“Silanos?” The sound of the name was like a bell struck with a gong. She thought of the eldritch gathering in the Cave of Gaia, the words of the masked one with that same name ringing through her head: I almost have the mother in my grasp. It must be her we focus on.
Myrrine nodded.
“Mother, Silanos is a Cultist.” She grasped Myrrine by the shoulders. “Don’t you see, this blockade was never about marble or money. It’s about you, the Cult hunt you.” She gazed out over the sea, breathing rapidly. “We have to get off of this island.”
“You’ve just seen what happened to the last people who tried,” Myrrine said. “Our only hope was Euneas, my navarchos. He had a theory that there might be a flaw in the blockade pattern.”
“Then summon him,” Kassandra said.
“He vanished at sea, months ago, before you arrived.”
“Where?”
“On a scouting voyage to test his theory about the blockade flaw. He sailed for the Sound of Paros—the narrow channel between the islands.”
“Nobody has found wreckage, or his body?”
“Nothing.”
Kassandra rose. “If he is our only hope, then we must find him.”
“Misthios, I do feel that this is a bit of a demotion,” Barnabas moaned as he rowed the tiny skiff. His face and arms ran with sweat and the back of his tunic bore a dark circle of perspiration.
“If you still have the breath to moan, then you’re not working hard enough,” she panted, working the other oar. She glanced over her shoulder to where the rowboat was headed. There it was, just as they had spotted from the mountain on the island’s southwestern corner: just off the salt marshes on the coast was a lone galley, sails hoisted. One of Myrrine’s men had confirmed it was Euneas’s boat.
The turquoise waters all around them lapped and glinted as they drew closer.
Kassandra dropped her oar and stood to face the vessel, then called out through hands cupped around her mouth. “Navarchos Euneas.”
The galley bobbed silently, no reply.
“Bring us closer,” she urged Barnabas.
“Navarchos,” she tried again.
With a shriek, Ikaros swooped down and landed on the ship’s rail. With a flurry of his wings, he seemed to be shrugging, confirming Kassandra’s suspicions: the boat was deserted. She climbed aboard to find it was so. No signs of a struggle, no blood, dropped items or scrapes on the timbers. Just a forgotten ship, drifting silently in this halo of water between the Naxian shore and the Parian blockade. There were sacks of grain, vases of vinegar and oil, stocks of arrows, tools, all neatly stacked.
She dropped down onto the rowboat again. “So why would Euneas bring his ship around here? Mother said he was a bold type.” Her eyes scanned the Naxian coast as she mused, then swung to the Parian cliffs on the far side of the sound. “Perhaps he drew too close to the enemy isle?”
“You may just be right, Misthios,” Barnabas said, leaning forward, peering at the clifftops. “See how the sun catches on something up there?”
She squinted, seeing flashes of metal. Armor? Weapons? Moving too. She cupped a hand to her ear in that direction and heard the soft sound of a man’s pleas. Desperate, ragged.
“During our time on Naxos,” Barnabas continued darkly, “I have heard chilling tales about how Parians execute their captives…”
Euneas coughed and spat the mouthful of dust from his lips, only for another spadeful to land on his sun-blistered face. He wriggled his several-months-undernourished limbs but found no purchase—buried now almost to his neck. “Coins, I can get you coins,” he croaked. The two Parians roared with laughter at his continuing attempts to broker a deal and win his freedom.
“The sooner you die,” one said, “the quicker Naxos falls, we get our hands on your bitch leader… and then there will be nothing Silanos cannot do. Why would we trade all that for some petty bribe?”
The second man patted the spade around Euneas’s neck, compacting the dust there. Next, he uncorked a pot and tilted it over Euneas’s head. Euneas jolted when viscous honey splatted on his hair and rolled down his face in thick streaks.
“Yum,” said the guard. The second guard then walked over to a knobbly pillar of earth nearby and kicked it. Euneas stared at the pillar for a moment, then fell agog at the sudden explosion of black, glistening ants that poured from the nest. They scurried and swirled, angered. The two guards hopped up on a rock, chuckling, watching as the ants swarmed around toward Euneas, the scent of honey intoxicating. He screamed, and could not bring himself to end his scream and close his mouth as they raced for him, surged over his face, into his mouth, his ears, across his bulging eyeballs, up his nose, through his hair. Each bite was like a droplet of fire. Gods, no, this is too horrible a way to perish…
Smash!
All of a sudden, the fury of biting fell away. A stench of vinegar curled up Euneas’s nostrils and the shards of a broken amphora skidded before him, the liquid inside driving the ants back like a breaker might chase timid bathers from the shallows. He watched as the lithe woman strode before him and faced the pair of guards. One rushed her and fell, jaw ripped off by her strange spear. The second fell to a wicked blow to the side of the head, stunned.
Myrrine accepted the gentle words of veneration offered by the Naxian villagers as she walked through the Phoenix Gardens. The scent of summer jasmine, thyme and lemon mixed in the sweltering air as her people chattered and enjoyed the game, fruits and wine she had provided for this feast. It was all she could do, in such dark times—to distract them from the fact that their jewel of an island was in fact a prison to Silanos… to the Cult.
“Kassandra is right,” Aspasia whispered, walking by her side. The Athenian beauty mirrored her own expression: a smile of polished teeth, desperately trying to distract from the troubled eyes. “The Cult are here for you. Every day you remain here, you are in danger—your people too.”
“I prayed last night,” Myrrine said. “For the first time in years. I asked the Gods to spirit me from this place, Kassandra by my side.”
“No,” Aspasia whispered. “Don’t you see? That would make things easy for the Cult, for then you and she would be combined as one target.” She linked an arm with Myrrine and pulled her a little closer—ostensibly like two old friends falling into a fond recollection of shared memories. “You must come away with me.”
Myrrine frowned. “I have spent twenty-three years alone, thinking my daughter dead. I cannot, will not, part from her again.” A clack of cups and a refrain of tuneful laughter rose from those around the babbling fountain, and the tanner and his family raised their drinks to her as she passed. “Archon!” they hailed her. Sanguine, trusting, good people. Talons of guilt scraped across her heart. “Talk of leaving is fanciful. These people, they need me. I could not bear to abandon them. They have been my family for all these years.”
A gasp sounded, a cup fell, heads swung to the low gates of the villa gardens.
Myrrine and Aspasia looked that way. The two brown-shelled guards there parted, dropping their spears and helping the hobbling trio that entered. Myrrine shook free of Aspasia and rushed to them.
“How? Where?” she wept, cupping poor Euneas’s swollen red face as Kassandra and Barnabas set him down on a marble bench by a statue of Apollo.
“I tried to… explore the Parian… cliffs…” he panted as helpers came and began dabbing at his angry wounds with wet rags and pastes. “They beat me, starved me, flayed me for months. I was to die today—my head was to be stripped of flesh by ants. She killed one of my torturers. And the second one…”