The Breaking

The messenger arrived on a hot day late in the spring, and Kyra met him in her receiving room.

Try as I might, I can't find Nicea. Weeks of futility, every path ending at the same closed door: the slave market on Delos. She would have been one of hundreds of sales made every day, the records of which sit in an archive closed to private citizens.

Overnight, the stars disappear behind a sheet of clouds, and at midday the autumn light holds a milky tinge, like drops of white paint stirred into water. On the beach the wind flicks and darts aimlessly across the sand.

I waste no time finding someone who can mark skin with ink: a Thrakian sailor on the crew of the Adrestia, Barnabas's old ship. He'll come to my estate when he's finished helping twist new ropes for the ship's rigging. Three days

Bruises heal, though the rift between Melitta and I remains, a festering wound we're both too stubborn to tend to in the way it truly needs: a good lancing to let everything air out. For the good of the house, we wordlessly settle into a truce.

In Barnabas's workroom, two pairs of eyes stare at me in disbelief and two voices speak at the same time.

Zinas could have told me anything. He could have fed me all sorts of lies about Atarbion, Epagathos, and Grifos, knowing he'd be far outside my reach by the time the falsehoods were discovered. It takes Melitta and her crew of informants several days to track down his

No one's surprised when a messenger arrives the next day to deliver an apologetic note refusing my offer. And not only that: Epagathos wants to visit my estate with Nicea on hand to meet with my orphans. The matter of his missing slavegirl must be resolved.

They come to me in ones and twos: children without family, children living on the city streets or in the forested outskirts, children who've heard stories of a wondrous palace in a valley below the great statue of Artemis, where there's always food to eat and

Autumn on Mykonos. Warm days, heavy-scented with figs and apples. Chill nights, clear and sparkling. The olive harvest has the farmhands working from dawn to dusk, and the fine weather allows the construction work around the estate to keep up a fast pace. In the mornings, I conduct household business: