Page 178 of A Tribute of Fire

I went over to help her clean it up while Zalira started putting our bedding back into place.

Io entered our room a few minutes later, shocking everyone.

We all rushed over to hug her.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“I’m fine. I didn’t get nearly as much venom in me as Suri did. She will be recovering for a while longer,” she said. “What happened in here?”

“Nysa, Artemisia, and her adelphia came to look for the treasury key,” I said.

“Did they find it?” she asked. There were dark bags under her eyes and fading red streaks around her mouth, and the purple-and-black finger bruises on her neck had started to turn yellow and green.

She looked like she’d been beaten up. She went over to sit on her bed and I was glad that Zalira had put that one back together first.

“No. I got rid of it in the forest on our way to the spring,” I said.

Io nodded, looking relieved. “Good.”

Ahyana went to sit next to her, taking her hand. “Did you hear?”

“About Daphne?” Tears instantly formed and began to slide down her cheeks. She sniffled. “I still can’t believe that it’s true. It doesn’t seem real. We just saw her yesterday and she was fine. In perfect health.”

“It can happen suddenly,” I said, echoing Maia’s words. “I’m really sorry. I know how close you were to her.”

Zalira and Ahyana also told her they were sorry, with Ahyana hugging Io tightly.

“After the festival we were supposed to go out to a nearby farm to help with their olive trees. I don’t know if that’s still going to happen. I’m going to miss her so much,” Io said.

We stayed silent for a long while, out of respect for Daphne and for Io’s loss. Then I couldn’t help myself—I had to ask the question that had been plaguing me. “Did anyone else think it was strange that Theano fell ill at the same time Daphne died?”

“You think the two events are connected?” Zalira attempted to clarify.

“I think it’s a possibility. It seems too strange not to be.”

“To what end?” Ahyana asked. “Do you think someone was trying to hurt them and it caused Daphne to die while Theano only became sick?”

I shrugged. “None of us know what happened yesterday. But who would attack them both?”

Zalira crossed her arms over her chest. “I think the more important question is why so many of these things are happening all at once. It feels like something is coming and each new thing brings us closer to a cataclysmic event.”

I knew what she meant. I had felt that way ever since I’d stepped foot into Ilion.

Time was counting down, but I had no idea what would happen when it ran out completely.

The next couple of days were filled with so much activity that there wasn’t much chance for us to speculate as to the wild series of events we had been living through. There was endless cleaning that had to be done to prepare for the festival.

Some of the older priestesses made some noise about canceling the festival, given Theano’s condition, but they were quickly overruled. The festival was too important to forgo for any one person.

Antiope was elected to the vacant leadership position left by Daphne’s death. I had expected that there would be a funeral for Daphne, but they didn’t have one. She was quietly buried in the earth with no fanfare.

“She was born of a woman, and to a woman she returns,” Maia said. “To the bosom of the goddess of the earth.”

Suri recovered quickly, and I figured it had to be due in part to Io staying down in the infirmary as much as she could to help concoct possible remedies. Combined with the antivenin, they seemed to work. We were all thrilled to have our sister returned to us, healthy and whole.

I wondered if she had the same red, fading streaks on her arm that Io had on her face, but Suri had returned to covering her arms. If my sisters had noticed her other scars, they didn’t say so.

While I kept expecting Antiope or Maia to make an announcement about what we’d discovered at the headwater of the spring, nothing was said. And we were expected to go about our business pretending that we hadn’t been attacked by creatures straight from a nightmare.

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