Voice of Gods (Blood of Gods and Royals) by Eleanor Herman

Author:Eleanor Herman [Herman, Eleanor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2015-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Three months later. Winter 357 B.C.

Helen approaches the royal palace of Ambracia with a groan of relief. She has been ten hours in the saddle; her thighs are so sore she can hardly stand, and she’s stiff with cold. The rolling countryside between Dodona and Ambracia must be gorgeous during any other season, but now it is the dead of winter, the trees skeletal, the pale yellow grass flat and limp.

She’s leaving her life behind for the third time now. Theangela, Halicarnassus, Dodona. Her life pattern always seems to uproot her from one place and slap her down in the next, leaving behind friends and everything she has grown used to. Still, she’s grateful to Myrtale. Grateful to be wanted. To be needed.

They both agreed that when they went to Macedon, they would keep secret the fact that Helen was an oracle; otherwise everyone from King Philip to the lowliest stable boy would be knocking on her door at all hours, begging for prophecies. They agreed instead to pretend that Helen is a friend of Myrtale’s from Epirus. Helen will ostensibly serve as one of the queen’s many handmaidens and give her prophecies secretly, behind closed doors.

It took the Epirote Temple Council three months to find a new oracle to replace her—a fake one, of course—but one who gives wonderfully melodramatic oracular performances complete with piercing shrieks and horrifying grimaces. Helen suspects she is mentally unbalanced, but she ought to draw a crowd, and that’s all they care about.

She hasn’t seen Myrtale in those three months as the princess was busy preparing for her wedding. But Stranger came twice to Dodona. Each time Helen was able to reach the gods, but the voices and visions were even more disturbing. Rapid-fire images careened through her head: blood and war, scorched earth and raging floods, and fire raining from the sky as something swallowed the moon and the moon reappeared and swallowed the sun. She bellowed prophecies of doom and destruction that left her shaking and empty. And every time the voice told Stranger he couldn’t join the gods until someone with divine blood ruled Macedon.

Afterward he held her until she recovered her strength. Then they kissed and toyed with each other on the steps of the dais. Though he had more self-discipline than she did, he wanted her, too, she was sure now, at least, of that. Each time he finally pulled away from her, it was with a kind of panting anger. It reminded her of when Mausolus’s fat minister of trade was trying to slim down; he would force himself to stand up in the middle of dinner, sweep his gaze over the mouthwatering honey cakes and roast lamb and, summoning every ounce of resolve he possessed, stalk off, frustration etched in every line of his face. Stranger was like that, storming away from what he wanted: her, Helen, to be his lover, to do with her everything a man and a woman in love are supposed to do.

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