomat's robes by sewing flowers onto them while he was still wearing them. She had earned her patience the hard way.

"The prince," Calla said carefully, tugging the fabric at your waist tighter until you let out a small oof, "has likely been raised on warfare, politics, and Ithacan stubbornness. I doubt his feelings on pink will factor heavily into the negotiations."

You considered this for a moment, then held up the rose sash again.

"So... the lighter one?"

A groan came from somewhere to your left—low and muffled and distinctly done with you. That would be Noura, the youngest of the three handmaidens assigned to your preparation. She was hunched over a tray of golden pins and oil-scented combs, her dark brows pinched together in concentration as she sorted through them.

"Does it matter?" Noura muttered under her breath, though not quietly enough.

"Of course it matters," you said, spinning to face her with wide, genuine eyes. "First impressions are everything. My mother told me that. If I show up in the wrong shade of pink, he might think I'm aggressive."

Noura's hands stilled. She looked up at you. Then at Calla. Then back at you.

"...Aggressive," she repeated flatly.

"Aggressive pink is a real thing, Noura."

"It is not."

"It is. There's soft pink, which says, 'I'm approachable and lovely and would very much like to be your wife, please.' And then there's aggressive pink, which says, 'I will fight you in a garden.' Those are two very different statements."

Silence.

Calla reached over and gently took both sashes from your hands. She held them up to the light, turned them once, and then—without ceremony—tossed the deeper blush into the discard pile.

"The rose," she said simply.

You beamed. "See? Was that so hard?"

Noura rubbed her temples.

The room around you was alive with motion—your chambers had been transformed into a buzzing hive of silk, steam, and controlled chaos. 

Somewhere near the far window, two other attendants were heating bronze curling rods over a small brazier, testing the temperature against damp cloths before even thinking about bringing them near your hair. 

A young girl—barely fifteen and clearly new to the palace staff—was arranging a tray of cosmetics with shaking hands: kohl pots, crushed berry pigments, a small jar of powdered gold that you had specifically requested because, in your words, "If I'm going to meet my future husband, I should at least sparkle."

Nobody had argued with that.

Partly because you were the princess. Mostly because arguing with you was like trying to redirect a river with a spoon—technically possible, but exhausting and ultimately pointless.

You stood in the center of it all, arms slightly lifted as Calla and a second attendant worked in tandem around your frame. The chiton they'd chosen—you'd chosen, after three days of deliberation that had driven the palace seamstress to drink—was a soft, flowing thing. Ivory linen layered with sheer rose-toned silk that caught the light when you moved, giving the impression of sunrise caught in fabric. The neckline draped low and elegant across your collarbones, pinned at each shoulder with small golden clasps shaped like open blooms.

It was, by every measure, the prettiest thing you'd ever worn.

And you had opinions about pretty things.

"Make sure her chest is even," Calla murmured to the attendant beside her, adjusting the drape across your bust with a critical eye.

Noura, who had been in the process of sipping water, choked.

You glanced down at yourself. Then back up.

"Wait—are they not even?"

"They're fine, Your Highness—"

"Because I knew something felt off. I told you the left pin was pulling weird." You cupped yourself with zero shame, tilting your head as you examined the drape in the mirror. "Make sure my titties are even. I'm serious. Fix them."

Noura, still recovering, let out a strangled laugh behind her hand. "That's... that's not how that works, Princess."

"Well then sew them back on right," you said, dead serious, adjusting the fabric yourself with a small shimmy. "I'm not going to Ithaca lopsided."

The room went quiet for a beat.

Then Calla—steady, unshakable Calla—pressed her lips together so tightly that the corners of her mouth twitched. She said nothing. Just reached over, undid the offending pin, adjusted the drape a quarter-inch to the left, and re-fastened it with the practiced ease of someone who had been dressing royalty since before you could walk.

You looked down. Squinted. Turned left. Then right.

"...Better," you declared.

"I live to serve," Calla said, entirely without inflection.

And despite the lightness—despite the pink sashes and the sparkle powder and the way you hummed a tuneless little melody while they worked—something quieter lived underneath it all. Something you didn't let anyone see, because you'd learned a long time ago that people didn't look for depth in girls who talked about the politics of color.

You were nervous.

Not the fluttery, butterfly-stomach kind of nervous that poets liked to write about.

No, this was the real kind.

The kind that sat low in your belly like a stone, heavy and cold, pressing against your ribs every time you breathed too deeply.

The kind that made your fingers tingle and your thoughts scatter, no matter how many times you smoothed them down like wrinkles in silk.

Because one week ago, your father had called you into his study.

One week ago, you'd stood on the other side of his desk—the massive oak thing cluttered with maps and trade ledgers and half-drunk goblets of wine—and waited for him to look up. He hadn't, not right away. He'd kept writing, his quill scratching against parchment in sharp, deliberate strokes, and you'd stood there with your hands folded in front of you like a child called before a tutor, wondering what you'd done wrong this time.

Had you offended another visiting lord? Accidentally insulted someone's lineage? Worn the wrong thing to a feast again? That last one had happened more than once—your father had made it abundantly clear that showing up to a diplomatic banquet in a gown made of "festival fabric" was not, in fact, a "fun surprise."

But when he'd finally set his quill down and looked at you—really looked at you, the way he only did when he was about to deliver news he'd already decided on—the words had hit you like cold water.

"You're getting married."

Not a question. Not a suggestion. Not even a conversation.

Just a fact. Stamped and sealed like a trade agreement, which, in fairness, it essentially was.

You'd blinked. Once. Twice. Your lips had parted, a dozen questions crowding behind your teeth—to who? when? why now? is he handsome?—but your father had already moved on, pulling out a scroll and reading off details you barely absorbed: Ithaca, the crown prince, a post-war alliance, something about naval routes and grain, words like strategic and consolidation and political goodwill that bounced off the walls of your skull like pebbles off stone.

You'd caught about a third of it. Maybe less.

What you had caught was this: his name was Telemachus. He was the son of Odysseus—the Odysseus, the one from the war, the one everyone whispered about in hallways and sang about at feasts, the one who'd been gone for twenty years and somehow, impossibly, come back.

His mother was Penelope, the queen who'd waited, who'd woven and unwoven and held her kingdom together with nothing but thread and stubbornness.

And you were being sent to marry their son.

You.

The youngest daughter of a minor island kingdom that most people couldn't find on a map without squinting.

A kingdom known primarily for three things: its flowers, its wine, and its alarming number of goats. Not for its military strength. Not for its political influence. Not for anything that mattered in the grand, bloody game of thrones and alliances.

Your father had five daughters before you—all married off, scattered like seeds across the Aegean to kingdoms that gave him something in return. Ships. Soldiers. Ports. Land. Each one a transaction. Each one a closed deal.

And then there was... you.

The last one. The youngest. The one who, by all accounts, should have been married off years ago but somehow kept slipping through the cracks—partly because your father hadn't found a match worth the effort, and partly because, well...

You were you.

And "you" came with a reputation.

Not a bad reputation, exactly. Not the kind that got whispered about in shadowed corridors with narrowed eyes and scandalized gasps.

No, yours was more of the... pitying kind.

The kind where visiting nobles would pat your father on the arm and say things like, "She's very sweet," with the same tone they used when describing a dog that couldn't learn tricks.

Or, "Well, at least she's pretty," as if that were a consolation prize for everything else you apparently lacked.

You knew what they thought of you. You'd always known.

Airheaded. Silly. Simple.

A princess who spent more time picking flowers than studying politics. Who couldn't name the major trade routes but could tell you which blooms paired best with which season.

Who had once—infamously, horrifyingly, and very publicly—asked a visiting Spartan general if Sparta was "near the pretty beach or the rocky one," and had somehow survived the diplomatic fallout only because your mother had intervened with a smile so gracious it could've brokered peace between warring gods.

Your mother.

The thought of her made your chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with the pins in your chiton.

She was the only person in the world who had never once looked at you like you were less. Not when you failed your lessons. Not when you mixed up trade agreements with love poems. Not when you cried over a crushed flower like it was a fallen soldier.

"Just smile, my love," she'd told you, the night before your father had delivered the news. She'd been sitting at the edge of your bed, brushing your hair with long, slow strokes, the way she always did when the world felt too big and your skin felt too small. "A smile is the only armor they can't take from you."

You hadn't understood it then. Not fully. But you'd tucked the words away somewhere safe—somewhere deep, beneath the pink sashes and the lip gloss and the endless, bubbly chatter that everyone mistook for emptiness.

Because the truth was, you weren't empty.

You were terrified.

Not of marriage—no, you'd always known that was coming. You'd watched every one of your sisters walk down that path, some with grace, some with tears, some with a quiet, practiced blankness that made your stomach turn.

Marriage was as inevitable as the tide. You'd made peace with that a long time ago.

What terrified you was simpler than that. Smaller. Stupider, maybe.

You were terrified that whoever you ended up with wouldn't like you.

Not love—you weren't naive enough to expect love from an arranged match, no matter how many romantic ballads you hummed in the bath. But like. Basic, ordinary, everyday like.

The kind where someone looked at you and didn't immediately calculate your political value.

The kind where someone laughed at your jokes, even the bad ones.

The kind where someone saw you—really saw you—and thought, Oh. You're not so bad.

That was all you wanted.

And somehow, that felt like the most impossible thing in the world to ask for.

"Your Highness?"

You blinked.

Calla was watching you in the mirror, hands paused at your shoulder where she'd been adjusting the final clasp. Her expression was neutral, but her eyes—dark and steady—held a softness that she'd never admit to out loud.

"You drifted," she said simply.

You exhaled and forced a smile. It came easily—it always did. Smiling was the one thing you were genuinely, undeniably, spectacularly good at.

"Sorry," you said, shaking your head as if to dislodge the thoughts. "Just thinking about whether Ithaca has good fruit. Do you think they have pomegranates? I love pomegranates. I'll be devastated if they don't have pomegranates."

Calla's expression didn't change. But her hand lingered on your shoulder a beat longer than necessary.

"I'm sure they have pomegranates," she said quietly.

You nodded, satisfied.

(She knew you weren't thinking about pomegranates. You knew she knew. Neither of you said a word about it.)

The final stretch of preparation passed in a blur of powder and oil and the soft murmuring of attendants working in practiced synchrony. Kohl was swept carefully beneath your lashes—not too much, just enough to make your eyes look wider, warmer, inviting in a way that said I am not a threat but I am also not to be ignored.

Crushed berry pigment was dabbed across your lips until they were stained a soft, rosy hue that complemented the sash perfectly, and a thin line of powdered gold was dusted along your cheekbones, catching the light every time you turned your head.

Your hair had been washed with rosewater that morning—you'd insisted on it, despite Noura pointing out that Ithaca's prince was "unlikely to be smelling your scalp upon arrival"—and now it was styled with care. Soft and intentional, the kind of effortless that took a frankly unreasonable amount of effort to achieve. Golden pins held everything in place, glinting like tiny stars scattered through dark sky.

Finally—finally—Calla stepped back.

The other attendants followed suit, retreating to the edges of the room like waves pulling back from shore. The air settled. The noise dimmed. And for the first time all morning, the room was quiet enough for you to hear your own heartbeat.

You turned to the mirror.

And your breath caught.

The girl staring back at you looked... different. Not unrecognizable—no, she was still you, still soft-featured and bright-eyed and faintly flushed with warmth.

But there was something else there now, layered beneath the gold and the rose and the carefully draped silk. Something that almost—almost—looked like a woman who belonged in a prince's court.

Almost.

Your fingers rose to your collarbone, tracing the edge of the fabric where it met skin. The chiton fit like it had been sewn directly onto your body, every fold deliberate, every line designed to draw the eye without demanding it. The rose silk shimmered faintly when you breathed, and the golden clasps at your shoulders caught the firelight from the nearby brazier, throwing tiny flecks of warmth across the walls.

You looked... pretty.

Really pretty.

Like, pretty-pretty.

The kind of pretty that made you want to walk very slowly into every room for the rest of your life just so people had time to appreciate it.

A grin split across your face—wide and unrestrained and so bright it practically glowed. You spun around, grabbing Calla's hands before the woman could protest, bouncing on the balls of your feet.

"Oh my gods—look at me!"

Calla's mouth twitched. "I've been looking at you for the past three hours, Your Highness."

"But look!" You released her hands only to gesture at yourself with both arms, spinning back to the mirror and gesturing some more. "I look incredible. I look like a painting. I look like something a poet would cry about. Do you think he'll cry? I hope he cries. Just a little bit."

Noura snorted from the corner. "If anyone cries, it'll be the prince's advisors."

You ignored her. You were too busy squealing—an actual, full-bodied squeal—as you twirled in front of the mirror, watching the silk ripple and catch around your legs like petals in a breeze. Your reflection sparkled. Your sash fluttered. Your lip gloss shimmered in the light like the surface of a still pond at dawn.

You pressed both hands to your cheeks, eyes wide and shining. "I can't wait to meet him."

The words came out breathless—not practiced, not poised, not princessly at all.

Just... honest.

Raw and excited and desperately, foolishly, wonderfully hopeful in a way that made Calla look away and Noura go quiet and the youngest attendant by the brazier press her hand to her chest like she'd just witnessed something she wasn't supposed to see.

Because it wasn't the excitement of a political bride preparing for duty.

It was the excitement of a girl—just a girl, underneath it all—who had spent her entire life being told she wasn't enough, and who had decided, stubbornly, defiantly, almost ridiculously, to believe that maybe, just maybe, she could be.

You caught your reflection one last time in the mirror. Rose and gold. Soft and bright.

Just smile, your mother's voice echoed.

And you did.

You smiled so wide your cheeks ached, and you held it there like armor, like a promise, like the only weapon anyone had ever taught you to wield.

I'm coming, Telemachus, you thought, pressing your fingertips to the mirror's surface. And I really, really hope you like pink.

He'd walked these halls a hundred times as a child, but now the air clung with the iron stench of slaughter, the ghost of screams still ringing in the silence.

And it was all because Odysseus had returned.

Alive.

Real.

Not just a name his mother whispered late at night when she thought he was sleeping. Not just a legend passed down from servant to servant. No longer a ghost behind his mother's tired eyes.

He still hadn't said the name aloud. Not since that first breathless moment when the old man dropped his bow and whispered "Son..." like it was simple. Like twenty years hadn't slipped between them like sand.

And yet—he had returned. 

And Telemachus still didn't know how to feel.

Part of him wanted to run.

Not from fear—he wasn't a boy anymore—but from the weight of it.

The weight of being looked at like a man now. The weight of meeting the eyes of the father he'd grown up without. The weight of knowing the king he'd imagined wasn't the man who stood in front of him now.

But another part—some quieter, humbler part—was just... relieved. Grateful beyond words that his mother was safe. That she could sleep now, without a blade hidden beneath her pillow. That she didn't have to pretend anymore.

That thought should have brought peace. It should have sat gently in his chest, like cool water on a fever. But it didn't. Not really.

His sandals continued to scuff quietly against the stone floor as he walked, the soft slap of leather the only sound around him. No chatter from the kitchens. No laughter echoing down the halls. No song from the maidservants as they swept. The air hung heavy. Stale.

Too quiet.

It hit him all at once—how silent the palace had become.

Once, Ithaca's halls had buzzed.

Even in the worst of the suitors' reign, there had been noise—forced cheer, sour wine spilling, men bragging over bones thrown from their plates. Servants rushing back and forth with platters and towels, eyes cast low, mouths tight. Women giggling, not out of joy but fear. Still, sound. Life.

Now?

There was none of that. Just the wind through the high windows and the soft echo of his own steps.

Telemachus slowed, the weight in his chest growing heavier.

Not all the servants had been loyal.

He remembered them. Not all by name, but by face, by their silence, by how easily they bent toward whoever held power.

Some had smiled too easily at the suitors. Brought them wine without being asked. Turned a blind eye when they took things—people—they had no right to.

Traitors.

They'd been dealt with. His father made sure of that. Justice, swift and final.

And... Telemachus had watched.

He'd stood beside Odysseus as sentences was passed.

Not a boy hiding behind his mother. Not anymore. He was expected to understand these things now—mercy, punishment, power—and what it took to keep a kingdom standing when the walls had already cracked.

He didn't know what disturbed him more—how many had betrayed Ithaca... or how easily he'd let them die.

His hands clenched at his sides.

They had deserved it. That was the truth.

The palace wasn't empty because of bad luck. It was empty because it had been rotting for years. And now, the rot had been scraped out, cut down, burned through like a fever breaking.

Still, he missed the noise. Even the bad kind.

Even the fake kind.

Because at least back then, he hadn't noticed how lonely the palace truly was.

He walked on, the hall narrowing, the light dimmer the deeper he went. Somewhere down the corridor, a door creaked—maybe from the wind, maybe not. He didn't flinch. Just kept moving.

There were fewer servants now. Fewer people altogether. Ithaca was smaller than it used to be. Or maybe it had always been this small, and he just hadn't realized until the crowd cleared out.

Telemachus exhaled through his nose and leaned his shoulder against the stone wall. The hallway stretched out ahead, still and silent. Dust floated lazily through the shafts of light coming in from the narrow windows, flickering like ash. Even the wind felt like it was holding its breath.

He didn't know where he was going. Maybe nowhere. Maybe just anywhere that didn't have his father's voice in it.

"P-Prince Telemachus?"

The voice startled him. He flinched, turning halfway with a sharpness that surprised even him.

A young servant girl stood behind him—probably no older than he was when the suitors first arrived. She had wide, nervous eyes, and her fingers were curled tightly in the hem of her tunic. She looked like she was expecting him to yell.

He didn't.

She swallowed and bowed her head slightly. "Your... your parents wish to speak with you, my prince. T-They're in the King's study."

Before he could respond, before he could nod or offer even the smallest "thank you," she spun on her heel and hurried off, sandals skittering across the stone.

Telemachus watched her go. Then sighed. Not out of annoyance—just exhaustion. Like the kind that settled in the bones when you'd been running too long and didn't even remember when you started.

He pushed off the wall and headed for the study.

It wasn't far. He knew the way by heart. Had known it for years, even when he'd never had a reason to go near it.

His steps grew slower the closer he got. The old door at the end of the hallway came into view, and something in his chest pulled tight. He stopped just short of it, standing in the shadow it cast.

He used to come here as a boy—too scared to knock, too angry to walk away. He'd just stand there, fists clenched at his sides, waiting for a voice he never heard. Odysseus was gone. Always gone. The study had stayed locked.

He remembered pressing his ear to the wood once. Just to hear something.

Now he was expected to walk right in.

Telemachus shook the memory off. He squared his shoulders, raised his fist, and gave a single, solid knock.

A pause. Then—

"Enter," came the low reply.

His father's voice.

Not imagined. Not dreamed.

Real.

He swallowed hard, pressed down the twist in his gut, and opened the door.

The study greeted him with a hush. It smelled faintly of parchment and smoke—familiar in a way that tugged at his chest.

The small hearth flickered in the corner, casting unsteady light across the stone walls. Shadows danced over the room's corners, stretching and shrinking with the fire's breath. The curtains had been drawn shut, and the lack of daylight made the space feel smaller somehow, like the walls were leaning in to listen.

His father sat at the desk near the back wall, posture straight, hands resting calmly over a scroll he hadn't unrolled yet. A faint trace of soot lined his fingers. Behind him, a rack of weapons hung against the stone—swords, spears, a bow he hadn't seen before.

Not decorations. Not anymore.

And to the side, just past the edge of the fire's glow, Penelope sat in a carved wooden chair with a basket of wool sat at her feet. Her fingers moved with quiet focus as she wove a pattern into her loom, the soft click of thread and bone needle the only sound in the room.

Telemachus lingered in the doorway, eyes sweeping over it all. The very room that had always been sealed off, like it was waiting for something—or someone—now held both his parents, and yet it still felt tense, like something was just barely being held together.

He stared a beat too long.

"Telemachus," his mother's voice called gently, pulling him back.

He blinked. "Sorry," he said quickly, clearing his throat as his ears burned. His feet finally moved, carrying him forward with a slight stumble. He scurried to the nearest seat like he was still a boy, half-expecting to be scolded for taking too long.

He sat down too fast. The wooden chair creaked beneath him. His hands fidgeted in his lap.

Penelope's lips twitched at the corners—just barely. She didn't say anything, but her gaze softened. She looked to Odysseus, who hadn't reacted much at all. The king's expression stayed neutral, unreadable. He gave her a short glance before looking back to the scroll in front of him.

Penelope returned to her weaving.

And the room returned to silence.

Telemachus sat stiff in his chair, back too straight, like he didn't know how to sit without bracing for something. The fire crackled in the corner, the only sound left besides the soft scratch of his mother's weaving. Her hands moved like they always had—measured, careful, steady.

He glanced at her, then at Odysseus.

His father hadn't looked up from the desk. Just sat there, fingers still resting over the scroll like he hadn't decided whether or not to open it. His face was stone—no emotion, no sign of thought. Just... blank. Watching.

Telemachus swallowed. Was he supposed to say something? Wait for permission?

He sat for what felt like forever.

And when nothing came, not even a glance, the awkwardness started creeping up his neck, hot and itchy. He shifted in his seat, hands curling tighter in his lap, pulse quickening under the surface.

He opened his mouth, clearing his throat. "Um, y—you needed me, Father—?" He barely got the words out before Odysseus cut him off.

"You're getting married."

It wasn't a suggestion, wasn't even a question. Just a statement, dropped like a stone in water.

Telemachus froze, his mouth hanging open for a beat. Then he blinked, once—twice—as if his ears had failed him. "I—I'm—?"

His voice caught. He choked on air and sat forward a little too fast, eyes wide as the firelight flicked in them.

"...Married?"

But Odysseus didn't even flinch.

"You're getting married," the king repeated, calm and final, like he was reading it from a list.

That was it.

No warning. No reason.

No name.

Just... married.

Telemachus repeated the word in his head like it might sound different the second time. Like maybe if he said it back, the meaning would crack and fall apart.

...Married...

...Married...

"...Married..." he finally echoed out loud, voice thin, like a reaction that slipped past his lips before he could stop it.

His eyes shot to his mother.

Please, he thought. Please look surprised. Say something. Anything.

But Penelope didn't even flinch. She kept weaving, steady as ever, her fingers moving as though Odysseus had just mentioned the weather—or a change in the tide. Not her son's future. Not his entire life.

Of course she wasn't shocked.

Deep down, he'd known she wouldn't be. That was just hope talking. Desperate, naive hope that someone else in the room might feel as blindsided as he did.

His mouth opened again. Then closed.

Opened. Closed.

Nothing came out.

He had too many thoughts and no words for any of them. What was he supposed to say? No? Could he even do that? Would it matter?

He sank a little in his chair, staring at the hearth like it might swallow him up if he stared long enough. His arms felt heavy. So did his chest.

Now? he thought. Now, after everything? After the suitors, after the blood, after finally getting the palace clean, finally breathing again, finally thinking straight for more than a day at a time—

Now he was supposed to get married?

To who? Why? What for?

He didn't even know who he was yet.

And now someone else was supposed to know him? Be with him? Sleep next to him and call it home?

He rubbed a hand over his face, already exhausted—and not in the physical kind of way. No, this was deeper. It was the kind of tired that made your soul ache. The kind that said I can't take one more thing.

But here it was.

One. More. Thing.

Telemachus didn't speak. He didn't move. But clearly, his face had said enough—because Odysseus, seated still and silent at the desk, narrowed his eyes slightly. Watching. Reading.

But it wasn't him who spoke.

"It should've happened long ago."

Telemachus looked at his mother. She didn't glance up from her loom.

"The truth is, by all accounts, you should have been wed at least three years past. Twenty one have passed by—soon a twenty-second, and still no bride."

There was no judgment in her tone. If anything, it sounded almost... rueful.

"I put it off," she continued. "I kept putting it off. Telling them you were too young. That there was still time. But time's run out, my son."

Telemachus swallowed hard, his fingers curling into the fabric of his tunic.

Penelope's voice softened. "After your eighteenth birthday, I began sending letters—marriage offers, alliance talks. Quiet ones, at first. But the kingdoms heard nothing from Ithaca for so long... with your father gone, and the suitors here, most thought any match would be pointless. Dangerous, even."

She finally stopped weaving, laying the shuttle down with a soft click.

"Some replied with apologies. Others with silence. A few... with threats. Most said the same thing in different ways: they would wait to see how it ended. Wait until I was married off to a suitor—" Her voice caught, just for a breath. "—and had a child for one of them. Then, they said, they'd be happy to discuss alliance."

A sound broke the air. Barely.

A long, quiet breath drawn in and released.

Telemachus' gaze snapped to his father.

Odysseus hadn't moved, but something shifted in his jaw. His shoulders dropped just slightly, like he'd been holding that particular weight inside for years—and only now let it go.

It made Telemachus sit up straighter without meaning to.

Penelope stood slowly from her seat, robes rustling as she crossed the room. She walked with purpose—graceful but not hurried—and made her way to a chest tucked beneath one of the curtained windows.

She knelt and opened it. The hinges creaked.

From inside, she pulled out a wide woven basket, heavy enough that she grunted softly as she lifted it.

She carried it over and let it fall at Telemachus' feet with a thud.

The lid tipped, and a dozen scrolls came spilling out—rolling across the floor in different directions, some tied in blue ribbon, others sealed in wax or pressed with strange, foreign crests.

Telemachus stared.

Penelope simply said, "These are your suitors."

Telemachus blinked, barely breathing.

Suitors.

The word rattled around his skull, sharp and heavy. Not that it was new—he'd heard it all his life, after all. But it had never been meant for him.

He opened his mouth, ready to speak. To argue. To ask the simplest, most honest question buzzing in his head—Shouldn't I have more time?

But before he could even shape the words, Penelope nudged the basket closer with her foot, the wooden edge tapping against his sandal.

"I've narrowed it down," she said, matter-of-fact. "These are the best of the offers."

His mouth opened in protest. "These are the narrowed ones!?" He couldn't help it. The scrolls had spilled across the floor like spilled wine—dozens of them. Dozens. And those were the finalists?

Penelope bent, plucked a scroll at random, and unrolled it with a flick of her wrist. Her eyes skimmed the lines, then she read aloud, voice flat. "Lord Telemachus, my daughter is of age, and her dowry includes ten ships and—" SNAP. The scroll snapped shut in her hands, her thumb brushing over the broken seal. "Well. That hardly matters now, does it?"

Before Telemachus could speak up once more in protest, Odysseus finally spoke.

"You're not a boy anymore, Telemachus." he said, voice low but sure. "You're the heir of Ithaca. It's time you had a wife."

That was it. No warmth. No discussion. Just fact.

And just like that, peace slipped through Telemachus' fingers again.

Completely, entirely, spectacularly naked.

The color drained from his face. Then rushed back in—not pink, not flushed, but a full, catastrophic red that started at his ears and flooded downward like a dam breaking, staining his cheeks, his neck, the tops of his shoulders above his tunic collar.

His mouth opened.

No sound came out.

His eyes went wide—wider than you'd ever seen them, wider than when you'd called him a handsome storm cloud, wider than when you'd eaten fish with your hands—and for one terrible, beautiful, frozen moment, Telemachus, Prince of Ithaca, Son of Odysseus, Heir to the Throne, Student of Athena, stood at the edge of a woodland pool and short-circuited.

His brain rebooted. Failed. Rebooted again. His mouth formed shapes that were not words.

His hand came up—palm out, like a man trying to halt an advancing army—and then dropped. Came up again. Dropped again.

He looked like a man who had been struck by lightning and was trying to remember how arms worked.

"You—" he managed. One word. Just the one. And then it abandoned him.

You tilted your head.

❝You can join me, if you want!❞ you offered brightly, entirely missing the reason for his sudden paralysis. ❝The water's really nice. I think it's fed by a spring or something—it's so clear. Like, I can see my toes. Can you see your toes in the baths here? Because at home, our baths are always a little cloudy, which my mother says is from the minerals, but I always thought it was because Cornelius—that's the goat, I told you about Cornelius—he sometimes gets into the—❞

Telemachus made a sound.

It wasn't a word. It wasn't a sentence. It wasn't, by any reasonable definition, a human sound.

It was a screech.

High and sharp and so startled it cracked in the middle—the kind of sound you'd expect from a man who had just stepped on a snake or witnessed a ghost or discovered that his betrothed was standing naked in a pool thirty feet away from him with zero apparent awareness of why this was a problem.

The screech echoed across the clearing, bouncing off the stone walls of the cove and scattering a flock of birds from the nearest tree.

You jumped, dropping lower into the water, your head whipping around in alarm.

❝What?!❞ you gasped, your eyes darting to the tree line, the rocks, the shadows. ❝What's wrong?! Is it the boar? Are they here? Where—❞

Telemachus had already spun around.

Not turned. Spun—a full, violent one-eighty, his back to you so fast it was like he'd been yanked by an invisible string. His hands came up—one clamped over his eyes, the other held out behind him in a rigid stop gesture, as if warding off something unholy.

❝Why—❞ His voice came out strangled. Wrecked. ❝Why are you NAKED?!❞

You stared at his back. (It was a nice back.) (Now was not the time.) (It was still a nice back, though.)

❝I'm... taking a bath?❞

..... ... ..... ━━━━━━━☆☆━━━━━━━ ..... ... .....

You were supposed to be a political pawn.

Pretty, pleasant, and conveniently disposable.

But instead of dying quietly in some noble's marriage bed, you ended up in Ithaca—engaged to a brooding prince with trust issues, fighting for a place in a palace still soaked in the blood of suitors.

You can't sew. You can't scheme. And the last time someone asked you about the Trojan War, you said, "Wait, so the horse wasn't real?"

But you've got a killer smile, a dreamer's heart, and a terrifying amount of emotional intelligence hidden under your perfume.

And honestly? That might just be enough.

Even if no one sees it yet... not even him.

..... ... ..... ━━━━━━━☆☆━━━━━━━ ..... ... .....

╭─↬ ❗𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆❗ ↫─╮ There will be mentions/descriptive scenes of the following:

╭ ⁞ ❏. Mild language ┊ ⁞ ❏. Parental trauma ┊ ⁞ ❏. Emotional neglect

🔺 Reader Discretion Advised.

Lol, I don't know if I got them all, so if you see anything I didn't list, come back and comment right here so I can add them to the list later ➡

Also, before you start, if you're new here, welcome! But if you're a returning reader/came from my other books, hi winxies🥹❤️ Enjoy (•͈˽•͈)