“How did you know about his past and mine?” Kassandra hissed, taking the coin purse and stepping toward him.
“I love theater. A great general throws his own children from a cliff on the say-so of the Oracle… it is a tragedy for all the ages.” He chuckled.
“You find amusement in the strangest of places,” she said. “Perhaps you will laugh one last time when I sink my spear into your chest?”
“Now, now, Misthios, let me explain.” Elpenor lifted his cup to drink again. His eyes obscured momentarily, he glanced to the colonnade. His eyes met those of a guard, and the guard quickly saw what was going on. Excellent, he thought as the leather-clad brute crept in from the gardens, coming for Kassandra unseen like a leopard stalking a gazelle. “The Wolf told you about your birth father and your mother, I presume?”
She nodded once, staring down her nose at him as she drew close.
“Then it is simple,” he said. “They will be your next two targets.”
She recoiled. “What did you say?”
“You heard me, Misthios. You have proven yourself a parent slayer already. Why the misgivings now?”
“I thought you a soulless cur at first, now I know that you are far worse,” she croaked. “Why, why would I do what you ask?”
“Then the answer is no?” Elpenor said, leaning forward on the bench, eyes wide as if awaiting a revelation.
“Never,” she said through gritted teeth.
“Such a shame, you could have been of use to me,” Elpenor said, then nodded once to the creeping guard behind her.
In a single movement, Kassandra bent around from the hips, drawing, nocking and loosing her bow. The arrow took the guard in the eye just as he lurched in an attempt to run her through. The man flailed and crashed headlong into the unlit hearth, where he lay, feet twitching.
Elpenor snatched the bronze spear from the marble hands of Ares, swishing it around toward her. He heard a clean chopping noise and saw both his hands and the spear spin through the air, Kassandra’s half spear flashing in a shaft of sunlight. He stared at the perfectly hewn stumps below both wrists: white bone, marrow, blood… then lots and lots of blood. He fell to his knees, wailing. “What have you done?”
She clamped a hand over his mouth and pressed him back against the bench. “You will bleed to death in moments. I can save you, but I want answers.”
Elpenor felt fiery agony in his forearms at first, then the hot wetness of the soaking blood. Then… a growing coldness. He nodded weakly; she slid her hand from his lips. “You are a fool, Kassandra. You only left Kephallonia alive because of me. The Cult wanted you dead. I said you would be more use alive.”
Kassandra’s face grew pinched and hateful. “The Cult… who?”
Elpenor sensed a final victory in the onset of death. He would be her master, at the last, ridiculing her with his dying breath. “Go, as the Wolf once did… and ask the Oracle,” he cackled, before he slipped into a cold black infinity.
Kassandra stumbled back from his graying corpse, numb. Absently, she snatched a few more coin purses from a drawer in his desk, then opened a wooden chest to find a silk robe that would no doubt fetch a good price and a wicked-looking but probably valuable theater mask, taking both. As she crouched to make her escape before any more guards arrived, she saw the slave kneeling by the indoor pool, white with fear, staring at her, having seen it all. She tossed him one of the coin purses. “Go,” she said, “far from this place.”
She heard the slave and the few other poor wretches of the household scampering away toward the docks. She, however, turned inland, toward the rising mountains and the streaming crowds of pilgrims flooding up into those heights. Soon, her thighs ached as she climbed with them, her head bowed, neck scorched by the sun, mind heavy with mysteries. All throughout the past winter, spent hiding out in the islands with Barnabas and his crew, she had rehearsed her confrontation with Elpenor. Now it was over, and she had nothing but a pair of coin sacks and a few fine garments—worthless compared to the answers she needed.
She glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the cur’s villa, behind and far below. Kirrha town was now but a shimmer of activity—the warren of streets and alleys like a tessellated promenade, hugging the green waters of the Korinthian Gulf. Up here the heat was dry and choking, the dust sticking to the back of the throat and stinging the eyes. She felt like a fooclass="underline" climbing toward Delphi and the Temple of Apollo and its damned Oracle as if she would truly find any answers there. But there was no other way. The Wolf had not told her of her true father or her mother’s whereabouts, and so now it came down to Elpenor’s dying jest and the famously abstruse words of the seeress.
Ikaros shrieked, banking and soaring up above. Kassandra squinted upward. He wheeled and sped across the pale rock and greenery ahead. A wreath of cloud obscured the higher parts, and the heat began to mix with a freshness. Here, a high green valley yawned, the sides veined with streamlets and dotted with pine and cypress trees.
On a plateau overlooking the valley floor, the Temple of Apollo was perched, like an eagle in its eyrie. The home of the Oracle. Silvery Doric columns supported a red-tiled roof, and starlings swooped to and from their nests in the brightly painted architraves. This, some claimed, was the center of the world, the neutral heart of all Hellas. The sanctuary of the Gods where Spartan and Athenian alike were but men.
The great train of pilgrims wound all the way up around smaller temples and shrines, snaking toward the grand entrance. Peddlers lapped against the sides of the pilgrim train like waves on a causeway, holding up ivory plaques and beaded necklaces.
When the hawkers crowded around her, she ignored them all, instead staring up at the ancient temple, thinking of what had happened on Mount Taygetos all those years ago. All at your behest, she mouthed sourly, thinking of the Oracle upon whose poisoned words it had been carried out. You will give me answers today, seeress, or I will sheathe my spear in your heart.
Her growing ire faded when she bumped into the man before her.
“Apologies,” she muttered, realizing the queue had come to a halt. She looked up the three-times-snaking path onto the plateau. A painful hour passed, with just a few shuffles forward.
Those queueing near her were full of grumbles and conspiracy. “This place has changed,” one moaned. “They say some are being turned away with no explanation,” complained another. “Guards everywhere too. Something’s going on,” cursed a third.
Just then, she heard a colorful and familiar voice, up on the plateau and nearer the front of the queue. She tilted her head back to look up. “Tell them, tell them!” Barnabas chirped. The captain had come up here while she had headed to Elpenor’s, and it seemed he had found a friend—someone his own age in an ankle-length exomis, with a tangle of brown hair held back from his weathered face by a blue band. He seemed aghast at Barnabas’s prompts. “Will you keep your voice down,” the man groaned.
“But you’ve traveled even farther and wider than I,” Barnabas persisted. “All across Ionia. You’ve even seen a phoenix, aye?”
“No,” the other fellow said, waving his hands to disappoint those in the queue who were listening in. “It was merely a seagull with its tail feathers ablaze.”
Barnabas’s face fell, and he climbed upon a stone bench to address the queue, jabbing a thumb into his own chest. “Well I saw a phoenix once. I swear I did. From a burning city she rose, swept high overhead and—”