“I won’t let them,” I said then with the carefree courage of a child.
“I know,” Mother said. “You’re a warrior.”
I carefully wrapped the spear in a leather roll, sensing that I should treat it with great care. I placed it in my quiver. When I heard the sky growl, I looked up.
“A storm’s coming,” Mother said, lifting Alexios.
It was a strange thing, for it had felt that way to me ever since Mother and Father had returned from their visit to the Oracle in autumn. Mother sensed my unease and placed baby Alexios in my arms. I felt instantly calm, kissing his forehead and gazing into his gleaming tawny-gold eyes…
Her hand shot up from the pyramid and she gasped. As the memory faded, she stared at Deimos. He was staring back at her, the tawny-gold eyes now wide as moons. There was no mistaking it…
Alexios? she mouthed, stupefied.
His head shook in disbelief, his lips barely moving: Kassandra?
She took a step backward, her legs numb.
“Well?” screeched one Cultist. “What did you see Deimos? Can we trust this one?”
Silence.
“Answer the question, Deimos,” another one pleaded.
Nothing.
A heartbeat later and another Cultist bustled forward, sighing. “Then let me take my turn. I have nothing to hide.”
This seemed to snap Deimos from his trance. With a roar, he grabbed the back of the Cultist’s head and rammed the masked face onto the point of the pyramid. With a thick clunk, the mask snapped. Blood puffed, the body jerked then slumped. The pyramid was pristine and golden, completely undamaged, but the Cultist’s face was a crumpled mess. Some of the other Cultists backed away, wailing, but a handful surged forward. “What are you doing, Deimos?” they screeched, clustering around him.
Kassandra backed away, stumbling all the way to the chamber entrance, then turned… and sped like a deer, stunned, shaken. She felt nothing as she hurtled back to the secret tunnel and scrambled through it in a blur.
She barely even noticed Herodotos’s words when she emerged into the night and onto the rocky shelf outside, gasping, doubling over and slumping back against the bluff face.
“My dear, what happened?”
She gazed up at the historian, eyes wide. “He’s in there. He’s their champion.”
“Who, my dear?”
“My brother. Alexios.”
In the blackness of night, the Adrestia sailed from Kirrha. Reza and the few other crew members manned the sails and the steering oar. Barnabas stood on the prow, one foot on the rail, eyeing the dark as if it were an old foe. Every so often he looked back toward the rear of the boat, seeking a decision from Kassandra, but still she was lost in thought.
She sat by the small cabin, clutching the hand that had touched the pyramid, staring into space. What she had thought of as reality had been cast down and shattered into a thousand pieces.
Herodotos, sitting beside her, carefully cut slices from an apple, lifting each into his mouth slowly and methodically. He again offered her a piece which she again refused and so he tossed it to Ikaros instead, who poked and prodded at it with mild disdain.
“There were many of them, all masked,” she said quietly. “The Oracle is theirs, and the Gods speak to the people through her, and the pyramid is at the root of it all. They have an army of spies and warriors. They control nearly all of Hellas. Everything.”
“Then it is worse than I thought,” Herodotos mused. He stared off into the night for a time. “If Perikles is in danger as you claim, we must make for Athens.”
She slid her eyes toward him. “Of all the things I saw and heard in there, why should I care about him? My brother lives, yet the Cult has turned him into something… horrible. They are out to kill my mother. This is my boat and Perikles is nothing to me—just another greedy and bloodthirsty general.”
“Bloodthirsty? You do not know the man,” Herodotos chided. “This war was thrust upon him.”
Kassandra eyed Herodotos sourly. “A general who doesn’t relish war? Unlikely.” She thought of the hearsay and rumors she had heard in the filthy taverns near Sami. “Some say he engineered this conflict under a guise of peace, so he could muster and flaunt Athens’s invincible navy and bask in its glory. Those boats go unchallenged by the pathetic Spartan navy, yet the Spartan hoplites rule the land, peerless and unafraid of the feeble Athenian infantry. But as long as Perikles receives adulation for what happens at sea, who cares about the interminable war?”
“Perhaps. Or maybe he saw that war was inevitable and guided affairs to make the best of them.” Herodotos shrugged.
“You are not convincing me. Why should I care for this distant King of Athens?”
Herodotos laughed, loud and long. “Athens has no king. Perikles serves the people. And his position is hardly splendid: there are plenty who lurk in Athens’s shadows, eager to take his place. If the Cult are colluding against him, it could turn what has been a fraught but noble war into a chaotic and bloody disaster for all.”
Kassandra stared at him, still unconvinced.
“Very well,” Herodotos continued. “But ask yourself this: if you are running from your brother, then you must be looking for your mother?”
She nodded.
“And where will you go to find her? Hellas is vast.”
“I presume you have a suggestion,” she said tersely.
“And you know what it is,” he replied. “Athens is the hub of our world, my dear. Unlike Sparta, with its closed borders and backward-looking ways, Athens seeks traders, merchants, travelers like me. Great minds preside over affairs there. Minds in the possession of much knowledge. If there is to be a clue as to your mother’s whereabouts, it lies within the streets of…”
“Athens,” Kassandra snapped, loud enough for Barnabas to hear.
He saluted her and bawled the order to his crew. The Adrestia’s sail groaned and the boat tacked around, altering its course to head out to sea for a long voyage around the Peloponnese, toward Attika.
Herodotos lay down to sleep. Kassandra rose and stood at the stern, watching the churn behind the trireme fizzle away in the boat’s wake. In the silvery moonlight, the rest of the sea was an unbroken sheet of gentle peaks and the sky a canopy of deep indigo, freckled with myriad stars. She stared for what felt like an eternity. When her eyes were growing tired, she blinked. One wave had seemed larger, higher, different, as if something was cutting through the water way back there. Another boat? She heard distant whalesong, drawing her gaze in a different direction. When she looked back in the Adrestia’s wake, the phantom “boat” was nowhere to be seen. She shook her head, knowing tiredness was playing with her senses.
When she turned away from the stern, Herodotos was awake and sitting up again. He was staring at Kassandra’s bow and spear, stowed upright against the cabin.
“You eye my spear as if it is a shade.” She laughed.
He looked up at her without a trace of matching humor. “The Lance of Leonidas. As soon as I saw you with it at the temple queue, I knew you had been drawn there just as I had.”
She sat across from him with a deep sigh. “I am of Leonidas’s bloodline. Some say I shamed his bloodline.” A memory of the Cultists’ voices snaked through her mind just then. The sooner we have the bloodline, the sooner we can dispense with Deimos’s chaotic, crude ways. She held up the spear, examining it. “It speaks to me sometimes, like nothing else… until tonight.”