Goddess (Starcrossed)

Poseidon will smash a few Greek ships before they make it home. What say you to that?”
    Most of the men cheered at Helen’s rousing tone, but a few still looked apprehensive. Time was running short, and she knew she had no choice. As Helen used the cestus to influence the last of the soldiers, she felt true hatred for the first time. And it was for herself.
    “Bring it in,” she repeated, and all the men on the wall rushed with dazed faces and blank eyes to fulfill her orders.
    As the great gate was being hauled open for the first time in over a decade, Helen hurried off the wall and made her way through the city to the temple of the Oracle. If Aeneas were to return to his post now, he would ruin the whole endeavor. Helen had to make sure he stayed occupied and away from the gate, or she would have to do something drastic.
    She couldn’t kill him before dawn. The deal Odysseus had made with Zeus was that Odysseus could get the great gate of Troy open and the entire Greek army into the city in one night without killing a single person before the sun rose. Then, at dawn while the city still slept, the Greeks would slaughter the citizens of Troy in their beds. In exchange for such a speedy end to a war that was turning all of the gods against each other, Zeus had sworn that the gods would not return to Earth unless the Scions united and threatened his rule.
    Helen had to make sure that she didn’t kill anyone while she accomplished her end of the deal. That didn’t mean she couldn’t hamstring Aeneas and tie him up, though.
    Her body trembled as she clutched her dagger. She didn’t want to hurt Aeneas, who had always been a good and true man, but she would do whatever was needed. There was already so much innocent blood on her hands that adding his wouldn’t make a difference, anyway. For a moment, Helen thought of Astyanax, Hector and Andromache’s infant son, and her eyes filled with tears.
    All the women, including Helen, were to be spared—after a fashion. They were to be divided among the Greek kings as the spoils of war. Helen was to go to Menelaus. She shuddered, repressing the memory of him trying to beat her to death, and knew that she would face that over and over in the years to come. He was impotent now, made so by Aphrodite’s curse on his town, and he would be determined to take it out on Helen for as long as she managed to live through his brutality.
    Helen felt like this was fair. The women were to be married off to the Greek kings, but apart from Atlanta, all the children of Troy were going to die that night. In comparison, Helen estimated that her suffering was small.
    Odysseus had refused to budge on the children, no matter how much Helen had begged for their lives. The Greeks wouldn’t take the chance that the babies would grow into men who might hunt them down to avenge their fathers’ deaths.
    The Oracle had warned them that the Greeks could slay all the children of Troy, but blood for blood was still to be the demigod’s fate. Cassandra foresaw that the Furies would not tolerate the killing of children and kin, and that they would punish all the demigods for the slaughter of innocents. But of course, no one believed her.
    Helen kept her dagger in its sheath until she needed it, and climbed the steep, rocky hill to the temple where Cassandra lived in solitude. Many times over the years, Helen had stared up at the gleaming pillars of Cassandra’s plush prison and thought that her husband’s little sister was like the moon. She was higher than any of them, remote, and so very alone.
    A few steps farther, and Helen heard some unmistakable sounds. Impossible, Helen thought as she heard the two voices cry out in unison.
    Helen darted from column to column and made her way through the forest of marble in the interior of the temple, until she was close enough to the inner sanctum to confirm with her own eyes what her ears had already told her.
    Aeneas and Cassandra were lovers. And from the surprised look on Aeneas’ face as he lay next to Cassandra, still panting, Helen could see that their intimacy was a new development.
    Aeneas sat up in the pile of discarded clothes and torn-down draperies that had served as their bed and ran a hand across his sweaty face like he had no idea what to do next. He looked around at the knocked-over amphorae, the ripped curtains, and the general havoc that their union had wreaked on the now-defiled temple, and then down at Cassandra, completely