Free Bring Down the Sun by Judith Tarr

year—pirate queens aside. Convenient, don’t you think?”
    â€œThe Mother disposes us as she wills,” Polyxena said. She knew she sounded prim. She refused to be embarrassed by it. “I’m a child of queens. From the very beginning the Mother has loved us.”
    â€œThey say you’re descended from Achilles.”
    â€œThey do say it,” she said.
    â€œAnd you? What do they call you?”
    â€œPolyxena,” she said.
    â€œOdd choice of name,” he said. “Didn’t she betray your noble ancestor?”
    â€œSome say she did. Others say she did what she could to save Troy. Yet others,” said Polyxena, “said he was besotted with her, and demanded her sacrifice on his tomb, to be his consort in Elysium.”
    â€œWith all respect, lady, I can’t see you submitting to any such thing.”
    â€œIt is unlikely,” she said.
    He sat up in a strong surge. Polyxena quelled the leap of startlement, so that he only saw how quiet she was, composed and calm. The heat of him made her breathing come shallow.
    He lifted the garland from her brows where it had been all night long. It was barely withered; its scent was nearly as strong as ever. “I give you a new name,” he said, “a fitting name. Myrtale, crowned one, beloved of Aphrodite.”
    Polyxena frowned. Part of her resisted; it clung to the old and the familiar. But the sound of the name in his deep burr of a voice, and the meaning of it, fit for a queen, had a rightness that melted her resistance. “Myrtale,” she said. “I’ll be Myrtale.”
    He laid the garland aside. Even as he reached for her, she took him as they said a man took a woman, swiftly and by storm.
    *   *   *
    She left him exhausted, breathing hard and slicked with sweat. Her knees tried to wobble as she walked away, but she held her gait steady.
    She picked her way down the steep bank to wash in the stream. The water was snow-cold. The shock of it on heated skin had a peculiar effect: it made her want him all over again.
    He was spent. In that much Nikandra had been right: males had no endurance.
    She toyed briefly with the thought of finding another man among the fallen and initiating him, too, but the ache inside and the practicality she did not often admit to convinced her otherwise. In the old world, the more men she bound to herself, the greater her power. But in this one, a woman had to tread more carefully.
    The man who snored on the bruised grass was a king—a ruler over men. Through him she bound them all.
    She scrubbed the blood from her thighs and the sweat from her skin. Sweet herbs grew by the riverside; she perfumed herself with them. There was nothing to clothe herself in but her thick red-gold hair, but she chose not to go searching for a garment among the fallen revelers.
    They were waking as the sun came up over the mountain, stirring and groaning and staggering to their feet. She walked among them as if she were still the Mother’s image.
    Who was to say that she was not? They opened a path for her. Some bowed or murmured snatches of prayer.
    A pair of priestesses met her on the first terrace, a few long strides from the city’s gate. They dressed her in silence. She was sorry to lose the freedom of the air on her skin, but the mortal world had risen with the sun, and it had its difficulties with the ways of divinity.
    She put on mortality with the soft new-woven wool and the demurely plaited hair and the veil. The world muted around her, but she kept the memory of that other self. It would come back to her when she needed it, or when the Mother willed.
    *   *   *
    Her sister had nothing to say, though her sister’s women eyed her sidelong. The pilgrims who had gone no further than the first Mystery were dispersing as the morning brightened, scattering to their ships. Troas might have done the same, but she had waited.
    Polyxena, who