Alcestis by Katharine Beutner Read Free Book Online

Sometimes I whispered stories over her grave, true stories and false ones, whatever words I thought would delight Hippothoe the most. I would crouch by the burial mound until my legs ached and my night shift grew damp with dew. The grave circle was always quiet and empty: just me and the stone markers and the bones. The servants whispered about dark spirits that hung in the air over grave circles, but I had seen no spirits other than the wind gods who licked up curls of the dust from the ground. No spirits and no sister.
    The courtyard was empty, the stable boys probably busy drinking in an empty stall, most of the guards sent outside the gates to patrol and watch the guests’ belongings. The servants were in the house and I had not seen Pelopia or Pisidice since the wedding song had begun. No one would catch me now.
    The two guards shifted, heavy belts clinking. The younger one blinked drowsily, rubbing at his eyes with his free hand. I gave him a sideways look, and he turned his face away: a guard’s eyes could not linger on me for too long.
    “You,” I said and waited for him to look at me again. “Walk with me to the gate.”
    “The gate, lady?”
    “Yes.”
    “I should not leave my post, lady.”
    “I know what you should and should not do.” I let one foot fall onto the step below. “Ahead of me, please.”
    He lifted his torch reluctantly and stepped onto the stairs. The torch enveloped us in a small bubble of light. The ground felt unusually rough beneath my feet, as if I had drunk too much wine, and I put out a hand to steady myself and grazed the guard’s downy forearm. The shock of it jerked us apart. “Sorry,” he mumbled, his blush visible even by torchlight. “I am sorry.”
    I shook my head. My fingers were tingling. “It was my clumsiness,” I said and lifted my head as we stepped beneath the arched gate. “You may stand here and light me.” I walked through the gate and into the grave circle, the low wall curving off to either side of me. Shadows lay soft under the encircling stone.
    “Lady, where are you going?” the guard asked, suddenly panicked. “Lady? I don’t—I don’t think you should be in there right now.”
    I said nothing. I walked among the grave markers until I came to Hippothoe’s; it was next to my mother’s, though I never visited that stone. The mound of my mother’s grave was hardly more than a gentle rise in the soil now, for the wind gods had carried most of the dirt away. Soon the ground would be smooth, and when the circle was full of graves the men would build a round tomb above it, closing my sister in forever. I knelt between the graves, my blue skirts spilling dark against the ground, and put my hands on the soil. “Hello,” I whispered. I had not seen this place in full darkness since Hippothoe had been buried. “Hello, Hippothoe.”
    Only the wind and the distant sound of revels. The woman’s shriek was still loud in my head, and I would have given anything to hear my sister’s voice drowning it out, anything to have her warm beside me, her head cocked down to let me whisper in her ear. I bent closer to the grave. “Pelias is wed, and his wife cried out in his chambers, and it was terrible,” I told Hippothoe. “She’s pretty but brown all over like a goatherd’s girl. She was crying when they brought her in.”
    “Lady?” the guard called again from the gate, and I heard the quick, familiar beat of sandals on dirt. I sat back on my heels and waited. The footsteps slowed behind me.
    “You aren’t going to shout at me?” I asked.
    “I’m too tired to shout,” Pisidice said. She stood with her arms crossed over her chest, an aggressive habit so old I found it comforting. “Stand up. You’re getting your skirts filthy.”
    I stood.
    “You should not have come here tonight,” Pisidice began, but stopped when I waved a hand at her. “What?”
    “Leave it,” I said, and felt pleased when she gaped at me like a fish. “Yes, it’s