Chapter 3 - Hypatos

The miserable reality of serving ten-year-old Androkles settled over me like a shroud. 

I woke each morning with the same thought: today, I will have to wipe the smug look off that boy’s face. I fully expected him to be spoiled and cruel, a miniature version of Nikos, Lord Zeus, all petulance and privilege. But what I discovered was something far stranger.

Androkles was frighteningly intelligent, sharp-tongued, and emotionally detached for a child his age. He didn’t whine or demand sweets. He demanded reports on troop movements and crop yields. He didn’t throw tantrums; he threw verbal daggers with an unnerving precision. 

The first week, when I’d served him undercooked eggs, he hadn’t cried or thrown his plate. He’d looked at me with his cold, blue eyes and said, “A steward who cannot properly prepare a morning meal is unlikely to manage a household properly. Do better, Hypatos.” The casual dismissal was more infuriating than any tantrum could have been.

The boy’s true unsettling nature became clear during combat training. I was forced to stand by the training arena, ostensibly to supervise but really to be a living monument to his father’s contempt. Androkles, despite his size, moved with an economy of motion that was chilling to watch. 

He faced boys three years his senior, trainees with the beginnings of warrior muscles and cruel confidence. He didn’t triumph with wild, lucky swings. He dismantled them. He’d sidestep a clumsy lunge, not with fear, but with a calculating calm, and exploit the opening with a sharp jab to the ribs or a sweep of the legs that sent them crashing to the dirt. 

He never showed excitement, never gloated. He analyzed, executed, and waited for the next opponent.

One afternoon, he faced a boy named Hector, a lumbering brute who was known for his strength. Hector charged, roaring. Androkles stood his ground until the last possible second, then dropped, rolling under the boy’s outstretched arm and popping up behind him. 

He didn’t strike. He just tapped the back of Hector’s knee with his wooden sword. 

The boy’s leg buckled, and he fell, sprawling in the dust. Androkles looked down at him, not with triumph, but with the detached curiosity of a scholar examining an insect.

I began to realize why people whispered about the prophecy surrounding him. This wasn’t just a boy being good at practice. This was something else, something cold and predatory hiding in a child’s form. 

Despite myself, I started to respect the boy’s discipline and the sheer focus he possessed. It was the Spartan ideal, stripped of all passion and camaraderie. It was perfect. And it was terrifying. I still found him insufferable, but now I understood. I wasn’t just serving a brat. I was serving the weapon.

While Androkles had been busy shadowing Eugenius at a closed-door meeting, I had stolen another secret meeting with Arete before she left for Euaristos’s wedding. We had met in the small, forgotten garden behind the old temple, a place overgrown with wild roses and thyme, far from the prying eyes of the main House. This scene had felt softer, more intimate than the frantic encounter in the barn. We had sat on a stone bench, her hand resting in my remaining one, the warmth of her skin a stark contrast to the cool marble. 

“You’re getting thin,” she had said, her thumb tracing circles over my knuckles. “That boy is working you too hard.” 

“He’s ten. He couldn’t work a sweat out of a statue,” I had grumbled, but I leaned into her touch. “I just miss our nights in the hayloft. I miss having you to complain to.” 

She had smiled, but it hadn’t quite reached her eyes. “We have this moment. We should cherish it.” 

We had sat in comfortable silence for a while, the air thick with the scent of roses and unspoken words. Then she had sighed, a sound heavy with the weight of forty-one years. “Do you ever wonder, Hypatos? About what might have been?” 

“Every waking moment,” I had admitted, my voice rough. “Every time I saw Erasmus’s eyes in the crowd, every time I heard Eukleides laugh.” 

She had looked away, toward the setting sun, painting the sky in hues of orange and purple. “I sometimes wonder what their lives would have looked like if I’d been allowed to marry you openly. If they’d grown up as your sons, with your name, your pride.” 

The thought had felt like a knife twisting in my gut. 

For twenty-three years, I had been married to Pavlina, a good woman who deserved better than a man who loved another. During that time, Arete and I had stopped our affair, a sacrifice that had nearly broken me. 

It had been only five years after Pavlina’s death that we had found our way back to each other, and we had been having this affair again for ten years then. Ten years of stolen moments and secret glances. 

“I’d have taught them to fight,” I had said, my voice thick with emotion. “I’d have taught them to love you properly. I’d have given them a life where they didn’t have to look over their shoulders, wondering if their father would discover the truth.” 

Arete had turned back to me, her hazel eyes shining with unshed tears. “We can’t change the past, my love. We can only hold onto the present.” 

I had pulled her closer, my lips finding hers in a desperate kiss. It hadn’t been about passion or lust, not this time. It had been about comfort, about finding solace in the one person who understood the depth of my loss. I had deepened the kiss, my hand tangling in her hair, trying to pour all the words I couldn’t say into that one moment. 

When we finally pulled apart, I had rested my forehead against hers. “Well, at least they didn’t end up like me,” I had said, my voice laced with dark humor. “One arm and a heart full of regret.” 

She had laughed, a soft, watery sound. "Oh, Hypatos. You’re so much more than that.” 

I had known she was right, but it had been hard to believe sometimes. Arete had not simply been lust for me. She had been the center of the life I believed had been stolen from me. She had been the mother of my children, the love of my life, the one constant in a world that had taken everything else from me. 

And as I held her there, in that fleeting moment of peace, I could almost forget that she was leaving in the morning and that I would be left alone again with my ghosts and my regrets.

A week after Arete had left for the wedding, I returned once again to The Obnoxious Pegasus. The silence in my rooms had felt like a physical weight, and the familiar haze of ambrosia was the only thing that seemed to lift it. As I pushed open the heavy tavern door, I noticed Saea differently. Not romantically, but consciously. Our brief conversation had carved a small space for her in my mind, and I found myself scanning the room for her familiar form.

She was there, wiping down a table, her long white hair pulled back from her face, contrasting sharply with the dark wood of the bar. As I approached, she looked up, and a small, knowing smile played on her lips. “Back already, Spartan? Did the little terror not tire you out?”

I felt a strange urge to smile back, an impulse I quickly suppressed. Instead, I slid onto my usual stool, the leather of my tunic creaking. “He’s away with his father. A brief, blessed silence.”

“Then you’ll need extra ambrosia to celebrate,” she said, already reaching for a clean mug.

As she placed it in front of me, I did something I hadn’t done in six years. I greeted her by name. “Evening, Saea.”

Her hand stilled for a fraction of a second, and her eyes widened almost imperceptibly. The surprise mirrored what I felt in my chest. It seemed strange, too personal, yet not entirely unwelcome.

“Evening, Hypatos,” she recovered smoothly, her voice carrying a new warmth. “To your brief, blessed silence.”

I found myself lingering in conversation longer than I intended.

She continued teasing me more comfortably now that the barrier had cracked slightly, her barbs light and sharp. “I hear young Androkles disarmed three older trainees this morning. They’re saying he fights like a serpent in a boy’s skin.”

“He fights like his father’s son,” I grumbled into my mug, my eyes fixed on the golden liquid. “All cold precision and no honor.”

“Perhaps he just needs a good satyr song to loosen him up,” she quipped, and I noticed the way her ears twitched when she was amused, a small, flickering motion.

I found myself noticing other small things: the easy confidence in her smile as she dealt with a rowdy patron, the way she moved with a fluid grace that spoke of her wilder nature, the fact that she didn’t seem intimidated by me in the slightest. She saw the broken soldier, the drunk, but she also saw something else, and she wasn’t afraid.

I didn’t dwell on it. I paid my tab and left as I always did, the night air cool against my face. But as I walked home, the image of her twitching ears and knowing smile remained. It was a tiny, insignificant detail, but it was the first thing in a long time that had managed to push through the constant, dull ache of Arete’s absence.

I didn’t know what it meant, and I didn’t care to examine it. But a seed, small and unnoticed, had been planted.

I had gone home early that night from The Obnoxious Pegasus. Talking with Saea had disturbed something in me, and the idea of returning to that coffin-like tavern had seemed obscene.

I had walked the streets back home beneath the glow of the moons. The empty house had seemed oppressive, however, hollowed-out and lifeless.

I had paced the halls, my boots clacking against the tile floors.

There had been a series of empty terracotta pots on the windowsill of our main living quarters. Pavlina had loved gardening. She had died fifteen years ago, but her plants’ ghosts still lingered on that sill. Her ghost lingered in every inch of this house that I despised. I had run my fingers across the dry, dusty dirt. That was what was left of my marriage: dead plants and empty pots. 

I had swallowed thickly, feeling bitterness coat the back of my throat.

Arete. I had thought of my wife, miles away on her way to her newest wedding. Smiling and waving as the happy wife and mother she always pretended to be. I had known, suddenly, with a weight that squeezed my heart: Arete would never be mine. No matter how much we loved each other, there would always be Eugenius, her sons, and her life that I would never truly be able to live within. We could never be legitimate. Our love was a tragedy, secretly beautiful, but never something that could be built upon. Never a life. 

I had collapsed into bed, sitting before my bedroom mirror and studying my reflection in the sheen of polished bronze. I hardly recognized myself. A one-armed man growing older and more tired by the day. His face was carved with years of regret, his eyes sunken with grief and vengeance.

I had mourned the soldier I used to be. The husband I should have been. The father I tried to be in secret. Ghosts that now haunted this empty shell of a man. I had contemplated whether or not this faded existence was all that awaited me: life as nothing but a slow, steady decline into obscurity. Ghosted by ghosts.