Page 223 of A Vow of Embers

And why she wanted me dead.

“Why are you telling me this?” I shouldn’t have asked the question. I wanted her to keep talking, to keep sharing and giving me information. But I knew her confessions must have a purpose.

She tilted her head slightly, as if to take my measure. “Because I’m not sure what will happen to me next. After a thousand years of mundane routine interspersed with subtle sabotage and quiet destruction, it is a bit invigorating not knowing what is to come. I’m telling you all of this because I want you to bear witness. To send a letter home to your parents so that they will know, and tell everyone in your nation, why Locris suffers. Why it has become a wasteland.”

My hands started to tremble while my heart pounded.

“Who, after the Great War, pregnant and mourning her husband and her sister and her son, took a ship to Locris and killed every priestess in your temple.”

This couldn’t be true. I tried to shake my head but my limbs had stiffened so that I couldn’t move.

Lysimache bared her teeth at me, as if trying to grin. “I am responsible for destroying Locris. I used the eye to ruin your nation. I am the one who cursed it.”

Chapter Seventy-Three

“N-no,” I stuttered, my mouth not working properly. “The goddess cursed us.”

“Is that the story you’ve told yourselves for the last thousand years? It makes sense that you stopped worshipping her, then. Cut yourself off from her power. How delightful,” Lysimache said.

Suri shot me a look, as if to ask if we could kill the high priestess now, but I shook my head.

“You’re lying,” I said. It wasn’t possible. How could she have turned Locris into a desert?

“Oh, Princess Thalia, I’m not. And you know it.” She shifted slightly in her chair and I stepped into a defensive stance, as if she were about to pull a weapon. Her hands remained in her lap. “I’m also telling you these things because I’ve heard stories about your husband. The noble warrior wanting to protect Ilion. And I expect you to tell him that he will lose. I’ve chosen the winning side and he is not on it. He can’t begin to imagine what he’s up against. He will not stop her.”

“I don’t need the prince to stop Artemisia,” I said. “I’ll do it myself.”

“And how do you plan to accomplish that? What’s so special about a Locrian maiden that can stop an incoming tidal surge that will destroy everything in its path?”

“I am the savior of Ilion.” It was the first time I had spoken the words aloud, the first time I had accepted that it was true.

I didn’t know if I said it to convince Lysimache or myself.

She started to laugh, clutching her sides. “You? You’re the savior? Oh, if I had known that someone like you would be the savior, I wouldn’t have spent so many centuries waiting for and worrying about you.” Her laughter subsided and she wiped tears of mirth from her eyes. “I knew it would be a woman. The people of Ilion assumed that it must be a man. But I knew. I just wish it had been someone formidable.”

Her words cut me when they shouldn’t have. I kept telling Io I wasn’t the savior. Lysimache seemed to accept that I was and then had dismissed me as a possible threat.

I wasn’t as helpless as she seemed to think.

“Why did Artemisia do this? Who does she answer to?”

This time Lysimache shrugged one shoulder. Did that mean she didn’t know or that she wouldn’t tell me? “The why, who, when, how doesn’t interest me. Only the end result. The what. And I am pleased with how that has turned out.”

Kunguru landed in the rafters of the gymnasium and cawed at me. It was a reminder that Xander and his men waited for us beyond the temple’s borders. I didn’t know if Zalira and Ahyana had told them yet what had occurred here.

Xander would need to know about Artemisia and Lysimache.

“Find something to bind her with,” I said to Suri. She nodded and jumped off the dais. I turned back to Lysimache. “How did you destroy Locris?”

She paused for several beats before saying, “Is that what all this is about? Are you hoping you might find a way to save your nation?” She gestured down to where she had dumped the ground-up eye of the goddess. “That was your last hope of doing so, and now it’s gone.”

The eye from Locris cut up and gone. The eye from Ilion lying in dust around my feet. I clenched my jaw, trying to ignore the anger that burned in my gut. I couldn’t lash out at her. I had to stay in control. Remember my training.

If nothing else, she had confirmed that I needed the eye to save Locris.

Although that knowledge did me no good now.

“Is there another way to restore the land?” I asked.