Helen woke up with a gasp that felt like sandpaper shoved down her throat. Her lungs brimmed with the acrid fumes of death and blood and honour, with the thick gore of livid wounds. 

She inhaled again and it was softer. She blinked, and soon the world was rearranging itself – the war outside her door gave way to sun-touched grass. Olive trees. Branches cut the sky into shards of azure blue. 

She had learned how to wrestle in this orchard. She had stolen her brothers’ javelins and practiced alone. She knew this view – lying on the ground, looking up – because she had laid out here in the shade on warm summer days, because she had fallen and bruised herself over and over, again and again, knocked all the air from her lungs. Helen sat up. 

Helen sat up. Her mother set down a mug of honeyed milk beside the hearth where she was warming her hands. There was blood on them and blood under her nails.

“Drink,” said Leda.

“Mum,” Helen whispered, “I think I’ve been hurting people.”

“Don’t talk about these things,” Leda smiled, “Of course you wouldn’t, darling.”

“Mum.” said Helen, “Look at the blood on my hands.”

“More honey?” The sunlight shattered through the wooden shutters and draped across Leda’s shoulders.

“How did I get here?” Helen shivered, wrapping her hands around her cold, gritty mug. “How did I get home? I was in Troy.”

“It’s not going to be easy.” said Leda, “Choosing between what you want and what people think is right. That’s what they’ll tell you. Isn’t it funny? That doing what they say is the right thing always takes something from you?”

“How did I get here?” repeated Helen.

“You walked.” Leda said. She was rinsing a rag in a basin of cool water. “You always find your way home.”

Helen didn’t remember walking. She remembered fire. She remembered the sea foaming red with the guts of men she’d never known. 

She exhaled sharply. “I think I hurt people.”

Leda glanced at her, then back at her hands. She took Helen’s fingers and turned them over, palms up, tracing the creases with her own. “You’ve always had soft hands.”

Helen swallowed. “That’s not true.”

Leda smiled. “Then tell me whose hands they were.” Her face was alabaster smooth in the light of Hestia’s flame. “You won’t see me again. You won’t see a lot of people again. It won’t be easy, choosing between what you want and what they tell you is right. A man will have died and you’ll be thinking about whether he had a choice.”

“Who’s dying? Who’s going to die?”

“It’s alright. You don’t know him well yet. Nobody important to you. He’ll be very important to other people – but of course, everyone is. He won’t have had a choice, but you do. You did, Helen, and what did you do with it?”

Castor was brushing through her hair, working patiently through the knots at the nape of her neck. His hands were remarkably gentle. Sunlight pooled on the floorboards, thick and golden.

“You haven’t done this since I was little.” whispered Helen.

“You’re still little.” Castor said, cradling her head and tipping it back gently so she saw his upside down smile, “You’re only eighteen. People expect you to figure your life out at eighteen. Why? Eighteen is no age.”

His face was smooth and his voice was squeakier. Had he ever been this young?

“You’re going to leave.” she said, “You’re going to go on adventures and forget to come home.”

“Aren’t the stars beautiful?” asked Castor, “Don’t forget to look up at them once in a while. Don’t forget to look.”

“You’re not really here.” she said.

“No.” he agreed, “You’re all alone. You’re surrounded by men who would die for you. Who are dying for you. Don’t you remember?”

“You took everything from me,” said Penelope. She was weaving a funeral shroud at her loom. “My husband. My life. Me.”

Helen clenched her fists until there were half-moon indents on her skin. “You don’t mean that.” The room was empty. It was very dark, and neither Leda nor Castor was here.

“Of course I mean it, Helen.” snarled Penelope, “Can you imagine what your mother will say? When it comes out that her little baby girl’s run off with a great man-child? She’ll hang herself.”

Helen clutched at the pale expanse of her throat, stumbling to the portico and longing to throw herself off the edge to empty her abdomen. 

“You always did have a flair for the dramatic.” Penelope called out from behind her, “Cold, septic bitch.”

“You’re not really here.” choked Helen, “This isn’t real. It’s a dream, it’s all in my head, you’re not really here.”

“He’ll pay for that.” seethed Clytemnestra, hair wild, eyes wilder. Penelope was gone. The loom was gone. The darkness had dissolved into pale morning light.

“Cly,” said Helen, “This city’s burning to the ground.”

“An eye for an eye, a limb for a limb.” Clytemnestra gripped the edge of the table and it bit into her calloused palms. 

“Cly, I think my husband’s going to kill me,” She said. “Why did I do that? Why did I go? Why did I run away?”

“You can go,” Castor said, kindly, and Helen shivered and shivered. “You’ve been dreaming about running all your life. Just taking a step and going.”

“Isn’t that what I’ve done?”

“Isn’t that what you’ve done?” Castor agreed, “Why can’t you do it again? What’s stopping you? You’re fast, Helen. You’ve always been the fastest of all of us. If you run, nobody will catch you. Not a thousand men, not a thousand ships.”

Apple blossoms filled the air. Dry grass tickled her cheek, the curve of her calf. The sky went forever. 

“I miss you, Helen.” said Iphigenia, who was smiling with her small, shy mouth. “When are you coming back home?”

“Why are you playing alone?” asked Helen. Iphigenia was sitting cross-legged at the lip of sand beside a flowing river. “Where’s your mother?”

“I don’t do everything with Mum.” She said, “She’s going to have to learn how to do a lot of things without me, one day.”

Spear against armour. Warm, uncomfortable breath. Hissing. Faraway shouts rising from the ranks like the roar of a summer wind.

“I’m so scared, Mum.” Helen whispered. The milk was steaming but her hands were shaking against cold clay. 

“Just run,” said Castor. The trees were rustling behind him. “Just run and go, Helen. Just run and go.”

“When are you coming back home, Mum?” Hermione said. “It’s been two years. Please come home. I’ve been given to Orestes. I don’t want to marry him. I want to run, run, run and go…”

“You know it’s not your fault, right?” said Pollux quite seriously. He was laying on the grass beside her and weaving together a flower crown. She always did like those tremendously – being appointed as queen, over and over and over again.

“I ran away.”

“Yeah, and? Plenty of people fall in love. That’s all you did. You were lonely and you wanted the whole world. Don’t you think I get it? We’re the only ones, you and me. I know what it’s like to have a God for a father. The King of Gods. I wanted the whole world, too. I thought I deserved it. Nobody else understood.”

“I should’ve known better.” Helen murmured, laying on her stomach and playing with the ends of her brother’s hair. “He didn’t even deserve me in the end – the bastard.”

“We don’t get to choose what kind of blood runs in our veins.” said Pollux, “But we get to decide some things. We get to decide where we run, where we land.”

The noise around her rose and rose.

“Helen!”

“You did this.” he rasped.

“No.”

“You did,” he insisted, “You’re the reason everything is ruined.”

He looked like Paris. He looked like Menelaus. He looked like Achilles and Agamemnon and Great Ajax and Teucer and every man who had ever tried to claim her as his.

The sea – all fire – churned beneath her. There was a wailing despair in the depths of her stomach.

“Look ahead,” said Paris, “Look at what we’ve done.”

“We?”

Paris smiled gently at her. “You chose me.”

He carved the glass of her cheekbones with an airy touch, gaze burning, and then he crashed upon her like a summer tide. A chokehold. Her eyes rolled heavenward.

“It’s getting colder,” said Helen, “Mum, I’m so cold.”

Castor was brushing her hair. It didn’t hurt, but she knew it should. She tipped her head back and let him hold the weight of her white skull with his two big hands. The sky was blue.

Penelope was unpicking her shroud thread by thread by thread. Clytemnestra paced in front of a table. Pollux was lying on his back facing the sky with eyes like glass. 

The stain spread and spread and she watched it go. She couldn’t lift her head.

“You have a choice,” said little rosy-cheeked Iphigenia.

“It’s getting colder.”

“I know.”

She was crying. Her tears were the only warm things in the world.

“Wake up, Helen.” said Paris, “Why don’t you make love to me?”

The blue sky shattered into one thousand shards and pieces.

She opened her eyes once more.