The great-hearted daughter of man-slaying Ares arrives on the last day of the funeral.
In shining bronze she comes across the plains of Ilium, Penthesilea, riding, with a dozen followers in tight formation behind her. Splendid spears and shields flash bright beneath Helios' golden rays, and stiff horse-hair crests shake in Eurus' breeze.
At first, guards set to watch for Argive treachery raise a call of alarm.
What sort of men but for Danaans would cross these wasted flats of dried and caked blood-red mud?
No men.
These warriors are women all, Amazons, come from the East.
Seeing guards reaching for arms, the leader of them dismounts, and her company follow her lead. In peace they come, leading strong steeds behind them.
Hector – Hector had been a tamer of horses.
Standing amongst her many sisters and brothers, Cassandra does not weep.
Too many tears she has already shed for her eldest brother, the most noble of them all, the most kind. Even before the nine days of mourning, kneeling within the seats of her father with all the women of the house as they wailed and beat their breasts and offered laments to deaf gods, she long ago looked upon his body with dry eyes.
As the mourners say their last farewells and Priam, king of Troy, lays the first stone over the golden urn, Cassandra turns towards these newcomers, these Amazons.
She knows their names and she knows their fates.
Bremousa. Bremousa will fall to the lance of Idomeneus, pierced through the breast, pouring life out onto the field of battle. Meriones, son of Molus, will slay Euandre with a lightning-fast sword. Diomedes will take Derimakheia's head from her shoulders. It will be a swift death. She will blink and then she will be gone.
And, proudest of them all, Penthesilea, mourned by men, she will fall to Achilles himself, best of the Achaeans.
But for now, she is alive. She is strong, she is handsome, she is filled with fire, even as shadows dog her step, swirling about her.
Cassandra has seen these shadows, these Furies, before. She's seen them haunting the house of Atreus, black gods, pestilent gods, gods older than Olympus, the Gracious Ones, screaming into the night for the blood of kinslayers.
What sort of kin has this woman slain?
Cassandra's lips press into a tight line. For all her art of arms and all her comely strength, for all her fate, this tall stranger is no Hector returned.
The scion of War waits for the Dardanians to heap up their barrow before she approaches.
"Priam, courageous king," she hails, "I am Penthesilea, daughter of Otrera and Ares, savior of cities who rallies soldiers about him. I have come to rout the Achaeans, to set fire to their ships, to kill their Achilles. I burn for groaning battle and with my strength and my spear I shall slay as many Danaans as there are good Trojan men who have passed to Hades' halls."
Cassandra watches her father's aged face as hope turns to joy. She needs no prophecy to know what the warrior woman's words have wrought. How mighty must she be, daughter of Ares himself! Surely she might do what in nine long years so many god-born Trojans had not!
And so Priam, lord of Ilium, welcomes her.
He welcomes her as a hero, a savior, a daughter of his own.
Together they ride back to the city, followed by her company, and all Cassandra's sisters and brothers, and those guards who first had spotted these newcomers.
Walking in the wake of them, sun-kissed Cassandra watches the Erinyes swirl.
Helios has crossed half the sky when the column passes beneath Troy's great gates. All the city is in mourning still, but the nervous hopes of Priam and his attendants rouse spirits and create a cloud of fearful anticipation almost as stifling as the fog of grief that has gripped the city for so long. Their column of Trojans and Amazons winds through the streets, spreading the cloud as it passes, until it reaches the broad steps up to the awesome palace of Priam.
It is a high house of gold, built in white stone with all trappings worthy of Troy.
The riders dismount and Priam himself invites bright Penthesilea and her band into his halls.
Here, Cassandra pauses. Her sisters and brothers disperse, women to weave and to wait, men to prepare again for war. Servants come and take the horses of the company to be watered and fed. She is, as she always is, alone.
On a whim, she closes her eyes and she attempts to peer past the now.
She sees naught but the backs of her eyelids.
Prophecy, like its god, is a fickle thing.
Still though, in seeing nothing, she has seen enough to guide her course.
Cassandra sets her feet to the stairs of the palace and climbs towards mighty golden doors. If the future is dark to her, she would know the past.
It is not a difficult thing, once within her father's halls, for the loveliest of all Priam's daughters to find her way. Her long dress of white linen whispers, wordless, as she walks across cool stones. None bar her way. It has been many months since anyone sought to restrain her step or silence her cursed tongue.
She slows her pace only when she has reached the vaulted hall of Priam's throne.
In better times, it was from this seat that Priam handed down laws to the people and assigned fair judgements. In this place, once, there had been joy, untainted by ever-present fear. Here, Priam had received guests from distant lands and heaped upon them gifts of hospitality. Here, still, Priam receives what few guests come, though Troy has few gifts left to give.
Cassandra slips into the hall and finds that she is not the first to come quietly to watch the king and the warrior.
Helenus, twin to her, waits in the shadow of the door.
Cassandra and Helenus both know his fate and, for this reason, they have not spoken in years. How many times must the love of a woman be the downfall of Troy?
"Sister," Helenus says, low and solemn. "You'll find no happiness here."
Cassandra's jaw tightens. Has cruel Apollo shown something to Helenus that she herself has not seen? No. He does not speak with the weight of prophecy. He may have some knowledge that Cassandra lacks, but, in this moment, his words are not fate. He guesses, he reasons, he lies.
And yet Helenus' prophecies are the prophecies that Troy chooses to believe.
Cassandra does not give her twin a reply and he says no more as he withdraws from their father's hall.
Again alone, she advances quietly towards the small gathering crowded around Priam's throne.
She can see them now once more, Erinyes, perched about the hall, stirrings of their dark wings causing torches to flicker. Beneath the earth, they punish the foresworn. Upon the earth, they hold scourges, their voices are blood-curdling wails, and their hair is snakes. For now though, they are quiet, but not complacent, sentinels guarding prey.
Cassandra watches them, and she watches the mortals as well.
None seem to take any notice of the awful gods, nor of Cassandra.
None, save for the woman they pursue, that great-hearted daughter of brazen Ares.
Though she laughs and boasts and drinks with her companions and their host, her eyes dart anxiously, never still, always sweeping from monstrous form to monstrous form. She reclines on a couch of purple and gold, but her body is as tense as if she were vying for life on her father's field.
It is her nervous scanning of the hall that causes her eyes to fall upon Cassandra.
In an instant, all breath is snatched from Cassandra's chest.
Penthesilea's dark eyes are as beautiful as those of a goddess - and they are hollow, and they are empty, and they are hunted.
Cassandra pulls herself back further into the shadows.
Helenus did not need prophecy to speak truthfully of the future.
In the steps of her brother before her, Cassandra withdraws from the hall. Her curiosity is not sated, but she thinks she no longer desires it to be.
Outside, in the courtyard of Priam's palace, servants rush to and fro, the workers of a hive, bees, industriously setting out tables and beginning to bring forth food the long-besieged city can't afford to waste. It is as if all sense what Cassandra knows. Hector is dead. The war will not drag on for much longer.
After nine years of waiting for the end, waiting for Helios to touch the horizon and waiting for the feast to begin is nothing to sun-kissed Cassandra.
She has no husband, no house to attend to save for her father's.
She was betrothed once, then twice.
Her first lord was Thymbraean Apollo.
As priestess to him, she cared for his temple and offered him his rites. He wanted more. Though she had no desire for him, not as a shining god, and certainly not as a comely man, he pursued her still. He plied all his art of persuasion, but she knew herself too well to promise what she could not give. When the oracular god finally saw this, want turned to spite. With his spittle, he cursed his gift to her, and she was his priestess no more.
Othryoneus then was the first mortal man to seek her hand, though not the first to seek her. For no other reason he had come to Ilium to fight, to die. Priam, king of Troy, master of all his house, promised her to that brave suitor in return for vain promises of victory. A feast had been laid for the betrothal. On the next day, by the time Nyx covered the earth, Othryoneus lay dead by Idomeneus' flashing spear.
Othryoneus' ashes had only just been interred when again Priam offered his daughter's hand, this time to beautiful Eurypulus. Eurypulus too had the mark of death upon him and Cassandra gave him nothing but a sad smile before he rode out to die beneath the high walls of Troy.
While Cassandra waits and remembers the lost, Helios above finishes his descent towards Ocean.
Now Hesperus rises.
Now torches instead of sun light the courtyard.
Now Cassandra's sisters and brothers return to their father's hall.
From the palace, Priam, lord of Ilium, emerges, followed by Penthesilea, followed by her company.
They are the guests of honor at Hector's feast.
They stand and they boast and they promise the world to dying Troy.
Cassandra has a place at her father's table, but she only picks at the food before her. The bread is hard, the wine is weak, and when she bites into the meat, she tastes nothing but salt. This night is not Troy's last, but this is the food that will be served when the time comes for the city to fall. And, for some of her brothers, beautiful men, strong with youth and dreams, who feast now with her -
Cassandra moves away from the table.
Her end will come whether she eats or not.
And she does not want to see the faces of the dead.
So she retreats.
She turns down the tall colonnade that leads towards her room in her father's house and she leaves the feasting, the celebrating, the drunken revelry.
When she's gone some distance from the courtyard, has almost reached her own hall, Cassandra perceives footsteps behind her. She has been followed. Some feeling darts through her. Is it surprise? A prophetess, Cassandra is not accustomed to being surprised.
Out of the corner of her eye, Cassandra sees the shadows lurch sickly, and she knows who has followed her even before she turns.
Far from the torches of the courtyard, god-born Penthesilea is bright in the darkness of Nyx. War-like in every aspect, she offers no pleasantries. "You see them," she says.
Wary, Cassandra nods once. The woman before her is as strong as any of Cassandra's brothers, stronger, even, for Cassandra's brothers are the children of mortal Priam and mortal Hecuba. In Penthesilea is the blood of gods. She is born of the immortals, born of their might and of their whims. The very air around her seems thick with barely constrained power. And she is coming closer.
Fire-filled Penthesilea speaks only a single word. There is hunger in her voice. "How?"
Cassandra hesitates. She does not have an answer and nothing of prophecy will yield one.
It matters not. With all her father's conviction, Penthesilea continues her advance. She comes near to Cassandra, stopping a mere breath away. Around her, the dark Erinyes swirl, but there is no room for them to come between the two women. "You are a seer."
Though this dark-skinned stranger towers over her, Cassandra is the daughter of a king. She draws herself up, cloaks herself in presence. She answers, "I am."
Bright Penthesilea looms tall, unmoved by Cassandra's display. In the night, her eyes appear almost black as they bore into Cassandra, searching. With every passing moment, her stillness warns of coming motion, warns that she is a daughter of the gods. So close, Cassandra can see the steady rise and fall of the warrior's chest, and it reminds Cassandra herself to breathe.
When finally Penthesilea moves, she does not move in violence. Slow, she kneels. She grasps at Cassandra's knees. It is the gesture of the supplicant. It is the gesture of a woman who offers all the faith she has to give to Cassandra alone.
Though Penthesilea wears a full tunic, when Cassandra looks down, she feels she can see all across the warrior's back where the dark Erinyes have lashed her as they drove her from her home to the remnants of dying Troy.
"Absolve me," murmurs the hunted daughter of mighty Ares. "Drive them away. Tell me my penance, let me be free of them. Let me sleep."
Speechless, Cassandra stands above the prostrate warrior, great-hearted Penthesilea, Penthesilea who gives to Cassandra faith without proof, who offers trust in the absence of promises or prophecies. Penthesilea for whom Cassandra can do nothing. Penthesilea, whom Cassandra cannot save.
And she would save her, if she could. She would save her from the Furies, from fate, from the nightmares that come with both.
She knows the nightmares of the future too well.
She knows the way they rob the body of all rest, the way they menace in the shadows of the waking world.
She lives her nightmares every time she closes her eyes to sleep.
She knows Athena will turn away when her time comes.
The daughter of Priam bends down and gently twines her fingers around those of her supplicant. "Penthesilea, mourned by men, daughter of city-saving Ares," she says.
Cassandra pauses. She waits.
Slow, Penthesilea raises her head and looks up.
Penthesilea, doomed by Troy – like all the rest.
And then Cassandra offers the only comfort she can. She offers Apollo's gift. She speaks with the voice of fate. "You will die tomorrow on the fields beneath Troy's walls. That will be your absolution." She does not speak the rest of what she sees. Some things are too awful to be given breath, even in cursed prophecy.
Penthesilea bows her head once more. Whatever force of desperation had filled her, it flees now.
All around them, the Furies cackle – the sound of clattering stones in the avalanche of a falling city.
Cassandra's hands tremble.
Fingers still twined, Penthesilea shifts her grip, steadies the daughter of Priam. "I did not come to this withered city," she says, voice slow with grief, "thinking that I would leave it."
Cassandra's reply is a whisper. "You believe me?"
The broken daughter of Ares releases Cassandra and stands. She is as tall as she was moments ago, but she seems smaller now than she was then. She is less bright. "Loveliest daughter of Priam," she says, cadence measured, "How could I not? I traveled here from far-off Thermiskyra, on the banks of the Thermodon, great city of my people, so that I might die well in battle. And now you tell me that that is what I shall do. Of course I believe what I already know."
Then, Penthesilea turns. "I must return to the feast," she says. "But I thank you for your words."
Before the warrior can begin to leave, Cassandra reaches out and catches her sleeve. "I had meant them to be a comfort."
Penthesilea turns back. "You have a queer idea of comfort," she says softly. She wears the same sad smile that kind Hector bore as he made his farewell to Adromache at Troy's gate.
Words catch in Cassandra's throat. She blinks. She swallows. "When I speak fate, they don't listen."
Penthesilea's hand rises, as if she means to clasp Cassandra's shoulder, but she stops herself and lowers it once more. "They should," she says. "You deserve their ears, their trust." She looks down to her hand, then back up to Cassandra. "Their hearts."
This time when the daughter of golden Ares begins to depart, Cassandra does not stop her.
She watches Penthesilea go, back to the feast, back to her fate.
Though she stands at the threshold of her home, Cassandra finds herself hesitating. If she goes now, if she sleeps, quiet, she will wake with the dawn and bright Penthesilea, full of life, will have already ridden out to fight her last beyond the gates of Troy.
And if Cassandra returns to the feast?
She does not attempt to peer ahead through time.
She has already seen Penthesilea's end, and she has already seen her own.
It is hard to imagine any consequences to actions, any need to act at all. But that is no way to live.
Cassandra meant her words to be soothing, and they fell short.
She turns her feet back towards the feast.
The words of prophecy had not been payment enough for bright Penthesilea's faith, but she has other words, surely. For the sake of a dead woman who, for a moment, believed in her, she must correct her error.
When Cassandra returns to the celebrations, the food has long ago been finished but the wine still flows freely. Many of her sisters have retreated from the revelry, but her brothers remain. Steps guided by the light of torches, they dance and they sing and they boast of their deeds, past and future both. They brag of their wives and they shout of even more exploits.
In every aspect of the raucous celebration, the Amazons match and outdo the Trojan princes.
It is easy to see why it is said that the Amazons are not women at all.
It is easy to see why Priam allowed hope to kindle.
Here is fierce Polemousa, laughing loud and speaking her life, what great beasts she has hunted, what mighty men she has brought low.
There is Antibrote, long shining hair unbound as she drinks with the sons of Ilium.
Here is Harmothoe, drawing the awe of all assembled at her capacity for drink.
The three of them, each and every one, Cassandra knows, will be dead tomorrow by raging Achilles' hand, flowers cut by a plow. She turns away. If they know their fates, they have made their peace. If they do not, then she will not be the one to prophesy to them.
Through all the commotion, Cassandra searches for only one woman.
Bright Penthesilea sits on a bench in the shadows of the courtyard, darkness ever about her. Her eyes do not dart to and fro. Instead, they stare forward into a distance no one else can see. The Furies do not so much swirl about her as they have come to rest upon her, leaning up against her, draping serpent arms about her, perched on her shoulders.
Cassandra approaches.
Penthesilea turns her head towards the daughter of Priam.
The Furies lift, resuming their gyre.
"Lady seer," Penthesilea says, raising her cup slightly in greeting. "For what cause have you returned?"
Cassandra speaks no reply, merely seats herself next to the great-hearted daughter of Ares.
She meant to offer words, not of prophecy, but of something else. Mortal words. But now, here, she finds she had none.
So instead she offers silent companionship.
A servant brings her wine and together the two of them sit, drinking, watching the night unfold.
The stars wander the sky, first rising, then beginning to fall once more.
Many of Cassandra's brothers, and some of the Amazons as well, lie still on the paving stones of the courtyard when Penthesilea reaches out and tucks a stray lock of Cassandra's brown hair behind her ear.
Cassandra turns towards her.
Bright Penthesilea, full of life, is more than mortal and her attention is intoxicating in a way that Apollo's never was.
Cassandra is the loveliest of all Priam's daughters. She is no stranger to the desire of others. But unlike the others, unlike Apollo, Penthesilea does not presume that Cassandra must be either bought or forced.
Penthesilea touches two fingers to Cassandra's chin and she asks, "May I?"
Cassandra's tongue darts out to wet her lips.
Surprise is fast becoming the refrain of the night.
It is not unpleasant.
She is tempted to close her eyes, to ask fate what she will do.
Instead, she nods once and she keeps her eyes open when Penthesilea leans forward and presses her lips to Cassandra's with a slow gentleness that chases away all the echoes of war that live in the air of Ilium.
She keeps her eyes open, for she wishes now for only the present, only Penthesilea.
Cassandra imagines that Penthesilea tastes of far-off fields, roaring rivers, forests and glades that Cassandra herself will never see, not in her life and not in the coming lives of her many brothers.
Oh but she wants to – she wants to see the things that Penthesilea has seen, to journey to those foreign places, to leave doomed Troy for a better fate.
Cassandra has never drawn any comfort from fate. Fate will not stand guard over her against the darkness, for fate is the darkness. Fate will not honor her with belief, for fate is faithless.
Fate is cruel and it has fixed the end for her, for bright Penthesilea. But it has not fixed the steps they will take to those ends.
Cassandra wants to live.
Cassandra's decision is made. She pulls away and she stands and, in the space of that motion, Penthesilea's face falls, then falls blank.
"My apologies," bright Penthesilea says. "I see that the hour is late. I am sorry to have detained you for so long."
Now it is Cassandra's turn to reach out. She takes Penthesilea by the hand and she draws her up.
Penthesilea's hand is heavy, limp.
Cassandra's heart thrums fast, skips a beat, skips another.
The night is long but it will not last forever, no matter the prayers of a mortal woman. The night will end. It must.
And then Penthesilea looks up.
And when she looks up, she looks up to Cassandra with those same eyes that Cassandra first saw in Priam's hall. And they are, as then, beautiful. And they are, as then, the eyes of a goddess. And they are different. There is nothing now of the darkness, nothing of fear, nothing of despair in them.
Penthesilea's breath catches, and then her hand becomes light as she returns Cassandra's gesture, as she stands.
Hands clasped, they leave the courtyard together and together walk the long colonnade back to the hall given to Cassandra.
Cassandra cannot absolve. She cannot wash away the blood on Penthesilea's hands.
But she can toil to drive away the Furies, for a time, and, though she can do little else, she can lead them both to a dreamless sleep as she lives her life.
Cassandra wakes with the dawn.
A/N: Thank you to LogosMinusPity, freestylesmiles, Mitha, Rachel, and Allison for helping me speed-edit this as I wrote it over the course of about a day and a half. I've made some edits since the last draft they got, so any issues are my fault entirely. This fic is crossposted at AO3.