AN: I know it's soon to post angain, but i had this written and thought that to make up for the fact that the scene from last chapter is still missing, then i could post this a littel early. Let me know your thoughts.

o

The wheel that turns

O Never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost."

W.B. Yeats

o

She didn't speak for the entire ride and her uncle didn't ask her anything. Before the gates opened he turned and that seemed to be the only moment when he was reminded she was there, Briseis saw his eyes fill with new anguish.

"My dear girl…" and then the words stopped. She preceded his question, the one he didn't dare ask.

Briseis wishes she could console the pain out of him, but what can she say that would not sound a lie? What, when he found her in Achilles company, when she still has bruises about her skin, angry and livid. When her eyes tell such a long story and what the old king saw himself between the warrior and his niece tells an even longer one.

So Briseis decides to be brave and takes his hands, holds it feebly, looking straight ahead. The old king does not retreat his hand, he hold her fingers strong in his grip as they silently move forward.

It is strange, but the ride to the palace it over in a blur. She hardly remembers any of it. Doesn't know what happens once she gets to the steps of the royal building, or when Andromache comes running, tears streaming. Doesn't realize that its Paris holding her, passing her to Helen who takes her to her chambers.

It's bizarre how shock operates. She was fine before she entered the city. But stepping in it was like slamming in a life that was supposed to be over. Being there overwhelms her. What used to be familiar now is foreign. She wonders, somewhere in the back of her mind, if she has lost her mind altogether, because it feels ten years since she last stood within these halls.

She doesn't know what to say when her maid, a friend that had served her for more than ten years and yet Briseis hardly recognises her face, asks her when was the last time she had eaten or drunk something. Briseis honestly does not remember. It's when they bring her food and water, that she finally sees black behind her eyelids.

Someone catches her before her head smacks the ground, but Briseis doesn't feel the difference.

oOoOo

She is told she slept for a day. That she was given water and wine and soft fruit and then she slept again. Days worth of exhaustion bleed out of her and when she woke, all she wanted was to fall back into her bed again and sleep the month away, maybe longer. All she wanted to do was cry… cry for everything without differentiating.

Instead she was made to get up and start inserting in her life the semblance of some normalcy.

That was three days ago.

Now she is soaking in her bath and wondering what to do with herself. It had all been so simple, some miles from here, on the sand of the beaches of her city. Nobody had cared, there had been none but him and her and whatever lay between them, be it repulsion, anger or that strange something else.

But she is not among soldiers anymore. She is in Troy, in a palace and she is a Princess again. And here everyone knows everything… and yet she cannot bring herself to care of the difference.

Briseis felt that familiar fracture in her breast start aching – because the difference is great indeed and does not suffer being ignored.

Last night she had sat with Andromache and Helen, and felt the flames of her cousins pyre burn her face. She had lost him and so had Troy… Troy whose grief came in great waves, who heaved like a living thing for its prince, the price Briseis had betrayed. And once or twice she had felt that she should step down into those flames and burn with him, so terrible seemed her crimes.

The guilt she had been pervaded with in Achilles tent had been but a shadow of what she felt now.

But…

But – that vile word that seemed to shamelessly negate everything that came before it. It was always there in her, as if she was duality, as if she was two of herself.

Briseis felt a ferocious frown settle on her face. The water didn't feel so pleasant anymore and she decided she couldn't stand the jasmine scent a moment longer. She stepped out of the bath angrily and wrapped a cloth around herself as she walked to her rooms. It was with those few steps that brought her inside her chambers that the rebellion left her and she felt the pervasive sting of solitude.

And that was the way that the rebellion inside her was slapped down by the undeniable truthfulness of the feelings that caused it.

Because there was no denying how miserably alone she felt in her own rooms, as if they belonged to a stranger. She recognised nothing from her old life… none of it seemed to fit her anymore. It was like trying to put on a robe that had been yours as a child: it simply didn't suit. You recognised it, recognised that it had been yours once, but now was of the past. That was the way Briseis recognised all the things around her, sometimes even the people: something familiar, over which she felt differently. Something that didn't belong to her anymore. It was the way she felt about herself every time she saw her reflection in someone else's eyes.

She had changed since these rooms last saw her, changed so much that now nobody seemed to know what to do with her, how to speak to her. She didn't know what to do with herself either. She asked for nothing, spoke of nothing, kept to herself and confided in no one.

Her family learned to leave her to herself, for she seemed most serene when not prodded by well meaning questions. Paris had his own way of being there without being there at all. He would look at her strangely sometimes, but mostly he was sad. Sad and silent and angry. Andromache… she was the hardest to look at, she who suffered more than all of them. Andromache had been frozen by Hector's death. Her spirit had cooled and hardened and she was as icy as a winter's dim morning now. There was no light in her anymore.

There had only been one moment of contact between them two, just once, the night after Briseis had returned. Andromache had come inside her rooms and without saying anything, brought fresh blue flowers, their symbol of hope, to lay by Briseis' pillow, and a kiss for Briseis' forehead.

It took one look into Andromache's eyes, one moment of her looking back into her own, to tell Briseis that all was bare between them. That the wife of the cousin she so had loved, knew everything… and could not bear to even look at Briseis for too long.

The scent of tears had overwhelmed that of the flowers, but then again, perhaps that was because Briseis had cried herself to sleep.

Andromache had not said a word to her since.

Briseis bypassed her bed and stepped into her closet. There were many robes folded in there, of celebratory red, pure white, petal pinks and oranges and bright greens… Her hands skimmed the soft cotton of one of the deep blue robes and her memory coiled like a live thing. She was, for a moment, back into that dark tent, him looking at her like a golden lion.

The gods envy us…

Do they? Who would ever envy this feeling? This treacherous ache that seemed to split the soul…

She had heard it from people who lost their arms or legs, they spoke of pains on the limbs they no longer had. That was how she felt on her every waking hour – as if she had lost a part of her body but the piece of her that was not there kept hurting. Something inside her seemed to be missing and the emptiness there ached in its own way

When Briseis finally chose a robe, she did so without thinking on it too much. She pulled it out and in as few movements as possible, with as little thought as possible, she put it on. The rich cerulean cloth cascaded around her, and without permission her memory reminded her that it was not the right shade: too clear, too much like the colour of a pale sky. But Briseis ignored it. She had not wanted to wear the necklace he had given her, it felt like betrayal all over again… but she had been more afraid of leaving it in her room for anyone to find, and thus risk losing it, than she had been of anyone seeing it around her neck and wondering.

'But' again.

Every 'but' that came after every thought – he was there. He was encompassed within the sensations that began and ended with 'but', and those were the feelings that were going to undo her…

oOoOo

Nobody missed it when she didn't go back to her maiden robes of purity. It was careful at first, hardly even perceivable - the looks and whispers, the oily sympathy she got from those around her, those sighs of something like 'poor girl' and 'such a pity'. Briseis ignored her irritation at their many expressions of commiseration because she thought she was being unfair. She didn't believe her own senses when they told her that 'she's lying' or 'he is insincere'.

She thought she had somehow managed to catch his cynicism as if they were a disease.

After all, she had never been able to tell a lie from a truth on a man's face so clearly before, so when she started realizing that she now could, it took her some time to get used to it. To trust herself enough to stay firm on her perceptions. That was why at first, Briseis chucked it down to her own irritability and held her tongue… until it became obvious that the fault lay not with her.

Hector – even thinking his name hurt – had always been so careful about keeping her away from court, as if he wanted to protect her from some wild animal, and now Briseis was starting to understand why. She noticed she was becoming something of an attraction for the more extravagant people of the palace: the rich nobles, magisters and advisors and even some temple devotees.

She became the Priestess who had been Achilles pet. The princess for whom he had a softness – Achilles, the most hated man among all the Greeks, the man who was the negation of all that was soft and delicate, had had a weakness and Briseis been it.

How those rumours had come about she had no idea. The mere suggestion of it was to Briseis absurd, ridiculous. She had never been his weakness. She had only been herself, as he had always been wholly himself. Together perhaps, they may have had something beautiful. Strings of moments that lived far away from here, in another realm where they could be lovely and untainted. Not here.

Whatever else it was that people whispered about, what they were so curious of… it didn't exist.

But regardless of her feelings over the matter, the result was that in the eyes of many she became almost inanimate, as if she were a thing, not a human. As if she were some exotic new atrocity they could all stare and prod and get away with it, because in their eyes she had lost the right to the inviolability of her own self.

After all, she had already been violated once. She had nothing more to lose but a good story!

Soon the looks and whispers became questions and those questions, once unanswered, started being more probing, less delicate, less respectful. Everyone wanted to know something, their curiosity was as perverse as their imitation of compassion was disconcerting - almost as disconcerting as how fast it ran out, in favour of more daring quips when she showed no sign of ever fulfilling their morbid curiosity. It was as if she owed it to the court to tell her tale of woe at the hands of the barbaric Greek warrior and Briseis could honestly not understand where this expectation came from, why they thought she would ever share?

That was how, and why, Briseis started holding her tongue for different reasons, anger building heavier at how they who knew nothing dared pity her, or demand from her, or tease her. She started building hardness, both in expression and in her eyes. Sharp looks that warded off people and cold indifference efficient as any blade. The anger starts calcifying in layers that make up all her self-restraint, because in the end… what could she possibly say?

There was not one moment of her time with him that she would ever share with anyone. She doesn't even consider those that bother her worthy of her indignation. Even that she keeps jealously to her breast.

It is in these moments, when she feels alien within the world that used to be her home, that she finds herself missing him the most, with a deep and boundless ache that she cannot even understand. Missing everything about him, from the unshakable confidence and that little smirk that curved his lips, to the intelligence in his eyes and how they would liven when she said something to dare him, to defy him or challenge him. How intensely he would look at her when he started a thought and she caught his reasoning in midsentence, knowing exactly what he meant… the incomparable thrill that he could do the same.

She misses other things too, but those make her hurt, so she tries not to think of them, even when she misses him.

She thinks of them at night, when the sting of loneliness makes her arms ache and her thoughts scatter, and she feels alone and forgotten by the whole world, because now she has evolved into someone that belongs nowhere and there is no isolation like it.

A cage in her own mind. A different form of captivity.

oOoOo

The sea is vast around them, clear and shining of the high noon sun. Every colour feels bright and blurry at the same time, but the feel of his arms around her is warm and solid, more real than the water lapping against her bare skin or the sun that catches in his hair.

She looked around but the beaches of Troy are empty. No ships, no soldiers, just warm sand and dunes…

The revelation is startling and she tightens her arms around him, her fear fluttering in her breast. Where were they? Had they left?

She feels his lips tracing patters and she shock passes, soothed by the feel of the tenderness she has been missing. Questions fade fast, as if they'd never been. She kisses him with the same ardour she's been missing him… and beneath his kiss she can feel his self-satisfied smirk.

And maybe it's the sun so bright and the salt in her eyes but the colours are starting to mix and blend and she doesn't know what she is seeing anymore. The water is the same but the beaches are white and cliffs stand tall instead of the dunes she saw there a moment before. Steep hills pebbled with buildings that house life, vegetation that reaches the shore and a mountain in the distance. Unfamiliar place that is out of focus as if a memory or dream long forgotten.

His arms tighten around her waist and sensation of him is vivid again when she is pressed against him from toes to lips. His kisses are the way she remembers them, they burn in the way she remembers.

"Achilles…" and it's a question, because there is something not quite right with this dream.

And she is aware by now that it's a dream.

"Do you trust me, Briseis?"

His voice too is the way she remembers it as he asks that which he had never asked before. Only in her dreams perhaps the answer could be safe.

"Yes."

"Will you go with me?"

She frowns. That is a strange way to ask for a strange thing. His eyes are intent on her, but something is missing. Her memory is flawed, she cannot reproduce his complexity the way she longs to.

"Where?" she asks, and it makes him smile, as if he knows a secret he won't tell. He whispers to her as he pebbles kisses on her throat.

"You will like it there. You can see the whole bay from the window of my room."

She shivers with recognition and a sinking feeling of inconsolable loss takes her.

Too late… much too late for that.

But as deep and aching as the feeling was, with the next blink it starts to fade in favour of an embrace and so does the sea in which they were floating. Everything is dark but stray moonbeams that filter inside through the flaps of a doorway. She is sitting in front of him, in his lap almost and he is looking at her through hooded eyes, easy smile on his face, one arm resting on her shoulder to pull her close whenever he wants a kiss, hand tangled in her hair.

But it's just a faded memory now. It's not even that – there is no tent, the darkness around them is boundless. An endless night pebbled with little stars, as if they we wrapped in sky.

She cannot shake that feeling of loss. His eyes keep reminding her, echoing her.

"I'll never see you again." Is all she can say, because that's the thought she can confess only in her dreams, the only place she can empty her heart. But his warm hand feels almost real against her cheek.

"Don't despair sweet Briseis. I'll find you."

He speaks softly, looking at her tenderly. It feels like a promise.

She knows it's just a wish. The sadness tightens her chest.

"Shshsh… I'll find you. I promise."

His promises were a living thing and this one wraps around her in warmth. Yes, in her dreams he always found her.

Even when they were nightmares.

Her sleep always brought them now, every night she fell from her bed to fire and death, or screams and darkness, remnants of the violence done to her and the bruises of her soul… and always, through anything, he would find her and the nightmare would end, she would again be wrapped in night and in his arms.

She aches to touch him again but just as she reaches to hold him he is gone.

Gone and she is alone in a darkness without stars, the fear returning, her heartbeat quickening in her ears. She moves, then starts to run, and her anxiety fuels screams that seem to come from a long distance away. The darkness starts to shimmer ominously and she is running hard now, doesn't remember if she is running away or towards something. She calls his name but nothing answers.

This is the first time she loses him so. In her dreams usually she finds him.

Vaguely she darkness calls her voice, as if it invites her to a fall, and Briseis is afraid. She doesn't know which way to go, nowhere is safe. The call comes from all directions and its getting stronger.

The abyss calling her name.

"Briseis!"

No!

oOoOo

Briseis jolts awake, heart beating furiously in her throat, a scream trapped behind her gritting teeth. Under her pillow she feels her hand curl around the hilt of the dagger she keeps there.

"Peace, my lovely cousin." A familiar voice says and Briseis doesn't know if she should relax or take out that dagger and be ready for it all.

(and thought it should be strange that she is so familiar with weapons now, it's not that strange at all. Because now she sleeps alone, and though here there is the safety of a royal palace to protect her in sleep, there is also that palpable emptiness beside her that makes her restless, cautious. She cannot feel entirely safe anymore, no matter how well protected the palace is… but she doesn't understand that the agitation she feels comes from within.)

"Cassandra?" Briseis whispers in the dark.

"Yes." She can almost feel the smirk around the word.

"What are you doing here, cousin?" Briseis asks just as she releases the blade and reaches to her bedside table to strike the lamp awake. The glow of the almost dead fire is not enough to see Cassandra's face. She is only a shapeless shadow a little closer than the rest in the room.

"I smelled a storm and thought we could watch it together. You have always liked storms."

Her words sounded sober enough, but as soon as Briseis can see her cousin's eyes, that smile in them has her frowning in distrust.

"What do you want with me Cassandra?" Briseis asks again, and this time there is a definite tone of command in her voice. As niece of Priam, Briseis cannot order anything out of the daughter of the King, but Briseis is too worn for niceties and Cassandra much too strange for formalities – especially at this ungodly hour of the night.

But the irritation in her tone that Briseis didn't bother to mask, did nothing but stretch the smile on the Princess' face wider.

"You have changed much, dear cousin." Cassandra said cryptically.

"So they say. However I have not changed enough not to need sleep in the night hours."

"I want to ask you something. Do you remember what I said to you some time ago? It was a stormy night then too, fire was in the air. Well, do you?"

And now the blue eyes of her cousin were almost frantic. This was why Cassandra was so frightening. She looked so utterly mad sometimes, it was no wonder that her father had her locked in her rooms… but Briseis knew that Cassandra was not so scorned for the way she looked, but rather, for what she spoke.

"I remember." Briseis admitted softly.

How could she forget? It had been not even a few nights ago that she had even repeated it, with a wide palm spreading warmth up her back.

"I celebrated my eighteenth birthday not four days ago cousin, and yet here I am, as alive as you are." Briseis said calmly, almost softly, touching her cousins hand, but Cassandra hissed and stepped down from the bed. She started pacing furiously, the white wisps of her nightgown trailing after her, dark curls wild and untamed only adding to the frightening vision she made.

"I keep seeing it burning cousin. I saw it years ago, saw it again when you came back to us and I keep seeing it every night since then. Every time I close my eyes the fire scorches my face… I know he won't believe me, but my head is swelling with the screams I hear in my sleep. I can't sleep anymore I'm so afraid…"

And by now Briseis had gotten out from under her covers and was hugging her cousin tightly because she felt the echoes of pain and torment in Cassandra's strangled voice. The tears wet Briseis shoulder as her cousin held her back, trembling, frightened.

She was cursed with such horrible nightmares…

"Enough… stop, Cassandra. None of that is real, stop hurting yourself so." Briseis whispered rubbing her hands up and down Cassandra's back. Her cousin was trembling like a leaf in her arms. Briseis felt her shake her head in denial.

"But it is. All of it is true… it's going to be. Just as the secret I told you came true." Cassandra said with deep sadness as she drew away from her cousin's embrace.

Briseis takes a breath of patience. She does not have the heart to be harsh. Not when Cassandra feels so frail in her embrace. She takes her cousin's hands in her own, holds them tightly.

"You are holding my hands, looking me in the eye, speaking to me - how can you say I am dead?" Briseis asked with a bone-deep weariness setting in. She was not so distracted by herself and her own worry however, not to notice how her cousin stilled, how her eyes became sharp, cold.

"But I never said you would die." Cassandra spoke with care, as if illustrating to a child a concept that was very simple. That glint in her eyes returning, the frenzy in her being pushed out just a little to accommodate a calmness that was even more eerie.

"I said that Death would find you - and he did." Cassandra said as she stepped closer and instinctively Briseis knew to step back.

"What are you… what is the meaning of this?" her question comes in a whisper but even as she says the words Briseis is aware of who her cousin speaks… and Cassandra knows it – it's there in that slow smile that makes her look feline, dangerously predatory.

"Oh, you know of whom I speak." Cassandra almost hisses. "And make no mistake, he is Death. He has walked one step ahead of it all his life, he makes it with his hands. Death is his gift - as mine is my sight and yours is your heart."

Word after softly-spoken word, and yet to Briseis they were blows. Briseis feels the trembles going down her spine, doesn't fight them. She almost fell on her bed when it stopped her retreat, shaken by wave after violent wave of realization, of comprehension that came so suddenly it knocked her over.

"…and it was that tender heart he wanted. I told you, remember. I told you you would teach Death how to love."

Cassandra's whispers were violent screams in her head as they echoed, amplified.

… above all others…

"Stop! Please stop!" Briseis begged. Her head was about to burst, her heat would follow suit. All this time, that word she'd been avoiding, substituting… only to have it spoken to her plainly my her half-mad cousin. And yet Cassandra never had made more sense than now.

"I can't!" Cassandra voice kept rising and that more than anything shook Briseis out of her shock. She could wake the whole palace if this kept on and Briseis didn't fancy having to explain their situation- So she decided to put her thoughts and feelings aside for the moment: her wretched self would be there after, but Cassandra was here now, and she was suffering.

"Cousin…"

"You know I'm telling the truth!" Cassandra interrupted, her words spiky with long-festering anger and resentment for all those that had always called her mad behind her back.

"I am speaking truth now as I spoke truth then, and I tell you this: Troy will burn. It will burn to the ground Briseis. Are you listening?" Cassandra shook Briseis by the shoulders trying to shake the truth into her, but the younger woman felt nothing. Her eyes were far away, somewhere Cassandra could not follow.

"You must believe me, and get out of the city, cousin. There will be nothing left of us after they are done, you must find a way and escape. You must believe me."

Briseis raised her tear-stained eyes to meet hers and Cassandra heaved a great breath and hugged her cousins with all her might when she saw the acceptance there. True and honest recognition about the finality of her words. Someone who believed her… and Cassandra felt that in that moment her whole life, all her pains, had been leading her to this moment. To someone who would believe her.

There was a city full of souls that she loved and she knew that she could do nothing to save none of them. Because tomorrow, when she went to her father and told him the exact thing she had told Briseis now, he would have her locked in the dungeons as punishment. The high priest would relish it no doubt. There in the bowls of Troy she would be left for the Greeks to find, after they were finished with the rest of the city.

That was her destiny. She had seen it and she believed it. She would face it head held high because there was no other destiny for her.

But Briseis… her path lay shrouded in doubt and mist that Cassandra could not penetrate. And that gave her hope. Hope that out of thousands, she could at least save one.

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TBC:::