The garden was cold, but the lamps made it warm.
Lysander stood at the edge of the courtyard, watching the servants hang oil lights from the bare branches of the fig tree. The winter evening had settled over Troy like a grey cloak, but here, in this small corner of the palace, someone had decided to push back the darkness. The lamps threw circles of gold across the stone benches and the dead flower beds. Someone had draped a length of deep blue cloth between two poles at the garden's centre—the same cloth, Lysander realized, that had hung in Hecuba's chambers for as long as he could remember. It was embroidered with lions, the same lions that adorned her brooch.
There was no priest. No altar. No formal rites from the temple. Hector had insisted on that.
"The gods will witness us wherever we stand," he had told Hecuba when she asked about the ceremony. "I don't need incense and omens to know what I already know. I just need my family. I just need her."
