The sun hung low over the Ionian Sea, turning the waves to molten copper where they shattered against the western cliffs of Samé. Alkeon sat on the smoothed limestone ledge at the cliff's edge, legs extended, one sandal dangling loosely from his toes.

Beside him you sat with your knees drawn up beneath the linen of your chiton, arms wrapped loosely around them. Four months since the wedding torches had guttered out in the megaron, four months since he'd carried you over the threshold of the king's chamber while the women sang and the men drank deep of the watered wine. Four months, and still the sight of you unraveled the careful geometry he kept in his mind.

The council had ended an hour earlier in the great hall below: representatives from Ithaca, Zakynthos, the smaller holdings on Leukas, even a dour envoy from Mycenae who spoke of Agamemnon's growing shadow and the insult at Sparta. Words like hybris, atimia, polemos had drifted through the air thick as incense smoke. Alkeon had said little—two sentences, precisely measured, enough to silence the room when the debate threatened to spiral into posturing. He preferred it that way.

He turned his head slightly, studying your profile against the dying light. Helen's beauty was the kind that launched fleets, they said. Yours was quieter, more perilous; like standing at the edge of a drop and realizing the fall would be endless. He had known it the moment you first met his gaze across the crowded symposium in your father's hall: not just beauty, but the mind behind it, hidden beneath the assumption that such loveliness must be empty. He'd courted you with riddles, watching the way your eyes lit when you solved one, the way your mouth curved when you answered with one of your own. No grand gestures. No poetry. Just the inevitable recognition that you saw him too.

"They're already counting ships," he said now, voice low, almost lost in the wind. "Mycenae wants levies. Ithaca will give what it can. Zakynthos pretends it has none to spare." He paused, thumb tracing an invisible line along the stone between you. "Troy will not bend. Not to Menelaus, not to Agamemnon. The insult is too public."

You shifted, the linen whispering against rock. "We have time, Alkeon. Seasons yet. The harvest, the winter storms. They won't sail in winter."

He almost smiled at the hope in your voice. It was the same hope that made Penelope clasp Odysseus's hand a little tighter when he spoke of distant wars, the same fragile thing that wives offered husbands like a shield they both knew was too thin. But you were not Penelope, and he was not Odysseus. Odysseus would talk circles, charm the fear away with stories. Alkeon dealt in lines: straight, unyielding, drawn on maps and in the ledgers of the shipyards below.

He glanced eastward, toward the dark silhouette of Ithaca rising like a crouching beast across the strait. His cousin would be pacing his own halls now, muttering to himself, already plotting routes and feints. Odysseus the fox. Alkeon the board on which the pieces moved.

He lifted your joined hands, pressed his lips to the inside of your wrist; brief, tasting the faint sweetness of the myrrh oil you'd rubbed into your skin that morning. Your breath hitched, just enough for him to hear it over the waves.

"I won't lie to you," he said against your skin. "When the call comes—and it will come—I will go. The ships in the eastern yards are mine to command. The timber from the hills, the bronze from the forges. All of it pledged long before I ever saw your face, psychi mou."

He lifted his free hand, brushed a wind-tossed strand from your cheek. His thumb lingered at the corner of your mouth, feeling the warmth there.

"The hardest thing I've ever done," he said quietly, "was not taking the throne at fifteen when my father's body came back on a shield. Nor burying my mother last spring, when the fever took her. It will be this—knowing I leave you behind, knowing you wait, knowing every day might be the one that ends me on some foreign shore."