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i.
Helen rides into Troy with untied hair, scandalous and prophetic. She is what the crowd sees in her: every personified dream, ominous prophecy, divine offspring.
Paris dismounts his horse and for a moment she stands there in peaceful Troy, becoming its queen; then he extends a hand which Cassandra knows is gentle but selfish and she disappears in their mirrored image.
Next to Cassandra on the ramparts her brother heaves a sigh. She slips her hand into his, relieved that someone who will be believed sees just how much blood Helen trails in her wake.
She brings death, Apollo snickers in her ear, his hand closed around her throat, and Cassandra, who is used to it, doesn't scream.
*
Despite all she sees Cassandra warms to the young queen, because she's silent and prone to illness, not at all the arrogant courtesan Cassandra imagined her to be. Paris visits her when he's not too busy running through the marketplace or riding his beautiful horses, but in the end she's just one of many gifts, and he looks upon her as he does them, with the same fleeting, soon-bored glance.
Cassandra brings Helen figs on a silver tray, as the sun dawns red over the horizon. "We are sisters now," she says. "You are become Helen of Troy, and I was born here: I am this town's daughter and you its queen."
Helen looks up. She holds her comb out, and Cassandra takes it dutifully, coming to stand beside her. "I am not a queen," Helen says. "Or if I am, I bring with me the end of my kingdom."
"What do you mean?"
Helen's eyes are molten gold - Cassandra remembers the most beautiful woman in the world and understands in the title another poisonous gift.
"Do you not see the truth, Cassandra?"
Cassandra lifts the comb; as she plunges it in Helen's hair she thinks about nightmares, waking up drenched in sweat, screaming silent screams in the stifling night. "I close my eyes," she says.
*
Even in Troy, where her proprietor favors other games over her, a trail of suitors follows Helen every time she leaves the castle. She wears laurel in her hair, not in a crown but in a bunch behind her ear - Cassandra feels like she's the only one who sees it for what it is, the imperious claim, undisputed queen.
"You should come with me sometime," Helen says to her once, disrobing.
"What, outside?"
Helen laughs. "You are beautiful."
Curses don't matter to Helen; she's god-chosen, almost divine. She comes closer, twisting a strand of Cassandra's hair around her ring-adorned finger. "You should come with me," she repeats. "I get lonely."
Cassandra the foreseer doesn't anticipate the words that come out of her mouth then: "Yes," she says, in the tone of worship that is the only thing she knows, "I will."
*
And so during the day they walk in the city, dipping their hands into all the fountains, leaning over each other in laughter. Helen leads the chase and Cassandra follows, always follows, except when she brings Helen to the temples. Then they pray side by side: Cassandra to Apollo, her vengeful, vexed benefactor, and Helen to Aphrodite who has made her who she is, damaging goods.
Helen's laugh is as beautiful as she is, maybe more; once she climbs on the ramparts, her dress tangling in the leather straps of her sandals, and she opens her arms over the immense sky, says: "You should live, Cassandra."
Cassandra reads what she isn't saying in her sad, burning eyes: You should live now - soon life won't look like this at all.
*
Cassandra is a box for secrets: in the confines of her ribcage they accumulate slowly, like lint, sure to never get out. Privately she thinks that Apollo, when he cursed her, was punishing her for that first and final lie: the dutiful I love you she whispered as he detached his body from hers in the cloaked night.
Among her collection of secrets is Hector's all-encompassing love for his wife, and his certainty that he would let his city crumble for her; one of Paris' lovers, a young Spartan prince, that he never quite forgot; Apollo's confessions every time she closes her eyes, the knowledge that the gods, like Paris, are fickle and volatile; and Helen's hatred of Troy.
"Why do you hate your city so much, Helen?" Cassandra asks on a starless night as Helen slips into bed next to her, her eyelashes fluttering.
"It's not my city. I don't come from here." And then, quieter: "I don't want to be this woman. I don't want to watch Troy burn."
Of all the things Cassandra could say (you'll develop a taste for fire; you are this woman; rest your head, Helen), she decides on the gentlest one: silence.
*
"Helen! Helen --"
There isn't far to go for her: they were entangled just a minute ago, before the machinery of Cassandra's dreams screeched into motion and the soft warmth of her body became the dreaded fire.
"What is it?" Helen asks, her eyes heavy with sleep.
"It's - there's a horse, and the ships - they're coming, Helen."
Helen is silent for a moment, her face shielded by darkness, her golden shoulder marred by the red sting of Cassandra's hair.
"Well," she says eventually, "it had to happen, didn't it?"
She reaches a hand to bring Cassandra close; Cassandra submits willingly to the embrace.
*
The ships come. They're a high tide, white, armored warriors setting siege to the Trojan shores, ransacking the temples, swarming over the land. Helen watches them from the ramparts, her orange dress like a sun, as if to say, come, I am the one you are looking for.
ii.
Even though she ought to have learnt her lesson by now, Cassandra tries to warn her father: "Don't trust the sun god," she says, and they watch over her with scandalized faces as the whispers rise, the mad girl, it's the mad girl.
"Apollo is on our side," Priam tells her as he locks her into her room, his tall, proud shadow swallowing her. "Don't you know he looks over us?"
"The gods are fickle," Cassandra screams, beating her fists on the wooden door.
*
After the war starts and Cassandra is let out, freed in the night like a beloved but rabid dog, she sidles up to Helen and watches with her over the blood-tainted dust.
"They are fighting for you, aren't they?" she asks, filled with something like wonder. Helen shakes her head, exhales a long, deep sigh.
"No, darling," she says, resting her hand on Cassandra's hip. "That war ended a long time ago."
*
Helen, Cassandra understands, isn't the foil of this war: if anything, she's a stitcher of wounds, another unheard herald trying to protect her own. When she stands next to Andromache and Cassandra again her beauty lies and deceits; in truth she's as peaceful as the first and as mad as the second.
Their three silhouettes on the ramparts, spelling wife-queen-prophet, are like a string of pearls: sometimes they reach powerless fingers as they see the frame of a loved one fall, slain, and they can't do anything but watch as the armies walk over him and meet again and again in a deafening ring of steel.
*
Nine years: what it takes for Cassandra to come to hate love, who took her tongue, her brothers, her father, her city, who will take her life.
Nine years: what it takes to bring Helen of Troy to her knee, crying for the mercy of death.
Nine years: what it takes for the high tide to rise, for the waves to ebb, for the storm to break.
*
Cassandra, better than anyone else, knows what destiny holds: she doesn't lift her head when a herald walks in the throne room and exclaims, "Troy burns," just like she doesn't meet Helen's eyes as she catches her mouth in a kiss and says that they will meet again.
She runs to the temple, forcing herself not to watch her home burn to ashes, and when she gets there, she sinks to her knees.
This isn't over, says the vengeful god.
Cassandra dries her eyes. "I know," she answers the silence, and lays her head against the ground, waiting.