“Sister in battle,” Diana said, ashamed of the tears that roughened her voice. “I have failed you.”
“You haven’t,” said Alia, taking another step toward her. “Not yet.”
Jason moved to block her path. “Enough. We never should have come here. You would be safe right now if—”
“No,” Alia said, and Diana heard the anger in her voice. “Your solution was to hide. Ours was to fight. Don’t you dare blame us for trying. Diana, you gave me your word.”
Diana could feel the oath that bound her, as powerful as the lasso, as indestructible. She could not live with herself if she violated the vow she’d given. But how could she live knowing she’d taken Alia’s life? She was immortal, and that would give her an eternity to endure this terrible shame.
“Make your choice, Daughter of Earth.”
Eris. So she had come after all. To gloat. Diana looked to Nim, expecting a monster’s face, but saw Nim’s wide brown eyes, her mouth agape as she stared at a figure perched at the apex of the rocky ruins, black wings spread wide, the tips of her filthy feathers nearly touching the ground. Her hair flowed around her face in curling tendrils of darkness, and the gold smeared across her lips glinted in the sun. “Foolish girl, with your noble quest and your heart that yearns for glory. Can you do it? Cut her throat to keep us at bay?”
“Is that what I looked like?” Nim asked in disgust.
A wind rose, billowing up from the earth around them, and the sound of hoofbeats filled the air. The dust collected in the shape of two chariots, cutting a path around them, the hooves of their horses seeming to fly over the ground.
“I don’t know,” said Theo, backing up so they stood clumped together at the base of the tomb. “I look pretty cool.” Phobos smiled from his chariot, his hideous pointed teeth emerging. “Or not.”
Had the battle gods grown stronger this close to sunset? Was that why they didn’t need to possess Nim and Theo any longer? Or had that just been a game to them?
“You have laid a feast before us!” shouted Phobos, his voice rising shrill above the clatter of wheels and hooves.
“And, O young warrior,” cried Deimos in exultation, the crack of his whip like a bomb blast, “we will eat our fill!”
Eris rose in the sky, beating her shield with her sword, the clamor unbearable. Diana covered her ears with her hands, but she couldn’t block out the sound of her regret. She’d gotten it wrong, all of it.
“The reaping moon has come. In an hour the sun sets and darkness rises, yet here you languish,” Eris cackled. She rose higher, her vast wings blotting out the sun, casting them in shadow. “What will you tell your sisters? Your mother?”
“And you, Warbringer,” Deimos mocked as his chariot raced faster. “What will you tell your mother in the afterlife?”
Phobos bellowed laughter. “She will wear a veil in the underworld and hide her face for the shame you’ve brought her, haptandra, the cursed.”
Diana and the others clustered in a frightened circle, back to back, shoulder to shoulder, as the chariots circled, their steeds sending up clumps of earth, the horses’ lips pulled back as they snapped at their golden bits, their muzzles trailing blood-flecked foam.
The shields, the hooves, the whip, the rumble of the wheels, the sound was overwhelming, filling Diana’s skull, shaking her teeth.
“I can’t think!” Theo shouted. “They’re too loud.”
“But why?” yelled Alia. “This is different from last time! Why are they making so much noise?”
Jason shook his head, hands clamped to his ears. “They’ve won, and they know it!”
He was right. Alia and the others were grasping at false hope. It was the way of mortals. And yet, if Diana had been wrong all along, why interfere at all? For the fun of it? On Themyscira, she’d grown used to the extraordinary, to the knowledge that the gods made demands, that their will dictated the rules of the island. But nothing in the mortal world was as it had been on Themyscira, and the gods of the battlefield were not the goddesses of her home. They hungered for blood and sorrow. They required it and needed mortals to provide it. So why exactly were they here? Had they simply come to enjoy her suffering in this last hour?
Her suffering—but not her terror. She was scared, frustrated, furious with herself—yet that gibbering, mindless horror wasn’t flooding through her. Why wouldn’t the battle gods want them terrified? Unless they didn’t want the group to run. What if they simply wanted them to stay here, stay still—paralyzed and deafened. What if Alia was right? What if they’d come with a purpose? What if all this din was to drown something out?
She remembered the way Phobos had hissed at the touch of her lasso. Could its touch kill a god? It didn’t have to. She just needed to drive them back. She just needed to buy some respite from that clamor.
Diana gritted her teeth and removed her hands from her ears, the noise rising to a jaw-shaking roar.
She unhooked the lasso and swung it over her head, a steady rhythm, matching it to the beat of her heart. It felt comforting in her hands, and yet so slight. Was this a weapon with which to face the gods? She let it swing farther and farther in a widening loop, then unleashed it with a snap. It glowed golden in her hands, lashing out like a tongue of yellow flame at the wheels of Phobos’s chariot and sending him veering off course. Snap. It snatched at Deimos’s helmet like a hungry serpent, forcing him to shake his reins and break his horses’ stride. The sounds of their shields and chariots faded. Maybe it was just the weapon she needed.
Diana swung the rope wider and wider, the lasso seeming to lengthen impossibly in her hands, the gust of its momentum forcing Eris back, her wings flapping grotesquely as she let fly a hideous shriek, and sunlight burst over them once more.
“Diana!” shouted Alia. Her face was alight; her braids made a halo around her head as if borne aloft by invisible current. She was bracketed by two figures of light. They were Nim and Theo, but Diana knew then they were also the Dioskouroi, Helen’s twin brothers and guardians, legendary warriors.
“Diana,” said Alia, “I hear it!”
“Hear what?” shouted Jason, his face grim and disbelieving. “I don’t hear anything.”
“Listen,” urged Alia.
He tugged on her arm. “Enough, Alia! We have to get out of here now.”
Alia shook her head. She smiled, and the air around her seemed to shimmer. “They’re singing.”
The song was faint, so quiet that at first Alia felt sure she was imagining it. She dismissed it, her mind still reeling from the sight of Eris wheeling in the sky above them, of Diana keeping Phobos and Deimos at bay, the lasso a bolt of lightning in her hands. Then there it was—a ringing in her ears, the wind in the trees—no, something more, a melody. One voice became two, ten, twenty. She didn’t understand the words, but she knew they were guiding her.
“What did the Oracle say, Diana?”
Diana glanced at her, confused, the lasso still whirling in her hands. “I told you—”
“No, what were her exact words?”
“?‘Where Helen rests, the Warbringer may be purified.’?”
Where Helen rests. “The spring isn’t here,” she said. “It’s one of the springs that feeds the river.” The Eurotas, the wide, slow river that had paralleled the road as they approached the Menelaion, that lay only a hundred yards below.
“This is her tomb,” said Jason. Every bit of his patience had vanished, replaced by an angry urgency. “Stop grasping at straws, Alia.”
Why couldn’t he hear them?
“No,” she said. She needed to make him understand. The girls were singing, and their song was one of mourning, a farewell to a friend. “Don’t you see? By the time Helen died, it was too late. She wasn’t Helen anymore, not really. She was Helen of Troy. She was Menelaus’s wife. Her tomb didn’t even keep her name.”