They get sidetracked

Winston studied the four women before him, his attention passing across faces that gave very little back. Penthascara’s jaw had tightened into a hard line. Aurascyra’s thumb moved slowly over the grain of her spear. Xanthibarqa scarcely seemed to breathe, while Helisparga watched him with a calm that felt less reassuring than open hostility might have.

“What do you think of me?” Winston asked.

Xanthibarqa’s gold eyes met his at once. “You are our king. Honour has settled that. Divine right has settled it. We will serve.”

There was no hesitation in the answer, which was precisely what made it uncomfortable. Winston knew what those words meant here. Their loyalty was not ceremonial, nor the grudging obedience of people who could ultimately refuse him. Blood, divine sanction, law, whatever name the Amazons preferred for it, they accepted his right to command with a completeness that still unsettled him.

He could order them. Not persuade or request. Order.

For the moment, that remained nothing more than a fact he preferred not to examine too closely.

Penthascara’s mouth shifted at one corner. “We will serve,” she said, making the words sound more like the edge of a boundary than a pledge. “Do not mistake that for welcome. You came from Man’s World, Winston. We have watched that place for centuries.”

A slow breath passed through her nose. “We have watched men build kingdoms on blood and tear them apart reaching for more. Land. Wealth. Women. Their own people when convenience demanded it. Then, when nothing remained to resist them, they gave the ruin a cleaner name and called it order.” Her stare sharpened. “Distrust did not begin with you. You simply arrived carrying every reason we learned it.”

Aurascyra settled the spear more firmly against her shoulder. “We survived because we remembered those reasons. We left that world before it could hollow this one out as well.” Her attention drifted toward the bright line of sea hemming the island in. “War forever searching for an excuse. Greed polished until everyone mistakes it for ambition. Cruelty repeated so often that people learn to live beside it. We wanted enough distance that our daughters might grow without expecting the worst from every hand that reached for power.”

Her fingers tightened around the shaft. “Then a man crossed our shore with the right to command us.”

The words struck closer than she knew.

“We will obey,” she continued. “Our honour requires it. The gods have spoken, the law has answered, and we will not disgrace ourselves by pretending otherwise. That is as far as obligation reaches.”

Helisparga had watched him throughout. “You asked for truth. The law recognizes you. The gods recognize you. So do we. That makes you king, whether the thought sits easily with us or not.” Her gaze lingered on him. “But when we look at you, we still see someone from the world our mothers taught us to fear, and their mothers before them. We crossed an ocean to leave that world behind. Centuries passed. Children were born who knew it only through warnings.”

A faint crease appeared between her brows. “Then one morning, it walked onto our shore wearing a crown.”

No one moved.

“You have our obedience,” she said at last. “What comes after that is yours to earn.”

Before any of them could continue, Hippolyta stepped to Winston’s side. The movement alone was enough to straighten all four former guards.

“You will speak plainly,” she told them, her voice never rising despite the warning beneath it. “Winston has asked for honesty, and he will have it. But you will also remember that you stand before your king.”

Penthascara lowered her chin a fraction. Aurascyra resettled her grip on the spear. Neither argued.

Only then did Hippolyta turn toward Winston. The sternness left her face as her hand came to rest on his shoulder, the affection in the gesture so easy and unquestioning that guilt stirred before he could stop it. Part of him still wanted to take comfort in her touch. Another part remembered that he had once wanted that love badly enough to use his power to guarantee it.

That had been personal. Selfish. He knew that much, whatever explanations he had once found for himself.

His attention returned to the four Amazons, which only made his confusion worse. Before coming here, the only Amazon he had really known was Wonder Woman, and calling Diana heroic hardly seemed sufficient. She believed in everything these women claimed to value: justice, peace, compassion, truth. Yet Winston had never heard her speak as though goodness belonged naturally to one sex or corruption to another. She had gone into Man’s World knowing exactly what it was capable of and still seemed determined to believe its people could be better.

Yet she had been raised here, by women like these.

Winston frowned. “So let me make sure I understand. You see Man’s World as violent, greedy, oppressive, and morally compromised.”

Penthascara’s expression did not change. “You have seen enough of it to know we are not inventing those words.”

“And Themyscira is different?”

“In some ways.”

The qualification caught him. “Some?”

This time Aurascyra answered. “We did not escape conflict simply by leaving the mainland.”

“Right. That part I understand.” Winston rubbed a hand across his face. “But I was told this place was built on peace. Harmony. Enlightenment. That’s the idea, yes?”

“It is more than an idea,” Helisparga said. “It is something we maintain. Peace does not mean making ourselves harmless. If we could not defend Themyscira, we would only possess it until someone stronger decided otherwise.”

He considered that, then nodded. “Fair enough. I suppose what bothers me is that everyone here seems very well prepared for something you say you left behind.”

“We left war behind as an ideal,” Aurascyra replied. “We did not forget how to survive one.”

“That makes more sense.” Winston glanced at her spear, then at the weapons carried by the others. “But you’re not merely prepared. You’re warriors.”

“We are.”

“And when fighting gets ugly?”

Penthascara answered. “Then we do what is required.”

“Including brutality.”

“If brutality preserves Amazon lives, yes, my king.”

The title was perfectly respectful. The look accompanying it was not.

Winston frowned rather than pressing the point. “That’s where I start having trouble with the distinction. Not because I think defending yourselves is wrong. I don’t. But you describe violence in Man’s World as evidence of what that world is, while violence here becomes something necessity forced upon you.”

Hippolyta’s hand still rested lightly on his shoulder, a quiet reminder of the authority beneath his title. Penthascara could look at him with as much contempt as she pleased only because he permitted the disagreement to remain hers. The thought unsettled him, but this time something else accompanied it.

Choice.

His authority did not require him to silence her merely because he could. Perhaps that was what separated possessing power from abusing it.

He was less certain than before that the distinction ended there.

“There’s something else,” he continued. “Themyscira has fought Bana-Mighdall.”

The change in the room was slight but immediate.

“Amazon against Amazon,” Winston said. “That wasn’t training or preparation. People died.”

“They did,” Aurascyra replied, without defensiveness. Only distaste.

“I understand defending yourselves. I understand keeping weapons. But you’ve had wars of your own. Amazons have killed Amazons, and when that happens you call it tragedy, failure, necessity, something that went wrong despite what Themyscira believes.”

“Because conflict does not erase principle,” Helisparga said.

“No, it doesn’t.” Winston nodded. “But that’s exactly what I mean. When violence happens here, you explain it by circumstance. You separate what happened from what you believe yourselves to be. When it happens in Man’s World, you seem much more willing to treat it as proof of what that world is.”

That quieted them.

“I’m not saying your wars make you monsters. I’m asking why your failures are allowed to be failures of principle, while theirs become evidence that the principle was never there at all.”

Penthascara’s eyes narrowed. “Our wars shame us, Winston. We do not teach our daughters to look upon Bana-Mighdall and see glory. Amazon blood was spilled by Amazon hands, and we remember it because forgetting would make us more likely to spill it again. We have never claimed ourselves incapable of cruelty.”

“No,” Winston said. “I don’t think you have.”

The concession seemed to take some of the force from whatever answer she had expected.

“I suppose that’s what keeps bothering me.” He rubbed at his jaw. “When an Amazon does something terrible, you can say she failed to be what she was supposed to be. It doesn’t become proof that every Amazon is dangerous.”

“Because it would not be proof of such a thing,” Helisparga said.

“Right. But you don’t seem to give men the same room.”

Aurascyra’s expression cooled. “History has given us little reason to.”

“I know. I’m not disputing the history.” Winston paused as the next part settled into place. “But an Amazon can do something terrible and still be judged as an individual who failed. A man can have done nothing at all, and the law has already decided enough about him to keep him off the island.”

Penthascara went still. “The law exists for reasons you have not yet understood.”

“Probably. That’s why I’m asking. Men are forbidden from Themyscira.”

“They are.”

“Not dangerous men. Not violent men. Men.”

“The law does not require us to discover which man will prove dangerous after he has already crossed our shore.”

Winston frowned. “So what he’s actually done doesn’t matter.”

“Not for the purpose of entry.”

“Or what sort of person he is.”

“The law concerns sex, not individual character.”

That answer sat badly with him. “Then you don’t need to know anything about him.”

“We know what world shaped him.”

“You know where he came from. That isn’t the same thing.”

Penthascara’s expression remained hard. “We know enough of Man’s World to exercise caution toward what it produces.”

*What it produces.*

The phrase tightened something in him. For a moment Winston became acutely aware of how easily he could end the argument. He could command Penthascara to trust him, strip the suspicion from Aurascyra’s stare, even change the law they were defending. None of them could refuse him.

Once, that knowledge alone had been enough to make the possibility feel corrupt.

Hippolyta’s hand against his shoulder complicated that certainty.

What he had done to her still sat badly with him. He had wanted something that should have been hers to give, then used power to guarantee himself the answer. Yet standing here, listening to women defend a law they admitted did not care what an individual man had actually done, Winston found himself wondering whether he had been too quick to place every exercise of that authority beside the same sin.

Wanting someone to love him was one thing.

A law was not affection.

A prejudice was not a private feeling.

The distinction felt convenient. He noticed that. He also noticed that he did not reject it.

Winston let out a slow breath. “If where a man comes from tells you enough, what he actually does with his life hardly matters.”

“Not to the law,” Penthascara said. “Because you continue to treat exclusion as a verdict upon individual guilt. It is not.”

“You bar someone who’s done nothing wrong and tell me that isn’t a judgment?”

“It is a boundary. The law was never written to decide whether every man beyond our shores is guilty or innocent. It decides what Themyscira is required to admit within them.”

The distinction did not satisfy him, though he could see where she was drawing it. “Then what exactly is the boundary protecting you from?”

“From having to make that judgment at all,” Aurascyra said. At his frown, she continued, the earlier edge giving way to something more matter-of-fact. “Themyscira was not created to punish innocent men. It was created so there would remain one place where women did not have to measure every man they encountered and decide whether he was dangerous. A place where a girl can walk alone without wondering who follows her, where no woman has to learn which smile hides hunger or which promise hides ownership.”

Her grip eased slightly around the spear. “Examining every man individually would bring the very vigilance we escaped into the place we built to escape it. Safety that depends upon recognizing the dangerous man before he proves himself dangerous is vigilance without end.”

Winston was quiet for a moment. He could see the appeal of it, perhaps more easily than he wanted to. Given what the Amazons remembered of the world they had left, he understood why they had built such a place.

What he could not understand was the certainty with which they treated the price.

“So the law isn’t really about guilt,” he said. “You’re saying you don’t have to find out which men might be dangerous.”

“That is closer,” Penthascara replied. “Themyscira is our home, not a proving ground for the character of men. We are under no obligation to admit a danger merely because one particular man may turn out not to embody it.”

“But you’ve decided the danger attaches to him before you know anything else about him.”

“His innocence does not make our caution immoral.”

“No,” Winston said slowly. “Maybe not. But I’m not sure calling it caution changes what you’re doing.”

Penthascara’s expression hardened. “It changes everything.”

Winston rubbed his thumb across one knuckle. “Suppose there were a place in Man’s World that barred women for the same reason. Not because they claimed every woman was guilty. They simply said women, as a class, represented a risk they were unwilling to admit.”

“That would not be the same,” Aurascyra said.

“I thought you’d say that.”

“Because it would not be,” Penthascara replied. “Women did not spend millennia building civilizations upon the subjugation of men. You cannot strip history from a judgment and declare two judgments identical.”

Winston nodded. “I agree.”

That drew a brief silence.

“The histories aren’t equal,” he continued. “But suppose the people making that rule had history of their own. Real history. Graves they could point at. Women who had murdered, abused, ruled cruelly. Would that make judging every woman who came afterward fair?”

“You are comparing isolated wrongdoing to systematic domination,” Aurascyra said.

“Yes, and that matters too. I’m not trying to make the histories equal. I’m trying to work out whether unequal histories make the principle different, or only make one version easier to justify.”

For once, none of them answered immediately.

Helisparga finally spoke. “You are asking whether suffering can make prejudice cease to be prejudice.”

“Something like that.”

“And you believe it cannot.”

“I think suffering can explain it. Maybe even make it understandable. I’m not sure it changes what it is.”

Penthascara’s eyes narrowed. “Circumstances are part of morality, Winston. You cannot strip an act from everything that produced it and judge only its shape.”

“No. But people are very good at deciding their circumstances make their own ugliness special.”

The room tightened.

The words struck closer to himself than Winston had intended. Hippolyta’s hand remained warm against his shoulder, and he became abruptly aware of his own talent for explanation. He had wanted affection, certainty, closeness, and in a moment of weakness had used his authority to remove the possibility of refusal. Loneliness, fear, desire, even love if he was feeling generous toward himself. There had been reasons.

There were always reasons.

“I’m including myself in that,” he said quietly.

That surprised them more than the accusation had.

“I’ve done things I shouldn’t have done and found explanations afterward for why they weren’t quite as bad as they looked. Good explanations, sometimes.” He resisted the urge to glance at Hippolyta. “Being able to explain why you did something and being right to have done it aren’t always the same thing.”

Helisparga regarded him more carefully. “You believe we have done the same.”

“I think you might have.”

“With our laws?”

“With some of the things underneath them.”

Penthascara folded her arms. “Say the word you mean.”

Winston met her eyes. “Prejudice.”

Aurascyra stiffened. Xanthibarqa’s expression hardened.

“Against men,” Penthascara said.

“Yes.”

“After everything men did to our people.”

“Yes.” Winston sighed. “There. That’s what I mean. Every time I name it, you answer with the reason. I’m not saying the reason isn’t real.”

Helisparga glanced toward Penthascara before looking back at him. “Then perhaps you believe the reason does not grant us the moral distinction we have given ourselves.”

Winston considered that. “Yes. That’s closer.”

Silence settled over the group until Aurascyra finally spoke.

“Suppose you are right.”

Winston looked at her.

“Suppose there is prejudice in it. Suppose some part of what we call caution is exactly what you say it is.” Penthascara turned sharply toward her, but Aurascyra kept her attention on Winston. “Would you have us open Themyscira?”

“I never said you should.”

The answer surprised them.

“I’m not writing policy,” Winston said. “I’m asking whether you can see the contradiction.”

*Not yet,* he added silently.

The thought came without quite the resistance it would have earlier.

He had no intention of rewriting Themyscira because four women had irritated him. That would be petty, and worse, familiar. But law existed to be governed. If they themselves could recognize a flaw and deliberately leave it in place, then his authority over that law no longer seemed quite so irrelevant to the conversation.

Perhaps listening was what came first, and perhaps command was what came after listening failed. He did not particularly like the thought, and liked even less that it sounded reasonable. For now, he wanted the answer before the authority.

Aurascyra was quiet for a moment. “I can see the resemblance.”

“Resemblance,” Penthascara repeated, plainly preferring the word.

Winston almost smiled. “All right.”

“But resemblance is not identity,” Aurascyra continued. “Understanding your argument does not require us to discard every lesson our history taught us.”

That stopped him.

So they did see it. Perhaps not as clearly as he did, and certainly not in the terms he would have chosen, but they could see the flaw and decide to live with it.

Winston found that strangely difficult to understand. Once you knew something was wrong, surely the next question was what you intended to do about it.

Then again, perhaps that was a very Man’s World way of thinking. Find the fault, seize hold of it, fix it, and worry afterward about who had given you the right.

The thought should have warned him.

Instead, he found himself wondering whether having been given the right changed the question.

Penthascara picked up the argument. “Perhaps our law is severe. Perhaps it is even unfair to men who would never harm us. I will grant you that much.”

The admission was so unexpected that Winston stared at her.

She noticed. “Do not look so pleased.”

Aurascyra’s head turned sharply. “Penthascara.”

Helisparga’s expression hardened. “You are speaking to your king.”

For an instant pride seemed likely to win, but honour asserted itself first. Penthascara lowered her chin. “Forgive my tone, my king.”

“I’m not pleased,” Winston said. “I’m surprised.”

“That is understandable,” she replied more carefully. “What I mean is that recognizing an unfairness does not automatically make it an injustice great enough to justify exposing Themyscira to what the law was created to prevent.”

Winston frowned. “So even if you think I’m right...”

“I did not say that.”

“Penthascara,” Aurascyra warned.

The Amazon went still, visibly irritated by the correction but obedient to it.

“Partly right,” Winston amended.

“Even if some part of your criticism has merit,” Penthascara said, “we would still choose Themyscira.”

Aurascyra nodded. “You keep asking what the law says about the innocent man outside our shore. We keep telling you that the law was written for the women inside it.”

“And that makes everything else acceptable?”

“No,” Helisparga said. “It makes everything else a cost.”

That distinction landed differently. Not justification this time, but admission. They knew the boundary harmed people who had done nothing to deserve it. They had simply decided the harm was acceptable because Themyscira benefited from it.

“You assume that recognizing a moral cost obliges us to abandon the choice that creates it,” Helisparga continued. “It does not. Sometimes every choice carries one.”

Winston considered that. The answer was not foolish. Governments made choices like that constantly. Someone gained, someone lost, and whoever held authority decided where the weight fell.

The thought remained with him longer than Helisparga probably intended.

“Maybe,” he said. “But that isn’t really what bothers me anymore.”

Penthascara’s eyes narrowed. “Then what is?”

“You spend a great deal of time telling yourselves how different you are from Man’s World.”

“We are different,” Aurascyra said.

“In plenty of ways, probably. But you don’t just say different. You say better. More just. More enlightened.” Winston looked between them. “You condemn the way they judge people by what they are, the way they use fear to excuse ugly laws, the way they find respectable names for things they would condemn in somebody else.”

His gaze settled on Penthascara.

“And then you do it too.”

Her face hardened. “That is not what we do.”

“Isn’t it? You’ve admitted the law can punish a man who has done nothing wrong. You know it can be unfair. Your answer is that your history makes it necessary.”

“Our history makes it different.”

“That’s the part I don’t buy. Maybe your reasons are better. Maybe they’re much better. But everyone thinks their reasons are what make their version acceptable.”

Silence settled over the group.

“If Man’s World wrote a law that judged every woman before knowing her, you wouldn’t sit around admiring the reasons behind it,” Winston continued. “You’d look at what the law actually did and condemn it. But when your law does the same sort of thing, suddenly the reasons matter more than the result.”

Helisparga’s expression had grown thoughtful. “You believe our claim to moral superiority makes the failing worse.”

“Yes.” Winston answered without hesitation. “Because you know better. Or at least you keep telling everyone you do.”

That one landed.

“A cruel man who knows he’s cruel is one thing,” he continued. “A cruel man who spends all day lecturing everyone else about cruelty while explaining why his own doesn’t count is harder to stomach.”

Penthascara’s stare sharpened. “You compare Themyscira to the kingdoms that enslaved our people.”

“No. I’m saying you compare yourselves to them constantly, and somehow you always come out spotless.”

That stopped her.

“Maybe Themyscira really is better,” Winston said. “But if it is, it should be because you hold yourselves to a better standard, not because you’ve invented better excuses for failing the same one.”

Penthascara’s chin lifted slightly. “We can know a law is imperfect and still believe the alternative worse.”

Winston regarded her. “And men simply carry the imperfection.”

“Yes.” There was no apology in the answer. “You wanted honesty, my king. Then have it. I do not know every man in Man’s World, nor do I pretend every one of them cruel. Some are honourable. Some are gentle. Some have spent their lives opposing the very things we despise. That does not mean I would remake Themyscira around the hope that we will always know which is which before it matters.”

The bluntness stopped him. Not because he had failed to get through to her, but because he suddenly understood that he had. She knew innocent men existed and that the law could treat them unfairly. She had heard his comparison and conceded enough of it to recognize the prejudice beneath the boundary.

She simply considered the result acceptable.

Something shifted in Winston’s understanding of the argument. Until then, part of him had assumed they simply had not followed the comparison far enough. They could see the harm in judging an individual by what he was, could condemn the same habit when it appeared in Man’s World, and still speak of their own judgment as though the reasons behind it placed it beyond question.

They were not correcting the contradiction. They were stepping around it without seeming to notice it was there.

Winston felt the realization settle uneasily. Their certainty had never depended on proving themselves consistent. It depended on believing that the things they did for Themyscira belonged to a different moral category from the things they condemned elsewhere.

His attention settled on Penthascara. “And me?”

For the first time, certainty deserted her. Her eyes flicked briefly toward Hippolyta, then back to Winston, as though the answer had become more difficult now that it concerned the man standing before her rather than someone nameless beyond the shore.

“You are different, my king.”

Winston caught the careful wording. “Different because you know me?”

Her mouth tightened. The pause told him more than the answer eventually did.

“Because you are our king.”

Something cold settled beneath his ribs. Not anger exactly. Recognition. All this time he had thought that if they came to know him, if they saw that he was not the thing they feared, perhaps that knowledge would force some crack into the larger judgment.

Instead, they had simply moved him outside it.

“That isn’t the same thing.”

“No.” Penthascara held his gaze. “It is not.”

Aurascyra stepped into the silence before it could sharpen further. “You stand apart, Winston. The gods named you. Honour binds us to you, and your authority over Themyscira is lawful whether we welcomed your arrival or not.”

His gaze moved across the four of them. “So I’m not evidence that you might be wrong about men. I’m simply the exception.”

“You are the king,” Xanthibarqa said, gold eyes steady on his.

“And every other man?”

The silence that followed held no uncertainty. They knew the answer. They were only deciding how plainly to give it.

Penthascara did.

“They are not.”

That landed harder than another argument could have. He had gotten through to them. Not completely, perhaps, but enough that pretending otherwise would have been dishonest. They understood the resemblance. They understood that innocent men bore the weight of things they had never done. Penthascara had admitted the law could be unfair, and Aurascyra had admitted prejudice might live somewhere inside what they called caution.

None of it had moved the boundary an inch; they had not failed to understand him, but had understood and chosen the contradiction anyway.

The authority beneath Winston’s title returned to his awareness, but differently this time. Earlier it had felt like a temptation beside the conversation, an ugly shortcut he might take because persuasion was difficult.

Now it seemed connected to the conversation itself.

If law could knowingly preserve an injustice because those protected by it preferred the cost, then perhaps law was precisely where a king was supposed to interfere. If prejudice had hardened into tradition, perhaps forbidding it was not the same as commanding affection into a woman who had never chosen to give it.

Hippolyta’s hand still rested on his shoulder, warm and steady, offering comfort without asking anything of him.

The comparison should have ended the thought.

It did not.

What he had done to her had been wrong. Winston had known that before he ever used his power. He had not been confused about the morality of it, nor had he mistaken coercion for affection. He had wanted to know whether the authority truly worked as completely as everyone claimed, whether Hippolyta could resist it, whether he could make her give him what she would not freely choose to give.

He had tested the limits.

The fact that he had wanted her love did not make the act less deliberate. If anything, it made the choice worse. He had taken away her ability to refuse because he wanted to see what would happen when his will met hers, and because some part of him had believed that knowing the answer would be worth the cost.

Nothing these women said changed that. But changing a law was not the same as asking someone to love him, and changing how his subjects regarded an entire class of people was not necessarily the same as changing how one woman regarded him.

There were dangerous conveniences in those distinctions. Winston could see them. What unsettled him was that seeing the danger no longer made the distinctions feel false.

Perhaps power was not corrupted merely because it overrode someone’s wishes.

Perhaps what mattered was what the power was used to override.

He did not realize until the thought had already formed that this was the first time he had considered the question that way. His gaze moved across the four Amazons. Their suspicion remained, and so did their obedience. Penthascara could disagree with every word he had spoken and still carry out an order before its echo left the room. Their distrust had limits. His authority did not.

For the moment, he left it untouched, though the decision no longer felt quite like restraint. It felt provisional.

Penthascara inclined her head. “You asked what we think of you. You know now.”

“And I suppose you know what I think of you.”

“We did not ask.”

Winston’s mouth twitched faintly. “No. But you listened.”

Aurascyra gave the smallest movement of one shoulder. “You are our king.”

The words were brusque, reluctant, and absolute.

Once, that absoluteness had frightened him because it meant he could make them change.

Now, looking at women who had heard the flaw in their own reasoning and chosen to preserve it anyway, Winston found himself wondering whether the more troubling possibility was that he might eventually decide he should.

His attention drifted past them toward the bright edge of sea beyond the tent. Themyscira had been built upon principles of justice, compassion, truth, and peace, yet even here those principles had limits. They could acknowledge the unfairness in a boundary and defend it anyway, speak of universal ideals while deciding there were people to whom those ideals need not extend in quite the same way.

Perhaps the island’s principles had always been larger than the laws meant to protect them.

And, for the first time, Winston wondered whether being king meant he was expected to carry those principles farther than Themyscira itself was willing to go, or whether it meant changing the Amazons who had grown too accustomed to defending the limits they had placed upon them.