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

She felt a shudder of strength and forced her spear back against his blade. Like an arm-wrestler turning a contest, she grew as he shrank, his blade beginning to slide, her spear tip now edging toward his neck. Deimos’s confidence began to crumble. She saw his eyes widen. Here she was again: on the precipice, with the chance to save her brother or let him die. And then he convulsed suddenly with a harrowing scream.

He fell. Kassandra backed away, staring at her lance. Had she done this? No, her blade had not touched him and had no fresh blood upon it. How then? Who? Then she saw the arrow jutting from Deimos’s back, saw him slump to his knees and slide to one side. The battle swallowed up his body in a frenzy of struggling men, thrashing limbs and whirling spears. Her eyes traced the path the arrow had taken—to a small wart of rock behind Deimos. Up there stood Kleon, his bowstring still vibrating, his face lengthening as if in disbelief. His lips flickered up into a crazed and fleeting grin of triumph, and then he hurriedly nocked a fresh arrow. But before he could even draw, Kassandra lurched toward him.

“Shit!” he squealed, fumbling the arrow, his arms becoming entangled in the bow.

As she speared for his chest, he threw himself to one side, tossing the bow down, then plunging into a reckless sprint through the battle. She raced in pursuit, fighting off a maw of gnashing spears just to cut through the chaos and keep sight of Kleon. Arrows whizzed and bullet-stones from slingshots spat overhead as she leapt over the groaning wounded, splashed through puddles of blood, vomit and loosed bowels.

Only when she reached the edges of the fray did the battle begin to thin. Eventually, the din of war was but a buzz behind her. All that mattered was the sprinting, flailing bastard ahead. He stumbled and rolled, his blue cloak rapping and snapping in his wake. She ran like a deer, feeling her soles scrape on bare earth and then wet sand. The crash of waves surrounded her as she chased Kleon onto the beach. Clumps of wet sand flicked up in his wake, then plumes of foam as he thrashed out into the shallows. He waded out until water rose to his chest, then halted, gasping, panting, head flicking back to her and then to the sea. His face was white as the moon. “I… I can’t swim,” he warbled.

Silently, Kassandra waded out to him. He raised his sword. She grabbed his wrist and twisted it until he dropped the weapon, then seized him by the collar of his robe, dragging him back to the ankle-deep shallows. There, she cast him to his knees. He began to wail and plead. She heard not a word of it. Planting a hand on the back of his head, she pushed him down, prone, driving his face into the sand. His arms and legs thrashed and muffled screams shook the sand. At last, he fell still.

She fell back to sitting, her breath coming in great rasps. The last and most dangerous member of the Cult was dead. Behind her, she heard the moan of Spartan pipes, the solemn cry of victory. “Aroo!” they cried, spears raised, forming a circle around the body of their adored leader. Brasidas was dead, but against all the odds, Amphipolis was saved, the north too.

From within Kleon’s robes, something floated out into the waves. A mask, she realized, notched on the brow from the strike of a sword. Ikaros came and settled on her shoulder as she watched it drift along the shoreline. The eagle shrieked at the shrinking piece of flotsam.

“Aye,” Kassandra said, stroking his feathers, “it is over.”

They said that Brasidas died with the song of Spartan triumph in his ears. They said that he died with a wistful smile. Few had really seen his terrible end on the tip of Deimos’s spear. As the Adrestia peeled away from the bay of Amphipolis, Kassandra gazed over the hinterland, shining red in the dying sun, pocked with funeral pyres and trophy mounds. The hill upon which the fray had turned was clear of bodies now, but the dead would never be forgotten. More, in Brasidas, Sparta had a new hero. Already they talked of his polyglot army as “The Brasideans.” Even now those Spartans and the Helots were camped together—for once classless and brotherly in victory.

Despite the victory, the voyage south was a somber one, with Barnabas and his crew subdued, spending the nights quietly drinking and chatting about their adventures with Kassandra. They stopped at Athens, where a new general had been elected. Nicias, championed by Sokrates and the set who had held on to Perikles’s principles in the darkest days of Kleon’s rule, had even opened talks with Sparta. A peace treaty was in the offing, some said—a fifty-year oath of harmony. It seemed fitting, Kassandra thought. Both Sparta and Athens had been ravaged by this war. Neither side had gained anything but an army of widows and orphans. She spent a moon in Athens, sitting by the graves of Phoibe and Perikles in silence before she set sail again, for home.

They reached Sparta in early August. Barnabas walked alongside her horse as she ambled north from Trinisa port and into the Hollow Land on a bright, late-summer morning. So much time had passed since the disaster at Sphakteria, since she had last seen Mother. It felt like that moment approaching Naxos, years ago. Did Mother even know she was still alive? Was she still well? Her heart thumped as they entered the Spartan villages. Helots stopped what they were doing and stood, staring at her.

“The misthios,” one whispered.

“The heroine of Boeotia,” said another.

“Is it her? She who fought alongside Brasidas at Amphipolis and won the north?”

Spartiates too, braying and mock sparring in the gymnasium, looked over at her, falling silent. They beheld her with evil scowls, as always. Then, as one, they began to lift their spears. For a moment she thought they meant to come at her, but the spears continued to rise, one-handed, pointing skyward in salute. As one, they issued a cry that stirred her to her soul.

“Aroo!”

Beyond them, she saw the gates of her family home creak open. Myrrine slid out between the gap, one hand on her chest as if to control her heart. Kassandra slid from her horse, staggered over and fell into her mother’s arms.

They sat up most nights around the hearth, drinking well-watered wine, eating olives and barley cake. It took many nights to explain it all: the disaster at Sphakteria, the long, maddening moons in the Athenian jail and the day when it had all changed. Freedom, the play, and then the journey north to Amphipolis.

“News of what happened there reached these parts last moon,” Myrrine said, supping her wine. “They talked of a great number of deaths, but a glorious victory. About the fall of Brasidas.”

“He was an example to us all,” said Kassandra. “The ephors granted him scraps to work with, and he saved the north from Kleon. I hear they plan to erect a cenotaph for him, near the Tomb of Leonidas. Fitting company.”

“I wept when I heard of his passing. But then I heard people talking of another who was present at the battle—a she-mercenary. At once I felt great hope in my heart that somehow, somehow , it was you. Since that moment I sent you to Sphakteria, I had not heard a thing—just tales of blackened corpses on that burned island. But I never allowed myself to truly believe it was you at Amphipolis. At times, I prayed it was not… for they said Deimos was there too.”

A stone rose in Kassandra’s throat. “He was.”

Myrrine slowly looked up from the fire, her face half-lit, eyes glassy. “Aye, and so the whispers that it was he who killed Brasidas must be true also.”

“You… you asked me to bring him home,” Kassandra whispered. “I could not.”

Myrrine seemed to shut down then, her gaze returning to the fire, staring, lost.