“You’re Hermione? You’re my cousin?” I blurted.

Hermione bristled. Her mother looked down at me with a slow, appraising gaze. “Why, hello,” Helen said. “Are you my niece?”

Clytemnestra’s hand tightened protectively on my shoulder. “This is Iphigenia.”

Helen’s eyes were hot like sunlight on my cheeks. I burned with embarrassment.

“She’ll be a beauty someday,” Helen said to my mother.

Clytemnestra shrugged. “There’s time enough for that.”

Hermoine pushed a tray of honeyed figs out of a slave’s hands. It clattered to the ground. “None of those are good enough for my mother!” she shouted.

Helen looked uncertainly at Clytemnestra, and then over at Hermione, and then up at the sky. She gave a sigh. “I don’t know how you do it, Clytemnestra. I was never raised to be a mother. I was only taught to be a wife.”

“Children are just small people, Helen,” mother said. “Albeit, occasionally stupid ones.”

Helen tugged a red ribbon off of her headband and held it out to me. “Here, Iphigenia, would you like this?”

Wordlessly, I accepted. The ribbon was soft and silken and magic with her touch.

“I’d like to talk with you, Iphigenia. Somewhere where other people can’t listen in. Just you and me. If your mother will agree?”

Helen lifted her gaze to Clytemnestra’s face. Mother’s fingers dug into my shoulders.

“Of course,” said mother. “She’s your niece.”

I knew my mother didn’t want me to be alone with Helen. I also knew that I wanted to be near that beauty, that glamour, that heat. I pulled the ribbon taut between my fingers.

“All right,” I said.

As I rode to Aulis, I forgot the day when I was eight when my mother plucked my embroidery out of my lap and held it up to the light. I waited for her to tear out my stitches and return it to my lap for me to do over again, as she had done every morning since I could first grip a needle. Instead she stared at my work with a thoughtful expression. “Hmm,” she said. “You’re getting better.”