Originally published in the Cauldron Literary Magazine

Back then, I lived in a city that overlooked the edge of the world.

Our home was situated delicately upon the swell of a cliff, right at the apex before its jagged drop. Often I would go to the edge to stare down at the sawtooth rocks below, but from the distance of our palace the view was beautiful and serene: a broad, blue tapestry spread across the surface of the world. You see, back then I did not know the ocean’s truth. This is the story of how I learned it.

I was the first child of my house, born two years before my brother. Thus I was my father’s heir, and as content with that truth as a child could be. I enjoyed being a prince, but had no real desire to be king. You see, a place as heir is the sort of thing one does not realize they crave until it is taken away. My days were spent studying, which I hated. Father lectured me often about the many responsibilities awaiting me: of managing men and resources and tempering the waters beyond our island; rival navies and thieving fleets. As King of the island, he was very concerned with the terrors of the sea. In fact, that is where our story begins, as all the best do: with piracy.

My brother Helenus and I were in the cramped room our tutor occupied in the palace, small stone tables scattered with red clay tablets, which the man attempted to explain the contents of. His room overlooked the courtyard in the center of the palace, and as I stared distractedly out the window, I noticed a sudden commotion. An explosion of bodies flooded from each adjoining door, servants clutching woven baskets of clean clothing or trays of fresh fruit, all of them with a sharp urgency to their movements. I squinted for the looks on their faces but was too far to see.

“Phoebus?” prodded my tutor.

When I looked to him, I found both his and my brother’s eyes on me.

“Pay attention, please. You can go out in just a bit.” He nudged a tablet closer to me. “Now, please continue reading where Helenus stopped.”

“Teacher, something is happening outside,” Helenus said, now looking where I was.

Our tutor glanced over his shoulder, sinew in his neck straining. His whole body was strewn together from bone and skin – no fat or muscle, just a thin line of insubstantial mass. He wore intricate, blue dyed linen draped over one shoulder, so the sharp protrusions of his collarbones peeked over, and a leather thong around his neck with an amulet tucked into his robes that I always longed to see.

“It’s no concern of yours,” he said. “We will finish this lesson. Phoebus?”

I was a few halting lines into my reading when the door to Teacher’s study burst open. Standing there was our father, shoulders heaving. He wore his sword on his hip with a plate of armor across his broad chest, and the thick curl of his hair was tied at the nape of his neck.

“Itonus, take the boys to the crypt. Hide there until I fetch you.”

“My Lord?”

“Quickly.”

Helenus and I looked at each other. Then, my brother was fifteen years old, and I seventeen. Still, he possessed the soft face of a juvenile, with pink, flushed cheeks and our father’s oil black hair curled sweetly over his protruding ears. His eyes were the stark turquoise of the water under the cliff. He looked at me then with those eyes blown wide, mouth pinched, as clearly a child as he had ever been. I cannot know what look I returned to him, although, unlike his, it bore nothing of our father’s visage. I always took more after our mother, with hair pale like honey and eyes black as olive pits. 

Teacher shepherded Helenus and I through the long hallway toward the stairs to the crypt, a place I had only been once before, on my sixteenth birthday when my mother took me down to gaze at the memorial to a comrade of my father’s who died at the same age. His grave was marked with a large krater painted with a scene of his final battle, and at the time I struggled to understand what that had to do with me. My mother was always very foreboding and unknowable in her actions.

Helenus and Teacher and I, as well as some of the children of our servants, crowded in the crypt. I caught sight of that mysterious krater from the corner of my eye and wondered if such a scene of battle would come to pass upstairs, and if my father, unlike his fallen comrade, would live to tell the tale himself… or otherwise be memorialized on a pot. 

“Who do you think has come?” Helenus’ knees were tucked up to his soft chin, and he wrapped his thin, long arms around his shins like a shield.

“Pirates, of course,” I answered.

“But pirates don’t come inland. They wait in cliffpasses to ambush our ships.”

“They are growing bolder.”

“Do you think Father is weak?”

I blinked, taken aback. “No. Why do you ask such a thing?”

“If Father is weak they might take advantage of that. That’s why they would come inland, only if they think he is weak enough to let them leave.”

My brow furrowed. “Or perhaps they only think that they are strong.”

Helenus turned his gaze away from me, casting it along a row of graves. Each was marked with a krater. “I wish I was heir,” he said. “I would never think like that. And that’s why I would be a better king than you.”

…

It’s like I told you. At seventeen, I did not often long to be king. I wanted to run barefoot along the dirt beaten paths outside the palace, or amateurly practice wooden swords with Helenus and the servants’ sons, or pluck figs from the tree to eat by the water’s edge, forever.

My brother was different. Since that moment in the crypt, I noticed a longing in him I could not recognize in myself. I suppose it makes sense for a child to want what he cannot have, and because his elder brother had something he did not, he coveted it for himself. I would have traded places with him were it possible, but the strictures of our island kingdom were precisely defined. Yet in the aftermath of the pirates’ attack, his determination began to culminate into something almost tangible. 

I recognized this first when we were practicing swords a few weeks later. Although I was a lackluster student in most regards, my skills with weapons were refined – according to my mother, I took after her own father this way, who was never quite the tactician my father was. I had long since accepted that I would never be like him. But as a moderately accomplished swordsman at seventeen, I was very prideful in the things I was good at, and took much joy in besting my opponents. So that morning when Helenus first defeated me, I was taken aback.

With my back pressed into the soft, powdery dirt of the training ring, I stared at my brother’s young face. Sweat beaded at the round tip of his nose, his eyes piercing and pale, and he crouched over my chest with the flat wooden edge of his sword against my throat. I was shocked. I might have laughed to brush off my wounded pride, but he looked so ferocious I could not summon the sound.

“…Very good, Helenus,” said Pelion, our trainer.

Helenus climbed off of me, unfurling his long limbs with refined grace, before he shook the loose curls from his face. A moment of silence passed before he reached down to offer me his hand, and I took it to pull myself up. Even two years my junior, he was taller than me, and this fact was made clear as I rolled to my feet. He peered down at me with his eyes flashing like silver coins.

“Is that the first time you’ve ever beaten me?” I asked, knowing it was but wanting to subtly brag.

“Yes. But not the last,” his lips curled into a smile.

It was easy to dismiss as good-natured teasing, so I matched his grin with one of my own. Then I stepped back and widened my stance to level my fake blade at his sternum, and said, “You wish.”

The next spar, I won. And the one after that. But the image of Helenus’ face looming over mine was not so quickly forgotten, and I suspected he might have been right. It would not be the last time I saw such a thing.

… 

In those days, we enjoyed times of peace. It was true that something more lurked beyond the borders of our island kingdom, but to my brother and I, things were calm. We both knew that our father had once fought in a great war, but that was years before either of our births. There were pirates beyond our borders, but they did not often come ashore. Therefore, to us, swordplay was a game to be played beyond the expectation of reality. Perhaps one day as king I would fight in a war like my father, but I had a tendency not to think so far in advance. 

In the aftermath of the pirate’s ambush, I wished to know what our father did not tell us. According to him, it was a large fleet controlled by a well-known captain with whom he had been tangled in the past. This spoke to a years-long rivalry, and I longed to know more. Father told us that after a few hours of fighting, the pirates were forced to retreat to their ships and disappear into the ocean, but he spoke little about how exactly this was accomplished. When Helenus and I trained with swords, I now pictured  myself as my father, striking the pirate captain through the heart. Or I instead imagined myself as the pirate captain, too clever to be killed, slinking away into the sea. Either way, both fantasies superseded my previous imaginings of simply winning a bout of sparring. And that, coupled with the strange gleam in my brother’s eye, spoke to a strange new beginning I did not know how to confront. 

It was easy for Helenus to convince me to listen in on our father and his council. Like me, he longed to know the truth of that battle, and with a little needling, I was persuaded to break the rules. After a morning of droning lessons with our tutor, we took to slithering quietly through the labyrinthian halls of the palace to the war room. Helenus walked with swift purpose while I lulled behind him. As we rounded one corner, the silence was broken by the murmur of two voices.

“…worry for him.” It was our mother. She had a gentle, breathy way of speaking that did not serve well for eavesdropping. But years of being convinced to sneak around with Helenus had turned me into a talented interpreter. 

My brother and I shared a look, and without speaking, decided we would stay and listen. Posting ourselves to the side of the wall, we craned our heads best to catch who she might be talking to. My mind raced. Was she worried for Father? Had something more happened that we did not know about?

“My Lady, he is still young. Perhaps he will grow into the role,” said our mother’s attendant.

I could feel the cold smoldering of my brother’s gaze against the back of my neck. Both he and I knew who they were discussing, and it was not our father. For some reason, be it pride or shame or an amalgamation of both, I could not meet Helenus’ eyes.

“It is different for him. You know this,” Mother sighed. “He has all the more to contend with. I worry he will discover the truth – or worse, someone else will.” 

The weight of Helenus’ stare grew all the more piercing – a knife pressed at the nape of my neck. My heart was pounding like a steel drum between my ears. What did this mean? The truth? Could she be any more vague?
“Lord Aecus loves the boy,” Said Mother’s attendant, referencing our father. “Even if he is not his own. Do not fret so much, my Lady.”

There was silence, then the muted, shuffling sound of a bristled brush passing through hair.

It was as though all the air in my body had been wrung out, stomach plaited in fumbling knots, throat squeezed shut. My mind raced. My palms sweated. An icy current of realization thrummed through my veins.

How could it be? I was heir to the throne. My father loved me. Yes – my father. My father who had spent years preparing me to take his place as king, who took pride in my accomplishments, who, as a child, sat me on his knee and told me legends of all-powerful gods and valiant heroes, and assured me one day, I could be so great. My father, who looked nothing like me, my father, with talents I had never shared.

Not like Helenus.

I did not want to look at my brother. In this strange, warped moment of unreality, I came to fear him. I did not fear that he would lash out and hurt me, but that unnameable thing that had been churning between us seemed to be arriving at its peak. If it wasn’t this, what was it? If I was not my father’s son, Helenus would be heir. He wanted this, and here it was, presented to him. I feared what that meant for the two of us.

Back then, I was a bit of a fool. You might have already arrived at that conclusion yourself. But I did not want to be king, and only wanted the golden glow of my youth to last forever. Meanwhile, Helenus seemed determined to chase it away.

“Phoebus,” he said, in a cold, empty voice.

A moment came and went. “…Yes, brother?”
“We should go.”

And so we left. My brother and I walked back through the meandering halls without regard to our previous plan, which – at least to me – had been entirely forgotten. That is, until we saw our father step out into the hall before us. His black hair, threaded with silver, curled around his shoulders, eyes vibrantly blue beneath his heavy brow, expression unreadable under his heavy beard. He wore a crisp chiton with a sword on his hip.

“Boys.” He nodded at us.

“Father,” we said in unison, bowing our heads. I could feel the needle of Helenus’ eyes on me once again.

Then Lord Aecus walked away. 

…

You might be wondering what really did happen in the battle between my father and that pirate captain. Well, that makes two of us, because I only know one version: the one I learned years after its occurrence, from the lips of Captain Evadne herself – according to her, her fleet was able to cut through quite a bit of the King’s men, and were progressing toward the palace with haste. There, they planned to lay siege and take a great deal of wealth, and Captain Evadne had her sights set on something quite particular: the trade routes of my father’s ships. If she could determine where in the waters they might be, all the easier to ambush them it would become. But although Captain Evadne and her men offered a good fight, at that point they were no real match for the island’s military prowess. The way the story goes, she would later return with a larger fleet, and put an end to King Aecus. Then Helenus would take up arms to avenge his father’s death and swear himself on a path of vengeance.

But I was not there to see it.

It was a few weeks after Helenus and I learned the truth that my fate was cemented. My brother spoke to me very seldom in the time between, and the usual playful banter we once shared had quickly worn thin. Most often I found him in the training ring, practicing swords against a line of dummies. I watched from a distance as their bodies crumpled and their stomachs bled dry straw over the dirt, Helenus’ shoulders heaving and his forehead dappled with sweat, that same piercing glint in his eyes. Meanwhile, I wasn’t sure what to do with myself, and resumed my life as it had always been, now under the chokehold of new knowledge. I was a bastard, but still a prince.

Then that night came. Often, I would wander out to the beach below the cliff’s edge to watch the waves and dip my feet into the frothing water. After sunset it was cool and crisp with salty mist, and in the darkness I laid in the white sand to stare up at the pinprick stars. My father once told me there were as many stars in the sky as grains of sand in all the world’s beaches, which I thought was ridiculous. Since then, I have followed infinite patterns of stars across the whole rolling sea, and know it to be true. But that night my eyes simply traced the silhouettes of each constellation I had memorized,  remembering their corresponding stories. Heroes immortalized by gods, now hanging in the heavens. I thought my father might one day be one of those constellations, but had no dreams of such a thing for myself. It simply never crossed my mind. 

I fell asleep on the beach. There was sand in my hair and the edges of my chiton were crunchy and wet from the rising tide when I woke, but it had been a long, restful slumber that I could feel in my bones. I was daydreaming about washing off in the warm, scented waters of the palace’s bathhouse as I ascended the steep hill to the side of the cliffs towards the palace.

A huge staircase was built into the rocky side of the hill, which leveled off into a wide platform. Tall, intricate pillars stood proudly in a row before the grand entrance. A collection of buildings with triangular roofs were assembled around the expansive central courtyard. The view of it from a distance as one climbed up the hill was magnificent. It sparkled white and pristine under the morning sun.

Two guards and their crossed spears greeted me at the entrance with their faces hidden behind bronze helmets. Growing up in the palace, I long since learned to recognize guards by their exposed chins and gleaming, muscular arms. The biceps of these two belonged to Belleophran and Atreus. They stayed planted in place with their spears locked together even as I approached, which was strange – they knew to let me in.

“Good morning,” I greeted, confused. “May I go inside?”

“There was great commotion here last night, little prince,” said Atreus.

“Oh?” I did not remember hearing or seeing anything from the beach. “What happened?”

The guards exchanged a look through the eye-slits of their helmets. Words unsaid hung heavily between them.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Let him in,” said a third voice, beyond the pillars.

I looked over the guards’ thick shoulders to find my brother standing there, chin raised and shoulders thrust back. A sweeping blue shadow from a pillar fell across half of his face, swallowing him partially in darkness. 

The guards looked at each other again, before disengaging their spears and moving apart to allow me through. As I stepped past, I felt their stares like brands sizzling on my back. What was going on? I walked toward Helenus feeling extremely lost, resting my palm over the hilt of the dagger I wore at my belt. I did not anticipate needing to use it, but it felt like the thing to do in this moment of unsurity.

“What is going on?” I asked as we walked down the main hall. My bare feet, rough with sand caked between my toes, slid over the tile floor as I shuffled along behind my brother.

“There was an attempt on the King’s life last night.” Helenus said.

“What?” I stopped walking. “Someone tried to assassinate Father?”

Helenus turned to look at me. His dark hair looked so black it was almost purple, and his blue eyes gleamed like ice. “That’s right,” he answered. “Someone snuck into his chambers from the window – a young man with a bronze knife. His face was hidden by a cloak. He went to stab Father in the throat, but Father woke up and he ran back to the window and escaped in his cowardice. There were guards everywhere, searching the palace and beyond… and no one could find you.”
“I was at the beach.” I was confused as to what that had to do with anything.
“You don’t see how curious it is that you weren’t in your room during this?”
“I don’t.” I furrowed my brow. Something was beginning to accumulate in this conversation and I did not like the implications behind it. “I very often go to the beach. If guards were looking for me, that should have been one of the first places they checked.”

“I find it difficult to believe that they did not.”
“You think I am lying?” I stepped closer to Helenus.

“I think you have been lying for your entire life,” he replied coldly.

How dare he? At that moment I was swiftly overcome with anger. Did Helenus really believe I previously knew I was a bastard? And that I would not have told him? He and I were always very close as children, we knew everything about each other… and even more than that, what child has the capacity to keep such a monumental secret? I was never particularly ambitious, since youth I showed little interest in my fate as heir. So, why? It was as if my very own brother could no longer recognize me. Yet, as I looked on at him and his hard, expressionless face, the opposite was true for myself. I recognized Helenus in that moment more than I had in quite a while.

Once, when we were young children, Helenus and I were playing war with some of the servants’ children that lived in the palace. There was a group of eight of us total, so we were split perfectly into two armies, with my brother and I on opposing sides. One of the other boys in my group wanted to be king and lead us, which I was perfectly content with. Meanwhile, Helenus was adamant that as princes, he and I needed to act as the kings. Eventually I conceded and passively let him situate me into the role. All of us were using thin, fallen branches with the bristles brushed off as false weapons, and we smacked them together playfully in imitation of swordplay. Helenus was fully entrenched in his role as king, and shouted orders at his men in the wavering, breakable voice of a young boy – nonetheless a powerful commanding force in a group of small children. Constrastingly, I had forgotten I was supposed to be commanding anything, and was taking very little seriously. Still, when it came down for the two kings to face off, we met each other with fierceness. I was having a great deal of fun pretending to be in the throes of war, and wanted to win for the pure, juvenile joy of it. I beat my branch against Helenus’, struck his arms and chest, and used my then superior height and weight to push him back toward the trunk of a tree. I remember his face taking the hue of a deep red pomegranate, beaded with sweat and scuffed with dirt, with stray black curls dangling over his forehead. He looked as furious as a child his age could look. Dropping his branch, he curled his grubby fingers into claws and attacked me, latching his nails into the skin of my shoulders and dragging long, red marks down my torso. He clawed and scratched at me until I was forced to stumble back and land on my behind, at which point he climbed onto my chest to perch there and dig his talons into my face. The other children did not know what to do, being servants witnessing the untameable aggression of a prince. Eventually I bucked my hips enough to throw him off, but I was shaken. I remember looking over at him then and seeing tears glistening in his eyes as he said, I won. I won. You all saw it, I won.

Have you ever seen my brother in person? He’s startlingly similar to how he was when I knew him, back when this story takes place. Always so composed, always with such explosive passion simmering beneath an icy exterior. He makes an excellent leader though, I must say. He knows how to be charismatic. I wonder if anyone else besides me or his foes on the battlefield have seen what that charisma is masking – the rage.

The two of us stood together in the long, shadowed hall leading into the palace. I knew him then. I knew he was the same child as he had always been, desperately clawing at my face for a chance to be King. And I would’ve given it to him, if I could have. If he had offered me the chance.

“I have never lied to you, Helenus.” I told him. “And I never will. I did not try to kill our Father. I love him. The fact that you think anything but wounds me deeply.”
“You’re a bastard,” he spat with venom between his teeth. “The King is not your father, he’s mine. And you can spin all the pretty sounding lies you wish, but it does not matter. I’ve already told Father what you’ve done.”

That is when I realized: Helenus had been waiting for the previous night for a very long time – possibly even before we learned the truth of my parentage. He waited for me to be absent from the palace so he could disguise himself as me, sneak into our parents’ chambers, act as though he was going to assassinate Father, and later accuse me. All of this had been orchestrated perfectly within the course of one night I spent lazing on the beach.

“It was you,” I said.

He looked at me with his face totally devoid of expression, still as the sea before a storm.

“If you want to be King so badly, you could have just asked!” I planted my hands on his shoulders and pushed him backward. “We could have gone to Father together!”

His gaze suddenly smoldering, Helenus marched toward me to shove me in return, lines of muscle in his forearms straining. I stumbled back a few steps but quickly reoriented myself in time for him to say, “You’re wrong, Phoebus! It can only be me! It has to be me, alone! I deserve this, you never should have even had the chance!”
Anger and confusion boiled in the pit of my stomach. I could not, for the life of me, understand him. He was insane! There was absolutely no reason for the two of us to be rivals; he was fabricating a conflict between us for no reason beyond his own hunger for victory. Why would he betray me like this? I loved him more dearly than anyone else in the world. He was my brother, my best friend, my companion! In that moment, I was so swept up in my anger and sadness that I could barely see straight.

Helenus had a lot of advantages over me – he was smarter, better spoken, more ambitious. But I have always been stronger than him. I shoved him again, and when he whirled back to once more advance on me, I tightened my shaking hand into a fist and struck him across the jaw. Blood streaked down the corner of his mouth as he fell back and attempted to brace himself by his forearms. I fell to my knees above him and raised my fist once more. I am not a very violent person – not if I don’t have to be. But I wanted to hit Helenus more than I had ever wanted to hit anyone, ever. If I hit him hard enough, perhaps I could beat some sense into him. Perhaps I could beat the sadness out of myself. I do not know what I thought I could do, but I know that I did it. I know I hit him until his curly black head slammed into the tile floor and his teeth turned red with blood. I know I hit him until the guards from outside rushed in to pull me off of him.

…

There is more to this story. What happened when I was taken to the King, the events of my trial, the look in my mother’s eye, Helenus assuming his role as heir. But none of that really matters, I don’t think. Believe it or not, I do not often think of those days. They are far behind me. Everything that came to pass – my mother hiding the identity of my real father, my brother coveting my place as heir, his accusations against me – it all was for a reason. After all, it’s more fun to be a pirate than a king, don’t you think?

And it was aboard the deck of a ship, of course, where I met you.