Description
Kallistrate was never a darling of the altars. Raised in Sparta and rumored to be Hades' blood, she learned early that survival is a craft. Her gifts-hearing the dead, bending shadow, keeping her spine steady-make her a useful problem the gods can't ignore. When she's sent to Ithaca to marry Prince Telemachus, she finds a court rotting under a hundred hungry men and a queen who refuses to bend. Ares trains her at dawn. Athena tests her at dusk. The island's dead crowd her name with pleas, and every rite becomes a battlefield. But Kallistrate is no one's spectacle. With Penelope at her side and Telemachus at her shoulder, she turns custom into strategy: sacred lamps, feast-day oaths, the old challenges that remember who a king is. As omens sharpen and a beggar with storm-bright eyes kneels at a dais, Ithaca's halls brace for the reckoning. A lyrical retelling filled with political intrigue, found courage, and slow-burn devotion, The Shadowed Song of Ithaca asks what it costs to keep a home-and whether a girl made of shadows can write her own ending. For fans of Madeline Miller, Jennifer Saint, Jorge Rivera-Herrans and mythic romantasy with sharp edges. Content notes: violence; death/grief; gods' manipulation; trauma mentions; court/political tension, mentions of assault (NEVER graphic), men being intimidating.
Prologue: The Challenge
