She rode along the Eurotas’s western banks, passing the Temple of Lycurgus and the Babyx bridge. At a parting of the trees ahead, she saw them: her new family waiting to greet her. Myrrine stood with Barnabas, Brasidas and Herodotos. The messenger she had paid to ride ahead had brought word to them. Mother’s eyes were wet with tears. Herodotos and Brasidas beamed like proud uncles. Barnabas blubbed like an old hen.
Memories of Nikolaos and Stentor’s reunion flashed through her mind as she slid from horseback and into Myrrine’s arms. She drank in her mother’s warm-petal scent, and felt the thick bear hug of Barnabas swaddling them both. They parted after a time, Kassandra and Myrrine both adopting tall, proud stances as if suddenly aware of their Spartan surrounds.
That night, Barnabas fell into a snoring slumber at the corner of their small abode in Pitana village while Brasidas sat in the doorway, whetting his spear. Herodotos busied himself making a sketch of Ikaros, who preened himself in an eave nest above the doorway. Myrrine and Kassandra—having enjoyed a bracing swim in the Eurotas and a good strigilling clean—sat around the hearth wrapped in freshly washed woolen blankets, drinking cups of hot, black broth. She told her mother everything about Boeotia, and about Nikolaos’s reappearance. “I never told you I spared him. I wasn’t sure you would forgive me that.”
Myrrine ladled more of the broth into both of their cups, breaking a second small loaf between them. “You once told me about the flame inside, Kass,” she said quietly. “I told you to hide it, to keep it a secret. I was wrong,” she said softly. “We are Spartan… but we are more than that,” she said, clasping Kassandra’s hand.
Kassandra half smiled and supped on the hot soup, the flavor strong and warming. “Yet it was not Nikolaos I set out to find. Of the Cultist king—the Red-eyed Lion—I found nothing. No clues, no whispers.” She stared into the flames and dropped her voice to a whisper. “I am due to report to the Kings’ Hall tomorrow, to detail my efforts in Boeotia. I had planned to use that moment to expose Archidamos… but he has covered his tracks well.”
“I too found nothing,” said Myrrine. “Arkadia is a strange land, and I was glad of Brasidas’s company. He and I made use of our spears more than once.”
Kassandra saw the recent scars on her mother’s hands.
“Archon Lagos was, as I feared, one of them.” She set down her broth mug as if suddenly losing her appetite. “He had a troop of masked ones with him. Brasidas and his hand-picked guards fought like a lion to slay them. Finally, I had Lagos pinned at spearpoint on the floor of his palace. He thought himself invincible: as if his wretched Cult would burst in and save him. Then I told him who I was, who my daughter was. His confidence fell like a rock. Forty-two of them, there once were,” she said, squeezing Kassandra’s knee, “and now only six remain. Mainly thanks to you.”
“But one of those six sits on the throne of Sparta,” Kassandra said flatly.
“I tried to get him to confess the traitor king’s identity.” Myrrine sighed. “Before I ran him through, he wailed and pleaded. Yet I got nothing. Nothing but another script.” She shrugged, drawing from under her blanket a tattered scroll. “From the Red-eyed Lion, once again.”
Kassandra held it up to the firelight, staring at the same lion-head seal as was stamped on the Parian script. She rolled the scroll out and scanned the Cultic script, understanding none of it—again, just like the one from Paros. Worse, this document was soiled too—part of the text obscured by… The breath caught in her throat. Realization rose within her. She barely heard the sound of her broth cup falling to the floor, or of Barnabas waking, startled, or of Brasidas dropping his now-honed lance, or of Mother shaking her. “Kassandra, what is it? What is it?”
The prattle of the Gerousia filled the Kings’ Hall as two Spartiates yelled and remonstrated their cases: one man claimed the olive orchard on Taygetos’s lower slopes as his own thanks to his tending of the estate; the other insisted it was instead his by birthright. The pair screamed until their faces were red, and it was only when the one claiming birthright drew the loudest wail of acclamation that the matter was deemed settled. The two were shepherded from the doors by the spearpoints of the Hippeis guards. Now, all eyes settled on the trio who were up next for judgment.
Kassandra stepped forth and beheld the two kings and the five ephors.
“Ah,” grunted Archidamos, “I heard that Boeotia was secured. You didn’t die in the struggle then?”
The Gerousia rumbled with dry laughter.
Kassandra stared at him. His tousled mane and beard, his bloodshot eyes, his foul, menacing mien.
“You have Sparta’s gratitude,” he muttered at last.
“And your estate,” added King Pausanias quickly. “I will see to it that the chains are taken off and the place is cleaned for your return there.”
Two Hippeis guards moved as if to herd Kassandra from the chamber, but she did not move.
“Is there something else?” Archidamos spat.
“My family was betrayed,” she said. A gasp arose from the Gerousia. “Sparta was betrayed. We’ve come to expose the traitor.”
Archidamos stared at her for a time. “Oh really? And who is this traitor? What is their crime?” He roared with laughter, rocking back on his throne to conjure more hilarity from the Gerousia too.
“On the island of Paros, I found evidence that one of Sparta’s two kings is allied not to the state, nor the Gods… but to the Cult of Kosmos. He goes by the name of the Red-eyed Lion.” She heard the hall fall silent, so still that even a feather falling to the floor would have been like the beat of a war drum.
Archidamos’s eyelids slid down a fraction, his gaze growing hooded. “That is a dark accusation, shamed descendant of Leonidas,” he growled. “You had best have proof of this, if you wish to keep your head.”
She threw him the scroll taken from the Cultists on Paros. Archidamos’s face paled, and his bloodshot eyes reddened further. “The markings of the Cult indeed. Still, this proves nothing.”
“Alone, it is worthless,” agreed Myrrine, stepping forward to her daughter’s side. “But then I traveled to Arkadia. There, I had another traitor confirm that there is a Cultist on the Spartan throne, and obtained another scroll with the same lion-head seal.” She held up the Arkadian document and shook it.
Archidamos trembled with ire. “Are you blind?” He held up his meaty hand, the hawk seal ring catching the light, then gesturing at Pausanias’s hand too and the crescent-moon seal. “There is no ‘Red-eyed Lion’ on these thrones!” he hissed, raising a finger for the Hippeis guards, who positioned their spears behind the two, ready to run them through, waiting on Archidamos’s finger to fall. “I should have done this the moment you first walked in here.”
“Wait! Wait!” Kassandra cried, throwing the Arkadian script at Archidamos. “Look at this second script.”
He caught it, hesitating on the brink of giving the order… then unrolling it.
“See the strange blotch upon it in the shape of a hand?” said Kassandra. “In Boeotia I was aided by a Helot who spilled the wine that stained that hide, whose hand made that mark…”
Archidamos’s bloodshot eyes rolled down to the dark stain on the document. The remaining color in his face vanished.