With that, she hopped down onto the bay and strode toward the rising cliff path, her black cloak flapping in the growing wind and her tail of hair whipping in her wake. Atop the bluffs, she came to the promontory… and froze.
There he was, standing with his back turned, staring moodily out into the dark and choppy ocean as if it were an old foe. She edged toward him, her heart beating hard. The sight of his wind-writhing, blood-red cloak threw a flash of memory at her. The walk uphill, she thought. To Taygetos…
She noticed strands of white in the black curls of hair that hung from his helm, and the short stretch of shin visible below the hem of his tribon cloak revealed knotted, age-worn legs. Strong but tired.
She made not a sound as she drew closer, but he sensed her presence, his head tilting down and to one side just a fraction.
Of course he heard, she hissed to herself. He is a Spartan, trained in stealth from birth.
She stopped.
He turned to her, slowly.
Thunder growled overhead.
He regarded her, through the T-shape visor on his helm, with the same laconic stare that Stentor had obviously learned from him. His body, naked under the cloak, was laced with scars, including a freshly bandaged gash earned against the Athenians in the dust-bowl battle. The years had not been kind. Nor will I, she raged within.
“So you are the shadow that has been following my army for months,” he began. “Come, tell me of yourself, of why you fight so well and all for no purse.”
His voice was as deep as she remembered, but it had loosened a little with age.
She stared into his eyes, sparkling in the first burst of lightning—a jagged thorn that lit the bay. Why don’t you remember me? she seethed within. After what you did?
“My trust is hard-earned, as you will have realized. But now that you have it, there will be many future purses for you to earn and—”
The wind howled, blowing Kassandra’s cloak back like a war banner, revealing her belt… and the half spear of Leonidas.
The Wolf fell silent. Another shudder of lightning, behind Kassandra, betrayed his eyes in full now: wide, staring, disbelieving. “You…” he croaked.
Kassandra’s hand went for her ancient spear, and as soon as she touched it, the past seized her in its claws.
I stared into that inky abyss, hoping against all hope that this was not real. The cold sleet bulleting down upon me said otherwise. Alexios was dead.
“Murderer!” The priest’s shrill cry cut through the wintry storm like a scythe. “She killed the ephor!”
“She has cursed Sparta, condemned us all to the doom predicted by the Oracle,” shrieked another.
Silence… then: “She must die in retribution. Nikolaos, throw her over too—make her pay for her dishonor.”
I felt icy fingers crawl up my back. Turning from the abyss, I saw Mother thrashing, still held from behind by one old man, and Father, mighty shoulders rounded, face torn with horror.
“She. Must. Die,” keened a skull-faced priest. “If she lives you will be cast into exile, Nikolaos. Shame will follow you like a spirit. Your wife will loathe you.”
“No!” Myrrine shrieked. “Don’t listen to them, Nikolaos.”
“Even Helots will spit on your name,” the priest continued. “Do as a true Spartan would.”
“For Sparta!” many others howled.
“No!” Mother rasped, her voice all but gone.
At that moment I wanted nothing more than to be with them all, by the fire in our home, for this all to have been a wretched dream. Father stepped toward me, the barrage of wicked demands raining down on his shoulders, Mother’s pleas fending them off. I opened my arms to take his embrace. He would protect me, shield me—I knew this just as I knew Apollo, God of the Sun, would rise from the east every morning. He halted before me, sighed deeply, and stared not at me, but through me and into eternity. At that moment I swear I saw the light in his eyes gutter and die.
Father seized my wrist, his hand an iron claw. I gasped as he lifted me. He took a step toward the abyss and I felt my feet scrape at the edge and then at nothing.
“No… no! Look at me, Nikolaos,” Mother cried. “It’s not too late. Look at me!”
“Father?” I whimpered.
“Forgive me,” he said.
And then he let go. My father, my hero, chose to let me go.
My hands clawed the air. I plummeted into blackness, seeing his face vanish, hearing Mother’s soul-tearing final cry. For a few breaths, there was a weightless fall, in time with the sleet, and a roaring wind around my ears, and then it was all over.
And from blackness I awakened. A high-pitched squeaking stirred me first, and then a gentle pecking at my face. I opened my eyes. First, I could see the flickering of the storm high above, the few icy blobs of sleet that made it all the way down here pattering on my face. On the floor of this sheltered abyss, all seemed eerily quiet. Were these the first moments of my eternity as a shade?
Then a tiny bird’s head craned over me. Coated in white down with gray-ringed eyes. A pathetic specimen. I ducked out of the way as it pecked at me again. A dry clunk of something shifting beneath me and a horrendous pain through my shoulders and one leg told me I was no shade. I was alive. Somehow, I was alive. I sat up. The bird waddled clumsily up onto my thigh. A spotted eagle hatchling, I realized. I lifted the mite, cradling it in my palms, weeping, longing to wake from this nightmare. My eyes began to adjust, and I saw the dry “rubble” upon which I lay for what it truly was: a pool of bones. Grinning skulls, smashed and cracked, rib cages hanging from gnarled outcrops, rags of clothing too. With a cold, rampant horror, I realized that almost all of them were the skeletons of infants. The unwanted progenies of Sparta. Too weak or imperfect, the elders had deemed.
“Alexios?” I whimpered, knowing he must be down here too. Even to cradle his body would have meant something. “Alexios?”
Nothing.
I set the eagle hatchling down and rolled onto my knees, keeping the weight from my damaged leg, crawling over the ossuary pit, feeling with my hands where the darkness would not allow me to see. Then I felt it: something soft and still warm. “Alexios?” I wept.
A streak of lightning high above revealed the staring, smashed corpse of the ephor—his face locked in a shriek and the back of his bald pate burst like an egg. I leapt back, horrified, grabbing a bone—as if I would need a cudgel to protect myself from that dead wretch. Yet I lifted up before me not a bone, but the Leonidas half spear.
I stared into the blade, hateful, bereft, lost. I staggered around the pit of bones, searching for Alexios’s body in a daze… until I heard the sound of bones shifting in a rocky corridor nearby, saw a tall shadow. Someone was coming. If they found me here, alive after all that had happened, they would strike me down. And so I took up the eagle chick and ran… from Sparta, from the past and all its horror.
The Wolf of Sparta braced, hands raised to halt his onrushing daughter. “How can it be?” he gasped.
Kassandra answered with a lightning attack, her lance streaking around for his throat. It was only his Spartan instincts that saved him, yanking a short sword from a bicep belt and blocking her strike with it. He swayed, his heels on the precipice, his eyes darting to the Spartan camp behind Kassandra as the thunder raged above.