{Interview+Giveaway} Rheia by Cassandra Page

The sound of footsteps on the road outside their home carried clearly in the quiet night air, as did the creak of the door as her father let himself into the villa. The soft voice of Rheia’s mother greeted him. He replied with a murmur. The bar thunked into its bracket, securing the door, and then footsteps ascended the stairs as they crept up to their own bedroom. It was next to Rheia’s, with Aias’s on the other side, closest to the stairs. Although they drew a heavy cloth across their door, she still caught snatches of their conversation over the sounds of her father removing his sandals and dropping them in the corner.
The word lottery caught her ear and, before she could question the wisdom of it, she rolled out of bed and padded to her door on bare feet, pulling her own hanging cloth aside so she could better hear what they were saying.
“I told them that,” Loukios was saying in a tired voice. “I could’ve had my crew ready and at the dock with the tide at dawn. But the priests argued against it and the king listened to them, not me.”
“What reason did they give?” Antheia’s voice was tight.
“They said it would mean renewed war with the helots, who would claim they had already given the required number of thysies this year. If we Oreareans are too careless to keep them alive, that is our problem.” His words were bitter.
“For followers of the god of war, the priests have taken a remarkably cowardly position,” Antheia said acerbically. Rheia covered her mouth to muffle her gasp. She had never heard her mother speak ill of a priest before.
Loukios grunted an agreement, before adding reluctantly, “But they are right. And more citizens would die in a new war than would die in this single lottery.”
“Why then could the king not buy a young slave girl, provide the thysia himself?”
There was a long pause. When Rheia’s father spoke, his voice was low, reluctant. “Honestly? I think the temple sees this as an opportunity. A lottery would remind the city of the god’s power—of the temple’s power. And it would silence dissent about the need for continued subjugation of the helots.”
“But … a lottery? They were awful. I never wanted our children subjected to that.” Antheia’s voice sounded hoarse, as though she spoke around tears. “When will it be?”
“Tomorrow. They don’t want to give people a chance to hide their daughters, or to marry them off.” Rheia’s heart leapt into her throat at the word. Daughters. Of course they’d need a girl to replace a girl. As Charis had said, the god liked balance. But hearing her father say it in such tones of distress drove the reality home.
Across from her, on the other side of her parents’ doorway, Aias’s startled gaze stared back at her from a crack in the fabric at his own bedroom door.
“Loukios, should we…?”
“We can’t. Draconaidas is already looking for an excuse to call for my exile. We must be above reproach.”
Draconaidas was Areus’s high priest. Rheia bit her lip, wondering briefly what her father had done to earn his displeasure, but her thoughts skittered away from the question like a fish on a line, drawn back to the bigger issue. A lottery.
“But Rheia—” Antheia said.
“—will be fine. There will be hundreds of names in the lottery. Thousands, even.” Loukios’s voice was soothing.
Rheia’s fingers fluttered to her forehead as she remembered the kiss of benediction in her dreams, and her nightmare the night before. The kiss from Eidoneus, God of the Underworld. Even as the recollection surfaced, she saw his face in her mind’s eye, watching her with kind eyes and a sad smile. The conviction that hers would be the ostra drawn tomorrow crept over her. With tears burning her eyes, she looked at her younger brother. His expression was stricken; he stared at her as though she were already dead.