Leonidas went down the mountain. He felt something humming in his blood that he didn’t understand. He knew all about the heat of battle, and maybe what he felt was something close to that, but much fuller. He took the bow as a sign of God’s favor and let that feeling fill the parts of his heart that were empty.

His dreams were dead.

With every step he took, he stomped on them.

He had once dreamed of a quiet home, of giving up being a soldier and being a shepherd instead. He had dreamed of cool water from a well drawn by a woman who covered her face and lowered her head. He had dreamed of his son at his elbow when the newborn lambs came.

All those dreams were over.

His hope now was to do as God instructed. He had to save Samara. Her God could save her in some other way. He knew that. He was being extended the privilege to save her. He just needed to try his best, and if his best wasn’t good enough… If his blood painted the palace walls, so be it!

He hated the palace. He hated the old king. When everything fell apart, he had chosen to stay away from his past life with his military rank because he didn’t even want to know what the newly crowned rebel was doing with his newfound power. Leonidas was one man and couldn’t change what another man, backed by an army, could do.

All his friends were dead.

He had killed them himself.

Leonidas touched his forehead and then his heart.

That had been a night he longed to forget. The highest-ranking soldiers had been invited to a feast. Leonidas was a captain, and he should have been there too, but he was not. He had missed it because he had been at a meeting with his future wife’s father. He was supposed to attend the feast afterward.

His would-be father-in-law explained to him in the cool of his home that his daughter had been in love with a childhood friend and that he had gone away to sea to work as a merchant with the hope that he would be able to earn her father’s promised approval. The father had not expected the boy to return a man with buckets of gold, but that was what had happened. The man was sorry, but he felt he had to keep his promise to his daughter’s lover, even if that meant breaking his promise to Leonidas.

Now that Leonidas was allowing himself to think of that night. He had not thought of it once in six months, but now that he was thinking about it, his third eye opened, and he saw something in his memory he had not understood at the time.

Her timid looks, her covered face, and the way his little fiancée moved had all been things he found especially charming about her, yet now he understood that those had all been symptoms of her unhappiness with their match. She did not want to marry him. He thought she was shy. He was mistaken. She was unhappy.  Leonidas was an unfamiliar man, someone she did not trust, and she was happy that her engagement with him was canceled for a man with whom she shared a childhood bond.  Leonidas’s quality was irrelevant to her.

When Leonidas went to leave her father’s house, she bowed to him with a little hop in her step that he had never seen in all the times he had visited her father’s house. He had put it out of his mind as he slowly strode back to the hall where the feast was taking place. He walked very slowly, partly because he felt sorry for himself… and partly because something had whispered to him that he should be slow.  A voice inside his head encouraged slowness.

It said things like, “After all, you’ve already eaten. Her father fed you supper before he broke the news. What are you going to eat at the party that will fill you after hearing that news? Are you in a rush to tell everyone that your engagement has been canceled? Do you need them to ask how many times this has happened? If you wait, they’ll be drunk on sweet wine, and it will be easier to tell them. It will be much easier to tell them.”

When he finally made it to the hall, something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

Instead of entering the front doors, he continued up a side stairway. That placed him above the hall where they were eating. They were not.

To his horror, Leonidas saw that the majority of the lesser soldiers in attendance had been murdered, their bodies left where they’d fallen. The generals and masters were drugged and bound. The pyres were being set up. General Archic was already tied to a pyre. He was saying things, but they were not words… They were nothing.

Some of the rebels, Leonidas knew on sight. Some of them were ex-soldiers he knew.

They were planning on burning them all.

Leonidas knew what he had to do. It was obvious. He went onto the stairwell and raised an alarm to the watch on the wall. They responded that there was fighting on the north wall. Leonidas sent another signal, insisting that his need was greater.

There was no answer from the guard on the wall. He was dead. Leonidas watched him fall from the height of the watchtower with an arrow in his heart.

By then, the first fire was lit in the hall. Leonidas returned with an unpleasant decision ahead of him. He counted his arrows. He counted the men on the floor. Then he did what no person should ever have to do.

He didn’t cry.

He didn’t even look at the faces of the men he shot.

He chose his targets quickly as if he were in a drawing competition, nothing more, and drew his arrows as fast as lightning.

Aim for the heart.

For the heart.

The heart.

Heart.

Heart.

Heart.

The rebels on the ground noticed him before he ran out of arrows, but paying them no mind, he shot his arrows until his quiver was empty. Then he dropped his bow and ran like he had given up being human.

There was no safe place to run. The city was surrounded. They were being attacked from within and without. With the heads of the army destroyed, the city was a mass of havoc. There were fires. People were running. Leonidas did what he could with the scimitar at his belt, but it wasn’t much.

Most of what he did was hide and run. Then he ran and hid.

He felt like his head was remarkably cool as he leaned against stone walls. He told himself he wasn’t afraid of dying, though he had so many dreams he wanted to see fulfilled. He had no explanation as to why he didn’t join the watch on the wall in their fight and help them. He could have joined the king’s palace guard and assisted them, but he did not. Instead, he stood in the shadows and breathed. For no reason whatsoever, he was exactly where he needed to be, breathing and waiting.

When the sun began to rise, he remembered Ciphas and started searching for him, but he found nothing. The rebels had begun moving into the palace when Leonidas had finished scanning the place.

Both the palace and the harem were empty.

Then, he met Samara, and all that happened to the two of them.

He had enjoyed his six months at his father’s home.

What happened to the rest of the old royal family did not interest him. He did not want to go back into their service and fight for their right to rule. They hadn’t been good rulers.

Now all he wanted to do was rescue Samara.

He did not need to be told where to find her. She was the most beautiful woman the old King had had in his harem.

Leonidas would find her at the palace.