“Did you know, brother?” Hector asked gently.
“I hoped,” he admitted, his voice hushed with emotion. “She lied to me.”
All the men but Paris nodded, like they could understand Helen’s choice.
“The Tyrant.” Aeneas barely whispered the word, but it was obvious they were all thinking it. “Mother. How did Menelaus find out that Helen was pregnant?”
Aphrodite tenderly brushed her fingertips across her half sister’s shoulder. “Helen waited for your ship to clear the horizon and then she told Menelaus herself.”
Paris started shaking all over. “Why?” he asked the other Helen, his voice high with the effort to hold back tears. The other Helen ran her bloody hand across Paris’ chest, trying to soothe him.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and put her hand on her belly. “I tried, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill us myself.”
Troilus leaned against his brother, propping him up, as they all regarded Helen with a mixture of awe and dismay.
“Don’t mourn, Paris. Your baby lives,” Aphrodite said. “She will grow to look just like our beautiful Helen, and her daughter will grow to look just like her mother—and so on and so on for as long as the line lasts. I have seen to it, so that even after my half-mortal sister is gone, I may always look upon the face that I love best in this world.”
The golden glow of the goddess brightened, and she regarded the men of Troy one at a time, her voice taking on the timber of quiet thunder rolling in the distance.
“You must all swear to me that you will protect my sister and her child. If Helen and her line of daughters die, there will be nothing on Earth for me to love,” she said, her eyes falling apologetically on her son, Aeneas, for a moment before they hardened against him. He dropped his head with a wounded look, and Aphrodite turned to Hector. “As long as my sister and her line of daughters lasts, there will be love in the world. I swear it on the River Styx. But if you let my sister die, Hector of Troy, son of Apollo, I will leave this world and take love itself away with me.”
Hector’s eyes closed for a moment as the enormity of the goddess’s decree sank in. When he opened them again the look he gave was one of defeat. What choice did they have? He glanced around at his brothers and at Aeneas, all of them silently agreeing that they could not say no, despite the consequences that were sure to follow.
“We swear it, Lady,” Hector said heavily.
“No, sister. Don’t. Menelaus and Agamemnon have sworn a pact with the other Greek kings. They will come to Troy with all their armies,” the other Helen moaned urgently.
“Yes, they will. And we will fight them,” Paris said darkly, as if he were already facing the warships that would inevitably sail to their shores. He lifted her up, and she struggled lamely in his arms.
“Drop me over the side and let me drown,” she pleaded. “Please. End this before it begins.”
Paris didn’t answer her. Holding her up high in his arms to keep her close, he carried her belowdecks to his bunk. The other Helen finally lost consciousness, and Helen’s visit to this terrible dream or vision or whatever it was ended abruptly as she fell back into a natural sleep.
TWO
Andy glared at the metronome on top of the organ she was playing and willed it to explode. It didn’t. She took a deep breath, waited a measure, and dove back into Bach. Ten swings of the metronome’s pendulum later and she was growling through her gritted teeth and shaking her fists in the air rather than pounding them on the keys. Abusing instruments was an unforgivable offense in Andy’s mind. But metronomes, on the other hand . . .
“You’re lucky you’re an antique,” she told it, just to let it know how close it had come to a splintery end. She emptied her mind and started again.
This time she let Bach do the work, and for several measures she found the art inside the complicated math of the fugue.
Bliss. Right up until she was interrupted by the ding of an egg timer. Andy’s fingers slid off the keys with the deafeningly loud blarting noise that only a giant, hundred-year-old organ could muster.
“Really?” Andy said to the heavenly glow of the Tiffany window that reached high above her head. Even the beauty of the patchwork colors, warming her face like a bright quilt made out of light, was not enough to calm her. Just when she was getting it, she had to stop.
She repressed the urge to swear in church and looked at her watch. It was 8:00 a.m. already. Drat. Her rehearsal time was over, and she had to hoof it in order to make it to her first class.
It was freezing cold. Outside, the sun was just starting to peek up over the far edge of campus. Andy hunkered down into the boxy layers of flannel and wool she used to conceal her stunning figure and made her way through the frost-stiffened scrub of her “shortcut.” Truth be told, it was a long cut. What mattered was that it was off the path and farthest away from everyone else. Andy wasn’t looking for friends at school. She liked her solitude. Actually, that wasn’t quite true. She hated her solitude, but she trusted it more than she trusted people.
“I saw you playing,” said a young man with a musical voice.
Andy screamed and whirled around. She saw a tall, beautiful youth crowned with golden curls. The edges of him twinkled in the thin sunlight of the chilly November morning.
“What are you doing here?” Andy said calmly. She blinked her sun-dazzled eyes and glanced around for another person. Wellesley College was an all-girls’ school in the most blue-blooded, upper-crusty, and thoroughly traditional area of Massachusetts. Unless this boy was a professor or a security guard, he was not allowed this deep into the campus without a visitor’s badge.
“You’re very talented,” he said, moving toward her.
“You said you saw me, huh?” Andy took a step back, not liking this situation. “How could you see me in the chapel? I was alone.”
He laughed, his voice dancing around the notes like a wind chime. “I wasn’t in the chapel, of course. I saw you through that big window.”
“You saw me through a stained-glass window? How’d you pull that off?”
“I could find someone as beautiful as you no matter where you hide. You’re so radiant, I bet you even glow in the dark.”
The way he said it didn’t sound phony. He wasn’t leering or rude in any way, but he was still moving toward her, even though she obviously didn’t want him to. When he got closer, Andy saw something wrong in his eyes—something distinctly animal and not human at all. She remembered the sunlight hitting her face through the stained-glass window and figured out how he’d seen her. She knew who, or rather, what, she was dealing with now. Andy backed away quickly, her breath starting to rasp with real fear.
“Are you going to run from me?” the youth asked poignantly, like this had happened to him many times before.
“Would you chase me?” she asked, adding to her voice the seductive, hypnotic edge that could drive mortal men to their death. She needed to stall for time, maybe get him to follow her back to the path. There was sure to be someone up there to help her.
“Of course I would,” he said, his eyes smoldering and his voice low. He was aroused, but not hypnotized—unfortunately for Andy. “Only the ones who run are worth catching.”