Night kept his face still and spoke inwardly. "Herta, what is happening? I cannot sense Helena at all."
Herta's voice rose inside his mind.
"I'm not sure.
Something may be blocking your perception. Under normal circumstances, even the gods struggle to conceal a soul contract connection. Unless you were in an entirely different world or a completely separate era."
"Unless what?"
A pause…
"It is difficult to say. My suggestion is that you move around. Helena's spiritual consciousness would have followed you into this world.
That much I can tell you with certainty, as the one who opened the door.
When you are close enough to wherever she is, some degree of the connection should return."
The exchange ended as quickly as it had begun. In the outside world, barely a moment had passed.
Then Night felt a warmth settle over the back of his hand.
"Hero?"
Chryseis leaned over him.
Her expression sat somewhere between worry and careful calm. Her hand rested lightly over his, deliberate and gentle, the kind of warmth offered to someone who might not know they needed it.
It was not without reason.
Until yesterday, the cold radiating from his body had been the cold of something with no life left in it, bone-deep and absolute.
She genuinely believed he was dead, that what lay there was simply a body that had not yet been moved.
Someone who had just come back from the Underworld, who had passed through that frozen and merciless dark and returned, she wanted to give him what warmth she could.
To remind him that there was something still worth coming back to.
Night looked at her hand. Then at her face. "There is no need to worry. I am all right."
A pause.
"Chryseis. That is your name?"
And then, quietly, the pieces fell into place.
.
Chryseis.
Candidate priestess of Apollo.
In the history he knew, she and her younger sister were both taken captive during Achilles' campaign through the outlying cities.
The instant Agamemnon laid eyes on her, he was so struck that he was even prepared to abandon his own wife and daughters to claim her.
In the end, the two sisters were separated, with Chryseis taken by Agamemnon and her younger sister by Achilles.
Their father, the high priest of Apollo, went to the Greek camp again and again, denouncing what they did and demanding the return of his daughters, but was refused every time.
Chryseis did not submit to Agamemnon. Her sister, in the end, chose to stay with Achilles.
Their father knelt before his god and asked for justice.
Apollo answered and sent word to Agamemnon, telling him to release her.
However, the latter, who finally had the women of his dreams, refused.
And so the god of light showed the world the other face of the sun.
The warmth withdrew. What remained curdled into something else entirely. Plague moved through the Greek camp like a slow fire, and men died by the hundreds, until the pressure became something Agamemnon could no longer hold against.
He let Chryseis go, bitterly, publicly, hating every moment of it.
But her sister, Briseis, was already lost to Achilles. That was a different matter entirely.
'The two of them were captured during the campaign at Thebes,' Night thought. 'So I pulled them out of that fate without even realizing it.'
He glanced down at his hand.
Chryseis caught the look, color rising quietly in her cheeks, and drew her hand back without making anything of it.
Before he could say anything, she began to speak on her own, filling in what he had missed.
She was there during the siege of Thebes.
She was the one who had led the prayers of the city's survivors, kneeling with countless others and calling on the gods to spare the stranger fighting on their behalf.
She saw Night then, briefly, though the chaos of battle had given him no opportunity to notice much of anything beyond the next enemy in front of him.
It was only now, looking at her face, that he remembered pulling her out of the path of a Greek spear.
'A candidate priestess of Apollo,'
He thought, looking at the beauty in front of him. "That explains it. No wonder Apollo took enough interest to lend his gaze."
In the mortal world of Greece, anyone could pray to the gods. Whether a god chose to answer was another matter entirely. And if they did answer and found the request trivial, uninteresting, or beneath their attention, then the wisest thing a mortal could hope for was that the god would simply lose interest and look away.
A god who made the effort to respond and found only something trivial waiting at the end of it was not a god in a forgiving mood.
The gods were not beings that could be called upon for anything, by anyone, at any time.
Because Night saved her during the war, Chryseis came forward herself after he lost consciousness and asked to be the one to care for him.
No one assigned her to it.
There was another thread connecting them he had not known about.
Chryseis and Hector were cousins, distant but real, which was part of why she could tell, when she first saw Night in Thebes, that the man wearing Hector's face was not Hector.
Hector, who placed enormous weight on family, chose to trust her.
He left Night in her care and returned to his men, to the walls, to the war that did not slow for any of it.
That was over a month ago.
Night listened as Chryseis told him what changed.
The war did not pause while he was unconscious.
Troy and the Greek forces bled each other in earnest, each engagement harder and bloodier than the last.
And Troy made a move that by any reckoning of history had no business happening yet.
They sent for Queen Penthesilea of the Amazons.
When the Amazon forces arrived on the field, wild and ferocious and utterly without fear, the balance of the war began to tilt.
The Trojan heroes opened their wine and raised their cups before the outcome was even decided.
The celebrations had already started.
Even the old king of Troy, who had long since handed the conduct of the war to his sons and faded from the center of things, stepped forward and stood before his people, speaking.
"We hold our mountains and our sea. A single man defending a narrow pass keeps ten thousand at bay. Let them fight. They will not break us here."
With the walls of Troy behind them, they could not lose. They only needed to hold, and time would do the rest.
Night listened to all of it.
His brow pulled together.
The Trojan War does not end that cleanly. It never did.
And Penthesilea's arrival was wrong.
In the history he knew, Penthesilea did not come until after Hector was dead.
That was the sequence. Troy's greatest hero fell, the city finally understood it was losing, and only then did they reach outward in desperation, calling for Penthesilea and for Memnon, king of Aethiopia.
Two divine-blooded allies who brought real strength with them, enough to stabilize the front for a time, but not enough to reverse what was already set in motion.
The war ground on either way.
But Penthesilea was here now.
Early. And because she was early, Troy was winning.
Chryseis explained how it had happened, and Night found himself listening with growing attention.
After Thebes, Hector did not stop.
He moved from settlement to settlement, pulling survivors back toward Troy, refusing to leave the smaller settlements to be swallowed by the advancing Greek forces.
The Greeks tried to stop him.
They tried to run him down.
But Achilles was still absent from the field, his wound keeping him back, and without Achilles, none of the other Greek heroes could hold Hector.
The fighting between them was brutal on both sides.
The hatred between the two armies ran deeper now than it did at the start.
But Hector carried something back from his time with Night.
A single idea, plain and unignorable.
'If I do not speak for you today, there will be no one left to speak for me when my turn comes.'
When the lip is gone, the teeth feel the cold.
He understood it fully, in a way he did not before.
Troy could not survive alone.
The Greek coalition was too large, too organized, and too powerful for any single city to face by itself.
And so Hector did something that would have been unthinkable to him before.
He didn't let his pride keep him from acting.
After bringing in what survivors he could, he went to his father, to his brothers and sisters, and laid it out plainly.
They needed Penthesilea.
And they needed it now.
Now, while they still had the strength to ask from a position of dignity, not later, when they would be asking from their knees.
.
.