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

“Not after Megara. Not after what you did, you murdering whore!”

The gathered crowd of Spartiates rumbled in anger. How much had Stentor told them?

She lifted the scroll high so all could see. “King Archidamos sent me to aid you in securing this region.”

The thunder of voices ebbed, all eyes on the edict. Stentor, chest heaving, slammed his sword back into its sheath, then spun away and stomped over to the northern edge of the camp. “This is how much Archidamos trusts me,” he bawled back over his shoulder. “By putting his faith in a fucking mercenary?”

Kassandra touched her jaw—the lips tender and the bone aching. Carefully, she followed her adopted brother. She stopped behind him, seeing the view of the north: sweeping, sun-baked golden plains and in the center, the great Lake Kopais fed by the green ribbon of the River Kephisos. Shadows rolled across the land where light clouds moved across the sky.

Stentor’s ears pricked up, detecting her closeness. “The Gods are punishing me with your presence.”

“If I was here to punish you, you’d already be dead,” she said, her patience deteriorating.

“What is Archidamos hoping to achieve by sending you—a single, traitorous mercenary—here?”

“To do what you clearly cannot,” she snapped, fueled by the now-blinding pain in her jaw.

His head snapped around. “You have no idea, have you? For four years, this war has raged. You think you know all about it because you walked to battle with us once in the Megarid?”

The pain peaked, then began to settle. Kassandra harnessed her anger. “I have remained entangled in conflict ever since that battle, Stentor. Let us not make swords of our every word. We have a job to do. I expected to find mercenaries and allies in this place. I did not realize the main Spartan force was here. Why? Why Boeotia?”

Stentor’s head dropped a little—as it had been at the map table. “We had Athens,” he said, raising one hand and clutching at the air, shaking his fist then letting it fall. “And then Kleon seized power there. He directs Athens with an iron glove. He has piloted many foolish land invasions, but some have been successful: when we tried to return to Attika, he drove our forces back. We find ourselves now mired in this region—a patchwork of allies and staunch enemies. The armies of Athens and their Platean allies threaten to squeeze us from this region too. That would be disastrous.”

“I will do what I can to ensure that does not happen,” Kassandra said calmly.

Stentor remained, staring out over the land. “The only reason you are still alive is that writ you carry. You are no ally. You are merely a weapon.”

“There is much you do not know about what happened that night in the Megarid,” she began.

He threw up a hand in demand for silence. “I have pieced it together, since, Sell-sword. You were the Wolf’s lost daughter. You came in the guise of a mercenary… when all along you were an assassin.”

Kassandra said, daring to take a step to the mountain’s edge beside him, “You do not understa—”

Screech. Stentor quarter-drew his sword again. “One more word.”

She let the matter rest.

After a time, Stentor spoke again. “We have just one lochos here. Just as in the Megarid. The omens were too uncertain and so the ephors withheld the other four regiments. So the chances of victory for Sparta in these lands rests on the shoulders of her allies. Thebes.” He gestured to the east, where a pale-walled city was just visible in the weltering heat of the plain. “And south, across the Gulf, Korinthia: they have a fleet ready to land and support us—with great numbers of men.”

She beheld the city of Thebes, then ran her eye across the most direct route from there to here—over the golden flatland. But her gaze snagged on a silvery vein that stretched from the southern shores of Lake Kopais to the easterly foot of the Helicon range upon which they stood. At first she thought it was a river, and then she saw it was in fact earthworks and men. Athenian hoplites.

“Very good,” Stentor mocked. “You see it too. That line is like a wall between us and our Theban allies—our only source of cavalry support. Pagondas and his riders cannot travel to join with us. That band of flickering Athenian steel controls the flatland like a strangler’s rope. They have plentiful supplies, and more men arriving by the day. The Athenian army swells like a boil, some say; Kleon is heedless of the nearly bare treasury—so obsessed is he with appeasing the people’s disquiet over his predecessor’s cowardly defensive strategy.”

Kassandra’s eyes shifted to the far end of the Athenian line where it met with the southern shores of Lake Kopais. She flicked her gaze across the lake to its northern edge. A way around?

“Rugged, impassable highlands,” Stentor preempted her suggestion. “The horsemen of Thebes know this land better than any other, and they do not even try to take their prize steeds through those treacherous passes to come around and meet us that way lest they lose half to broken limbs.” He pointed out the strange X shapes on the ground before the Athenian line, on the side nearest Mount Helicon. Kassandra squinted for a time before she understood what they were: two dozen Spartan men, staked out spread-eagled, naked, baking in the sun. “By the Gods, we have tried to break that wall of spears, and that is the result.”

“Then the Korinthians and their vast numbers are the key,” Kassandra mused. “When they land, they can fall upon the southern end of that line. It would distract the Athenians enough to allow your lochos to assault them from this side, and Pagondas and his Thebans from the other side.”

“Well observed.” Stentor’s shoulders jostled as he laughed dryly. “Yet Boeotia is famed for its plains, its woods… and its damnable lack of landing sites. There are just two good spots for the Korinthian fleet to make shore.”

Kassandra’s eyes slid shut. “The Athenians hold them both, don’t they? The Korinthian fleet is unable to land.”

“Welcome to my bed of thorns, Misthios. Not so confident now, are you?”

She spent many nights planning, traveling along the Helicon range, roving south and north as far as she could go unseen, watching, searching. At last, she knew what she had to do, and she returned to Stentor’s command tent.

“You are but one hired blade. What can you do that my lochos could not?” Stentor spat, rising from the stool and taking a long draft of watered wine.

“Give me a dozen men.”

Stentor glared at her with an icy half grin. “By all the Gods, I will give you nothing.”

“You need victory here. Sparta needs victory.”

Stentor’s grin turned into a snarl as his teeth ground and he turned away from her, striding around his map table. “I promised the Korinthian fleet a beacon before the summer was out. If they receive no such signal, they will have to return to their own city. But we cannot light a beacon until we clear one of the landing sites for them.”

“Give me men and I will make it so.”

He turned to her, his angry mien melting into a grin again. He snapped his fingers, making some signal at the staff behind her. She heard light feet pattering up.

“Master?” the wiry Helot croaked, his face all but hidden behind curtains of black hair and his dogskin cap.

“The Misthios here has a plan,” said Stentor.

Kassandra’s mouth opened to object.

“You are to aid her in her efforts,” Stentor finished before she could speak.

Her top lip twitched. “So be it,” she spat, turning away. “Be ready at dawn, as I explained.”

She and the Helot trekked south as darkness fell. They stopped not to sleep but to eat and rest for a short time, eating hare roasted on a spit, Ikaros picking over the bones. The Helot introduced himself as Lydos—a shy and afraid man of thirty years. Kassandra tried to put him at ease by asking him about his family, but he gave their names and offered little else. He had a nervous habit of tucking his hair behind one ear every few moments, and when he did, she noticed one of his cheeks were sunken—broken at some point in the past. More, the backs of his legs were laced with scars.