by Camilla Monk
I stiffened. Undressing in front of him was out of the question. Just as my lips parted to decline Nerie’s offer with a poorly crafted excuse, Gemina lifted slanted blue eyes at me. “There’s a lady in here, you know, and she doesn’t want to see your filthy ass. Go change in there,” she snapped, pointing at the feathered curtain concealing her private quarters.
Nerie thankfully snickered as I retreated behind the curtain with a sigh of relief.
“And for Meditrina’s sake, use the basin too!” she yelled at me through the flaps.
I glanced down at the wooden basin sitting near her bed, filled with soapy water in which purple hederia leaves floated, along with a few long hairs. Gemina must have washed recently. I undressed and picked up the damp cloth resting on the edge of the basin. Grime transferred to the washcloth as I scrubbed my body hastily.
How long had it been since I’d been that clean? I’d almost forgotten what my naked body looked like, this foreign expanse of bruised and scratched flesh. The skin on my elbows and knees had gotten a little coarse, like that of my palms and knuckles. The cut Fishtail had inflicted on me had healed, but many others had appeared, courtesy of Victrix and Irius’s brutal training methods. Lean muscles, square shoulders. Almost a boy’s body. Almost. But the soft flesh on my chest was all too feminine. How ironic that Servilius had wanted to make me a woman. For the first time I saw more clearly that he hadn’t. He had ravaged me, and now I could no longer care about the skin he’d stained, as if only tearing it off bit by bit in combat could purify it at last.
As I ran the cloth through the short locks curling behind my ears, I thought of my mother. Did she miss me? I didn’t really miss her, but I sometimes wondered what her life might be in the aftermath of what I’d done to Servilius and Arun. Could Arun still work the fields with his missing fingers? What of Servilius? Had he perhaps taken his anger out on my mother after my escape? Guilt crawled under my skin at the thought; I rubbed at my arms reflexively, as if it might rid me of the relentless bite of a thousand invisible insects. I almost wished I’d had actual fleas instead: Gemina could have done something about those with a poultice. I shrugged on the black tunic and fitted it over my hips with a punishing tug that nearly ripped it at the seams; there was no cure for a poisoned mind.
The trousers and the wrist guards fit better than I expected: Nerie must have gotten them from a lean fellow—possibly a dead one. I fastened back my greaves and my sword belt, and there I was, no longer just a boy. A man, I realized for the first time since Ulpinus’s head had fallen to the ground.
Nerie wasn’t done searching Gemina’s treasure chest; as soon as he saw me come out, he brandished a short-sleeved chain-mail shirt. “And we have this too!”
After I’d shrugged it on and readjusted my sword belt, he gauged me, his lips pursed in admiration. “Look at you, Silverlegs…”
I frowned. “Silverlegs?”
He tilted his head to the shell curtain through which a gravelly voice could be heard swearing and urging the men to take their spears and shields. “I heard some of them call you that. I like the ring of it.”
Behind him, Gemina examined me too. As her gaze trailed up and down my body, I noticed she held an oval object wrapped in a piece of linen. “Come,” she said, motioning to the shell curtain. I followed her outside in the cool night air. Hemmed in by the gentle pink glow of the crusamantes, her tent seemed a peaceful sanctuary amid the bustle of the camp on the eve of the battle. She led me farther away from the entrance, toward a secluded corner of the mine where divine water seeped through the stone and trickled silently into a small pool.
Once we were alone, she looked down at Victrix’s greaves around my legs. “So, you’re wearing them?”
I nodded hesitantly. “Victrix gave them to me. He said he had no use for them.”
Her pale fingers tightened around the mysterious packet she held. “They should fit you well. He was about your height when I had them done for him.”
My mouth fell open in shock. Why would she have done that? “I’m sorry,” I blabbered, bending to remove them. “I’ll give them back to you. They looked too expensive anyway.”
“Keep them. Nothing can cut through those.”
I looked up at her in confusion. “Is it steel?” I’d first believed it might be sterling silver; steel just didn’t have that kind of shine. But Victrix had said it wasn’t.
“It’s orichalcum.”
My breath caught in my throat. She wasn’t serious. She couldn’t be serious. It would mean I wore greaves made of a metal so rare and so costly that Servilius’s farm and every single ibex he possessed weren’t worth even one ounce of it!
When she noticed I would soon lack air, Gemina broke the tension with a petulant sigh. “Clearchos gave it to me. His gifts can be quite extravagant when he’s in the mood.”
Not gifts, I thought bitterly. Payments, for taking care of the soldiers… and for that same thing all the other women did. And Gemina had all that orichalcum made into greaves for Victrix instead, who said they were shit and wouldn’t wear them. What the hell was wrong with these people?
I gulped. “I’ve never had anything so expensive. I don’t know if I should accept—”
She rolled her eyes. “Clearchos will be pleased there’s at least someone using them.”
“If you say so…” I bit my tongue before saying something stupid. Whatever arrangement they had was none of my business.
Gemina’s grin dampened to a joyless smile. “I say so. Speaking of gifts, take this.” She handed me the mysterious oval object. I removed the linen to reveal a bronze mask. “They’re for lepers, when the disease has eaten a face so badly it’s best not to look at it.”
Befuddled, I looked back and forth between her mischievous gaze and the androgynous features etched in the greenish metal. The nose was very straight, the cheeks a little fuller than mine, and the eyelids drooped slightly in a way that would shadow my own gaze. Thin leather straps ran through holes on each side, allowing the mask to be secured to the wearer’s face.
“It’s clean,” Gemina noted, anticipating my concern. She tilted her head, her expression growing impish. “Maybe someday you’ll grow tired of being a boy and you’ll meet a man you want to be a woman for. Save that pretty face for him.”
“I don’t care about that,” I retorted, my eyes set on the mask’s lifeless features. The very idea of anyone ever touching me again made my skin crawl.
“Suit yourself.”
I positioned the mask on my face in guise of an answer, the contact of the cool metal against my cheeks strange and exciting. I liked that no one would be able to see my face or guess my thoughts, that I’d be a ghost to them. A monster. I fastened the leather laces around my head tightly to keep it in place. And it was done; I no longer had a face. I wasn’t Constanter; I was Silverlegs, and in that moment, I felt like I could take on an entire army.
“I have to go now,” I told her. “Thank you. For everything.”
Her bangles chimed as she flicked a dismissive wrist. “Think nothing of it. In truth, I want to see how far you’ll go.”
So did I.
17
“What the fuck is this?”
Standing near the entrance of Clearchos’s lair in full armor, Victrix took in my appearance with a tightly set jaw and a glare that could have cracked diamonds. “I already told you we’re not a theater troupe. This is serious—”
“I thought this was a covert mission,” I retorted.
His mouth remained open midsentence, and already his fingers were curling into fists. I prepared to dodge, but he breathed out his rising fury through flaring nostrils. “Listen, birdshit, you’re under my command, and you’re not gonna give me any attitude tonight, or else, I swear, your first mission will be your last. Got it?”
I crossed my arms defiantly but consented to a nod. There was a smirk under my mask that he couldn’t see—Silverlegs proved to be much bolder
than Constanter had ever been.
“All right, follow me.”
We took the stairs as usual, but this time, barely a few steps in, he pushed a worm-eaten door I’d always seen closed, that opened to a dank and pitch-black corridor where neither of us could stand upright.
“Watch your step,” Victrix warned as we crawled toward a faint green glow. As we neared the end of the tunnel, I registered deep voices echoing from the depths of a hole in the ground. Once I stood close enough, I could make out a rope ladder hanging a thick iron ring wedged into the rock. It dangled down a well that was thirty- or maybe forty-feet deep. Bright emerald water shimmered at the bottom, lighting the way. Victrix went first, the rotten wood rungs creaking ominously under his weight—I could hardly believe that a giant like Vatluna might go down the same way without breaking them all.
I followed him with cautious movements, breathing slowly to ward off the certainty that the well’s walls were closing in on me and I was being swallowed into the cave. The passage was so narrow I could barely look down to see where my feet were taking me. I heard Victrix fall into the water with a splash, and soon I too reached the last rung. I expected to plunge neck-deep, but I found myself crouching in an even lower tunnel, my boots soaking in a shallow pool of divine water that cast swarming green reflections on the wet walls.
“This way,” he announced, progressing to our right.
This time it wasn’t long before the bottleneck opened to an immense cave cradling a small subterranean lake of divine water. All but ignoring the four men awaiting us, I craned my neck to contemplate the glistening stalactites hanging high above our heads. The water’s glow painted everything in touches of ever-changing grass and emerald green. Whatever magic lay within the sparse green tendrils snaking in my village’s stream, it was nothing compared to this magnificence. I ventured closer to the edge of the pool to stare into the luminescent depths. Could one be rejuvenated entirely if they bathed in that water? Or maybe it held so much power it’d make them sick instead?
Clearchos’s voice pulled me out of my contemplation. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”
“No… I didn’t even think it was possible to have so much divine water in one place.”
His gaze lingered on my greaves before he moved closer to rest a hand on my shoulder. “Unbearably beautiful… but ultimately useless.”
I glanced at his scarred cheek, sculpted by the greenish hue. He must have tried to heal it in vain. Was it really that the water didn’t work though, or that Clearchos had been refused by Meditrina because of his many sins?
“What’s with the mask, Silverlegs?”
I turned to Hastius’s grinning face, secretly pleased that the moniker seemed to be catching on so fast. “A gift from a friend,” I replied evenly. “And something for our enemies to remember.”
Behind me, Victrix snorted, and I picked up a softly muttered bullshit.
“Good choice. It’s very distinctive.” Spoken in a voice so deep it reminded me of the thrum of a long horn, the remark came from hulky Vatluna, whose own keen fashion sense was evidenced by the many phalerae decorating his cuirass—each engraved bronze disc belonging to a centurion he had killed, according to the rumors—and a nice silver necklace holding the biggest tooth I’d ever seen, a sharp, three-thumb long canine. I’d need to ask him where it came from, and if he had killed that beast too…
“You should consider one for your ugly mug, Luna,” Hastius shot back, waggling his eyebrows.
The interested party rested a threatening hand on the guard of his long, two-handed sword, but the grin splitting his short raven beard belied any sort of animosity—he must be used to Hastius’s sharp tongue.
Irius, who had been his usual silent self until now, pointed to a path around the pool that seemed to connect to another tunnel. “Hastius, is the river this way?”
It was Clearchos who answered for him. “Yes. Follow the Meditrinal water to the foundations of the old temple. You won’t even need torches.” He extended his arms to gather us around him in a circle. “You have until dawn.” His hands squeezed my shoulder and Victrix’s, as we stood closest to him. “The thirteenth legion is moving already, and our men are starting to clear a path out of the mine as well. Parthicus is sending reinforcement to Nyos as we speak, and it won’t take them long to realize we’re about to attack. Time is slipping through our fingers. You mustn’t fail. Open the Magnatura at any cost.” His lips curled, stretching the burnt flesh of his jaw. “Let’s give Nyos back to the West, and Manicus will make us rich men.”
Having said this, he pulled Victrix to him to kiss his forehead, in what I now understood to be a ritual. I was next, and this time around I didn’t mind the contact so much, safely hidden under my mask—the thrill raising the hair on my nape was one of pride. He could have chosen anyone else among the hundreds of men out there, but here I was, among his best.
After he was done kissing Vatluna, Victrix slammed his fist against his lorica and barked, “We’re moving.”
Hastius seemed to be the one who best knew his way around the cave; he led us around the pool on slippery rocks and into the short tunnel. Clearchos had been right: with so much divine water everywhere, there was no need for torches even in the tunnel. Hastius stopped near the exit and raised his palm for us to do the same.
“This is where it gets a little tricky,” he warned. “The river’s down below.”
I peered over his shoulder and smiled. It wasn’t so bad, just a bit of a steep cliff plunging down to a narrow bank running along the green subterranean river. He searched a big leather satchel for a length of rope—presumably to fasten it to a series of old pitons that looked like they’d been wedged into the stone decades ago. While he worked, my attention was drawn to a rocky ledge a few feet below that led to a series of good holds. The last thing I heard before jumping was Victrix’s anguished shout, “Birdshit!”
By the time he and the others figured I hadn’t killed myself, I was well on my way to the river below. The wall was a bit slippery from the kind of shiny moss I’d noticed in Clearchos’s lair—I gathered it fed on the water and somehow managed to survive without daylight because of it. There were more than enough ridges and holes to grab onto though, so it was a fairly easy way down.
After I let myself fall, landing on the gravelly riverbank, I looked up at Hastius and his rope and yelled, “You guys coming or what?”
Hastius’s permanent grin had been wiped off his face as he stared down at me, but it was to Victrix that he asked, “Where the fuck did you find him?”
•♦•
It was difficult to keep track of time walking underground as we were. The slight ache in my legs told me we’d been following the river for at least three hours, maybe a little longer. Vatluna was the same sort of quiet, meditative fellow as Irius, and Victrix marched in angry silence. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was just a side-effect of the weight of the responsibility Clearchos had dropped on our shoulders, or if he was still pissed about Ulpinus, his greaves, my mask… in short, everything I’d done tonight, I realized with a twinge of unease.
I got to know Hastius better though, because he wouldn’t stop talking. A lot of what he had to say revolved around the countless women he’d bedded and who moaned the loudest or who played hard to get, but I did manage to learn that his family hailed from the old southern kingdom of Hyparthia. They had sailed north across the Subea Sea to Loria when he was still a child, and his father now lived in Cispirina where he made and sold liquamen—Vatluna speculated that Hastius’s insatiable taste for women could thus be traced to growing among hundreds of jars of fermented fish sauce.
After he was done laughing, Hastius went on to tell me that Hyparthia was a kingdom of sand, where all cities stood along a single river, like a green vein from which life grew in the desert. He claimed that the royal Hyparthian dynasties once ruled everything south of the Lorian empire, all the way to an unknown world, filled wi
th lush forests and mountains taller than anyone had ever seen. It was said that gods and nymphs lived there, but in truth, no one truly knew what lay beyond the white sands of Hyparthia.
“What about you, Silverlegs?” Hastius asked after he was done telling me about the time he’d thrown one of his lead-weighted darts right between a man’s eyes. “How did a farm boy straight from the lake’s ass land in Clearchos’s Legion?”
I tipped my head to Victrix, who had been listening to our chat with tightly set lips so far and was busy pretending to be genuinely interested in the greenish gravel his boots crushed. “He snatched me in the woods with Fishtail and Thurias.”
A deep chuckle shook Vatluna’s shoulders, while Hastius made no effort to contain his barking laugh. “Clearchos likes to call it a firm invitation. It’s true we’ve been handing out a lot of those lately. But before that?” he insisted, his tone sobering. “What were you doing in the woods with that Lorian sword of yours?”
My heart drummed a little faster, like every time someone asked too many questions. As usual, my answer was a tight balance between truth and omission. “I found the sword on a dead man on the lakeshore. I spent some time in the woods after that.”
“Alone?” Vatluna probed.
“Yes.”
He cast me a sideways glance. “Ran away from home?”
“Got into a fight with my stepfather,” I said evenly, my stomach churning at the memory of Servilius’s body against mine.
Hastius’s lips twisted sideways in disappointment. “And that’s it?”
Victrix sighed in irritation, and ever-silent Irius briefly turned to look at me, a flash of curiosity in his dead, brown eyes. My hand slid to the grip of my sword, finding comfort in the feel of bound leather. “I got into a fight with the old man and broke his front teeth with a pestle. I left afterwards, and my stepbrother came to find me to take revenge, and I cut his fingers off with my sword.”