The road out of Athens was an open wound in the earth. Cadmus walked, he did not run. Each step was deliberate, a break from the man who had fled his entire life. Demosthenes's safe-conduct was tucked away, but his true authorization had come from the goddess in the valley of dreams. Trust what you feel. And go. What he felt was a pull, an invisible rope tied to a pair of blue eyes and a song that bled.
Rural Attica was a landscape of ghosts. Burned-out farmsteads, abandoned fields, refugees with empty faces staring through him. One night, he took shelter in a tavern that smelled of sour beer and despair, listening to murmurs of the war. No one looked at him twice. Just another man the war had broken.
But he didn't feel broken. For the first time, he felt strangely whole. His mission had not been ordered by a general or by Spartan law. It had been chosen. And the weight of that choice was real, solid.
On the third day of his journey, he found them. Near a stream, three deserters were tormenting a family of farmers over a sack of grain. The father, a pitchfork in his hands, was trying to protect his wife and his small daughter, his posture a pathetic mix of defiance and terror.
The old Cadmus would have walked on by. It's not your war. Spartan discipline had taught him to focus on the mission. But then, he looked at the frightened little girl hiding behind her mother's legs, and her face dissolved. For an instant, he saw blue eyes in a dark barn again, heard a terribly calm voice begging for death again.
The memory struck him not like a knife, but like a branding iron, searing a new law into his soul. The goddess's words echoed: Stop hunting the wolf's reflection in the water. The wolf would have ignored it. He was no longer the wolf.
He did not shout. He simply walked toward them, his steady pace kicking up the dust. The deserters only noticed him when he was already too close. — What do you want? — the leader growled. Cadmus didn't answer. His gaze passed over the man and fixed on the little girl. — Leave them in peace — he said, his voice calm, but with the weight of stones. The deserter laughed. — And who are you to give us orders?
Cadmus drew his sword. Not with the speed of an assassin, but with the solemnity of a judge. The steel gleamed. — The last person who will ever give you an order.
The fight was brief and ugly. It was not a dance, but dirty work. Cadmus moved with a brutal efficiency his body remembered, but that his soul now controlled. When the leader lunged, Cadmus didn't parry his blade; he sidestepped and the tip of his sword moved like a surgeon's needle, severing the tendons of the man's wrist. The deserter's sword fell with a thud. The pommel of his own sword crushed another's nose. The edge of the blade opened a gash on the third man's shoulder, deep enough to incapacitate, but not to kill. They were movements of containment, more difficult and deliberate than the killing blows that came naturally to him.
When he turned, the family was staring at him, gratitude mixing with terror. The father extended a hand. Cadmus took a step back, shaking his head. He didn't deserve gratitude. He didn't feel like a hero, but like a man trying to make the first payment on an impossible debt. This act was not heroism; it was penance. Only the first step in wiping away the wolf's tracks.
He looked one last time at the little girl. — Head north — he said, his voice rough. — The road south isn't safe. And he continued on his way, leaving behind three wounded men and a family who would see him in their nightmares and their prayers.
At the end of the fifth day, he saw it. Eretria. The city was nestled by the sea, its walls gleaming under the setting sun. But even from a distance, Cadmus felt the tension. There was an unnatural stillness, the tense calm that precedes a dam breaking. She was in there. And, for the first time in his life, Cadmus was not fleeing a battlefield, but walking willingly toward one.