The word Cassandra had given him meant *tide.*
Not *tide* the way you used it casually — *the tide is coming in, the tide is going out.* The specific Mycenaean usage was more precise than that. It referred to the sailing window — the period each year when the winds and currents aligned favorably enough for open-water voyaging across the Aegean. When sailors said this word they didn't mean water rising on a beach. They meant: *the window is open. The conditions are right. If you're going, go now.*
He found it on the third tablet he checked the morning after Cassandra said it, in a record of a merchant fleet's departure from Troy's harbor, cross-referenced against a season marker he recognized from other administrative texts.
He sat on the library floor with the tablet in his hands and read the entry twice.
Then he sat very still for a moment.
Then he said, quietly, in English, to nobody:
*"Oh. That's what she meant."*
---
The sailing window for westward Aegean crossings — toward the Greek mainland, toward Sparta — opened in spring and closed by midsummer when the northern winds shifted and made the crossing dangerous. He had known this academically. He had read it in maritime history papers and Bronze Age trade route analyses and never once thought about it as a personal problem.
He thought about it now.
It was spring.
He had assumed — based on nothing more than the vague comfort of thinking he had time — that Paris's departure was still weeks away. A month, maybe two. Enough time to build his language. Enough time to earn standing. Enough time to figure out what, if anything, he could actually do.
He looked at the tablet.
The sailing window was open *now.*
Had been open for at least ten days.
He thought about the way Paris had smiled when he pointed at the horizon and said *ship.* The private, anticipatory smile of someone who was thinking about a plan rather than describing one.
He thought about the word Paris had said back.
*Soon.*
He thought about Cassandra in the corridor, flat and factual, no drama, saying the word *tide* and then walking away.
She hadn't been warning him that time was running out in some vague future sense.
She had been telling him Paris was leaving within days.
---
He put the tablet back exactly where he'd found it.
Walked out of the library.
Stood in the corridor for approximately four seconds, doing the mental equivalent of checking his pockets: *what do I have, what do I need, what can I actually do right now.*
What he had: three hundred and one words of Mycenaean Greek. A functional reading knowledge of Linear B that he was pretending was still developing. Nine days of observations about the palace's rhythms and relationships. A tentative working arrangement with Paris involving writing lessons that had been going better than expected. A complicated unspoken understanding with Cassandra. The beginning, maybe, of something with Hector — though *beginning* was doing a lot of work in that sentence.
What he needed: to know Paris's exact departure date. To know who was traveling with him. To know if there was any possible way to be part of that delegation.
What he could actually do right now: find Paris.
He turned left and went to find Paris.
---
Paris was in the stables.
Not doing anything useful in the stables — not grooming a horse or checking tack or performing any of the legitimate functions a person might have in a stable. He was sitting on a fence rail with his legs dangling, watching a groom work, providing a commentary that the groom was clearly pretending not to hear.
He saw Lysander come in and his face did the thing it did — a brightening, an orientation toward the new arrival, the instinctive social pivot of a man who experienced other people primarily as opportunities for conversation.
He said something in greeting. Warm, easy. Karim caught *morning* and a word that might have been *early* or *finally,* depending on context.
Lysander crossed the stable.
He had been rehearsing this conversation since the library. Not the whole conversation — he didn't have the vocabulary for the whole conversation. Just the opening. Just enough to get information.
He sat on the fence beside Paris.
He pointed west — the gesture they had established for *the sea, the sailing direction, the thing you're planning.*
He said: *"When."*
Paris looked at him.
Lysander said it again. More carefully, making sure the inflection was right: *"When — you go — west. When."*
Paris was quiet for a moment.
Not the quiet of someone deciding whether to answer. More the quiet of someone slightly surprised to be asked directly — as if he'd been carrying this plan around as a private thing and had just noticed that other people could apparently see it.
He said a word.
Lysander didn't know it.
He reached for his shard.
Paris watched him reach for it and said the word again, slower, and then held up three fingers.
Three.
Lysander looked at the fingers.
Paris said the word a third time — and this time, with the fingers and the context, Lysander heard it differently. Not a word he didn't know. A word he knew in a slightly different form — the same root, differently inflected. A counting word. An ordinal.
*Third.*
He looked at the fingers.
*Three days.*
---
The fence rail was smooth under his hands. He could feel the grain of the wood. The stable smelled of horse and dry hay and the particular warm animal smell of enclosed spaces where large creatures lived.
Three days.
Paris was sailing in three days.
In three days the machinery started turning. In three days the stone began rolling down the hill. In three days every single thing that was going to happen to this city began the sequence that ended in fire and silence and ruins that would take three thousand years to excavate.
He kept his face neutral.
He said: *"Where — you go. West — where."*
Paris said a name.
He knew it immediately but let himself look uncertain, processing, the way someone does when they're hearing a foreign place name for the first time.
*Sparta.*
He nodded slowly, as if cataloguing it.
Then he said the thing he'd been building toward: *"I — also — go?"*
---
Paris blinked.
He said something fast — caught off guard, the natural speed of his speech coming back when he wasn't deliberately slowing for comprehension. Lysander caught fragments: *you* and *why* and something that might have been *training* or *here* or both.
He said, in his careful measured Mycenaean: *"I want — to see. Other places. I want — to learn. Different — things."*
He had practiced this. The vocabulary was within his range and the sentence was honest, technically — he did want to see Sparta, he did want to learn things, the things he wanted to learn were just somewhat specific and consequential.
Paris looked at him with an expression Karim recognized from faculty meetings when someone proposed something unexpected — the rapid internal calculation of whether this was a good idea, complicated by the fact that you hadn't considered it before and couldn't immediately tell.
He said something and pointed at Lysander's head.
The fall. The injury. *You just had an accident, you're in no condition—*
Lysander said: *"Ten days — past. I am — well."*
Paris said something else. Longer. Lysander caught: *father* and *allow* and the negative particle.
*Father won't allow it.*
He filed that.
He said: *"Maybe. But — ask."*
Paris looked at him.
Lysander met his eyes and held them — not aggressively, not with challenge. Just: *ask. That's all I'm saying. Ask.*
Paris made a face that communicated several things simultaneously — that he thought this was probably not going to work, that he could see from Lysander's expression that arguing wasn't going to be productive, and that he was not, fundamentally, opposed to having company on a sea voyage.
He said something short.
Lysander waited.
Paris sighed the sigh of someone agreeing to do something they'd already decided to do and not wanting to admit it, swung down from the fence rail, and walked out of the stable.
Lysander watched him go.
He had approximately zero confidence that Priam would agree.
But he needed Paris to ask. He needed the question on the table. He needed to exist, in the context of this voyage, as a variable rather than an absence.
*Start with what you can do,* he told himself. *Adjust from there.*
He sat on the fence rail for another minute.
Three days.
He had three days to either get himself on that ship or figure out a different approach entirely.
He got down from the fence and started thinking.
---
He spent the afternoon doing three things in parallel.
The first was vocabulary — he couldn't stop that, couldn't afford to pause the language acquisition for even a day. He moved through the palace with his shard and scratched every new word and returned to the library at intervals to cross-check against the tablets.
Three hundred and fourteen words by the time the sun reached the midpoint of the sky.
The second was observation. He had been observing since day one, but today he was observing with a specific question: how did people in this palace prepare for a sea voyage? What were the signs? Who knew? Who was involved?
He found them quickly, once he knew to look.
The kitchens were producing more than usual — preserved foods, dried meat wrapped in cloth, the compact portable provisions of people planning to be somewhere without a kitchen. Three of the palace's larger storage jars had been moved to an outbuilding near the harbor path. A pair of servants were cleaning and oiling leather gear that looked like travel equipment.
Paris had been preparing for days.
Which meant Priam knew.
Which meant the question wasn't whether Priam had *approved* the voyage — he clearly had — but whether he had approved it with or without Lysander.
*Without,* almost certainly. Lysander was not the kind of son who appeared on voyage manifests. He was the third son. The training-ground faller. The boy who scratched marks on clay shards and stared at walls.
The third thing he did that afternoon was look for Hector.
---
He found him where Hector usually was in the late afternoon: in a courtyard on the south side of the palace that got the last of the sun, going through weapons maintenance with the quiet systematic attention he gave everything. Oil and cloth and a bronze sword that probably didn't need the level of care it was getting, but was receiving it anyway because that was how Hector did things.
Lysander sat nearby without being invited and without explanation.
Hector glanced at him.
Lysander looked at the sword.
He said: *"Paris — three days. Sailing."*
Hector kept working. His hands didn't pause. But something in his posture changed — a slight shift, a small adjustment in how much of his attention was on the sword and how much was elsewhere.
He said: *"I know."*
Lysander said: *"I asked — to go."*
Hector's hands stopped.
He looked up.
His expression was not alarmed. It was not even, quite, surprised — more the expression of someone who has just received a piece of information that rearranges other pieces of information they already had.
He said: *"Why."*
Not accusing. The same word he'd used in the library conversation, delivered the same way: a genuine question, plain and direct, expecting a real answer.
Lysander thought about what he could say.
What he wanted to say: *Because I need to be there. Because if Paris goes alone this is all over before it starts. Because I know what happens in Sparta and I need to be in the room.*
What he had the vocabulary for: something much smaller.
He said: *"Paris — alone — is — not good."*
A pause to find the next piece.
*"Someone — should — be — with him."*
Hector looked at him for a long moment.
He said: *"Someone who watches."*
The phrasing was interesting — *someone who watches.* Not *someone who helps* or *someone who protects.* Hector had chosen the word for observation, for attention, for paying the kind of careful ongoing regard to a situation that might head off a problem before it became one.
Lysander said: *"Yes."*
Hector looked back at the sword.
His hands moved again, slow and methodical, working the cloth along the blade.
He said: *"Paris does not — always — think — forward."*
It was, Lysander understood, an enormous concession from a man who measured his words the way other people measured gold.
He said nothing. Just waited.
Hector said: *"I will speak — to father."*
---
He had not expected that.
He had expected to be told it wasn't his decision. He had expected to be redirected to Paris, or to the normal palace channels, or to be told that the voyage was already planned and the manifest was already set and there was no room for last-minute additions.
He had not expected Hector to simply say *I will speak to father* in the same tone he used for everything — flat, final, already decided.
He said: *"Thank you."*
Hector made the small nod that was his acknowledgment of most things.
Then he said something else — shorter, almost added as an afterthought, glancing back at the sword.
Lysander caught two words: *careful* and a word he thought meant *there* or *that place.*
*Be careful there.*
He nodded.
*"I will,"* he said.
He meant it more than Hector could possibly know.
---
He ate the evening meal in his room that night.
Partly because he needed to think and the hall was loud, and partly because he needed to run through everything he knew about Sparta and put it in order.
He sat with his clay shards spread around him on the mat and ate his bread and organized his thoughts the way he organized everything — by category, by time, by what was known versus what was inferred.
*What he knew about Sparta:*
Menelaus was king. Not the most powerful of the Greek kings — that was Agamemnon, his brother — but significant. A warrior, proud, possessive of his status and his possessions. He treated people well by the standards of his world, which meant he treated them according to their function. Helen was queen, which meant she was both enormously important and entirely decorative.
Helen.
He needed to think carefully about Helen.
Everything he knew about her from the ancient sources was filtered through men — Homer, Virgil, Euripides, Herodotus — each of them with their own interpretation of what she was and what she wanted and how much responsibility she bore for what happened. She had been written as a victim, as a temptress, as a willing participant, as a woman who had no choice, as a woman who chose everything.
The truth, almost certainly, was that she was a person.
A person living a very specific kind of life — beautiful, famous, confined, watched. A person for whom the arrival of a beautiful young man from a foreign land was probably the most interesting thing that had happened in years, not just romantically but simply as an event, a disruption in the routine, a proof that the world was larger than the walls she lived inside.
That was what he needed to understand.
Not how to stop Paris from wanting her.
Not how to stop her from being interesting to him.
But how to change the context enough that *leaving with Paris* stopped being the most available option.
He turned over a new shard and scratched on it, in the Linear B Paris had taught him:
*What does Helen want?*
He looked at the question.
He didn't know yet.
He would need to be there to find out.
He scraped the question off — couldn't risk it being found, couldn't explain it — and lay back on the mat and stared at the ceiling.
*Get on the ship,* he thought. *Everything else comes after.*
---
Hector came to his room before dawn.
Lysander was already awake — had been awake most of the night, his brain refusing to stop running the problem — and he heard the knock and was on his feet before the second one.
He opened the door.
Hector was in the corridor with his arms crossed and the expression of a man who had done a thing and was reporting the result.
He said: *"Father — says — yes."*
Lysander stared at him.
He said: *"Yes?"*
*"Yes."*
He had expected to fight for this. He had prepared arguments in his fragmentary Mycenaean, had planned contingencies, had thought about who else to approach if Hector's conversation with Priam went badly. He had not prepared for *yes.*
He said: *"Why — yes. Why does he — agree."*
Hector uncrossed his arms.
He said something longer — four, five sentences, and Lysander caught most of it, enough to piece together the shape:
*Father said — Lysander is — not useful here. Not yet. Training — not good. Maybe — traveling — teaches — what training does not. Also — * and here a word he didn't know, followed by * — Paris needs — someone — with sense.*
Lysander absorbed that.
*Not useful here.*
He had known this, intellectually — that Lysander was the overlooked son, the training-ground liability, the one with no particular role yet. He had been counting on it, in fact. A useful son would have assignments and responsibilities and reasons to stay.
But hearing it said out loud, even secondhand, even filtered through Hector's neutral delivery, landed somewhere unexpected.
He pushed it aside.
*"I will — not fail,"* he said. *"The trip."*
He meant it as a simple statement of intent. But from the way Hector looked at him — that slight recalibration in his expression, the key-in-the-lock quality — he thought maybe it had landed as something larger.
Hector said: *"I know."*
Then: *"Two days. Prepare."*
He turned and walked away down the corridor, his footsteps even and unhurried, the walk of a man with a great many things to do and a clear idea of the order in which to do them.
Lysander stood in the doorway.
*Two days.*
He was going to Sparta.
---
He went back inside and sat on the mat and let himself have thirty seconds of something that wasn't quite triumph and wasn't quite relief but was somewhere between them — the feeling of a plan moving, of variables resolving, of the first step of a very long road being taken.
Thirty seconds.
Then he picked up his shard.
He had two days.
He needed to know as many words as possible before he stepped on that ship. He needed specific vocabulary — diplomatic language, the formal registers used for guest-friendship and negotiation and the careful dance of interactions between foreign courts. He needed the language of the harbor and the ship and the sea.
He scratched *today's words* at the top of a clean shard.
Then he started.
---
He spent the first day in the library.
Not reading tablets for vocabulary this time — reading them for content. Specifically: any records of previous diplomatic contacts between Troy and Sparta. Any administrative records of gift exchanges, which was how you tracked relationships between palaces. Any mention of Menelaus or his household.
He found three relevant tablets.
The first was a record of a Spartan trade delegation that had passed through Troy's harbor two years prior — guest-friendship invoked, gifts exchanged, the formal language of international courtesy observed. From this he got: Menelaus's formal title in the Mycenaean diplomatic register, the specific gifts Troy had sent back with the delegation, and — most usefully — the name of the Trojan official who had conducted the exchange.
That official, he would discover later in the day, was still in the palace. An older man, one of Priam's advisors, who moved through the corridors with the slightly abstract air of someone whose primary existence was administrative.
He filed the name.
The second tablet was a record of a ship's passage through the Dardanelles — the strait that Troy controlled, the reason Troy mattered economically. The ship had been Spartan, the tolls recorded, the date noted. From this he got maritime vocabulary he hadn't had before and a better sense of the geography he would be sailing through.
The third tablet was harder to read — damaged at one edge, several signs unclear. But what he could make out seemed to be a record of a message received from a Greek palace, and the name that appeared in the surviving text was not Menelaus.
It was Agamemnon.
He sat with that for a while.
Agamemnon, King of Mycenae. Menelaus's older brother. The most powerful king in the Greek world. The man who would command the fleet that sailed for Troy in five to seven years and lay siege to it for ten.
Agamemnon had sent a message to Troy.
The content of the message was in the damaged section he couldn't fully read.
He spent twenty minutes trying to reconstruct it from the surviving signs.
He got: *ships* and *agreement* and a word he thought might mean *terms* or *conditions* and then nothing, the edge of the tablet crumbling away into dust and silence.
*What were you saying to us,* he thought, pressing his fingertip very gently against the damaged edge. *What terms. What agreement.*
The tablet didn't answer.
He put it back and kept working.
---
That evening Paris found him.
He came into the library — which Paris apparently never used and seemed to regard with the mild confusion of someone encountering a room full of objects whose purpose he understood abstractly but had no personal use for — and looked at the tablets stacked around Lysander with an expression of theatrical bewilderment.
He said something. Lysander caught: *why* and *all of them* and a word that probably meant *crazy* or *excessive.*
Lysander said: *"Preparing."*
Paris said: *"For what. We are going — to be guests. Not — fighting a war."*
The irony of that sentence was not something Lysander could comment on.
He said: *"I want to — understand. When we arrive. The — correct — words. The correct — ways."*
Paris looked at him for a moment.
He said: *"I know the correct ways."*
Lysander said, carefully: *"I know. I want — to know them also."*
Paris picked up a tablet at random — held it upside down, which Lysander noted — and looked at it with the expression of a man performing engagement for courtesy's sake.
He said: *"You are strange — now. Since the fall."*
Lysander said: *"I know."*
Paris put the tablet down. He said: *"It is not — bad — strange. Different strange."*
He used the same word Damon had used: the one Lysander had roughly translated as *present* or *aware.*
*More present. More aware.*
*You are more — here — than before.*
Lysander thought about that. About the version of this body's original inhabitant that had been here before — the undertrained, overlooked third son, the boy who fell in training and didn't write things down and apparently hadn't been particularly *here* in the specific quality of attention.
*He wasn't,* Lysander thought. *That's fair.*
He said: *"The fall — changed — something. Inside."*
He touched his chest. The gesture for the self, the interior, the person behind the face.
Paris looked at him with the directness he sometimes showed when the performance dropped — the real face behind the charming one, younger and more uncertain and more interesting.
He said: *"Does it — hurt. Still."*
He meant the fall. The head injury.
Lysander thought about how to answer that honestly without answering it at all.
He said: *"Sometimes. Less — each day."*
Paris nodded once.
Then he said: *"Tomorrow. Before dawn. The harbor."*
He held up two fingers.
*Two days.*
Lysander said: *"I will be there."*
Paris picked up another tablet, realized it was also upside down, put it down, and left.
Lysander looked at the empty doorway for a moment.
Then he looked back at his tablets.
He had one more day.
---
Three hundred and forty-seven words.
He counted them before sleeping, running through the list in his head, testing each one, discarding the ones he wasn't confident about and adding asterisks to the ones that needed more context.
Three hundred and forty-seven.
Not enough. Would never feel like enough. But more than yesterday, which was the only equation that mattered.
He thought about Sparta. About a harbor he'd never seen, a palace he'd only read about, a woman he'd studied in texts for years. About the thing he needed to figure out when he got there — not what to prevent, but what to *offer.* What alternative to provide. What door to open that was more appealing than the door Paris was going to try to walk through.
He thought about Hector's expression when he'd said *I will speak to father.* The unhurried certainty of it.
He thought about the damaged tablet and the word *agreement* in Agamemnon's message.
He thought about Cassandra, who knew things and said them plainly and was never believed.
He closed his eyes.
*One more day,* he thought. *Then the ship.*
*Then you start actually doing something.*
Outside, the spring wind came off the Aegean — the sailing wind, the good wind, the wind that had been waiting all winter for the season to open.
Three days ago it had been an abstract threat.
Tomorrow it was the wind that would take him to Sparta.
He lay in the dark and listened to it move through the window.
And began, very carefully, to plan.