The words landed with finality. I wasn’t ready. I was barely learning how to stand straight again after the ache of training. My arms still trembled sometimes when I lifted the staff. My thoughts were still tangled. My understanding was still shallow. And yet?—
I had been heard.
That was the line I couldn’t stop returning to. Not chosen. Not selected. Heard.
It made it sound like a wish I had not known I made had been answered.
But I didn’t feel honored.
It was too soon.
It was exactly the time.
It was real.
Chapter
Five
CALLIS
The sky was painted with fire.
Clouds drifted in slow waves of rose and bronze across the horizon as I followed the attendant through a long corridor open to the warm dusk air. The breeze carried the scent of honeysuckle and heated stone, and the faint sound of a lyre somewhere distant echoed like memory.
We descended into the bath chambers as the sun began to vanish beyond the sea.
The space was carved directly into the rock beneath the palace—a hollowed sanctum of arches and smooth floors, lit with lanterns set high along the walls. Steam curled lazily toward the ceiling. There was no harshness here. Only warmth. Stillness. The sound of water shifting gently within its basins.
The baths themselves were wide, sunken pools of golden stone that glowed faintly from within—sunstones. They drank in the light each day and gave it back to the water slowly, keeping it warm long afterthe sun had vanished. The heat rolled across my skin as I stepped near, wrapping around me like breath.
Two attendants waited without a word. They were young, but older than I—barefoot, robed in white, their hair tied back, their expressions unreadable. They did not bow. They simply looked at me and waited.
I understood.
I undressed slowly, aware of their gazes, though they said nothing. Theseretslipped from my shoulder and fell soundlessly to the polished stone, leaving me bare in the golden steamlight. My chest rose slightly as I inhaled, arms at my sides. I told myself I wasn’t ashamed.
But the truth was smaller. Tighter. I had never been seen this way. Not like this.
The water welcomed me as I stepped in. It enveloped my legs, my hips, my chest, until I sank into it completely. The heat unknotted something at the base of my spine, and a breath escaped my lips without permission.
Then they began.
One moved behind me, the other to my side. Neither spoke. Hands, warm and assured, dipped into bowls of fragrant oils and worked them into my hair. They poured water from shallow vessels, cupped and slow, until my scalp tingled and my neck slackened. Their touch was firm, practiced, reverent.
They washed my shoulders with cloths soaked in herbal foam, moving in gentle, sweeping strokes that chased the ache from my muscles. My arms, my chest,my stomach—nothing rushed, nothing left to shame. Every inch of me was acknowledged, and I didn’t know what to do with that. No one had ever touched me like this. Not out of love. Not out of lust. Just… attention. Care.
I thought I would be embarrassed.
Instead, I sat very still and let it happen.
One moved lower, kneeling beside the bath as he scrubbed my legs with clean-smelling salts. The other brushed his hands through my hair again, now rinsed smooth and weightless. Their hands never lingered where they shouldn’t—but still, something in the rhythm of their motions blurred the line between sacred and sensual.
I had never been with anyone. Not man. Not woman. Nineteen summers had passed and I’d spent them in temple halls and scriptoriums, apprenticed to words, not bodies. I had assumed, in the way boys do when no other vision is offered, that my future would hold a wife, perhaps children, a simple home behind the temple walls of my island.
And yet even then, even as a child, I had lingered over the myths where men lay with men. The old legends. The moonlit rites. The warriors who wept in each other’s arms before the battle. My tutors glossed over them quickly, but the stories remained. Carved in stone, etched in ink, sung in verse when the wine flowed too freely.
Such pairings weren’t uncommon. Not here. Even on my island, where tradition hardened like salt in the seams of stone, there had been some—two oldfishermen who lived together by the harbor, a healer and his apprentice who never married, a traveling merchant who brought the same handsome servant year after year. No one spoke harshly. Just quietly. Like something precious should not be too loudly named.
