Free The Sweet Girl by Annabel Lyon Page A

with spit on a cloth and redone it to her own satisfaction.
    “Daughter.”
    I snap back from the contemplation of my odd-looking self in a bronze to smile at the introductions Daddy’s making. Plios pinches my cheek again and says I’m as pretty as he’d guessed. The woman who gave me the drink is back for formal introductions. Glycera is her name, and these are her daughters, three beauties in soft colours who don’t speak, but smile without malice at everyone and everything. Thaulos is here, and greets my father more warmly than he did on the hill; a priestess of Artemis—white-haired, with black brows—is presented to us; also a handsome officer. I can’t hear clearly over the tinkling music, and decide it’s time to stop sipping. Daddy is bragging about me. “Reads, writes, keeps the kitchen garden,” he’s saying to Glycera. “Knows her herbs. She healed one of our slaves last winter of an infection, all by herself, no fuss. Didn’t tell anybody. Lanced the abscess, cleaned it, applied a hot fennel poultice, checked the pus for—”
    “Daddy.”
    “The body is not disgusting,” Daddy says, too loudly, reproving. “As I was saying, the pus—”
    “An accomplished young woman,” Glycera says. “A credit to you, my dear.” That stops Daddy. He’s not used to being anyone’s dear. “What else can she do?”
    “Cauterize a cut, set a broken bone, apply leeches—”
    “Weave,” I say. “Embroider, a little.”
    “Does she sing?” the priestess wants to know.
    “Like a hoopoe,” I say.
    The room bursts into laughter; everyone is listening.
    “Dance?” Glycera asks.
    Daddy frowns; I look at the floor.
    “I think she loves flowers,” the officer says. “I sense it. She fills the house with vases of wildflowers, beautifully arranged.” I look at him gratefully. “Blue,” he adds. His eyes crinkle too when he smiles, but not like Glycera’s. He’s young. “A bit of purple, but mostly blue.”
    His name is Euphranor. I ask one of Glycera’s smiling daughters in the women’s room, where the pots are. She smiles at the question, without curiosity; I wonder if she’s drugged, though she checks her appearance carefully enough in the bronze, and corrects a smudge of colour on the lid of one eye with a steady finger. She smiles again when she sees me watching.
    Back in the big room, Glycera takes my elbow. “I’ve offended your good father,” she says. “Only I do so love dancing. My friends know this eccentricity of mine and forgive me. I’m sorry if I’ve shocked you. There’s nothing so beautiful as a young girl dancing. So innocent. So healthy for the body. Do you enjoy exercise?”
    “I swim,” I admit. She covers her mouth with her hand andher eyes go big. “Is that terrible?” I say, maybe a bit wistfully. “Will I not be allowed to swim here?”
    “Utterly charming,” Glycera says, which isn’t an answer. She lifts my chin with a single finger and adds, “There. That’s right. We wear our chins terribly high in Chalcis.”
    I giggle.
    “Oh, we’re going to be great friends.” Glycera beams again. “You’ll come weave with us, my daughters and me. We’re a house full of women now that my dear husband is gone. Five years ago, now. We love sweet company. Anything you need, you call on me. You have no mother, I think.”
    “My mother died when I was three.”
    “Precious.” Her eyes go bright and she pulls me to her, smothering me briefly in the front of her dress. “You come to us whenever you want.” She glances over at Daddy, who’s holding forth about something across the room. I see the men around him exchanging glances, amused at something Daddy isn’t aware of. “They shouldn’t laugh at him. He’s a greater man than any of them will ever be,” she says.
    I feel surprise, and gratitude. “Will you excuse me?”
    “You hold him up like a stake holds a vine. I see it. Go, go to him. You’re everything to him; those men are less than