1st Week of July, 1460
If you had told Stathis that, in the space of half a year, he would go from a no-name man-at-arms to a decorated captain, he would not have believed you.
He would not have bet against it either, but only because Stathis was not a gambling man. He never would have thought anything so foolishly unlikely might come to pass.
Yet now, when he walked through Suyren’s castle, men lowered their gazes and stood a little straighter. They listened when he spoke, and not because he raised his voice, something he was not wont to do anyhow.
In a sense, it was everything he had ever wanted. Recognition for work carried out properly. A quiet proof that discipline, patience, and steady effort were not invisible things after all.
That only made him lean harder into the habits that had brought him here.
He was out of his room at first bell, heavy boots joining the cacophony of steps from passing servants, now used to the strict routine imposed in Suyren, unlike the men he was now charged with.
By the time the first pale light began touching the upper stones of the castle, Stathis stood alone in the open courtyard, listening to the early stirrings of the place. Chickens scratched near the kitchens, and roosters were beginning their song.
The new recruits came in bleary-eyed and slow, some stretching their arms, others rubbing sleep from their faces as though the day had ambushed them.
Stathis fixed them with a level stare and they straightened.
Nothing more needed to be said. Their chief officer was already gathered in the courtyard before them. They were late. He had told them the time of day they were to be assembled, and they had missed it. Soon enough, they would learn what that meant.
“From today forward you will be running the length of the castle town every morning,” he said when most of the group had arrived.
The hushed conversations died at once. He could have snapped at them for whispering, but he allowed such things so long as the men stood attentive and kept their ears open. A man did not need to be crushed to be taught obedience. That was a crude way of doing things in Stathis’s mind. A man needed space to breathe.
Example was the better teacher. He arrived early, so in time they would arrive early. He stood straight and quiet, so in time they would learn to do the same. And for those who were slower to learn, there were other lessons.
“Moving forward, if even one of you is late,” he continued, “the run will be to the riverbed and back.”
A heavy silence settled over the group.
If they expected to be beaten into motion, they were mistaken. Stathis turned, climbed onto his horse, and guided the animal toward the gate at an easy trot. The sergeants under him were the ones who barked the recruits into motion, yelling for them to follow and keep pace.
Stathis did not need to shout.
He would do, and the rest would follow.
…
By the time they returned, the men looked suitably worn down. Sweat darkened their tunics, and more than a few were breathing hard enough to shame themselves. Still, it spoke well of the selection that only a handful looked truly spent. They had taken care to choose the fittest and most seasoned men they could draw from the outlying villages.
The thinking was that this first batch was only half strength, and the situation in the north was still unsettled, so Suyren needed the most competent fighting force it could scrape together.
That did not make them much better than rabble, but less terrible was better than nothing.
“Alright,” he called, lifting one hand to gather their attention. “Tend to your feet, then begin your warm-down stretches.”
The men obeyed with the awkward care of those still unused to military habits. Some sat heavily on the packed earth and pulled off their shoes, wincing as air touched raw skin, examining their soles with worried frowns. The older sergeants moved among them, showing them how to clean the dirt away and how to lance the worst swelling with heated needles.
Stathis watched in silence, letting the now familiar lesson settle for men who had never learnt it.
Stathis noticed a few of the sergeants huffing alongside their charges, though they were significantly better conditioned than the men they led. Having them join the exercises was part of his thinking. Better that the habit of leading by example passed downward, from him to the sergeants, and from the sergeants to the men.
It was also a test. The Commander had charged him with selecting proper leaders from among the brutes they had gathered, and in some cases the difference was as clear as daylight.
“I keep tellin’ ya, you’re supposed ta dig into your hips, damn fools,” Kratos barked.
Stathis turned his gaze toward the loud-mouthed boy and saw him physically shoving the men of his ten-man squad into position, grabbing shoulders and knees as if he were arranging sacks of grain. The recruits looked more confused than corrected, flinching whenever his hands came down too hard.
Stathis held back a sigh.
He would have to speak with the Commander about him. The boy was not suited for command. He had a strong voice and a mean stare, but that was not the same as leadership. Any fool could yell louder than the men around him.
“That’s enough,” Stathis called, giving the signal with one hand. “Get your meal.”
The men did not need to be told twice. They moved eagerly toward the steaming cauldrons set out in the open courtyard, their earlier weariness forgotten at the smell of hot broth. Wooden bowls were passed down the line, and the castle servants ladled out thick portions beneath Stathis’s watch.
He saw contented smiles begin to form among the men as they ate.
It was no wonder. In the midst of a possible famine, the Commander had them eating hearty broth with even a small taste of meat in it. That alone made the meal feel generous, even if most of it was grain with whatever lentils, peas, and onions could be spared. It reminded Stathis of the regimen the Commander had used for his first militia, only now scaled up for the castle and town.
Scraps and leftover meat from the castle feasts went into the pot, along with bones and offal from Suyren’s animal farms. It was much like the old arrangement with the pigstead, except broadened to include all the major farms around town. Nothing that could feed a man was allowed to go to waste.
To offset the slight splurge on the stews served to the militia and castle servants, the castle feasts had become famously temperate affairs. The exotic meats and strange dishes favoured by the late Adanis were gone, replaced with local legumes, dark bread, and plain meat barely better than what commoners themselves ate. The leftovers now fit neatly into the food given to the militia, which Stathis suspected had been the point from the start.
The Commander was trying to make use of every scrap of resource available to him. Still, none of it would have been possible had the food relief from the capital not arrived. It was more than grain. There had been lentils, peas, and other seeds as well, some of which the Ccommander had given out to the townspeople with orders to expand their household gardens. Any household that produced above a set amount of legumes would receive a small reduction in the hearth tax.
When the bowls were emptied and the men began lingering too comfortably, Stathis raised his voice again.
“That’s enough. Form up.”
The scraping of spoons stopped. Men swallowed their last mouthfuls and hurried back into order.
“Split into groups. New week, new rotation.”
The recruits sorted themselves into their assigned work details, some more cleanly than others. The training regiment was already a very different thing from what it had been under the Nomikos, and had been extensively detailed out by a document the Commander had handed out.
Stathis, like most of the other captains, couldn’t read, but the Commander had explained it to him in detail in person so he was sufficiently caught up. It just meant he had to store it up in his head, and not in any paperwork.
Stathis remained with the half kept inside the castle. They were led through basic marching formations, the tight quarters of the courtyard making the manoeuvres more difficult, which was exactly the point. Men bumped shoulders, corrected lines, and learned to listen where there was little room to fix a mistake. This was the first building block of discipline, and the skill the Commander most wanted hammered into them. If a man could listen to orders and stand where he was told, he was already of some use on a battlefield. Without that much, he was only fodder ready to rout.
After a time, Stathis rode out past the castle, where several of the other groups had been set to what was quickly becoming a time-honoured tradition of the Suyren militia - City building.
“How are they coming along?” Stathis asked, easing his horse beside Charilaos, who was surveying a group of peasants redaubing one of the older houses in Suyren’s outlying district.
“Nearly as hopeless as the first batch under the Commander had been,” Charilaos snorted, though there was no real malice in it. “They’ll learn soon enough. Babis will straighten them out.”
Charilaos nodded toward the old man presently scolding a group of recruits for laying thatch as though they were trying to invite rain into the house rather than keep it out. Babis had both hands on thin hips, his back bent crooked but his voice still strong enough to harry the militia farmhands.
Babis was one of a handful of townsfolk the Commander had taken into semi-employment to oversee the reconstruction efforts. He was no renowned builder, but he knew the small tricks of raising something near to stout from thatch, mud, reeds, and stubbornness by the simple virtue of having lived long enough.
Stathis understood the Commander’s thinking. It kept older, poorer folk in Suyren fed without calling it charity, and it passed useful skills into the hands of the recruits. A man who could mend a roof, ditch a road, and keep his feet sound was just as useful as one who could only hold a spear, and these were things that would be of use when they came back. Knowledge the small hamlets and villages they came from might not have.
“Hopefully they’ll straighten out as much as these roads need to be,” Stathis deadpanned.
“I promise you, when I’m done with them, the roads will be so unswerving a drunk man could stumble through them without veering off path, if only because he fell into the ditches.” Charilaos hacked out a laugh and Stathis had to fight to keep his mouth from quirking up.
It wouldn’t do to show humor before the men.
Another group of militia worked farther down, carving rough ditches alongside a road that was being beaten firm with wooden rammers. The men lifted and dropped the heavy blocks in uneven rhythm, thudding dry earth flat one punishing stroke at a time. Along the more troublesome stretches, where rainwater liked to sit and turn the road into sucking mud, they laid fascines and reeds into the soil before tamping it down again. The road itself was being raised a foot above the ground and shaped with a slight slope from the centre toward the ditches, so water would run off instead of gathering.
The Commander was, as usual, using the militia as common labourers, changing Suyren one day at a time while hoping the work hammered discipline into the men along the way.
It left the work of patrolling the countryside to the few professional men-at-arms they had, and they were too few to do it properly. Suyren needed a ready corps of recruits to help keep order along the north, but Stathis knew better than to rush training merely because of need. A green man sent too early into trouble could make more danger than he stopped.
After leaving Charilaos to his work, Stathis rode toward the outer edge of Suyren, where the last group of recruits had been sent to labour on the new pigstead. The road they were building stretched toward the large latrine dug outside the town, a broad, unpleasant pit with timber bracing and a cart path laid beside it. The Commander wanted the daily collection and transport of waste made as painless as such work could be, and the new farms had been placed nearby for that express purpose.
The smell was already poor, though not as foul as Stathis had feared. Fresh earth, trampled straw and what had to be pig dung mingled in the air. Men worked with cloth tied over their noses, hauling posts into place while others shaped the beginnings of a fenced yard. Behind them, the frame of a wooden structure had begun to rise, broad and sturdy. It was no small pen scraped together at the edge of town, but a proper farmstead, with room to grow.
The Commander stood in deep conversation with the pig farmer, both of them looking over a rough stretch of marked ground.
“Commander,” Stathis said, drawing up beside them and saluting.
“At ease,” the Commander answered. “I was just checking in with Zois about the progress of the farm.”
“I hope it is up to standards,” Stathis said. “I was coming to inspect the progress myself.”
That had become much of his day now, riding from one task to another, catching problems before they grew teeth and dealing with those that already had. It was not glorious work, but it was necessary, and necessary work suited him well enough.
“It is going along nicely, no need to worry,” the Commander said. “Though I want you to make certain there is a separate space for bedding and the yard the animals stay in during the day. I do not want Zois, or my men, trampling through fouled hay whenever the waste needs clearing.”
Zois looked plainly relieved by that.
“Of course, sir,” Stathis said with another salute. He was fairly certain that was not the reason for the separation at all, but he had long since stopped trying to guess the full breadth of the Commander’s methods. It was hard enough to carry them out.
“Thank you for this opportunity, lord,” Zois said, bowing with awkward earnestness. “When do you think we will be able to move in?”
He had come around to the idea of leaving his old plot easily enough once he saw the size of the farm being raised for him. Stathis could not blame him. The place would allow for proper expansion, and already looked sturdier than the house he was leaving behind. If Stathis had to guess, it was probably due to the eccentric Master Woodcarver the Commander had gotten a hold of for the project.
The Commander quirked an eyebrow at Stathis, giving him his cue.
“Two weeks at the most,” Stathis promised, choosing a longer time than he thought the work would truly take.
He made a point of delivering what he said he would deliver. It was better to promise less and finish early than to speak too boldly and leave men waiting.
Zois bowed again, deeper this time, and withdrew toward the rising frame of the farmstead.
The Commander watched the fledgling farm with clear satisfaction in his eyes.
“This will change much, Stathis,” the Commander said. There was a dangerous smile on his face, “mark my words.”
“How so?” Stathis asked.
He tried to keep the doubt from his voice, but he had a hard time believing animal dung could be quite so valuable. The Commander spoke of it as if they were standing beside a silver mine.
“Animal waste is just as valuable as the human waste we are collecting, perhaps more so in some respects,” the Commander said. “Animals produce it in greater amounts for less cost, and their diet makes it well suited to feeding the soil once properly handled.”
His lord was filled with the strangest ideas Stathis had ever heard from a man, let alone a noble. Yet those ideas had carried them this far, and Stathis had risen higher under them than he would have ever imagined. So he nodded and listened.
“Our waste collection scheme has another important aspect,” the Commander continued. He had a habit of slipping into explanations once a subject caught hold of him. “It will inevitably make large-scale animal production more profitable than keeping animals in every household yard. Smaller household pens will gradually fade, as families sell their pigs and goats to larger farms. Production will become centralized.”
“And that is good?” Stathis asked, frowning.
He knew enough of common life to understand what a pig or a few hens could mean for a household. They were small safeguards against hunger, and small things mattered most when times grew hard.
“Because it makes husbandry more efficient. Larger farms are better placed to use the waste, feed, and labour efficiently,” the Commander said, nodding as if the matter were plain.“And it removes a large source of disease from the population centre.”
Then he noticed Stathis’s unease and softened his tone a little. “I plan to place incentives for townsfolk to turn the spaces they once used for animal pens into vegetable gardens instead, so they will not be worse off in the long run.”
“Besides,” the Commander added, turning his gaze toward the horizon, “by the time the small farms begin to die out, we will have a surplus of food in the Principality.”
He said it with such certainty that Stathis found himself wishing, not for the first time, that he could see what the Commander saw. Just one glimpse would have been enough. One look beyond the danger, hunger, and unfinished roads. One sight of the thing waiting past the horizon.
To know what it was like to be touched by God.
Because Stathis was sure the Commander was.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“You missed a spot. Scrub harder, girl.”
Miss Dina’s high-pitched voice was a constant, grating pressure against Cassandra’s ears.
“Do I need to tell you everything? Can you not spot filth when it is right before your eyes?” The woman clicked her tongue in a sharp tick. “One would think you had never looked in a mirror.”
The barrage of insults and denigration had never truly stopped, no matter how often Miss Dina was chastised for it. To her credit, the other students who had become passable at their duties no longer suffered the same tyranny. They were corrected, scolded, but no longer abused.
Cassandra had become the exception, and the girls delighted in it.
Their light, lilting chuckles had become another unwelcome presence in her days, always hovering at her back, waiting for the next mistake. In the low circles of scullery maids and cleaning girls, feminine cruelty was much the same as it had been in high ballrooms. The hands were redder, the dresses plainer, but the shape was familiar.
Perhaps common women and noble ones were not as different as she had once believed.
Over the past weeks, as the servants had finally been judged to possess some basic level of competence in all different tasks, they had been divided according to temperament and whatever talent the head staff believed they showed. Some were sent toward kitchens, others to laundry, others to serving rooms, and each group now answered to the head servant responsible for that particular duty.
It was Miss Dina’s charge to ensure the tidiness of the castle and the stern headmistress oversaw the poor unfortunates beneath her with implacable fastidiousness. Cassandra could understand why she had been trusted with the work; she had never seen the castle so spotless in all her years living within it.
Unlike nearly every servant who had been allowed to remain in the castle, Cassandra still had not been assigned to any single team. She was too slow-footed for courier work, too clumsy to be trusted with knives in the kitchen, and the soap and lye of laundering made her skin swell red and angry until the smell itself left her light-headed. Sweeping, the supposedly easiest of all tasks, became the hardest whenever Miss Dina stood watch over it.
“I am sorry, Miss Dina,” Cassandra said, lowering her head. A lock of Cassandra’s hair slipped from beneath her head covering and clung damply to her cheek, but she did not dare reach up to fix it while Miss Dina watched.
She had become very good at apologizing. It was one of the few things she had found that gave Miss Dina any kind of pause, however brief.
Was this how servants had felt when they bowed before her father on these very stones? Cassandra had never once considered the terror that might live behind such a gesture.
But surely that could not be right. Her father had not been some petty tyrant like this old woman. He had not delighted in catching people at their weakest. He was nothing like her at all.
“It is as if you never learn, child,” Miss Dina said, heaving a sigh so dramatic it seemed meant for an audience. “At least you do not blister and drop your broom at the slightest touch anymore.”
She peered down at Cassandra, who was kneeling over a particularly stubborn stain in the stone, and seemed to come to some private conclusion. Cassandra was sure she looked haggard and beaten, defeated by something as simple as spilled wine ground into old flooring.
“Take a break, Carissa.” Even the woman’s kinder gestures seemed like a stern, authoritarian order. “Aella, take over for her.”
A small buzz of a girl stepped forward with all the stiff pride her slight body allowed. She practically shouldered Cassandra aside.
“Move,” Aella declared, her eyes bright and mean.
Cassandra gladly allowed it, leaving as soon as she could.
She drifted through the castle as if only half alive. After her failed escape, she had come to accept there was no easy way out of this prison. That was what the castle had become to her, one that seemed built to wear her down day after day.
That thought touched her less than it once would have.
She brought herself out of her room each day, not through some hard-earned determination to make the most of her circumstances, but because her feet moved and her body followed. Like they did now, carrying her through quiet passages toward the loggia.
The greenery there was vibrant, almost choking despite the summer heat, sheltered beneath the shade of summer vines. The air was cooler under them, damp with the smell of soil and crushed stems. For a moment, Cassandra could almost imagine the rest of the castle falling away behind her.
But then she saw the garden was choking.
Weeds had crept up everywhere, crowding the paths, tangling around the stems of flowers, pushing through the beds her mother had once kept with such gentle care. The Captain might have planted a suitable host of herbs and blooms to keep the place alive, but its beauty was fading beneath unwanted green. Slowly withering beneath neglect.
Cassandra reached through the leaves, brushing her fingers over them as if touch might wake something in her. She wanted to feel grief, anger, longing, anything strong enough to prove that some part of her had not gone numb. Even the sight of her mother’s garden dying did not stir what it should have.
Her hand caught on a bristling offshoot.
Pain stung sharp across her fingers, and Cassandra looked down.
Her hands were a ruined mess of scratches, cracked skin, and hardening calluses. The soft, ladylike fingers she remembered had been scraped raw by stone, reddened in patches from soap, and toughened in places like worn leather. For a moment she simply stared at them, unable to decide whether they belonged to her or to someone else entirely.
They were as hideous as her life had become.
The thought broke through the dull surface of her mind and struck something tender beneath it. It hurt, and because it hurt, Cassandra clung to it.
She turned on the weed that had hurt her with sudden vengeance, seizing the bristling stem in both hands, and tore it out by the roots. Dirt came with it in a clotted fistful. A vindictive little pleasure rose in her chest at removing the cruel, ugly thing from her mother’s garden, from the one place that was meant to be hers.
So she chased the feeling.
She moved through the garden with frantic purpose, circling around hale flowers and comely bushes to strike at the weeds hidden among them. Her knees browned from kneeling in the soil. Her hands stung as prickly stems scratched and bit into her already ruined skin, but she hardly cared. Each small hurt only fueled the anger, feeding it where numbness had been.
She kept attacking the intruders as if they were personal enemies. Every time a thorn pricked blood from her fingers, grey eyes flashed in her mind, and she tore harder.
It made no sense. She was sure she looked half-mad to anyone who might glance into the garden. Yet to Cassandra it felt, for a little while, as though she was hurting fate in return, if only a little.
By the time her strength failed, one side of the garden looked as though some weed-hunting beast had trampled through it. Torn stalks lay strewn across the paths. Clods of earth marked where roots had come free too violently.
Then the anger went out of her.
It left as suddenly as it had come, draining away and leaving behind a hollow place she could not fill again. The urge to give up rose through that emptiness, heavy and almost gentle in its certainty. Cassandra sank back onto her heels amid the wreckage she had made and stared at her filthy hands.
Why had God condemned her to such a fate?
She joined her hands together despite the dirt and scratches, trying to force some answer out of the silence.
“Please,” she whispered, her voice thin. “Show me something, Lord. Anything about what I am meant to do now. Please.”
Nothing answered her. No sudden warmth passed through her chest to tell her she had been heard.
She sat in the half-ruined garden and lowered her head. “Just some sort of sign that I should not end it all,” she breathed. “That this life is still worth living.”
“God will not show you that,” an aged voice said behind her.
Cassandra turned so sharply she nearly fell sideways into the dirt.
Demetrios stood at the edge of the garden, the Captain’s old henchman watching her quietly.
“Because it is something He trusts you will find yourself,” he said.
He had the posture of some aged philosopher, hands folded calmly before him, his lined face softened by the shade. The sight upset Cassandra fiercely. As if he were not a common servant to a villain. As if he had any right to speak gently in this place.
“What would you know about that?” she demanded.
Demetrios did not flinch. “I too have thought about letting go.”
The admission gave Cassandra pause. Shame followed quickly behind. Her eyes dropped toward the ground as it finally caught up to her that someone had heard her impious thoughts.
“Our faith in something better wavers during the darkest times,” Demetrios moved slowly through the messy garden and sat beside her. He did not seem to mind the dirt staining his robe or the torn weeds scattered around them. “It is nothing to be ashamed of.”
That one of her enemies should comfort her made something twist unpleasantly inside Cassandra. It reminded her of Stefanos during her failed escape… why could they not simply leave her alone?
“You have taken everything from me,” she whispered, her voice tight with regret at not fleeing with her family when she had the chance. Regret at not tying up her brother and dragging him away by force if that was what it took. “What would you know of shame?”
“I know it is something you lose with age,” the old man answered, a faint trace of mirth touching his voice, entirely unprovoked by her accusation. Cassandra wanted to strike him for sounding so mild. “What you gain instead is perspective, and the knowledge that your trials are not so different from another person’s, even when the circumstances never look the same.”
A sudden gust moved through the garden, stirring his fraying hair. Demetrios tilted his head toward the sky.
“To climb out of despair,” he said quietly, “you need a raft to hold onto. That is what I believe.”
“I could not care less what you believe,” Cassandra spat, “or what advice you think you have to give.”
She would never have thought herself capable of carrying so much poison in her heart. Had her new life changed her? Or perhaps it had only scraped away the pretty layers and uncovered what had always been buried beneath.
“But I will give it anyway,” The old man fixed her with a kind gaze, and that kindness only made her angrier because it did not give her anything to rage against.
“Why?” Cassandra asked, not quite bitter this time, only confused.
“Unlike what you may think, I do not bear you ill will,” Demetrios said, and against everything Cassandra would have thought possible, she believed him. “Perhaps you can avoid making the same mistakes I did. That is the duty of those who have lived longer. Not to spread wisdom as if age made us enlightened, but to share experience. The mistakes we have made, and the price we paid for them.”
Cassandra saw then how his face looked lined and tired in the shifting garden light.
“And what were yours?” she asked, despite herself.
Demetrios lowered his eyes to the torn greenery around them. “I tried too hard to do everything myself. I convinced myself there was no way out, that I was alone, and that if I wished to endure, I had to rely on faith, fear, and most of all, anger.”
He gestured softly toward the flowerbed beside them, where Cassandra’s vengeance had left a wreck of bent stalks, broken stems, and exposed roots.
In her rush and fury, she had torn more than weeds from the earth.
“If you try to solve all your troubles with anger and fear,” Demetrios said, “you may find that you lose the very thing you were fighting to preserve.”
“Fear and anger are all I have left,” Cassandra countered, clenching her teeth hard.
“Because you choose them to be.”
“What would you have me do, then?” Cassandra rose to her feet in a sudden spray of earth. “There is nothing else I can rely on.”
“There is,” Demetrios said, “if you know where to look.”
He nodded toward the loggia.
Cassandra followed the motion and saw a boy stepping into the shaded walkway, his head turning as he searched the garden. Stefanos.
“You cannot be serious,” Cassandra said, and she could not help the scoff that escaped her, but it carried a weak bite when she remembered their conversation beneath her mother’s oak that night, and his confession.
“Stefanos is the reason you are alive,” Demetrios said.
Cassandra turned to him sharply.
“He made the Captain promise to protect you after the rebellion,” the old man continued. “He took up the charge of keeping you hidden. Whatever you think of him, or of us, that much is true.”
“You cannot expect me to thank you for what you have done to me,” Cassandra said, incredulous now, anger rushing back because it was easier to hold than shame.
“What have we done to you?” Demetrios asked.
Cassandra stared at him, caught flat-footed by the absurdity of the question.
“You murdered my father,” Cassandra began, in pure disbelief.
“Your father rebelled against the realm,” Demetrios replied. His voice did not rise to meet hers. “Theodorus did not make him do so. Greed and ambition did. He helped the Crown defeat the rebellion not because of some personal vendetta, but because he wanted to prevent a bloody coup from swallowing the Principality.”
“He sent my brother to Mangup to die,” Cassandra said, her voice climbing despite herself.
That Apostolos had somehow survived was likely the one thing that had kept her from committing to despair.
“Because Apostolos asked him to,” Demetrios said gently. “Theodorus was surrounded by Crown officers, with Zeno there besides. He could not have allowed a traitor of the Crown to simply walk away without making himself a rebel in turn. Even then, he petitioned the Megas Doux in secret to spare your brother’s life. Without that, Apostolos would be dead.” Cassandra reeled from the revelation. Was it true?
“He tricked my family from the start,” Cassandra said, trying to shut out the terrible sense in his words. “Fooled us to gain our trust.”
“He was sent as a spy from the beginning, yes,” Demetrios admitted. “But the purpose was to stop the rebellion before it ever bore fruit. The plan was not to let your father rebel and then destroy him for it. It was to prevent the senseless death and ruin that followed before it became real.”
Cassandra shook her head, forcing denial.
“He fooled me!” she screamed. Tears blurred the garden into wavering green and brown. “He made me believe he loved me! To use and discard for his aims!”
It hurt to say it, even now. No matter how deeply she buried it, that wound remained alive.
Because no matter how much she did not want to, she still loved him back.
Cassandra fell to her knees, and tears darkened the earth beneath her, watering beautifully broken flowers.
Demetrios’s face darkened with sadness. He lowered himself beside her, and when his warm hand came to rest on her shoulder, Cassandra found herself too tired to pull away.
“It was not kind,” he said. “You are right to feel betrayed. Theodorus took no joy in it, child. Not in misleading you, and not in drawing you close.”
“How can I believe you?” Cassandra whispered.
She wanted to believe that some part of the man she had loved had been real. Yet she could not forgive him. No amount of logic could climb over the pain he had left behind. He had helped kill her father. He had ended her family as she had known it.
“Do not, then,” Demetrios said, squeezing her shoulder once. “Open your eyes, and believe yourself.”
Cassandra did so, though she did not know why she obeyed him. Through the blur of tears, she saw how heartbroken the old servant looked.
“It is easy to colour us as villains,” Demetrios said. His gaze held hers with unexpected weight, dark brown to her copper. “But if you choose only the easy path, you may make mistakes you will regret. There is always light on the other side of suffering. If you end it all now, you will never reach it.”
He reached behind him and brought forward a single orange bloom, bright despite the dirt on its petals. It was one of the flowers Cassandra had trampled in her fury.
“And if you paint your whole world in black and grey,” he said, placing it carefully in her hand, “you will miss the colours still left around you.”
Cassandra cupped the fragile flower to her nose. Its scent was faint but sweet, and she breathed it in through snivelling inhales until her eyes closed.
For a little while, she simply cried into the soft petals. Thinking of her brother, of her father, of her family.
Of her mother.
“Cassandra?”
Stefanos’s voice caught her unaware.
She opened her eyes and found Demetrios gone. She lay alone in the garden, dirty, trembling, and tear-streaked, with the orange bloom in her hands.
“Is everything alright?” Stefanos asked.
There was naked worry in his tone. Whatever distance he had tried to keep between them had been shortened by the shock of finding her folded in a ruined corner of the garden.
“No,” Cassandra admitted, her voice small. “No, it isn’t.”
It felt right, at least, to say that much aloud.
She remained where she was, and Stefanos seemed to understand. He turned and walked to the garden’s edge, placing himself where anyone coming through the loggia would have to pass him first.
There he stood, silent and watchful, protecting the sad quiet that followed an old wound bursting into life.