Chapter Text
In the summer of the 87th Olympiad, Brasidas of Sparta comes home from a long, cold campaign in Attika, sagging with the weight of secrets hoarded and lives taken in service of his kings.
The work is good, and it suits him. He is helping to end a costly war, to preserve his ancient customs and protect the lives and wealth 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 has 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 pain is not a prize, where the connections between people are rich and precious and preferable to the glory of a good death. Now, he needs to be inoculated back into Sparta slowly, with wine and laughter - not with the skulls of infants at the foot of Taygetos, the darting shadows of krypteia opening the throats of rebellious slaves, the wet warbling 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 inoffensively enough. Brasidas drinks with friends he hasn’t seen in seasons, and watches the footraces, and threads flowers into 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 Makedonian, inviting a scandalous delight from his companions). And the feel of the chiton, tied carelessly 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. A slow reshaping, like being poured hot and brittle into a blacksmith's mold - that painful retaking of a shape that seems to not fit as well as it once did. It has happened every summer, every campaign, since Brasidas was old enough to steal secrets for his country.
At sundown on the second day of the festival, a ghost of Sparta’s past comes back from the dead.
---
It has 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 small dramas of elites while surrounded by the stink of sweat and hard work and weakness being scrubbed away, the web of scandal had a way of gripping you tight and drawing you in.
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. They could not bear the oracle's sentence.
The line is ended. The blood of the warrior king will fade into obscurity.
Only it hasn’t. When Myrrine appears at the palace of the kings without warning or fanfare, 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.
When she sees him, Kassandra’s measured frown breaks into a great beaming smile.
“Brasidas!” she calls. “Brasidas, do you remember me?”
The question is so absurd that he almost laughs in her face.