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Race Phobos up the dirt roads, his coarse mane in her face, the smell of rich soil and goats in the air. All through Arkadia, both Kassandra and the nation scorched and filled by the rush of victory and anticipation, she ran like lions followed at her heels. Kassandra of Sparta won Boeotia for Stentor. Kassandra of Sparta killed many times, cold and hot, from shadows or in the sun under a banner. Boeotia was the first time she felt she might have been a soldier.
After meeting Myrinne, after seeing their old home from a new height, after helping a boy to the agoge and a nation to an Olympic wreath, she had begun to wonder whether she might have some loyalty to Sparta after all.
A town passed her by. There would be a bounty board there, coins in her hands and a bounty on her head both likely. There would be cause for her to wear a white hood staining to gray with road dust, and brown-gray armor that showed no allegiance at all. In Stentor’s camp, or on the beach and full of wine, she had relaxed among Spartan men the same way she had relaxed in the Athenian symposiums. One of the benefits of being a mercenary was money and wine from both sides. Only in Boeotia did she wear Spartan red-and-gold with comfort and the bone-deep certainty she had earned it. Let the false king and the real king see her claim their nation before it had claimed her.
Beyond the farm she passed into deep woods, the ground springy with fallen olive leaves and pine needles, the shadows cooling her face. Kassandra shook her head. Maybe she felt some loyalty to Sparta after all, but the idea disgusted her. There was a difference between battle-lust and loyalty to the ones who happen to shout the orders.
Sparta had— No. The Cult of Kosmos had thrown her to her death. Nikolaos had. There were others to blame for that. Not Myrrine. Not Brasidas.
She rode to him and her mother to prepare them for war. She rode to Brasidas with a new resolve. Ever since they had fought together in the burning warehouse, she had thought of the uncanny way they moved around each other. Neither had faltered. Neither had, despite the fire and the burning wood and the black smoke and ash and the bloody swords, stumbled against the other once. They might as well have been training together for one hundred years.
Meeting him again in Sparta had just increased that feeling. Even in Stentor’s camp, surrounded by her pinch-faced half-brother and his hulking guards and the soldiers and their shields, she could not stop thinking of what a presence Brasidas would have been on that battlefield. She missed him, and she would tell him exactly how she had missed him when she saw him next. Kassandra the Eagle-Bearer did not swallow her words.
Now she wore a mercenary hodgepodge of armor, her quiver and Leonidas’ Spearhead a brace upon her back, and a red half-cape tied at her shoulder. The color did not mark her as Spartan, although in Arkadia the association would as likely help her as hurt her. It marked a message of alliance and intent, even if only for this brief span between battles.
She wore his colors the way Ikaros wore his feathers: shed after a season.
Kassandra lowered her face to the cloth, smelled her own sweat and the road, and pressed on.
By the time she saw Myrinne and Brasidas again, the fight-madness was back on her and three bounty hunters were bleeding out on the road. She embraced her mother one warrior to another, open hands and decisive words, trying not to pay attention to the prickle of nerves from her toes to the crown of her head on her right where Brasidas stood. Kassandra so often kept her composure around would-be-lovers and would-be-killers alike. This would be no different.
Even when she clasped Brasidas’ forearm, hard muscle to rough hands, she did not waver. The feeling of synchronicity circled her like a breeze, and eased her. If he lingered, more familial than martial but perhaps no more than that, it was a hesitation as calculated and controlled as the aim of a spear point.
The three of them talked of Lagos.
They made plans.
Evening came on, and with it the last flare of humid heat before a cool, clear night.
“Brasidas. Walk with me?” Kassandra finally asked. Myrinne was tending the fire. Kassandra regretted having to leave her mother alone, but she needed to have privacy.
Besides, anyone who had been hunting them was dead.
“Of course.”
Up the hill, behind a light screen of trees, there was still enough late sun and new starlight to see by. At the same time as Kassandra looked for the right place, secluded and screened but open to stars, she savored the sounds of Brasidas’ footsteps, the familiar smells of leather and metal and skin. When she stopped and looked at the stars he stood close enough to touch. Their first meeting had been full of fire and madness, and even with the clarity she always felt in battle she had not taken the time to study his face the way she could now. Such trust in his eyes, at odds with the viciousness with which she had seen him fight. The neatness of his braided hair, a standard as militaristic as a laurel wreath in Sparta but almost fastidious to eyes used to scruffy Athenian philosophers, fascinated her. Faces like his would be masks for villains on Athenian stages.
“Claiming Boeotia was not the first time I fought for Sparta,” Kassandra said. “But it was the first time I really felt I was part of it, and not because of that snake Stentor. It was because I had been home, and because of you.”
He laughed softly. “Because of me?”
“But I need to talk about …” She began, surprised by her own hesitation.
“The way we fought together …” He said at the same time.
Then, even the awkwardness felt comfortable. She pressed her hand lightly over his heart. Beneath the armor, he wouldn’t even feel it if he didn’t want to. “Ever since we met, I felt connected to you. Body and soul.” She drew her hand away. Her voice remained steady. “If you don’t want me, we’ll never speak of it. You can keep the honor. For weeks, the Eagle Bearer thought of you.”
Both of them wearing entirely too much armor , she had time to think, before he rested his forehead against hers. He cupped his hand around her upper arm, shrugging into her space with casual grace. The gray cowl closed them both in. “I do.”
She wrapped her fingers as far as she could around his wrist. His heartbeat pulsed under her hand, fast and steady. Kassandra knew the strings that tied lovers together, was not surprised by the momentum of the kiss. She and Brasidas kissed like they had been together for years: practiced, straightforward, without teasing. The coarse hair of his beard caught at her chin. Along with the familiarity traveled the sense that they could anticipate one another’s movements before they happened, already knew the weight of each other, became something entirely else when they moved together. When they ended the kiss, her lips already noon-hot from his breath, they stood foreheads together and her hand on his pulse.
“I have been waiting for that.” He smiled.
She laced her fingers through his and held their hands up together, enjoying the slight resistance. He moved like a wolf, loose and languid one minute and bow-string tension the next. Surely he had been taught exactly how to do that. He pulled their hands to him and kissed her calloused knuckles. Warmth and relief painted both the present and her memories, lighting them in hindsight with the idea that she had always, always meant to come home to him.
For years since Korinthia she had wanted to run her fingers along the blue-black scar like a slip of ink across his cheek. Now that she could, she explored the angles of his face and the dip of his cheek before tracing her thumb over the scar. He leaned into the caress, the heat of his skin dappling her fingers.
“I’ve been waiting for this,” Kassandra said. “The way we moved together in Korinthia was amazing. Didn’t you feel it?”
A blessing: she felt him nod against her hand. In response, flush with energy, she shifted to touch two fingers to his chest and danced into an exaggerated fighting crouch, turned to present a narrow profile. “Shall we try again, general?” She grinned. “Just the two of us?”
She saw the color darken on his cheeks, but he didn’t play along. Instead he gently folded his fingers around her jabbing hand.
“No … that isn’t right.” He spoke thoughtfully, as if puzzling over a coded message. “Because … I would worship you. But you don’t want to be worshipped.”
Kassandra shook her head. “I don’t.” Even though the words, coming from him, made her feel strong and warm. Any worship anyone had tried to give her had ended up awkward or dangerous. He was saying that play-fighting made him feel equally awkward.
“And you would love me for my prowess at war?” Brasidas continued, their palms still flat to each other. “I would not want that kind of desire.”
“Then I’ll bank that particular fire.” Now that they were in the same place, she longed to study his movement in a way she could not do so openly before, but there was no question she would make him comfortable. “There are others. There are dances which do not prepare for war.”
“We know that even in Sparta.” Brasidas smiled. He reached out to rest his hand on her waist. Kassandra saw in his eyes the merest flicker of uncertainty, replaced quickly by steady warmth. As soon as she felt her own glimmer of uncertainty—hadn’t the last time she danced been a drunken flail on a Lakonia beach?—the ease she felt with him took over.
It was so easy to rest a hand on his arm, intentionally meeting skin instead of armor. It was easy to move in steps they both knew, on feet accustomed to certainty and control. They danced no formal steps, no ritual motion, but a comfortable sway in a rhythm they found so effortlessly it snatched away Kassandra’s breath. She leaned close to kiss him, and with eyes half closed remembered the one misgiving they both had left.
“How we talk of Sparta.” Her words hissed.
Brasidas took her banked anger with hushed curiosity.
“All the way here,” Kassandra said, “I thought about how much I’ve done for Sparta the last few days, and how much I fought to get back to you.” She pressed and released his arm. She still stood close enough to feel his breath. “I chose to fight because it was the only way to find out which of the kings is corrupt. Not for Sparta. And you’re someone else entirely. Your own person. You have a good heart despite Sparta.”
His silence was heavy with words not ready to be spoken, but she thought she could hear the same ones that had echoed in her head during the euphoria after Boeotia. Hating Stentor and hating the blood and stink on her armor and hating the red banners and — relieved, a muscle-deep smoothing away of any hesitation she had ever had. Kassandra did not kill for pleasure. That one time, she had known what it was like.
Never again.
“Thank you for giving Lagos a chance,” said Brasidas, and pressed his forehead back to hers.
In truth she hadn’t known what to think of Lagos until the end, when he had been willing to talk.
“He was committed to peace, just as you said.” Kassandra struggled to collect her thoughts. “When we first met, you called me a soldier. You know by now I’m not. We both kill by our own codes, and those might not be the same.”
“And you trusted me with your history. Told me who you’d been, that you weren’t defined by General Nikolaos. You told a spy your secrets.”
Kassandra laughed. “I wouldn’t be a very good spy. Why stand in a room so long with a person you could save others from right then?”
For the first time since they had walked alone together, Brasidas’ attitude became colder. “There are so many ways to try to prevent bloodshed. Often, it spills eventually. But in that room you might find another way to save people. Or that your enemy is exactly as vicious and merciless as you thought him to be. Or that your enemy is so much like you. I spy because I’m good at it. But it’s also become one of the best ways to see war without blood.”
Right. Fight smart. “I hadn’t thought about it like that,” Kassandra said, with honesty. “In Korinthia, I was thinking mostly about finding my mother and doing my job, not about statecraft. But I know a person who does terrible things. I believe his mind can be changed.”
She saw the question in his eyes and knew Brasidas was thinking about Lagos. Now was not the time to talk about Alexios. Not because she wanted to hide her brother’s existence, but because she was tired of heavy talk.
She changed her tone to one more teasing. “And I was thinking about you. Wondering how much I could learn about you. Wondering whether you’d be there when I won.” She traced her thumb along his scarred cheek. “Letting me admire you.”
Now came the laugh, rich and confident. “And in Korinthia, our plan worked! I respect your choice to kill the Monger quietly. And you don’t have to wear red to be the person I trusted back then.”
Where the dance would have called for a turn to the right she instead tucked herself against his arm. Leaning the flat of her elbow on his shoulder, she carded through the hair just above his ear.
“Even a misthios can believe in mercy,” she muttered. “I believe in that, and in you.”
This time the kiss and the dance continued at the same time, the easy slide of skin against skin, the heat at the back of his neck, easy laughter, the fulfillment of months of waiting.
Hurry. Race Phobos through the warm, shallow water, the Athenian camp a blue blur on her right. Kassandra resisted the temptation to crash right through it. Demosthenes, with an unexpected opportunity and something to prove, had wrecked his fleet on the shore and decided to turn the political firestorm into a literal one. Athens had invaded Spartan territory.
The misthios, the Eagle Bearer on her way to becoming a legend, could lend her aid. She wore red again, the same clothes from Stentor’s victory, better for her allies to recognize her. Unaffiliated mercenaries could create their own kind of terror, but for now she needed the red plume of a Spartan Titan.
The battle was a creature made of blood and screams, stench and metal. Kassandra weaved through individual brawls, the organs that made up the beast of the battle, looking for an Athenian commander to catch unawares. First she found Brasidas throwing a corpse off his shield, and met his eyes. Mere seconds of contact filled her with clarity and resolve.
Killing the commanders passed in no time at all. This wasn't blood lust; it was the regular, confusing time compression of war. It all blurred together and then stopped like a speared man. Out of the grunting, screaming mess of men around her emerged Deimos, tearing off his blue-plumed helmet. Usually as theatrical as the rest of the Cult, no one was used to seeing him use trickery. He turned Brasidas’ sword cut aside with a ringing sweep and dropped the blade in his other hand, slicing meat off Brasidas’ thigh and shoulder like a butcher.
Kassandra’s stomach soured. Calculate this. Know perfectly the angle of the fall. You know how to choke him out before he sees your face.
She knew with that uncanny synchronicity that Brasidas was not about to swing in her direction. While Deimos was still looking at his fallen foe, Kassandra ducked under Deimos’ arm and tried to hook her elbow around his throat.
Her brother turned inside her reach and hit. A hammer slammed on Kassandra’s chest as Deimos pushed her with the flat of his sword. Even a mocking slap with the Sword of Damocles pushed her to the ground.
“Was this how I looked the last time you saw me?” Alexios said, screaming above the crashes and shouts of the battle.
No, she wanted to say. You were cleaner, less dramatic, and more well-spoken, as a tiny baby.
Kassandra summoned every bit of brawling strength she had left, her chest aching and her armor digging against her skin, and kicked her brother in the jaw.
Alexios reeled. Coughing, Kassandra backed away and drew the Spear. By the time they got their distance again Brasidas was gone, whether carried away by his men or trampled under Athenians Kassandra did not know.
More blows, both of them strong and sheathed in the finest metal in the Greek world. More words: “I don’t want to kill you, Alexios. But I will stop you.”
More blades and pleading. She offered a hand to Alexios, but he didn’t take it.
Until a tree fell, weakened by fire, and it was a hurry to try to save someone she feared was already gone, then a hurry to escape the conflagration the spit of land had become, and ultimately no escape at all.
Kassandra woke up on a ship. From the salt air and the slight movement of the deck, she assumed for a second she was back on the Adrestia after Pylos. Did Sparta win? Did Alexios survive?
Cage walls cast darker shadows on a murky hold. So it was not her ship. Not at all. Athens had captured her. And there were more cages, some empty. The cage was floored with straw, like an animal pen, and it scratched at her fingers. Beyond its walls she could see a narrow, brown-walled cargo room, crowded with boxes and ballast. Not made for prisoners, but not bad at stopping the prisoners from attacking the rowers.
The cage nearest her was not empty. Brasidas sat slumped against the wooden slats, sagging toward her. With his left side facing her she couldn’t see how badly Deimos had hurt him, but his presence in a cage meant he wasn’t dead, and the Athenians didn’t think he would likely die soon. Kassandra crawled toward him.
When Brasidas opened his eyes, he thought she was an enemy. She watched the transformation happen: fury in the lines between his eyes and in the light in his gaze, heavy fury like the fight in the warehouse, where she had been splashed with blood from his executor’s swings. Then recognition won.
He sat up and reached through the bars. “Kassandra—”
Kassandra reached back. If she leaned hard on the bars she could strain for his hand. Their synchronicity could not move the cages closer, and through chance or malice they were just barely too far apart. She felt that if she tried hard enough she could reach him using the movements of the air, like splashing with water. Both or them reached, strained, finally subsided.
Kassandra met his eyes with all the pull of the touch she couldn’t have. “I didn’t know whether you were alive.”
“Still here.” His expression remained firm around morose eyes that made him look older. “But wondering why they saw fit to capture me.”
“Either of us.”
“You, I understand.” He sighed.
She watched his shoulders move against the bars.
“The Athenians pride themselves on their democracy,” Brasidas said. “The Eagle-Bearer will be brought back to Athens for a rigged trial. But not killing me was an act of absurd restraint. I’m a general.”
“The Cult might have some plan for you. And for once, I thank them.”
“That wild warrior, the one who fought you like Ares himself. He must be part of the plan.”
“He couldn’t make a plan to save his life,” Kassandra said, almost before she thought about it. Was this the strongest thing left in her relationship with her brother? Her utter assurance that he was a weapon, not a mastermind? My idiot Titan brother, who I love. She slumped against the bars, aching to hold Brasidas and at the same time trying to focus. “That’s the man I think can be saved. He did this to you. The Cult’s Deimos… is my brother.”
Brasidas paused for a long time. Then: “Leonidas laughs.”
Kassandra snorted. What would the Spartan hero think of his corrupt and loathsome grandson? Probably that he wasn’t worth bringing back into the fold. Maybe Kassandra would spite him that way, too. She had saved Lagos for Brasidas. Maybe he could help her save Alexios. At least Brasidas did not seem to hate either of Myrrine’s children.
“Kassandra, I do not know what they have planned for me in Athens, but it may be faster and less expected than an execution of a misthios after a mock trial. I plan to make them pay however I can. Bringing me alive onto one of their ships was a laughable mistake.”
“Maybe it’s because of me.”
“How?”
“Deimos heard me swear to blame him if you died. He knows I care about you.”
When Brasidas fell silent, Kassandra was sure he was thinking the same thing she was. They must not let one another be used as levers. They must put something above themselves. But would it be each other, or Sparta? If either way caused the same loss of material and life in Athenian territory, what did it matter?
Kassandra stood and stretched. Best stay as limber as she could.
Footsteps rang on the wooden steps. Alexios stood tall in the middle of a crowd of Athenians, blue-armored boys and men, lean archers and muscled swordsmen. Without pausing to talk they swarmed her cage. She glanced at Brasidas but could not see the door that would lead to him over the heads of the men. Alexios himself opened the cage door and brandished not a gods-touched weapon but a dirty cloth stinking of herbs.
“So many of you?” Kassandra said. “I’m flattered.”
“Shut up.”
Her brother approached her first. She hit him twice, the hard ridge of her knuckles to the side of his neck, before shields crowded in around her. Then it wasn’t even a fight in such close quarters, but a press like the flat of a hand against an insect, and the sound of blows, and the overwhelming smell of the herbs pressed against her mouth.
Hurry. Sick of being in a cage, sick of being gone from the world. Kassandra could not at first be certain where she had been taken. The yard smelled like mud and horses, like tens of places in tens of cities. At least she could move around, in a cell as big as a stall, and stretch and think. Her joints all still felt stiff. A dim headache squeezed behind her eyes.
So Kleon has not yet gone through the process of allowing himself to kill me.
Brasidas—Where is he? Did anyone treat his wounds?
Slow down. Kassandra reminded herself why she bothered to talk to Alexios at all. The Cult had manipulated him for his entire life, and Kassandra, with so much practice existing outside any family or creed, could convince him otherwise. She did not want to see her brother’s blood on the ground. They could both be happy, someday—
If she convinced him.
Then, like the fulfillment of a bad omen, Alexios stood in front of the door. He had soft-footed all this way, and only then, of course, begun to shout.
She tried to persuade him. He screamed his denial at her. As she argued back, she insisted to herself it was not too late.
Hurry, Alexios. Make up for all this lost time, and help me teach you who you could be.
Kleon interrupted their conversation. Kassandra had not spent nearly as much time with him as she had with Perikles, not interested in his blatant war-mongering. She hadn’t been sure how she felt about Sokrates’ symposium friends at the time she first met Kleon, either. But she had known for certain she wasn’t going to yoke herself to Kleon’s cause so closely she began to look like a soldier for Athens. It would be bad for her job.
Hurry away, Kleon. Lay down in front of the feet of the revolt. He explained the way he puppeted Athens’ democracy, and Kassandra felt more and more that his words were utterly empty, but filled with invisible choking gas, like the caldera of a volcano.
Kleon left messy executioners to do the job. Even stiff, Kassandra could kill two men.
Hurry. Barnabas appeared like an actor storming clumsily onto the stage, reeling as he saw Kassandra had already executed her would-be executioners. With the cage door open at last, Kassandra stalked after Barnabas and Sokrates into the stink of the prison yard.
“There is someone else we have to rescue,” she said.
The headache faded when she saw Brasidas alive, but he struggled even to limp. Kassandra suspected his wounds had not been treated. He could be used as a bargaining chip just as well half-alive, after all.
He muttered thanks deliriously into her ear.
“I’ve got you.” She pulled his arm over her shoulder and battlefield carried him as best as she could. The more difficult part would be bringing him through the streets without attracting attention.
She would unwind clothing from one of the dead men, then.
Humid, cool evening air wafted in through an ajar window in Perikles’ residence. Kassandra paused to breathe it in. The plague-wracked city was tentatively feeling its way back to functionality. Elsewhere in the city, Rhexenor was changing the guard. Kassandra would creep into his fortress in the deepest hours of the morning. Blood for Athena or blood for the hetaera; what mattered was Thespis’ play, inciting citizens against Kleon.
It seemed a roundabout solution to Kassandra, but with Kleon always on the move and backed by the people of Athens, attacking him head-on would be less useful than pulling one eye from a hydra.
Kassandra hadn’t spoken to Brasidas since she had carried him into the house. Oh, the disbelief. Sokrates and Alkibiades knew the general by name from their military service. Every man in the house knew from Brasidas’ uniform what he was. The reception had been awkward, to say the least.
Not one of the men had agreed right away to let him stay in Perikles’ house. Kassandra argued that if they cared about her, cared about her family at all, they would trust her on this wild thing.
She was bringing danger down on them, Thespis accused.
“Not if you don’t tell anyone,” Kassandra snapped.
Finally Sokrates brought his hands down on the table piled with scrolls. “We know Kassandra. We know Brasidas to be … reasonable, for a Spartan. And we know Kleon is our true enemy! Are we not more hospitable than Kleon would be? A general is still just one man. Let him stay for a day. No longer. Recover his strength. If you want to hide in that time, then hide!”
Kassandra suspected Sokrates was thinking of the situation as an illustration of a moral question as much as a real political firestorm. Doubt hovered in everyone’s eyes. In the end it was Alkibiades who gave them the third vote, noting casually that he himself had fought for multiple sides of multiple wars.
In payment for this support, Alkibiades asked why a Spartan general would have been used for collateral against Kassandra.
“He is a friend of my mother’s,” Kassandra said, unblinking.
If Alkibiades asked her other questions on his way out of the house, it was only fair to pay in kind with teasing answers. He reminded her too that he had been at war for longer than he liked to let on, and to be careful.
The atmosphere in the house remained brittle. They installed Brasidas in Perikles’ room, so that he could not listen to planning. Kassandra suspected this was also to reduce anyone’s temptation to confront him in anger. She moved through the empty halls, remembering symposia, and up the cool, stone steps.
The door to the upper bedroom was ajar. Inside she could hear the person most equipped among them to do trickier healing: Sokrates. Kassandra wished Hippokrates had been anywhere near Athens. But despite his soft appearance and convoluted mind, Sokrates had been in battle, too. He would know how to handle wounds left to fester. And certainly he knew how to keep secrets, how to hide the two people Kleon most wanted gone.
Sokrates’ voice filtered through the narrow opening. “They took care of you and you were lucky, which is the only reason I can do the rest. They didn’t want you to die on the ship.”
“Then they were fools,” Brasidas said.
It felt to Kassandra like she hadn’t seen Brasidas in a year. During their years apart she had not been able to conjure an accurate memory of his voice, so every new word was a revelation. Their synchronicity seemed to flow through the room like wind. It was easy to imagine them both moving around this room, following invisible tides.
Both men looked up as Kassandra strode in.
Someone had offered Brasidas a white chiton, pinned at the waist and one shoulder. His clothing and armor, neatly folded but stained and smelling like a ship’s hold, sat at the foot of the low bed. Both wounds had been covered, and the air in the room was fresher than she had known on many battlefield bedsides.
Seeing Spartan red in the house of the Athenian leader amused her. Even the fact he was listening to Sokrates’ advice at all set Brasidas apart from many of his countrymen. Stentor or Thaletas would have hobbled out the door already, missing a leg, looking for a fight.
“What is the news?” Kassandra said.
“Kassandra.” The relief in Brasidas’ voice soothed her.
Sokrates collected his words as slowly and carefully as if he was deciphering a code from a page of nonsense. “The news is good. His wounds will heal. The only thing to do now is rest … as long as it is possible.”
“One day.” She clasped Sokrates’ shoulder. “Thank you for doing what you can.”
The stark smell of herbs lingered around Sokrates. “One day, Kassandra. If anyone sees this man in this house, Kleon will have more fuel for the fires than he could ever want. Perikles was colluding with Sparta the entire time! I can see the lies now.”
Kassandra nodded. Sokrates did not linger, shuffling out with the gravitas she was sure he rehearsed. She was relieved he had not made the departure more difficult. Humid air from the doorway tickled her hair against her neck. She took a deep breath to focus before meeting her companion’s eyes.
Brasidas reached for her forearm and clasped it as she sat down beside him. “I cannot stay here.” Despite the urgency of the words, he did not sound angry. His eyes were wide, his expression soft but unyielding.
“I know.” She smiled. “It took a debate to allow you to rest a day. But we’re safe.”
He curled his good arm around her shoulders. She let herself fall against him, a relieved collapse against his shoulder with her lips brushing cloth. Easily she lay in the narrow bed beside him, wary of his wounds but hooking one muscled leg around his as if to shield him. She felt him relax against her. Her fingers caught in curls across his chest. The world became the spiral chambers inside a shell: his mouth against her hair and his heartbeat under her ear, the snug heat of the back of her leg against his. Their synchronicity did not agitate her, but rather layered the rest in time: she knew he would not move yet.
She closed her eyes, took another stabilizing breath. “If Deimos had killed you…”
“He didn’t.”
Kassandra smiled. Still wearing Athenian leather, Kassandra could feel only dimly as Brasidas traced lines across her back. For a time they did not talk, but let the reassurance of one another’s presences wash over them like the sea on the shell.
Finally: “I never thought I would hold a woman in Athens.” A laugh lingered around his words.
Kassandra made an exaggerated slump against him, then craned her neck to see his eyes. “Does it make you hate this city any less?”
He paused for a long time, steadily breathing. “It would be worse if I burned a city I did not hate. What do you think?”
“I’m a misthios.” She shrugged. “We are welcome and unwelcome anywhere. Where will you go next?” She asked not because she expected to accompany him, but to hear him talk.
“Back to my army. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t appreciate the time with you. Let my wounds heal, and my heart fill.”
He lifted the hand she had pressed against his chest and played with it. The grace she employed on rooftops could as easily be turned to the work of twining and untwining. Callouses and scars made both of their hands into maps. She recognized the change in the skin under his thumb from holding a sword hilt.
“We belong to each other,” she said once, but the same sentiment followed from the synchronous movement of their hands. For a while it did not matter what it meant. When she rested her head and her hand against him again he drew his good hand through her hair to her ear, then her lips. He tasted like salt and healing herbs, and in play she nipped at his fingers.
“A fighter!” He laughed and trailed his hand to her throat, turning her head with the smallest pressure. She lifted herself above him on her elbows, careful of his shoulder, and kissed him with a growl in the back of her throat. He laughed through the kiss and tongued into her mouth. When she eased to gasp and breathe he pressed the kiss with new ferocity.
When they sat back, the frenzy of the kiss draining away like the tide, she caught his eyes. Their synchronicity turned from affection to concern, and she spoke what she thought he was thinking.
“I hate how much Sparta would celebrate us.”
The idea of someone gleefully recording the bloody lineage of her children disgusted her. The Cult had pushed Nikolaos to do what he did, but it had not been outside the realm of normal Spartan law. The Eagle-Bearer and the general would be a bloodline to Sparta, a blessed legacy due to the state.
Brasidas idly drummed his hand against her back. “The most devout Spartans would celebrate for the wrong reasons. But we know what honor really is. You proved that by bringing me here against all the dangers.”
She was surprised he had criticized his own country that far, but did not pull her own punches. “I won’t let Sparta get in my way of making my own choices,” she said.
Brasidas laughed. “And I won’t become as stubborn as Nikolaos. But I will dream of you fighting beside me.”
“In the dream, what colors am I wearing?”
He looked at her for a long time. Touched her chin, then played with the ragged edges of her red himation. This red marked bounty hunters, not Sparta. “Whichever you choose.”
She lay her head back against his heartbeat. She did act with honor, even if others didn’t always think so. Someone like Thespis wouldn’t understand what it was to choose killing over dying. Beyond that … she left it to Sokrates to think, and to Brasidas to show Sparta some softness.
Hurry. Listen to Ikaros map the fort out in lazy-looking wingbeats, the eagle’s responses water-clear to Kassandra as she saw through his eyes. It was one of her strengths as a misthios, a transformation she suspected was gods-given. Bounty hunters had gimmicks, animals and poisons, and Kassandra the Eagle-Bearer had Ikaros’ sharp eyes.
Hurry up the wall, her movements smooth and strong. Rhexenor slept in a tent below her, where wild grass had gotten a foothold between two stone walls.
She couldn’t kill him in one strike; soldier’s instincts had him going for her throat before Nikolaos’ sword could finish its red line around his neck. She could make the rest quick, though, using every darting bit of speed she had. That was the only part of the fight that reminded her of Brasidas. Since their time in Perikles’ house she had felt his touch on her. The distinction of what she was doing was important: it wasn’t murder she associated with him, but mercy. A quick kill. This mission was neither for him nor by him, but simply by proximity it was of him.
She hurried back to the house with her uncanny spatial awareness tuned to something different. The most important resource, the window as clear and obvious as an arrow slit in a fortress wall, was time.
Brasidas hadn’t slept through the small hours of the morning either. By the time Kassandra returned to the house he had cleaned his armor and wrung out his clothing as best he could, and rearranged the chiton as a cloak. His shield, wrapped in a bedsheet, could have been a pack of supplies for a long hunt. When Kassandra found him he was standing by the edge of the roof (in full view of assassins—), the hood low over his face.
“The deed is done,” she said as she approached. “The play will go on. Kleon will lose the support of some of his people.”
“And may use war to try to regain it.” Brasidas looked at her with affection for just a moment before returning a hawk’s gaze to the rooftops and the distant acropolis.
“Where will you go?” Kassandra asked again.
“To Boeotia, first. You’ve made it the natural choice.”
“To my stupid half-brother.”
Brasidas’ lips quirked. “Yes. Then … I have some ideas.” He turned toward her. “I will send you the news when I have it, and pray you join me.”
She eased forward and pressed her forehead against his. In the thump of his hands against her armored hips she felt both the camaraderie of the agoge and the passion of a lover, and all the ways the two could intertwine. She took the time to press her hands against his armored stomach, then to the sides of his neck, gingerly around the wound.
Would Kasandra measure Sparta against Nikolaos? Against Myrinne, who opposed the Cult but would have left her children to the agoge instead? Against Sokrates, soft and warlike at once? Against a soldier like Timotheos? Kassandra would not. She was not a philosopher, as much as they had taken her in, and would live in time moment-to-moment. Would count herself and Brasidas as one wall against which Alexios could fling himself until he became tired, and she could carry him home like an infant.
“Chin up,” Brasidas said, almost mournfully, no Spartan title attached.
This time Kassandra was the one who played it more laconic, only nodding before letting him go. On the steps he looked back once, the pastel pink of the morning coloring his white cloak to a soft yellow-coral. Their synchronicity told her the pace he would go, but she could not conjure up any images of fighting, or dancing, more powerful than his departure.
Finally she found something to say, although she could not be sure whether he was too far to hear it.
“Hurry back to me.”