1.65 [Stavros Aetos]

Youngest of the Convocation

I danced through lashing coils of flesh and lowered my shoulder into the back of Gyro’s man. The lowly Civic cultivator’s head snapped back, but he held stubbornly onto his blade while I hefted him up like a sack of grain without breaking stride. For all the good it did him. What remains of his borrowed blade could hardly be called a dagger – now it was little more than a hilt and a jagged shard of iron the length of my middle finger.

“Lord Aetos!” he gasped, staring upside down at the pained drakaina while I ran. “Wait, I can still fight! I can still-”

“Can’t fight without a weapon,” I told him. “Wouldn’t matter if you had one.”

Thon and I closed the distance in desperate strides. Aristotle, for his part, stepped lightly over thrashing mounds of flesh and somehow outpaced the monster’s reach at a walking pace. I kicked up sand just short of Gyro and the shield woman as they dashed out of the graveyard of broken timber beyond the ship. I dumped my brother’s freedman onto the beach between us.

I stood tall, snapping the fletching off of Damon’s arrow and pulling the shaft out of my shoulder. Cauterized flesh bled once again. I dispersed the pain and re-sealed both ends of the wound myself with an invocation of virtue’s flame. I met my brother’s eyes resolutely.

“We can kill it.”

“Of course we can, brother,” Gyro said, helping his man up. “How was your swim? Bracing, I hope?”

“To say the least.” I turned to the shield bearer. “Who are you?”

She was tall for a woman of her standing. Muscular enough that her status as a cultivator could not be denied – her shoulders and arms were cut by martial labor, her thighs thickly defined. She wore sandals of white leather that crisscrossed up her ankles and a tattered shawl of white silk that hung from her right shoulder, leaving the left bare so it wouldn’t obstruct her shield.

An unmarred breastplate of fine bronze clung to her like a second skin beneath the shawl, forged to mimic the lines of muscle it guarded. Greaves of the same quality bronze flashed as her stance adjusted and her shawl shifted over her legs. A gossamer of a silver-white thread held the golden braids of her hair in place, paint of the same color accenting curving scarlet eyes. She was regal, and she was strong. She had something we needed.

The woman from Olympia smiled and offered me her hand beneath the shawl, keeping her adamant shield up on her unclothed arm.

“My name is Elena. I’m on a sacred quest, sent from Olympia,” she said graciously, gripping my hand. “Are you as mad as your brother?”

“You’ll have to narrow it down.”

Elena laughed, clear and bright. “There are more of you?”

“Four in all,” Gyro said, dumping onto the sands a bundle of wooden shrapnel he’d gathered from the ship’s remains and taking his broken sword to one of the planks. “Our father vowed to stop at three sons if he wasn’t granted a daughter by then, so of course the heavens punished him with a set of twins. This is one of two.”

“Stavros,” I said. It was likely just the night air and my dip into the Ionian depths, but her skin felt oddly warm. I let her hand go. “The beautiful man on the other side of the beach is my twin, Fotios.”

She smirked. “I see. And where’s the fourth?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “We didn’t make it that far down.”

That scarlet gaze swept over me, eyes a color I had – seen burning, one gazing up from the eastern range while the other glared within the depths of the western mountains – never seen in my living memory. Elena took a note of how drenched I was. She looked past me, at the serpent with a woman’s upper body dragging itself onto the beach while my twin danced around it with his flaming whip, and beyond to the whirlpool rising up around the island like an upended dome. It didn’t take her long to make the connection.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” she told me with sad sympathy, while she laid her calloused hand on Gyro’s shoulder.

“Don’t be,” I told her. “Not yet. He’s in a bad spot, but he’s not gone. It was Damon that saved us.”

“I was wondering how you got yourself shot fighting a snake,” Gyro said, fierce joy in the dimpling of his cheeks. He carved away at his plank of wood with deft motions, somehow cutting clean edges despite his broken blade more closely resembling a saw. “Damon always said he could hit any target he wanted, even blind or underwater. Seems he was right.”

“Stavros,” Thon said urgently. He pressed his back to mine, raising his borrowed iron in an amateur’s grip. Boxing had always been his strong suit. “It’s shaking itself off.”

He wasn’t wrong – the keening of the drakaina’s feminine voice was tapering off. It would be on us again soon, and I still had to secure our proper tool.

“And you are?” Elena asked the ugly freedman at my back, pleasantly uncaring of the rallying threat.

“His name is Thon,” I said, brusquely cutting short any possible back and forth. Then, before she could ask, “and this is-“ I stopped short, frowning at Gyro’s blood-hungry man. What was his name again?

“Menoeces, Lord Aetos.”

“Call him Stavros,” Gyro said, elbowing me in my side. “Better yet, call him a bastard for not bothering to know your name.”

“He was a slave just a few hours ago,” I protested. Damn it, no, we didn’t have time for this.

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“Even slaves have names, brother. They’re still men like you and I. The only thing that separates us from them is a handful of gold.”

“You’re a kind slaver, are you?” Elena’s eyes were measuring.

“The kindest there is,” Menoeces firmly agreed. Gyro only hummed and reached into a fold in his chiton.

“A kind slaver,” he mused. “I wonder if anyone can claim that title.” From the fold in his logic, he pulled a wineskin and drank deeply from it before tossing it to Menoeces. “Quick, while there’s time. Get some courage in you.”