Fledgling

Kassandra learned the enormity of the price on her head as soon as she reached the outskirts of Sami, by the way the townspeople dropped their eyes as she passed, their whispers carrying the words "Cyclops" and "coin" and "dead" across the salty air. That the Cyclops searched for her was nothing new. What was new was the bounty he'd sponsored, backed by cold, hard drachmae—enough to buy a family passage off the island. Enough to start a new life. After twenty years in Kephallonia, Kassandra knew everyone in Sami by name, and they knew hers. But the Kephallonian Way was to look out for yourself first. Old friends could easily become new dangers.

She tied Phobos's halter to a picket line near the market, mildly surprised that her hands were steady as she worked the rope into a knot. Markos's constant scheming had brought them constant trouble; trouble she'd always been able to get them out of thanks to her intimidating presence and the occasional application of fists. But there was a big difference between punching thugs and crossing blades with a real mercenary, especially the kind that would go after a bounty as sizeable as the one on her head right now. The churn in her guts was getting harder to ignore. She swallowed hard and patted Phobos's neck, feeling solid muscle under her palm. Maybe he'd lend her some of his strength while she figured out what the Hades she was going to do now.

The market was bustling as always, with the shouts of merchants and children hanging in the air and a menagerie of animals pecking and scratching in the salt-crusted dust. It was only a short walk to the docks, and that's where she'd start asking questions. Some mercenary had to have picked up her contract by now, and she needed to know who she was up against. Trade goods weren't the only things unloaded from ships.

It was impossible to ignore the hush that followed her. Voices lowered. And was she imagining those mothers pulling their children close and whispering in their ears? "Don't end up like poor Kassandra, children. Killed by a real misthios."

She needed her information quick, and then to get herself gone, away from Sami where she could plan her next moves. She snagged the shipbuilder's boy by his tunic as he scurried past and got him talking by flashing a coin. Yes, a ship had arrived yesterday with passengers. Yes, a bunch of them were armed, but they mostly stuck close to one really rich guy who wore blue robes. Except for the mercenary. He kept to himself.

"A mercenary, eh?"

The boy nodded. "He's not as big as you, but the sailors said he had fists made of stone and that he could knock a bull out with one punch."

Kassandra flipped the drachma into his palm, and she sat back on her haunches and watched him disappear into the bustle of the dockyard. She knew of only one man who matched the sailors' description, and that was Talos the Stone Fist. He'd done jobs in Kephallonia before, always for the Cyclops, who was the only one on the island with enough drachmae to pay a misthios's rates. Kassandra had never crossed paths with him, but she knew he was old for a mercenary. Not that that mattered much—any steps he'd lost to age were made up for by experience. His years had been spent fighting real battles for real coin, not roughing up thugs and knocking over merchants' pots for pitiful handfuls of drachmae. The thought of it sent a chill down the back of her neck. Talos could still be in Sami. He could still be in the dockyard. He could be watching her right now.

She resisted the urge to wrap her hand around the handle of her sword. Instead, she rose to her feet and strode up the path back to the market, setting her shoulders and playing up the swagger, trying to project a confidence she didn't really feel to the eyes she knew were following her.

Phobos saw right through it, of course, and he snorted softly into her hair and nudged his muzzle into her chest as she untied him and gathered up the reins. "It's all right, boy," she said. "We're not in trouble yet."

She set out towards Pali. If Talos wanted to find her, she'd make him look in the shadowed forests of the Cursed Valley. And she wasn't planning to hide, for she had far too many tasks yet to be done: Drucilla the bowyer still had a missing shipment of lumber that needed finding. And the temple priestess still needed Kassandra to retrieve that missing spear. And the Cyclops himself had to be dealt with once and for all...

She'd handle them one thing at a time.

❧

At the lumberyard, it didn't take Kassandra long to figure out that Drucilla's wayward shipment had been looted by bandits, and clumsy ones at that. They'd left fragments of wood behind, and deep gouges raked the forest duff into a trail that pointed straight to a nearby shipyard as brightly as one of Apollo's arrows.

She watched the bandits from a hidden perch on a rocky escarpment overlooking the dock, while Ikaros circled high overhead and the sun sank to meet the water at the horizon's edge. There were seven bandits by her count: four tasked with moving the lumber closer to the dock, and three to keep watch. As she watched them struggle with their misbegotten goods, dusk smeared the sky orange and purple, and in due time, Helios's disappearing chariot lit a sunpath over the water as the shadows darkened a trail down to the docks.

The first bandit was too easy; he wasn't even looking in the right direction, instead distracted by one of the many chickens roaming about. She approached him from behind and wrapped one arm around his neck while covering his mouth with her other hand, pulling her forearm tight against the side of his throat until his body went limp beneath her.

The next four were grouped together, and she took the first two by bashing their heads against each other like rotten melons. Another bandit went down with a palm strike to the forehead, but she couldn't get to the last before he'd turned tail with a shout. Torches were lit and the remaining bandits went into full alert, but there were only three of them now and those were the kind of odds that she liked.

She drew her sword and her broken spear and faced the nearest bandit as he attacked in a headlong rush, blindly, stupidly, giving up the numbers advantage in his panicked charge. Three against one was a challenge. One against one made her smile, and she swept his blade aside with the point of her spear and slammed the pommel of her sword into his nose as hard as her strength would let her. He dropped to the ground with a howl and a spray of blood.

The last two bandits were a tall woman and a lanky man. The man wore quilted leather and was armed with a cudgel, but the woman wore a full breastplate and tassets and wielded a sharp-looking gladius. Better gear came with power. This woman was probably the captain of this operation; the man her second-in-command.

They attacked in tandem, but they were only two against one and Kassandra turned the cudgel aside with her spear and the gladius with her sword. The edge of the gladius glinted in the torchlight and she used its flash to keep track of the captain's location as the three of them circled around each other. The chickens and goats in the yard had reached a state of full panic and were milling about the edges of the torchlight, raising an ungodly ruckus of noise and movement between the shadows. Kassandra kept her feet balanced and moving, pivoting to keep both bandits in front of her. Then the man leapt toward her and swung his cudgel at her head wildly, more as a distraction than anything else, and she dropped low and took out his knee with a sweeping kick before rolling out of the path of the captain's gladius.

Broken knee was crawling out of the edge of her vision and she let him go in order to focus on the captain, who was turning out to be more than just competent with a sword, and thus more skilled than most anyone Kassandra had ever fought on this backwater of an island.

Metal struck metal as they tested each other's defenses, always circling, always moving. Neither had the advantage of reach, and Kassandra was quickly running out of tricks to try that could break an opponent's guard. She'd have to keep up her defense and outlast the other woman. Far more interesting than knocking out thugs and breaking pots.

The muscles in Kassandra's shoulders warmed with the exertion of swinging two blades, and her blood felt hot and rich. She felt herself smile, and noted how it made her opponent twitch in alarm. Good. The captain's attacks began to falter, and Kassandra sensed opportunity. The gladius swung towards her on a downstroke, and she parried the blow with ease, only realizing a moment too late that the attack had been a ruse, as the captain suddenly used the parry's momentum to pivot the direction of her blade. Kassandra leapt backwards, felt a sear across her belly and anger in her blood as she parried the next two strikes in quick succession. She caught the next attack with the edge of her sword, then relaxed just enough to bring her opponent in closer while drawing her slightly off balance. It was all the opening Kassandra needed to break through the captain's guard and drive the spear so deep into her belly that the blade disappeared entirely.

Then Kassandra felt it: the liquid thrill that ran down her spine every time she killed someone with the spear, a spark of satisfaction that tinted the edges of her vision red. It lasted as long as it took for her to pull the spear free of the bandit captain's belly, and then all that remained was a queasy feeling and the coppery smell of blood all over her hands.

She heard the sound of clapping, then. Loud and booming, it cracked in counterpoint to the bandit captain's wet gasps as she lay dying at Kassandra's feet.

The source of the clapping was a bearded, broad-shouldered man in a full set of armor, golden greaves and all. "That was a good show, girl," he said, drawing his sword and taking a step towards her.

Golden greaves, an iron sword, and a breastplate that cost more drachmae than Kassandra had ever earned working for Markos. Gear fit for a successful mercenary. This had to be Talos the Stone Fist.

"The people in Sami said I could find you by following the sound of the nearest fight. They weren't wrong. And your bounty will keep me in wine and whores for months."

Kassandra tightened her grip on the spear and turned to face him. Her right side stung and her chiton was cut and wet with blood. She wore no armor and had little but a broken spear and a cheap bronze sword. So she did what anyone with half a basket of sense would do when faced with a far more powerful opponent.

She ran.

❧

Talos might have had the upper hand in experience and equipment, but Kassandra had roamed this part of Kephallonia since she was a girl. She knew the crags and hollows of the Cursed Valley, and Artemis smiled upon her from behind a sliver of moon. As she sprinted on forest paths she didn't need light to find, she could near Talos crashing through the forest underbrush behind her. But then she heard Ikaros's hunting cry and a shouted curse, and then the crashing noises veered away and began to fade, and she kept running and climbing until she reached a sheltered grotto in a ravine formed by rock walls and falling water.

She knelt by the shadow-dark pools, took a deep breath, and listened hard over the sound of her heart pounding. Nothing but the musical trickle of water and the occasional flap of a great pair of wings circling somewhere overhead. She sent a whisper of thanks to Ikaros, and plunged her arms into icy water up to her elbows.

The darkness within the pooled water hid the blood that sloughed off her hands and forearms, and kept her from being completely sure she had washed it all away, if that was even possible. An eternity of scrubbing would be as futile as moving Sisyphos's boulder.

With a sigh, she unbuckled her swordbelt and untied the cord that held her chiton in place, casting it aside before stripping the garment up and over her head. The cut across her belly was clean and shallow, thank the gods, and only a handspan wide. If she could get it to stop bleeding, she might even avoid a visit to the physician.

She needed rest and food, and to mend her chiton, and sharpen the new gouges out of the edges of her blades, and then after that she needed to figure out how to kill Talos the Stone Fist without getting killed first.

Rest now. Stop bleeding. Wait till sunrise. Her hunter would be found in the light.

❧

For all his boasting about how easy Kassandra was to find, Talos wasn't hard to track down himself, and thus avoid, in the days after their encounter at the shipyard. Kassandra patched up her gear, let her wound get a good start at healing, and kept one step ahead of Talos by constantly staying on the move.

The Stone Fist proved to be a less than cunning hunter, preferring to stick to a patrol of sorts between Sami, Markos's vineyard, and her home to the south. His predictability extended to the evenings, where he spent his time drinking wine in a kapeleion near the Temple of Zeus before retiring to a rented room down by the docks.

She formed a plan. She'd climb the roof of the Temple of Zeus, and would wait until after the priestesses went home and the temple torches burned down low. Let Talos wander by after a night of wine and song. She'd put an arrow straight into his skull.

The highest roof of the temple was crowned with large decorative akroteria at both ends, which made for perfect cover later that night as she nocked an arrow and aimed at her target below. She inhaled, focused on the squeeze and thump of her own heartbeat, and when her hands reached the steady point between beats she let the arrow fly. The silvery bolt flew true, threading the needle of Talos's eye socket with a sodden thud.

But to her horror, the bastard didn't die.

"Kassandra!" he bellowed.

"That arrow suits you," she shouted from behind the akroterion. Let its heavy stone protect her while she gathered her wits and figured out a new plan.

"Come down here and face me, you daughter of a whore," he shouted. He was closer now, almost to the base of the temple's columns.

Her hands squeezed her bow until the wood began to creak. Her eyes narrowed, and she tossed her bow aside and stood up to full height. "Let me introduce you to Hades," she said, drawing both of her blades and beckoning him to join her.

She heard Talos climbing up the column to the first level of the roof, and once he clambered upon it, she took a step back, inviting him up to the second level where she stood. The arrow's fletching protruded from his eye socket grotesquely. She had no idea how he was still alive, much less able to climb to the roof of a temple. Perhaps Zeus was displeased at her choice of a venue.

To Hades with Zeus, and to Hades with Talos. Her anger was flowing now, crackling along her veins like golden sparks from a smith's hammer.

Talos suddenly leapt up to meet her, and at that moment her rage took over. She reared back and kicked him square in the chest with so much force that he flew off the roof entirely, his cry of surprise following him down over the edge.

She scrambled across the roof and peered down the side of the temple. Talos's body lay in a broken heap on the stones far below. Lights began to glow from torches being lit in the homes nearby. There wasn't much time if she wanted to claim Talos's purse—and his gear. She'd look damn good in a set of golden greaves...

❧

Kassandra set the heavy bundle down on her bed. She raised her arms and stretched as much as she could without worrying the healing cut at her belly. Her muscles ached with the remnants of last night's rage, but she grinned with satisfaction and more than a little wonder. Where in Tartaros had that kick come from? She'd certainly never done it before, but there's no way she'd forget how to do it now. Another arrow for her quiver of tricks.

She bent down and unwrapped the bundle, then laid its contents out across the rough woolen blanket that covered her bed. A full chestplate. Leather tassets. A set of bracers and greaves. And a fresh chiton made of fine white linen to wear underneath it all, the spoils she'd earned by defeating Talos the Stone Fist.

And it fit perfectly too, every piece of it, as she found after she put it all on and adjusted the various straps and buckles. She felt huge and powerful. She felt like a real—

"Misthios," Phoibe whispered from behind her.

Kassandra turned and smiled. "Little sneak," she said, then spread her arms. "How do I look?"

Phoibe's eyes were wide. "Like a hero sent by Zeus."

So she looked good enough to awe a child. Kassandra had to laugh in amusement at that. "Well, this hero is hungry. What say you and I run up to Markos's vineyard and rustle up something to eat?" She took Phoibe's hand in her own, and together they walked out of the hovel and up the path to Mount Ainos, and it was already shaping up to be a very fine day.

Continue to "The Price of Greatness"...