The delegation from Argos arrived on a Thursday.
Lysander knew about it four days in advance — his supply role meant provisioning requests reached him before most people knew a formal reception was happening. He had read the guest list, noted the composition, and spent three evenings in the library reading what the palace archive held about Troy's relationship with Argos.
The relationship was old, polite, and thin.
Argos was not Mycenae — not Agamemnon's city, not the seat of the power that would eventually direct the war. But it was connected to Mycenae the way all the Greek palace states were connected: through marriage, through obligation, through the specific web of relationships that meant what happened in one palace eventually reached all the others.
A delegation from Argos was not a delegation from Agamemnon.
It was, however, a delegation that would report back to a world that included Agamemnon.
He went to the reception prepared.
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