It took two full days for me to get used to the feeling of solid ground under my feet. I could hardly mount the stairs in the manor without swaying to one side or the other, and found myself holding the smooth wooden rail for balance until the world stopped sloshing like water in a glass bottle.

But as soon as we were used to the land again, Connor took his beloved bow and left to stay a few days at Kanatahséton and reconnect with nature. I did not blame him: after six months at sea, surrounded by the same people every day, even I wanted a break. Some silence.

But silence was a luxury I could ill afford. Myriam and Norris were getting married in a mere two weeks, and while most of the preparations had been done in our absence, I could still feel it in the air - a crackling tension, the calm before a storm.

Maybe I was selfish for wanting to escape from it. My six month odyssey was no Caribbean holiday. I had lived so long on edge, waking in tension, sleeping with one eye open, that I was bone tired. Really! I thought to myself. Not yet twenty-one years old, and already I had the weak constitution of a seventy-year-old.

I was happy to be home - happy to sleep in my own bed again, happy to talk to different people - but most of all, I was happy to be back to my books. I had not brought many with me to Martinique, only two novels: a copy of Richardson's Pamela, and my tattered edition of Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. One for my heart; the other, my soul.

Sitting on an armchair on the upstairs landing, a steaming cup of tea beside me and an open book in my lap, I stared into the empty space above the worn floorboards, and thought of the half-year that had passed me by. There was so much that I needed to do - I had to see my family, who had recently been visited by Ryan during his time off school; I had to speak to Jamie Colley and Clipper Wilkinson, two of our recruits, about the movements of the Templars during our absence; I had to ask Prudence and Corinne about their plans to feed the coming wedding party and how I might help in that area - I had so much to do that I ended up doing nothing at all.

Sometimes I felt that my life could have been so much more. In moments like this, it was as though I were sitting cross-legged in a river and watching the silver fish swim past me. I could see them coming, could easily reach out and grasp them, but I was distracted by the feeling of the water flowing through my fingers, and the fish flitted past me, flashing their tails in mockery. I was hungry, but could not eat; I was thirsty, but could not drink. There were so many fish that I ended up choosing none at all. I was being murdered by my own complaisance. My life was not my own - I was a pawn in the hand of a nation in labour, playing on a chessboard designed by my grandfather, and his grandfather before him.

Good for Connor, I thought grumpily. He can escape for a few days, while I'm stuck here, rotting like a log in the forest.

The book in my lap was unappealing. I closed it and laid it gently aside, listening to Achilles' cane echo off the downstairs floor as he limped into his study. His health had deteriorated in the months since I had last seen him: he was slower-moving than usual, and I had noticed Diana visiting more often with this herb or that ointment for his use. Even his breathing was different: he struggled a little more to take breaths that were still too shallow.

It worried me to see him like this. The only man that had ever been a father to me was only human, and just as perishable as the rest of us - and it terrified me. I had lost enough people that I loved. I was not ready to lose him, too.

Perhaps that was the reason that Connor had left so quickly after arriving. Maybe he was scared, too - he just did not know how to show it.

He and Achilles had made up when we arrived; after all, six months was more than enough time for both men to calm down from their argument and talk about it like adults. Achilles had even welcomed us, though his tone was dry. And how was Martinique? he had asked.

I had let Connor do the talking: he had more to say than I did. I owe you an apology, he had said. It was wrong of me to say the things I did.

Your words were harsh, Connor, Achilles had conceded, his voice calm, but there was also truth there. I failed the order. Allowed the Templars to take control.

But now their hold is weakened, I had found myself saying with conviction, which leads us to believe that there's a chance for peace.

Imagine what might be accomplished if we were to unite, Connor had added.

But Achilles had not been convinced, and even now, he was still wary. Why the change of heart? Where is this coming from? he had asked with narrowed eyes, which widened as the truth dawned on him. You've met your father, haven't you?

Connor had not needed to say yes or no: his response was all Achilles needed to hear. I do not claim to trust the man, or even like him - but we would be remiss to ignore this opportunity.

Haytham may listen, Achilles had agreed, but I had known even then that he was dubious, but will he understand? And even if he does, will he agree?

Connor had remained resolute. Even he must admit that we achieve more together than we do alone.

True as his words may have been, none of us could deny the apprehension that followed us over the next few days: the buried suspicion that a grave mistake was about to be, or had already been, made.

Another noise from downstairs roused me from my thoughts - a noise I knew very well: the grating of stone on stone, the shifting of metal gears. Achilles had opened the hidden doorway to the basement.

Curiosity got the better of me and brought my silent feet down the stairs above the old man's descending head, which was bare and grey without his hat. The basement was as dim as it always was, and smelled faintly of mould after six months of disuse. A thin layer of dust coated the weapons racks, something I knew Connor would not be happy about. I, on the other hand, was a little pleased: a life without the need for such weapons or violence was a good life indeed.

But it was just a dream.

I joined Achilles in standing before the portraits of our targets. Only Haytham and Charles Lee remained - they glared at us from the painted canvases, faces cold and impassive. I scanned the notes Connor had written on the wall over the course of our study of the Templars: their roles in the core group of Templars, their motives, and the questions we had never gotten answers to. I picked up a piece of chalk and carefully corrected the spellings of a few words.

Achilles was staring up at the picture of Connor's father when I turned around, his mouth pulled into a thin line. "Sometimes I wonder if that portrait will ever be removed."

If there was peace between the Assassins and the Templars, we would have no need to cross out Haytham's face like we did the rest. I wondered how far Connor was willing to go in the name of peace. Perhaps, if our lives had been different, we would have known what it was to be calm, to live lives unshaken by wars.

There was an empty space on the wall - not quite large enough to fit another portrait of the same size as the others, but noticeable enough that my eyes was drawn to it. I found myself asking something that had been on my mind for a long time, but had never been brave enough to share. "Why isn't Shay Cormac's portrait among these?"

Achilles was silent for a few moments, and his eyes met mine. He sighed. "Did I ever tell you how I got my limp?"

I shook my head. The old man arched an eyebrow. "It was in 1760," he said. "Some of my Assassins and I - Liam O'Brien, primarily - had discovered the location of a Precursor site up in the Arctic. We sailed for weeks to reach it, through the ice and freezing waters. Little did we know, Shay Cormac and Haytham Kenway had followed us there. The Templars wanted to destroy it like Cormac did the one I sent him to find in Lisbon, back when he was one of us.

"Kenway managed to catch me alone on the ice, while Cormac went and killed Liam. We fought there, but Kenway was younger than I, and fresher in his skills. He managed to disarm me, and was about to kill me . . . but then Shay Cormac stepped in and begged mercy on my behalf. According to him, I was no longer a threat to the Templars. And I wasn't. They had killed everyone. Shay had killed everyone. He managed to convince Connor's father to spare my life - but he made sure that I would never fight again."

He reached down and touched his right leg. "He shot me, point blank. Just below the knee. The bullet shattered the bone in my shin. I've never walked properly since. But," he added, "were it not for Shay Cormac, I would have been dead on that ice eighteen years ago. I have left him off this wall because, though loath as I am to admit it, I owe him my life, miserable as it may be."

"Even though he killed Charles Dorian two years ago?" I asked - not to provoke, but to understand.

Achilles fixed me with a look of sudden melancholy. "While he is a hindrance and a danger to our cause, if you or Connor decide to eliminate him, it will not be by my command. Besides - whatever he has attempted to stir up in Paris is nothing compared to what you and Connor have done in America."

It was the closest thing to praise that he would give. I chose to accept it with a dip of my head. "We could never have done it without you."

"I know." His tone was uncharacteristically tender, and though he had never been one for physical touch, I felt as though this was the equivalent of him laying an arm over my shoulder in a fatherly manner.

I looked at him properly. In the dim light of the torches on the walls, he looked small and thin, and the lines on his face seemed deeper, like cracks in stone. He was nearing seventy years, I realised. Time was catching up to him swiftly, like a dog nipping at his heels.

This was the first time I had noticed that he actually looked old. Connor and I called him old man on occasion, but more often than not, it was only to get a reaction out of him. But now he was starting to live up to the name. Suddenly we did not have nearly as much time left with him as we thought we did.

I had never been good at hiding my heart. Achilles saw right through me, and rolled his eyes. "Come," he said, taking me by the arm to turn me towards the stairs. "Go on upstairs and make me a cup of tea. I'm not so old that I can't get up these steps by myself."

*

Perhaps I loved too much, all at once. It was simultaneously what I admired and loathed in myself: my ability to feel so very deeply.

Looking back, I think it is what prompted me to leave the manor a few days after my conversation with Achilles and take a horse to my family's house in Boston. Their faces floated before my eyes, phantoms of people I would love even if it killed me.

The house that I once inhabited looked grey and dead, even in the June sunshine. Like all of the light had been drained from it, evaporated through the open windows. Then again, I supposed, only two people lived there now. With Ryan in Virginia, Meredith missing, and Nadia married, only Lydia and Gabriel remained.

My mother opened the door when I knocked. She looked more tired than I remembered - there were dark smudges under her eyes, her lips turned down, even her golden hair did not shine as it once did. The house did not smell the same either: the scent of flowers had been replaced by the musty smell of old perfume that had not quite washed out of the fabric of the cushions.

Lydia greeted me on the doorstep with a hug that pulled me tight against her chest, before she held me at arm's length so she might look at me. "Oh darling," she said, looking me up and down. "You've gotten terribly tanned. It looks very lower class."

My smile faltered. "What a pleasure it always is to see you, mother."

She invited me inside and sat me down in the drawing room, leaving me alone for a few minutes while she fetched Gabriel from his study. In these moments of silence, I pondered.

Sometimes, I did not actually like my mother. She spoke her mind at the worst of times; she abandoned me and attempted to smother me to make up for it, which drove her other daughter away; she kept my very blood a secret from me. While I did love her, I did not like her.

She still had not told me the name of my Templar father. It was something I had agonised over, picked apart, in the last six months - and it was only made worse by Haytham's presence on the ship. The way he looked at me so critically, like he knew exactly what I was. Occasionally I had felt that he knew who my father was, and was on the verge of telling me. But, after six months, I knew Haytham - and I knew he would tell me nothing if he thought he could use it as leverage.

How different he was from his son!

How different was I from my father? Were we as far apart as the east is from the west, as fire and ice to one another - or were we as close as long-lost siblings, carved from the same bone, waiting to be welded back together?

I had voiced these thoughts to Connor many times, during those long nights keeping watch at the wheel. He had tried to assure me that I was nothing like my father, but neither of us knew for certain whether or not his words were true. Nevertheless, I had appreciated his attempts to comfort me.

The drawing room door creaked as Lydia opened it wider for Gabriel to pass her by. I stood and gladly hugged him, smiling at his softly-spoken greeting. If there was anyone in the world that I could choose to be my father, I would have chosen him.

"How are you both?" I asked once they were seated on the sofa adjacent to mine.

"Bearing up," said the gentle Gabriel. "I don't think we'll ever get used to how quiet the house has become."

"How is Ryan doing? I am sorry I missed him."

"He's so tall now," Lydia gushed. "You would hardly recognise him."

Gabriel leaned forward in earnest. "He's so clever. They're teaching him such marvellous things in that school. Why, he stood before us and recited poetry in Latin for us!"

"That's wonderful." A headache was already forming behind my eyes. I could not imagine the Ryan that they spoke of: all I could see in my mind's eye was the little boy with the gap-toothed smile. "Have you heard from Meredith?"

Lydia and Gabriel exchanged a sad look. "No," said my mother. "The theatre group moved down to the Carolinas a few months ago, and after that, we don't know. We haven't seen her since she ran away."

I took a breath. "I saw her performing," I admitted. "In New York. She was . . . she was good."

A line appeared between Gabriel's dark brows. "What was the performance?"

I was not sure I wanted to tell them that their precious golden daughter played one of the primary characters in a play about sex, but I knew I should not lie to them. "The Country Wife."

For a few moments, they sat silently as the realisation settled upon them like a pox-infected blanket. Then, Lydia's blue eyes filled with tears and she pressed a hand to her mouth. "Where did I go wrong?" she whispered. "Where?"

Though I did not know if I was like my father, I knew that I was not like my mother. I knew when to keep my mouth shut.

So instead of torturing her with the truth, I sat next to her and placed an arm over her shoulder, while Gabriel held her from her other side. He was as sad as she was, but he held it better than she did. "We did our best," he said quietly.

Lydia leaned into his shoulder as the tears made their way down her cheeks. "Did we?"

"Yes," he murmured. "We never stopped loving her."

I felt Lydia sink further into Gabriel's side, and further away from me. I removed my arm from her shoulder. "Look at what we've raised," she wept. "A scholar that we never see, a runaway actress, and an . . ."

I knew the word she did not want to say. Assassin. I was following the path she had hoped desperately that I would avoid. But I noticed that, of all her children, I was the one she abandoned first, and the only one who kept coming back. My relationship with her was an open wound that oozed no matter how I tried to pack it.

I wondered if it was a fatal flaw on my part, that I would keep returning to this place like a dog to its vomit.

Perhaps I was thinking too much about myself.

Lydia wiped her cheeks with a sniff, and looked at me with watery eyes. "I'm sorry. I have not asked you about your travels. You spent six months in the Caribbean?"

Her voice was trembling. For her sake, I ignored it and spoke normally. "Yes. It was awful living on a ship."

"I can imagine." She wrinkled her nose. "I still remember the journey I took to get to America. What a horrid three months they were."

She had come over here alone. At least I had had Thomas and his family with me.

"The journey was exhausting," I admitted, "but I cannot deny that Martinique is a lovely island. We spent three days there."

"Out of leisure?" She tried for an engaged smile.

"Necessity, mostly. We docked there for some repairs, but we got to see the island, too." I clasped my hands in my lap.

She nodded along. Gabriel piped up, then. "And how is Connor doing?"

"He is well," I said. "After we returned, he went to stay at his village. He is still there now."

Lydia's mouth pursed with interest. "How did he find the journey? I cannot imagine he has been on a ship before."

Something in me bristled. "He is the captain of the ship."

Shock - utter shock flooded her face. For a moment, I feared that she would say something else, also ill-spoken, but all she said was, "He is more impressive than I thought."

I had the impression, then, that she was envious. Not of what I had with Connor, but of the life I lived. Assassin or not, I went on adventures - the world was at my fingertips. She had never lived like that, never had those opportunities.

I might have tried to say this, to sympathise with her - the words were right there on my tongue, but what came out was something different entirely. "When will Ryan visit again?"

Gabriel sighed through his nose. "Not for another few months. We will have to deal with the silence in this big old house until then."

I understood the sudden loneliness they felt, the split-second transition from having everyone in the house to having no one. Two birds with an empty nest. My tender heart understood them, saw them for what they were, and took pity.

"I have an idea," I said. When they both looked at me, eyes wide with curiosity, I smiled. "You could move out of this place and come to the homestead. It's a close little community - you would be most welcome."

They looked at each other, stunned. Lydia opened her mouth, about to refuse, but I watched Gabriel place a hand over Lydia's. "Maybe she's right," he said. "There's nothing for us here anymore."

Lydia was still for a few moments, and then her chest moved with a deep breath. She raised her eyes to mine with a smile that slowly grew in certainty. "Okay."

She hugged Gabriel's side, and then leaned over to hold me too. I reciprocated with closed eyes and a smile - but I was not finished. "You must answer me this, though."

Her expression was instantly wary, like her momentary bubble of elation had been popped as I asked the question that had plagued me for months. "Who is my father?"

She was very still. "Why are you asking?"

Because he was a Templar. Because I was sworn to fight against his cause and all for which he stood. Because I deserved to know who I was. "I need to know."

I remembered leaning over the side of the ship in Martinique to watch the water spraying against the hull. Reaching out to touch it. If I leaned far enough, I might have flown. The world had sped past me, whipping red into my cheeks. I remembered feeling like I was passing by the entire world: I could look up and it would all be gone, covered by the sea.

The feeling returned as she opened her mouth and told me the truth. My father's name was—

*

GUYS it is canon that Connor cannot spell "traitor" and ??? idk why that's so cute ???

(I am fully aware of the struggles of being bilingual bc I too face them)

It's also Cassandra's birthday on the 19th of August (edit: today!!) so please please please wish her a happy birthday 🥹 or I will find where you live 🩷