chapter 1: nostos
In the summer of the 87th Olympiad, Brasidas of Sparta comes home from a long, cold campaign in Attica, sagging under the weight of secrets hoarded and lives taken in service of his kings.
He is happy to do this work. He's helping to win the war, preserving his customs and the lives of his people. He is the aegis that guards against the creeping danger of Athenian dominance over the waters that carry Spartan trade and culture to distant shores. With this refrain in mind, he is able to meet his welcoming party with a broad smile and warm embraces, oppressively and perfectly cheerful.
This is the upside of being a spy: there is little danger of them knowing the truth, which is that he is tired, sore, and heartsick.
Mercifully, he's arrived just a few months in advance of the Hyakinthia - a festival honoring the death and rebirth of Apollo's mortal lover that will transform the stern straight lines of his home city into a mosaic of art, flowers and decorated caravans. Before long, soldiers will leave the front and come home to celebrate. Goats will be slaughtered to please the gods, and young men and women will dance and race nude in the streets in euphoria.
Brasidas needs this very badly. He has just spent half a year outside the valley of Lakonia, where the connections between people matter more than the glory of a courageous death. Now, he needs to be inoculated back into Spartan society slowly, with wine and laughter - not with the skulls of infants at the foot of Taygetos, the shadows of krypteia as they open the throats of rebellious slaves, the wet cries of boys dying in the training arena before they can so much as dream of a battlefield.
He's careful to keep that thought folded neatly inside himself when he makes his reports to the diarchs. As usual, Archidamos is pleased with him; Pausanias is thin-lipped and smiles with practiced politesse. As usual.
Brasidas reclaims his apartment in the heart of the city, resumes his seat at the war council among the ephors and generals that will one day be his peers, and waits to feel at home again.
The first day of the Hyakinthia passes without incident. Brasidas drinks with friends he hasn't seen in seasons, and watches the footraces, and puts flowers in the hair of all the dancers that pass their banquet table.
It's strange to exist in the open after so long without a name. It's strange to enjoy the taste of wine, even the good rich stuff from Chios, and allow it to dull his mind (he takes his neat now, like a Macedonian, inviting a scandalous delight from his companions). And the feel of the chiton, tied with practiced carelessness over one shoulder and exposing too much vulnerable flesh, is foreign and uncomfortable after months in stiff leather armor -
But this is all part of it, isn't it? The slow, painful reacclimation to a cast that seems suddenly to not fit as well as it once did.
At sundown on the second day of the festival, a ghost of Sparta's past comes back from the dead.
It's been twenty years since anyone saw Myrrine or her children in Lakonia, but the wound of her leaving is still fresh. Brasidas himself remembers being in the peak of his training at the agoge the night she fled the city. As difficult as it was to care about the drama of elites while surrounded by the stink of sweat and hard work and weakness being scrubbed away, the web of scandal was impossible to escape.
The name of Leonidas, savior of Hellas and the last true Greek hero, is tarnished, it whispered.
His daughter has run away like a coward, and his grandchildren have perished on Taygetos.
The line is ended. The blood of the warrior king will fade into obscurity.
Only, it hasn't. When Myrrine appears without warning or fanfare at the palace of the kings, dressed in corsair's rags with her chin pointed high and a web of leathery scars displayed like trophies from a bitter violent life, all of Sparta seems to drop its flowers and its amphorae and look at her.
But Brasidas is not looking at Myrrine. Brasidas is looking at the woman beside her.
Kassandra's measured frown breaks into a great beaming smile when she sees him.
"Brasidas!" she calls. "Brasidas, do you remember me?"
The question is so absurd that he almost laughs in her face.