The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

Brides did not smile.

I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.

But most ugly of all are his eyes: blue, bright blue. When people see them, they flinch. Such things are freakish. He is lucky he was not killed at birth.

Chiron had said once that nations were the most foolish of mortal inventions. “No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from.”

“I have done it,” she says. At first I do not understand. But then I see the tomb, and the marks she has made on the stone. achilles, it reads. And beside it, patroclus. “Go,” she says. “He waits for you.”

In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out the sun.