A Spartan's Sorrow (The Grecian Women Trilogy, #2)

by Hannah M. Lynn

Our own father. And my sister, my sweet, loving sister, was also the heartless mother who had abandoned me to die in that field all those years before.

So she was raped by her father, and when got pregnant she left the baby. Making him, her brother/son.

“Why do you do that? Why do you always belittle yourself? You are the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on.”

But when I arrived, he was standing there, over the bodies of my husband and child. Three days later, I was in Mycenae, brought here, as his wife

Kh no

I am glad he killed Iphigenia. It shows he really is the man I have thought he was all along. I would have offered myself, had he only asked.”

but I have always been grateful to you, My Queen, for letting me treat you and your children as if I were more than just a servant.”

She had done her job. She had protected her children. The King was dead.

That man deserved o be dead a long time ago

We have been fighting the same battle, Clytemnestra, against gods and kings and people with power and privilege. They are so terrified of losing their control over us, that they crush us at the slightest sign of our own independence or happiness.

“He was a child, Orestes. A little boy. Your brother. I told him about you. I told him of all the time we had spent together, studying birds and animals. He knew your name and he wanted to be just like you. He wanted you to be a real brother to him.” Tears blurred his vision.

And so, with every last ounce of strength he had left, he reached for the blade, and drove it up into Aegisthus’ stomach.

“What do I have to say to get through to you? I want to be by your side. To help you. But how do I do that, Orestes? How do I help you?”

“All fathers? Have you even considered what that means?”

perhaps, the way many would have. How did she manage this? Why, because she had to, to protect her remaining children: the warrior princess, Electra, the compassionate, maternal Chrysothemis, and Orestes, her beloved son. The future king. Her murderer.

And yet, by the gods’ rules, she is not deserving of vengeance. She deserved her death. After all she had done, all she had been through, that is what the gods think of her.”

The goddesses, the mothers, they are the ones we turn to. And yet it is a god’s word that we have to obey, one that tells us that a man must be avenged, but not a woman.”

Instead, he took hers. And that woman deserves her justice. She deserves so much more than she was given in her lifetime. Do not make her suffer in the afterlife, too.”

Our choices are shaped by our experiences, and our experiences by those who surround us from our birth.

too, such as the loyalty that a man would show to a god. The suffering he would endure for him. For eight years, Orestes ignored the will of the gods, to try and protect his mother from a fate that he had not decided, that he did not want.