I remember him in gold.

When I was a girl, my hair was such a rich gold, and my skin so pale, that my father said I looked like a chryselephantine statue with great, dark eyes. Perhaps I now look so; I no longer know what I look like, or whether I am visible. I think we are all invisible to the Achaeans, now that they have conquered. They load their ships with our women, our weapons, our belongings and our pieces of home, our gold.

He glittered that day in the temple, when I was no more than sixteen. I did not hear him come in at first; I was sweeping. It was sunrise, and outside the light would have been golden and turned the sea into a sparkling array of a thousand lights, so that we could not look at it; but I was inside, and the candles shone off a thousand dedications and trophies and statues. I saw him reflected in the shield as he came behind me.

"You're up early, Princess Cassandra," he said.

At first I did not recognize him; he had taken the form of a mortal man, albeit uncommonly beautiful; his dark hair was caught in an athlete's knot, and his dark eyes were so liquid that I drowned in them and sank. "My lord," I said, "I have duties to the god."

He laughed, then, a deep, beautiful sound, like the ringing of a bell. "He is pleased, then."

"That's not for me to say, my lord." But in my heart, I liked to think that it was so.

"Modest, too. But I assure you, Cassandra, it is for me to say." I turned to face him, and saw, then, something faint and hard, hidden in those dark eyes; I was afraid, but put it out of my mind. When his hand rested on the bow he carried, I recognized him then, and I sank to my knees.

"You may kill me if you like," I whispered, my hand trembling as I reached for the hem of his chiton.

He frowned. "And why would I want to do that? In any case, it doesn't suit you to kneel at my feet like a suppliant." (But are we not all suppliants before the Gods?) "Get up." I did not move; I dared not move. "Cassandra. Get up, or I shall be angry."

I found my legs, then, and got up; weak and trembling, overwhelmed, I leaned against him, and he put his arm around me. "You have nothing to fear, if you are a good girl and do as I say. I have great plans for you."

After that, he came to me often. Not always as overtly as he had done that day; sometimes I would hear his voice as I walked the streets, coming to me in some snatch of half-overheard conversation. It was not unusual to see crows or tame house-snakes, especially given that so many of us were priestesses, but now I seemed to see them more than ever, and every so often I would find mice in my room where I could have sworn that there were none before. Once, at sunrise, I even saw a wolf which must have gotten into the palace at night; when I approached in fear and trembling, it did not attack me, but only looked at me gravely before padding off.

There seemed a thousand secret messages for me everywhere. When I read, the words almost glittered, luminous and set in gold; the wind in the laurels carried messages that I could not quite hear. When I visited the Thymbraean temple with my brothers, the sun swelled bright and heavy on my entrance. Knowing myself beloved of the god, I ran my mind often along our shared secrets, sweet as a piece of honeycomb on the tongue.

He courted me assiduously all that summer; I did not yet know the fate that befalls a woman who gives herself up, body and soul, to a god. He wanted me beautiful, temperate, rational, and I became these things, and knew myself beautiful because he loved me. My mother and sisters remarked on the changes in me, but none of them seemed able to figure it out.

I was to walk, that summer, in the procession to Athene with my mother and sisters and sisters-in-law, all the great joyous rabble of my noble family as it was before the war. Of course the importance of the festival did not escape me; since becoming a priestess, I had become more religious (and, had I but known it, a bit worse than a thorough bore). But I was not as free of earthly vanity as I am now, and I could not settle on a dress to wear, nor on what exactly I ought to look like; I said to myself that it was to honor Athene, but I wanted, too, to draw her brother's notice.

When I picked up my mirror, the bronze disc shone suddenly as bright as the sun, and although I could not see him, I knew that he was there. "Not that one," I heard him say, and felt his touch like a crow's feather against the azure of my peplos. "Wear white; it will never suit you better than tonight."

Chaste and pure, I walked in the procession when we took the robe to Athene in the temple. After I came back, I lay, first hesitantly and then eagerly, with the god in the narrow confines of my bed.

He opened my mind as well as my body; I saw words, strange curved letters like the Phoenicians' that I could make no sense of, and was transported worlds away. I saw the Fates' skein unwinding before me and could make perfect sense of it; in his arms, nothing was unknown to me, nothing denied. The taste of laurel leaves filled my mouth; an odor I did not recognize filled my nostrils, and I babbled ecstatically.

After, we lay still, my heart thumping like a frantic, captured sparrow in my chest. He stroked my hair from my forehead and bent to press his lips there; they burnt like divine fire, and I felt myself seared, all the impurity in me washed away. "Tell me," he said, "what you would like for a love-gift."

Would that he had never asked; would that I had never answered.

"Oh," I whispered, my hand resting on his shoulder, "only kiss me again, and I shall be happy."

"I shall do more," he murmured in my ear, and when his lips found mine again, I heard the twanging again of a harp, the whirr and thud of an arrow's flight, the howling of wolves. Nothing, I knew, would be the same again. "Now," he whispered, "when you go to divine, everything you say will come to pass, and they will know you for my own."