Antinous -The Odyssey

The great hall reeked of wine and rot.

You stood near the wall with an empty pitcher balanced against your hip, watching them the way you always did now. Counting them, cataloguing them, hating them in a way that had gone quiet and cold instead of hot. Dozens of men sprawled across the benches that used to hold Ithaca's council. They'd killed three of the king's best pigs that morning alone. Bones and rinds littered the floor where the hounds fought over scraps, and no one bothered to call it wasteful anymore, because wastefulness had a name now. They called it Zeus's Law, as if the god himself had decreed that Penelope's home belonged to whichever man could eat and drink and demand his way into her bed first. As if devouring a kingdom down to its bones were a kind of piety.

You watched a serving girl flinch away from a hand that grabbed at her wrist too hard, watched her force a smile because smiling was safer, and something in your chest tightened like a fist.

Twenty years. you thought. Twenty years the queen had waited, had woven and unwoven her grief at a loom, had told them all not yet, not yet...and still they sat here, growing fatter and bolder, certain that eventually she would break.

You were beginning to fear they might be right.

Across the hall, Antinous leaned back against a marble pillar. Letting his eyes move slowly over the room he had, in his own mind, already claimed.

Look at them. His mouth curved, though there was no warmth behind it. One hundred and eight men, all baying after the same prize, all convinced the crown will simply fall into their laps because they showed up and ate her cheese.

Fools. All of them. Diomedes with his ridiculous poetry. Eurymachus and his father's gold, spent so freely it might as well have been water. They thought charm was enough, that persistence alone would wear the queen down like the tide wore down stone.

Persistence is not enough.

What Antinous needed was information. Something none of the others had. Some thread he could pull that would unravel Penelope's careful, maddening resistance from the inside, rather than simply battering against it from without.

He was still turning the problem over, idly, the way a man turns over a coin he hasn't decided how to spend, when his gaze snagged on something at the edge of the hall.

A servant girl, standing very still against the wall, watching the feast with an expression she wasn't bothering to hide.

Disgust. Open, unguarded disgust...with something sharper underneath it. Not fear. Loyalty.

Antinous went still, the coin in his mind finally landing.

Well now.

He knew that look. He'd seen it on old nurses, on hand-maidens who'd practically raised the children of the house, women who knew every secret a great hall could hold, simply because no one thought to notice them listening. A servant close enough to the queen to hate them this much, this personally, was a servant close enough to know things.

If I can't have her ear, he thought, watching the girl's jaw tighten as another suitor's laugh cracked too loud across the room, I'll have someone who does.

He set his cup down, unhurried, and let his most practiced smile settle into place, one that had opened a hundred doors that should have stayed shut.

Let's see how loyal you really are, little bird.

He crossed the hall toward you, unbothered by the way you failed to rearrange your face into something more welcoming. When he reached you, he leaned one shoulder against the wall beside you, close enough that you could smell the wine on him, and tilted his head toward the chaos of the feast as though the two of you were sharing a private joke.

"You look like a woman who'd rather be anywhere else," he said, low enough that it wouldn't carry. "Can't say I blame you...present company excluded, of course." His eyes moved over your face, like a predator sizing up it's prey. "I don't think I've had the pleasure. And here I thought I knew every pretty face in this house."

He smiled, easy and warm and entirely too practiced. "What's your name?"