Heir of Troy: The Third Son Chapter 3 — What Paris Wants
He heard Paris before he saw him.
Three days after waking up in Troy, Karim had developed a system.
Every morning: vocabulary drilling in his room before the palace woke up. Every meal: corner seat, back to the wall, maximum field of hearing. Every training session: performance calibrated to slightly better than yesterday, nothing more. Every interaction: listen twice, speak once, speak carefully.
He had one hundred and forty-seven words now.
He kept the count the way a castaway keeps a count of days — not because the number itself mattered, but because the act of counting was proof that time was moving, that progress was happening, that the situation had a direction even when it didn't feel like it.
One hundred and forty-seven words in three days.
He needed roughly a thousand to stop feeling blind.
He was working on it.
The laughter came from the courtyard below his window, loud and sudden, cutting through the early morning quiet like something thrown through glass.
Male. Young. The specific register of someone who had never once in his life felt the need to moderate the volume of his own amusement.
Karim was at the window before he'd made a conscious decision to move.
The courtyard was one level down — a wide stone space used for moving goods and people between the palace's outer and inner sections. At this hour it was usually quiet, a servant or two crossing it with purpose, nothing more.
This morning it had an audience.
Seven or eight people clustered near the far wall, arranged in the loose half-circle that forms around someone performing rather than simply existing. At the center of the half-circle, talking with broad gestures and apparent total confidence in his own narrative, was a young man Karim hadn't seen before.
He was — there was no other word for it — beautiful.
Not handsome in the way that implied strength or character. Beautiful in the way a sunset is beautiful: vivid, effortless, slightly too much, the kind of thing that made you squint a little. Dark curling hair, the build of someone who had trained enough to look good without training enough to actually be dangerous, a face arranged by nature with a generosity it rarely showed.
He was telling a story.
Karim couldn't follow the words from this distance, but he could follow the performance — the expanding gestures, the shift in voice for different characters, the pause before the punchline that suggested this was not the first time he'd told this particular story. The audience laughed at the right moments. One woman laughed a moment early, anticipating, which meant she'd heard it before and liked it anyway.
Paris, Karim thought.
He didn't know for certain. But the age was right — late teens, early twenties at most. The courtyard attention was right. The being watched was right, worn the way other people wore clothes, so naturally it barely registered.
And something else.
Something in the absolute ease of him — the way he stood in the center of attention like a man who had never considered that attention might one day run out — that matched every account Karim had ever read.
Paris of Troy had been described in ancient sources as charming, beautiful, and catastrophically self-assured. As a man whose confidence was not the product of achievement but of something more innate and therefore more dangerous: the unexamined certainty that the world would keep arranging itself around him because it always had.
The man in the courtyard finished his story with a gesture that seemed to indicate something impossibly large.
The audience laughed.
He grinned.
Yes, thought Karim. That's him.
He met him properly at the midday meal.
The main hall was fuller than usual — a delegation from somewhere, Karim had gathered from the increased activity that morning, though the specifics were beyond him. More people at the tables, more formality in the servants' movements, a low-grade tension running under the ordinary rhythms of the meal like a current under still water.
He had taken his usual corner seat and was running vocabulary in his head while eating when the bench shifted beside him and Paris sat down.
Not across, the way Hector had. Beside him.
He said something immediately, in the fast, slightly-too-loud way of someone who spoke at conversation speed and expected the world to keep up. Karim caught maybe a third of it:
Something something Lysander something something yesterday something — smile? laugh? — something something you look.
He looked at Karim's face while he said this with the cheerful expectation of someone who had never once delivered a line that didn't land.
Karim said nothing.
Paris kept talking.
He had, Karim was realizing, the particular energy of someone who experienced silence as a vacuum requiring immediate filling. Not from nerves — from abundance. Too much to say, not enough hours, why would anyone choose quiet when there was all of this to talk about?
He caught more words this time. Practice was working.
Training. Head. Fall. Trainer. A word he thought meant embarrassing or shameful delivered with a laugh that indicated Paris found it funny rather than shameful. Yesterday. Again? Always?
You always fall, maybe. Or: you fell again, embarrassing, I heard.
Then Paris said a word and pointed at Karim's ear.
The word was one Karim didn't know yet.
He scratched it onto his shard.
Paris stopped talking.
He looked at the shard. Then at Karim. Then at the shard again.
He said something short and curious.
Karim did what he'd done with Hector — pointed at his ear, made the listening gesture, pointed at the marks. Sounds. Writing sounds.
Paris leaned in close to look at the shard with the uninhibited nosiness of someone who had never learned that looking too closely at things was impolite. His shoulder pressed against Karim's. He smelled of something — oil, probably, something scented, the Bronze Age equivalent of cologne.
He said a word and pointed at one of the marks.
Karim said the sound the mark represented.
Paris laughed — not unkindly, more the way you laugh at something that surprises you — and said something that from context might have been: that's not how you write it or that's a strange way to write it or simply what is that.
Then he did something Karim hadn't expected.
He reached out, took the shard, and scratched a shape onto it.
Linear B. An actual Linear B sign, the script Karim recognized from tablets, from textbooks, from the reproduction hanging on his office wall in a life that no longer existed. Not his phonetic system — the real writing of this world.
He pointed at it. Said the sound it represented.
Karim looked at the sign. He knew this one — he knew most of the Linear B signs, had studied them for years. But he didn't let that show. He let his face show the careful attention of someone learning.
He pointed at the sign. Repeated the sound. Correctly.
Paris looked moderately impressed in the way people look moderately impressed by a dog performing a slightly complicated trick.
He scratched another sign.
Karim identified the sound.
Another.
Karim got it slightly wrong on purpose — close enough that he could have been uncertain, not so wrong that it seemed impossible.
Paris corrected him. Repeated it.
Karim repeated it back, correctly this time.
Paris scratched three more signs in quick succession and looked at him expectantly.
Karim identified two out of three, hesitated on the third.
Paris said the third one three times with increasing theatrical patience, the kind of patience that is really just performance of patience and is not very patient at all, and Karim repeated it and Paris made a satisfied sound and sat back.
He said something that might have been there or see or good and took a large mouthful of the food that had apparently appeared in front of him during the writing lesson.
Karim looked at the shard.
The Linear B signs Paris had scratched were clean and automatic — the handwriting of someone who had been writing this script since childhood, not thinking about the forms, just using them. He could read every one of them. He had been able to read them before he arrived here.
But Paris didn't know that.
Paris thought he was teaching a brother who had apparently never paid much attention to writing before.
That, Karim thought, watching Paris gesticulate at someone across the table, is useful.
He didn't know how to feel about Paris.
That was the honest answer, and he sat with it for the rest of the day.
He had expected — what? Obvious villainy? Some visible sign of the catastrophe this person was going to cause? A tell in the face or the manner that would make it easy to keep a clear line between what Paris was and what Paris would do?
Instead he had gotten a young man who taught him Linear B over lunch because it seemed like an interesting way to spend the time, who laughed too loudly and talked too much and clearly had no filter between thing I am thinking and thing I am saying out loud.
Paris was not a villain.
He was something harder to navigate than a villain.
He was a person who was going to do something catastrophic for completely human reasons — because he fell in love, or thought he did, and because the idea that love might have a cost he couldn't afford had genuinely never occurred to him. Because he had been beautiful and charming his whole life and the world had kept arranging itself around that, giving him what he wanted, and he had learned exactly the wrong lesson from it.
He wasn't going to destroy Troy out of malice.
He was going to destroy it out of certainty — the deep, unexamined certainty that it would work out, it always worked out, he was Paris of Troy and things worked out for people like him.
How do you stop that? Karim thought.
You can't argue someone out of certainty. You can't reason with it. Certainty doesn't update on evidence.
What does it update on?
He didn't have an answer yet.
He scratched three new words on his shard and kept thinking.
Four days later, he had two hundred and nine words and a working theory about Paris.
The theory was this: Paris wasn't stupid. He was, in fact, quick — quick to laugh, quick to follow a joke's logic, quick to learn something if it interested him. The problem wasn't intelligence. The problem was that his intelligence had been almost entirely deployed, his entire life, in service of being liked.
He was extraordinarily good at being liked.
He read rooms. He knew, apparently by instinct, what each person wanted from an interaction and delivered it — not cynically, Karim didn't think, but naturally, the way a musician plays without thinking about the mechanics. The woman who wanted to be entertained got a story. The man who wanted to be respected got an acknowledgment. The younger boys who wanted to be seen got direct eye contact and actual attention.
He did this for everyone.
Including Karim.
Every day for those four days Paris had found him — at meals, in corridors, once at the edge of the training ground — and sat down and continued the accidental language lesson he'd started. He would scratch signs, Karim would learn them, and in between he would talk with the unselfconscious ease of a man who had never once worried that he was saying too much.
Karim understood maybe half of it now. Enough to follow the shape.
Enough to know that Paris talked, often and fondly, about a trip he was planning.
A voyage. Somewhere west. Guests came up repeatedly — the formal Mycenaean word for the sacred relationship between host and visitor, the hospitality code that the entire Mediterranean world ran on.
Guest-friendship. Xenia. The obligation that ran both ways: hosts must give, guests must receive, both sides bound by rules older than any kingdom.
Paris spoke about it with the satisfied anticipation of someone who had already decided that something was a good idea and was now enjoying the thinking-about-it stage.
He's planning the trip, Karim realized. He's already thinking about it. It's not an impulse — he's been planning this.
How long have you been thinking about going to Sparta, Paris?
The question he couldn't ask yet.
Couldn't ask because his language wasn't there. Couldn't ask because asking would reveal that he knew where Paris was planning to go — and the only way he could know that was if someone had told him, and as far as he could tell, nobody had told anyone, it was Paris's private anticipation carried around like a gift he hadn't unwrapped yet.
So he listened.
And learned.
And waited for the words to come.
On the fifth day, Cassandra found him in the library.
He had discovered the library two days ago — a room off the east corridor, small and stone-shelved, holding clay tablets in ordered rows. He couldn't read them, not exactly; his academic Mycenaean was enough to get the shapes but not the administrative specifics. But the tablets were organized, labeled, and the labels were in clean standard script that helped him map his own phonetic system onto something more formal.
He went there in the late afternoons when training was done and the palace was in its quiet hour before the evening meal. He sat on the floor with his back against the shelves and read tablets and scratched marks and added words.
She came in without announcing herself and sat on the opposite side of the room.
She had a tablet of her own. She read it.
They didn't speak for a long time.
The library was small enough that ignoring each other required cooperative effort — a mutual agreement to maintain parallel silence. Karim was aware of her the way you're aware of something that might matter and you don't know yet if it will.
Finally she said something.
Two words, not looking up from her tablet.
He caught one: Paris.
He looked at her.
She still wasn't looking at him. Her eyes were on the tablet. But the stillness in her had a different quality now — the stillness of someone paying close attention to someone else's reaction while appearing not to.
He said, carefully: "Paris — what?"
She looked up.
He heard, in the Mycenaean he was slowly assembling inside his head, something like: You watch him.
He thought about denying it. Decided it was pointless.
"Yes," he said. One of his most confident words.
She looked at him for a moment. Then she said something longer — four, five words, and he caught three of them:
Know. What. Come.
He sat with that.
You know what is coming.
Not a question. The same declarative certainty as that first night in the corridor. She wasn't asking if he knew. She was telling him that she had observed that he knew.
He said: "Yes."
She made a sound that might have been the Mycenaean equivalent of of course you do and returned to her tablet.
He returned to his.
After a while she said something else — shorter this time, flatter, a statement delivered to the room rather than to him specifically.
He caught only one word.
Believe.
Or more specifically — the negative form.
Not-believe.
She said it once, plainly, and then didn't say anything else for the rest of the hour.
He thought about that word for a long time.
They don't believe.
He had known that, academically, for his entire adult life. Cassandra's curse: she sees the truth and nobody believes her. He had read it in Homer, in Aeschylus, in every retelling of the myth. He had taught it to undergraduates as a narrative device, a dramatic irony, a tragedy built into a character before the story even starts.
He had never, until this moment, understood what it actually felt like to live that.
To be the person in the room who knows exactly what is coming and to open your mouth and have the words land with no weight, no traction, dissolving into the air like they were never spoken.
He looked at her — the careful way she held the tablet, the practiced quality of that stillness, the particular kind of quiet that people develop when they have learned over years that speaking doesn't help.
She was seventeen years old and she had already learned that.
I believe you, he thought. But he didn't have the words yet, not the right ones, not in the right order.
He scratched believe onto his shard and added it to the count.
Two hundred and twenty-one words.
That evening, Paris found him on the palace steps watching the sun go down.
He sat beside him without preamble, the way he did everything — no consideration of whether the action was welcome, because it never occurred to him that it might not be. He had a piece of bread in one hand and he offered half of it to Karim without looking at him.
Karim took it.
They sat for a while in the kind of easy silence that exists between people who have recently stopped needing to talk in order to be comfortable. Karim was aware that this was, for Paris, probably nothing unusual — he likely had comfortable silences with many people, it was part of the equipment. For Karim it was the first silence in five days that hadn't been the silence of I don't know what you're saying.
He understood Paris well enough now, he thought. Well enough for a simple conversation, if Paris spoke slowly.
He made a decision.
Pointed west, toward the horizon where the sun was going down over the water.
Said one word: "Ship?"
Paris turned to look at him.
Karim pointed west again. Made a gesture — both hands flat, moving forward, a sailing motion.
Paris looked at him for a moment with an expression Karim couldn't quite read.
Then he smiled — not the performance smile, not the charming-the-room smile. Something smaller and more private, like someone smiling at a thought they hadn't shared yet.
He said one word back.
Karim knew it.
"Soon."
He lay awake that night and thought about soon.
Soon. Paris was going to sail soon. He had known this — it was in every text, it was the first event of the war, the stone that started the avalanche — but knowing it academically was different from hearing it in the voice of a real person sitting next to him eating bread on stone steps in the evening light.
Soon.
He had planned, in the vague way he'd been planning everything, to address the Paris problem once his language was functional. Once he could actually have the conversation. Once he had some standing in this palace, some reason for Paris to listen to him at all.
But soon was a word with edges.
Soon did not wait for him to reach a thousand words.
He thought about what he knew of the timeline: Paris would sail. He would arrive in Sparta as a guest of Menelaus. He would meet Helen. And then — this was the part that mattered, the part that all the sources agreed on — Helen would leave with him.
Not taken. Not abducted, or not exactly. Helen, in most of the ancient accounts that Karim had spent years arguing about in faculty seminar rooms, had made a choice. An active choice, for reasons the sources went to various lengths to explain or obscure.
She chose to go.
Which meant the problem was not just Paris.
The problem was Paris and Helen and a specific set of circumstances that would make a married woman choose to leave with a beautiful stranger from across the sea.
What are those circumstances? he thought.
He knew them, academically. A troubled marriage. A husband who was powerful but absent, who treated her as a political asset, who had stopped looking at her as a person somewhere between the wedding and the war. A life in Sparta that was comfortable and hollow and bounded on all sides by who she was supposed to be.
And then Paris — who looked at her the way Paris looked at everything he wanted, with that unguarded, uncomplicated desire, the look of a man who wanted something and saw no reason in the world why he shouldn't have it.
She chose him because she felt seen, Karim thought. That's it. That's the whole catastrophe. A woman chose to be looked at as a person instead of a symbol and it started a ten-year war.
He stared at the ceiling.
How do you stop that?
You couldn't stop Paris wanting her. You couldn't stop Helen wanting to be wanted. You couldn't argue two people out of feeling the thing they were going to feel.
But you could, maybe, change the context. Change the circumstances that made that feeling feel like the only option. Change what was possible.
Or — the thought arrived quietly, the way the most important thoughts usually did, without fanfare — you could go to Sparta.
With Paris.
Not to stop him. Not to intervene in the moment, to physically prevent whatever happened. That was a losing strategy. You couldn't shadow someone for weeks in someone else's palace and stop every conversation they had.
But if you were there — if you were present, part of the delegation, someone with a reason to talk to people — then other things became possible.
Things that required language and presence and the ability to be in a room.
He counted his words in his head.
Two hundred and twenty-one.
Not enough, he thought. Not nearly enough.
He closed his eyes.
Work faster.
In the morning he went to find Paris.
He found him in the outer courtyard, doing what Paris apparently did every morning at this hour: absolutely nothing, with total commitment. Sitting on a wall, letting the early sun fall on his face, the relaxed bonelessness of a man who had woken up without anything required of him and had decided that this was the correct state of existence.
Karim sat beside him.
Paris opened one eye.
Karim held out the clay shard. Pointed at it. Then pointed at Paris.
Paris opened the other eye.
Karim said, slowly and carefully, in his best Mycenaean: "Teach me. More."
Paris looked at him.
Then he sat up, took the shard, and scratched three new signs on it.
Said the sounds.
Karim repeated them.
Paris corrected his pronunciation on the second one, demonstrating with exaggerated mouth movements that Karim suspected were slightly mocking but were also, genuinely, helpful.
Karim repeated it.
Paris gave a nod of grudging acceptance.
Good, said Karim.
Paris made the small private smile again — the one that didn't perform for the room.
Then he scratched another sign and the lesson continued.
Outside the palace, the Aegean moved in the morning light.
Blue and enormous and indifferent.
Somewhere across it, in a city called Sparta, a woman was living a life she hadn't chosen, in a marriage that had become a gilded routine, in a world that had a very clear idea of what she was for.
She didn't know yet.
Neither did the beautiful young man sitting on a wall in the Trojan sunshine, teaching his younger brother to write, squinting in the morning light with his future completely invisible to him.
Only Karim knew.
He looked at the signs on the clay shard and learned them and said nothing.
Two hundred and thirty-four words.