Gordon Doherty - Assassin's Creed Odyssey - The Official Novelization

Kassandra blinked to be sure of what she had seen. She had never set foot inside this place as a child, but she had heard rumors. She had even heard one drunken Athenian at Perikles’s symposium mocking the Spartans’ primitive means of voting. They opt for the proposal of whoever garners the loudest cheer, that old goat had scoffed. If only he had seen this: opting for the wisdom of whoever was better at kicking the most shit out of the other.

The wild audience retreated then, like a wave drawing back from a shore. They settled on tiered benches lining the hall. Kassandra recognized the biggest group: the Gerousia —twenty-eight ancient things, hunched and bald, but rumored to be laden with wisdom. When the two kings took their plinth chairs at the far end of the hall, the Gerousia stamped their walking canes on the ground in veneration. She also recognized a smaller group: five men in gray robes who stood on the plinth behind the kings’ seats and made no such gesture of adoration. The ephors. Kassandra’s heart turned to stone as she eyed them all, remembering the vulture-like one among them who had thrown Alexios from the mountain… before taking the plunge himself. But her hatred eased as she saw five faces of men in their thirties and forties. None had been part of what happened that night. The ephors were not an evil force. It was the Cult, she reminded herself. It has always been the Cult, working their way into any gap in the stonework. Yes, the ephors owed the kings no adoration, but that was their purpose—to keep the monarchs in check. Sparta: the two-headed dog, chained around the neck by a five-headed master!

“Brasidas,” Pausanias boomed, extending his arms in greeting. “What do you bring for us today?”

Brasidas led Kassandra and Myrrine to the foot of the low plinth upon which the kings sat. As he began to introduce them, Kassandra noticed that for all Pausanias’s eagerness, Archidamos sank back into his throne, his mane settling on his shoulders, his face melting into a look of suspicion and disdain, and those blood-veined eyes searching Kassandra and Myrrine like a butcher judging a cut of meat.

“… they come to lay claim to an ancestral estate. One that lies unoccupied.”

“Who are they?” Pausanias asked, intrigued. “What line, which estate?”

Just then, Archidamos’s bloodshot eyes flared as he at last recognized Myrrine. “You,” he roared, rising, the legs of his throne scraping on stone. His glower turned upon Kassandra, seeing the resemblance, the puzzle clicking together. “And you!”

With a guttural roar, he snatched up his spear and took a lunge down the few steps toward them. It was only Pausanias’s swift reactions that halted him.

“Unhand me or by Zeus Agetor, I will skewer you,” Archidamos snarled.

“I don’t understand. Why do they anger you so?” Pausanias complained.

“Because they are of the line of Leonidas… the shamed bloodline.”

Pausanias’s face paled. He stared at Kassandra and Myrrine. “The Taygetos disaster, all those years ago?”

Kassandra said nothing. The glassy film that rose across her eyes was answer enough.

“And they dare to return,” Archidamos confirmed. “I thought you both dead, and better for you had it been that way.”

Pausanias stepped down between the malevolent king and the two women. “Yet they come humbly before us. Brasidas vouches for them, yes?”

Brasidas nodded once. “Kassandra has performed unsolicited and heroic acts for Sparta in these years of war. She helped me free Korinthia from the brigand who had seized that city.”

Pausanias turned back to Archidamos. “And they are of the line of our most famous king. Perhaps we should not be so quick to turn upon them… aye?” He reasoned further with the older king, cagey and respectful. It took an age, Archidamos’s eyes still blazing over his shoulder at Kassandra and Myrrine. But, at last, the older king stepped back, slumping once more in his throne. “If you want your estate back,” he grunted, “then you will have to do something for me. Chase away your past shame. Prove to me you are worthy.”

Kassandra waited, watching as the fire in his eyes rose, a grin of yellowing teeth spreading across his face.

“Travel north in the spring, aid the effort in Boeotia, help secure that land for Sparta.”

The onlooking Gerousia gasped at this—surely a measure of the task.

Pausanias pounced on the sliver of accord. “That seems to be a fair balance, aye? And while you winter here in wait of spring, I will arrange a place for you to stay.”

He clapped his hands. A Helot hurried to him with a wax slab. He muttered something to the slave, who scratched the arrangement onto the slab, before Pausanias pressed his ring into the wax to approve the requisition.

A signet ring! Kassandra’s breath halted and her senses sharpened as she and Myrrine stared at the ring. It bore an emblem of… a crescent moon. No lion seal? she thought. Then it must be… Her gaze rolled toward Archidamos, who continued to glare back, eyes hooded. She glanced down at his callused hands, folded, covering his own seal ring.

“It is a small home, but one I think you will find comfortable,” Pausanias continued, snapping the tablet closed. “And over the cold months, you can help our champion, Testikles, to prepare for the coming Olympics. He needs as many training partners as he can find.”

“So, scion of Leonidas,” said Archidamos, his grin growing, “you accept my task?”

He unfolded his hands and Kassandra stared as the seal ring was exposed. Her heart thumped… and then she saw that it bore the image of… a soaring hawk. What, how?

“Is something wrong?” Archidamos chuckled.

Kassandra had never been certain of anything in her life. But here, now, she felt an iron assurance that Archidamos was the traitor king—that she was being sent north into Boeotia to die. If a trap awaited there, then so too perhaps, did evidence of his Cultic ties.

She sensed the Gerousia, the ephors and the Hippeis guards all staring at her, awaiting her answer.

“I will do as you ask.”

“Come back,” Testikles roared. “Oil me!”

Kassandra lifted her cloak and slung it over her naked body. “Oil yourself. You’re drunk… and in terrible condition.” She paced away from the gymnasium, leaving the wayward champion rolling around in the dust where she had knocked him for the third bout of pankration in a row. He was an idiot, but she liked him—possibly because he was a rather un-Spartan Spartan, fond of humor and pranks… and wine.

It had been a long winter, marked with drunken nights of epic Spartan poetry, games, races and craft. She had even managed to convince Pausanias to allow Barnabas, Herodotos and the crew to come here from their grim cove, and now they lived as guests of the young king. The citadel ward was cloaked in a thin shell of frost, but the first snowdrops sprouted on the meadows around the temples, and birds sang in the cypress trees. Spring was all but here. Tomorrow, she would set off for the north—a misthios once more—to turn the struggle in distant Boeotia. One thing she had learned in winter was just how ensconced the Spartan and Athenian forces were in those lands. She felt like a fool for agreeing to Archidamos’s demands. One thing she certainly had not found over the winter was proof of Archidamos’s secret. The man was a snake, she was sure. Yet she could not accuse or attack him as a Cultist until she had proof that it was so.

She passed their still-chained estate, then stopped off at the small two-room house they had been granted by Pausanias. There she washed and sat in the doorway of the home, drinking a long draft of berry water. Her gaze slid across Pitana—to Leonidas’s ashlar tomb. It was almost noon, she realized. With a tired sigh she rose and walked over there.