by Camilla Monk
“Spurius let the women and children go,” I told him, not certain what sort of point I was trying to make. The old legate did sound like he hated the Lorians, even so.
His visible eyebrow jumped. “He just let them go?”
“With nothing but the clothes on your back and the shame in your hearts,” Vatluna quoted with a nod. “He’s having the men and boys scourged to death. Wouldn’t want Aus to look soft.”
To death. The notion had danced at the edge of my consciousness since Spurius announced the punishment. I suspected it’d be like that, but a small part of me had wanted to believe that it wasn’t so. That we weren’t responsible for this.
“At least the others will survive,” I mumbled, more to myself than to convince anyone in here that we were good men—or girls.
Vatluna shook his head. “The way to the East is unsafe. The ground will tear their feet. They’ll be cold, and they have nothing to feed the children. It’ll take them at least a week to meet Parthicus’s troops. By then half of them will be dead. Spurius knows all this.”
“It is what it is,” Hastius repeated, his eye lost in visions only he could see.
Vatluna slapped his thighs. “But tonight, we’ll drink to forget, and celebrate!”
“To death and desolation,” Victrix replied, the words ending in a hiss when Nerie gave an unforgiving tug on the stitching thread. Something in the tight line of his lips told me that was no accident.
I didn’t feel like drinking to the many dead of Nyos, and I couldn’t quite pinpoint the roots of that growing sense of unease. After all, the Lorians would have butchered us too if Clearchos and the Thirteenth hadn’t charged. We were at war; our side had won. Simple as that. It is what it is. Maybe I just needed to forget, like Vatluna said. I got to my feet abruptly. “I need some air.”
“Don’t come back too late,” Vatluna said. “I’ve got a jug with your name on it.”
I gave a wry chuckle. “Drink it for me.”
“Will do…”
“Constanter,” Hastius called as I turned around to leave.
“Yes?” Constanter, not Silverlegs or birdshit?
“Thank you.”
“I’m a sweet little piri,” I reminded him with a shrug.
Vatluna erupted in roaring laughter. “And a dangerous madman. But I like that about you, my friend.”
My eyebrows jolted under my mask. Friend? I hadn’t thought about him and Hastius as friends until now. But he was right, the day’s events had forged a bond between us, and while I’d never trust them with my secret, it brought me comfort to know that I could rely on them on the battlefield.
Behind us, Nerie was finished stitching Victrix’s thigh. He looked up from his work and smiled to me. “Don’t forget this on your way out,” he advised, tipping his head to my precious satchel, sitting against one of the wooden poles supporting the tent. “Thurias grabbed it before we left the mine.”
I went to pick it up, a sudden tension in my muscles. “Is he all right?”
“Yes. He didn’t fight; he stayed behind with us to watch over the carts and the cattle.”
“Good. I’d miss his lentil soup if he died,” I joked.
Victrix arched his back to crack his shoulder blades with a long-suffering groan. “I swear he shits it directly in the pot.”
I acquiesced with a snort and headed out. Near the shell curtain, Gemina still sat by Felus. She’d covered his pale, sweaty body with a wool blanket, and I was ashamed to admit to myself that I preferred that. I didn’t want to see his stump; it only served to stoke the secret guilt I was desperately trying to stifle.
Moments after the curtain closed shut behind me, the shells chimed again to let someone out. “You were lucky,” Gemina’s soft voice called.
I turned to face her. Like Nerie’s, her apron was stained crimson. “Next time it could be your leg or your eye I remove.”
“I know.”
The pearly white of her neck and cheeks turned an angry shade of pink. “Do you, Constanter?”
“It’s like that for men,” I said. “They get money and power. They’re free, but there’s a price to pay.”
“You think Felus is free?”
“More than any girl will ever be,” I snapped.
Her fists clenched. “He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t end up a beggar.”
Blood strummed under my temples, fueling rancor and a fury to rival hers. “Why don’t you tell that to Clearchos? Tell him he shouldn’t have taken us to fight his battles,” I hissed. He was the one doing this to our lives, after all. Shaping or destroying them, like it was all just clay in his hands.
Gemina went silent and her throat rolled as she swallowed, over and over, until a single tear rolled down her cheek. I watched it pool at the corner of her lips, stunned and ashamed of myself. She had been nothing but kind to me, and I wished I could take the words back, but now it was too late. She didn’t give me time to apologize. Looking past my shoulder at a group of horsemen trotting the camp, she said, “Go tell him yourself, Constanter. I have work to do here.”
24
Cheers exploded from all directions before I even saw Clearchos’s blue wolf cloak. He and Irius were back, escorted by a group of our companions. I stood behind while men chanted his name and gathered around him to touch him—or even just his horse. He bent down on his saddle to pat a few shoulders, but the melted flesh of his face was void of any emotion. He didn’t give a shit.
When his gaze swiped over the crowd and he saw me, though, a feral smile stretched his scars. He jumped off his horse with surprising agility for a man his age and motioned to a big tent in front of which black standards bearing a wolf head had been planted. I followed him, elbowing my way through a throng that already smelled of wine, mere hours after the battle. On my shoulders, too, I felt taps, squeezes, laced with words of congratulations that reeked of smoke and dried blood. Once I managed to shimmy out of the embrace of a soldier who wanted to sell me a shard of the Magnatura, I slipped past the silver-embroidered flaps of Clearchos’s tent. He was already inside with Irius, sitting regally in his folding chair.
“Have you come to get paid?” he asked, in the guise of a welcome.
Not really. I wasn’t even sure what I expected of this meeting. But money sounded like a good outcome. I crossed my arms over my chain mail. “I guess.”
“Irius,” he called.
No further instructions were needed. Irius went to kneel in front of a long wooden chest and plunged his hand under the neck of his tunic to retrieve a small iron key tied to a chain, which he used to open the chest. I made a mental note that this was how much Clearchos trusted him: enough to have him keep the key to his treasure.
Irius took a leather purse inside and returned to drop it in my hands. It was much heavier than I expected; how much money was this?
Clearchos rested his elbows on the sculpted golden paws ending the armrests of his chair. “A hundred. Count.”
A hundred assari? My heart drumming fast, I tugged at the leather laces sealing the purse. Good thing I still had my mask on: Clearchos wouldn’t see me gaping like a fish trying to breathe out of water. There was no bronze in the purse but the mesmerizing shine of silver. A hundred sigli. A thousand assari. Enough to buy… a whole lot of vegetable carts.
“Count,” Clearchos repeated.
I hesitated to dodge the challenge with some heartfelt thanks and a reassurance that I trusted his accounting skills. But he was staring at me, drilling holes through my mask with those pale irises of his. I placed the bag on his command table and emptied it on a map of Nyos, my cheeks hot with embarrassment. Having never set foot in school, I wasn’t good with big numbers, then. Ten was easy enough to recognize, so, one by one, with slow movements, I gathered the sigli into stacks of ten, examined them and concluded that there appeared to be ten as well. I figured that must make a hundred.
I turned to Clearchos. “We’re good.”
> He nodded once. “What are you going to do with your money?”
I heard myself reply, “Have Rascius modify my sword, and maybe buy some equipment from him.” As soon as I had spoken, I saw Gemina’s tears again like a blurry painting under my eyelids. I should tell Clearchos that I wanted to leave, that Spurius was no liberator but a monster, and that I wanted to head east, away from the war, and buy a vegetable cart. But that would be a lie; I didn’t want to leave and try to be a girl again. My rotten, damaged soul couldn’t find enough compassion, enough honor to walk away from the money and the bloodshed. Silverlegs couldn’t.
My answer seemed to delight Clearchos, whose catlike eyes flitted to my greaves. “A gift from Victrix?”
“Yes. He didn’t want them.”
“Understandable.”
So, Clearchos too knew Gemina and Victrix didn’t like each other.
“Take good care of them,” he advised.
I fidgeted uncomfortably at the reminder that I wore more orichalcum than I could ever hope to buy in a lifetime. “I know. They’re very expensive.”
The corners of his lips tugged down, wrinkling the smooth skin of his burned cheek. “The price is irrelevant. What matters is that they are a gift from a valuable friend.”
“Yes,” I concurred, a vague unease lingering in my stomach from the knowledge that in spite of his remote presence, Clearchos seemed to know every single thing that went on in his legion. Was it Victrix who had told him that we had become friends? What a strange notion, considering that I had spent my first weeks at the camp hating his guts and thinking of ways to escape. But Clearchos was right; like Nerie, Hastius, or Vatluna, Victrix was my friend—and nonetheless, a petulant asshole.
“You can go,” Clearchos concluded, turning away as if to emphasize that he no longer had any interest in me for the time being.
I gave a little bow—of submission or gratitude, I wasn’t sure—and turned on my heels, shoving the precious purse in my satchel. Once outside, I set on finding Rascius. I managed to successfully careen my way among carts, tents, and half-drunk men for a while, until a warm body hurled itself at me. My fingers gripped the hilt of my sword instantly, only to release their hold when I realized my attacker wore a gauzy stola under a faded red veil. A pair of fleshy breasts squished against the flat bosom I concealed under my tunic and chainmail. Before I could shove the girl away, she pressed a sloppy kiss to my mask. “Come on, Silverlegs! Spare some coin for me. You won’t regret it!”
“You will,” a fluted voice called. “She has boils in her ditch.”
The girl who’d kindly offered to spend the night with me flung back red curls over her shoulders with a wounded look. “Stop lying, Soa!”
I turned around to see that it was, indeed, Soa’s delicate frame and messy blonde hair, safely shielded by Thurias. I poked my admirer away gingerly. “I’ll pass. Go find someone else.”
The girl draped herself in her veil with a dramatic swipe of her arm and danced away to latch onto a burly soldier with a missing front tooth.
I tilted my head at Soa. “Thank you.”
She ducked her chin in response. Her forehead rested against Thurias’s arm, tender and possessive at once. I doubted she’d let any girl approach him either.
An impish grin lit up Thurias’s face. “Tales of your great deeds are spreading fast. Apparently, you and Vatluna punched the Magnatura down.”
I shrugged the praise off. “Victrix and Hastius were the ones who bombed the chains, and Vatluna wasn’t even near the gate at the time.”
“Gossip doesn’t care for truth. Want to drink?”
“Actually, I was looking for Rascius.”
He pointed to a vague direction behind me. “I think he’s in the village.”
“Thank you. I’ll try to find him.”
Dealing with Rascius might at least take my mind off Clearchos’s unnerving omniscience and the memory of Gemina’s sudden tears. On my way out the camp I removed my mask and tucked it into my belt, relishing the feel of a late afternoon breeze against my cheeks. I strolled to the Bride’s Lake shore and knelt in the grit to splash water on my face. With each slow breath, each cold drop dripping down my chin, I felt Silverlegs leave me, until I was left an empty husk. The girl staring back at me in the lake’s silvery surface was a stranger. Her tired features were neither a man’s nor a woman’s, and I feared that without her mask she was nothing. No one.
After I was finished washing my face and the dried blood on my arms, I followed the bank to the village. Scattered along the path, awakening crusamantes buds lit the way to the first thatched roofs.
Here, too, Spurius’s purge had taken place. Not a sound, save for the occasional creak of a door left ajar, or the distant barking of a dog. I ambled along thatched roofs, drawn to the iron sign of a blacksmith’s shop. The fire was still going in the forge, and it seemed all the tools had been abandoned on the spot. I gathered the owner wasn’t protected by the hand and would never see his home again. His loss was another’s gain: a near-bald skull emerged from between two straw baskets. Wrinkled arms followed, sprouting from the sleeves of a grimy tunic.
“Found something you like?” I asked, leaning against one of the sturdy wooden posts supporting the shop’s awning.
Rascius paused in his exploration to spit a brownish glob on the stone slabs lining the floor. “Hid his coin up his ass ‘fore he ran, tha’ one, I tell ya.”
I shrugged. “Sour luck. You can have my coin instead.”
Old Rascius’s head snapped up, his face bunching until his toothless chin was practically folded over his nose. “Mayhap…”
I pulled out my Lorian sword from its scabbard, flipped it and handed him the hilt. When he extended gnarled fingers to take it, though, I swiftly raised it out of his reach. “I need it lighter, with a sharper blade, and a better bend.” Seeing him bare his gums to reply something, I cut him off. “Don’t worry; I have the money.” I pulled out the fat purse Clearchos had given me. “Two sigli for that, right?”
He shook his head and raised four fingers. “’Twas four.”
“I’m damn sure I heard two. But I’ll toss another half sigli if the blade is really good.”
He folded one finger, one bloodshot hazel eye peering up at me from under a tangle of greasy, ashen eyebrows.
I took out the three sigli and slammed on the shop’s counter. “Make it perfect.” Placing the sword on a nearby stool, I asked, “How long will it take you?”
Rascius’s sharp gaze fell on the exiled blacksmith’s tools and the brand-new bellows connected directly to the side of the furnace—a marvel of modernity compared to the equipment in his old shack back at the camp. “Come back at dawn,” he chewed out.
“I’ll be here.”
I stepped out on the street and went still, inhaling deeply the faint whiffs of smoke and grilled meat carried by the wind from our camp. They made me hungry. I stretched and listened to the dark. Waited some more.
“Come out,” I said at last. “I know you’re here.”
Rascius mumbled a muffled “busy” from inside the blacksmith shop. I ignored him, focusing on the shadow peeling off the side of a house across the street. Victrix had traded his lorica for his usual leather cuirass; he strolled to me, his thumbs hooked into his sword-belt and a lazy smile hanging on his lips. He held out a bottle of wine and a threadbare canvas bag I gathered contained food. “Want to celebrate like a king?”
I rubbed my nape tiredly. “No. I think I’ll go find a good branch to sleep on. I’m not really in the mood for…” I flung my hand in the direction of the camp, where the notes of double flute and bagpipe carried to us through the streets and a bonfire lit up the night sky.
His eyes took on a devilish glint. “I was thinking of something better than that.”
25
“Where are you taking me?”
“Shut up and walk, birdshit.”
Well, I was. Victrix h
ad taken us back to Nyos’s now deserted streets. The desperate howls coming from the forum had stopped—They would no doubt resume at the crack of dawn. I let him guide my steps through this eerie city bled dry from its inhabitants, stealing glances at every stone, every finely sculpted column. Here a lonely cat mewled to a master never to return; there sheer linen curtains billowed silently, gilded by a lamp no one had put out before leaving.
The paved streets became progressively steeper until we reached a small place overlooking the city and the lake. Victrix stopped and observed with narrowed eyes as a group of legionaries methodically pillaged a house. “This one looks nice, and they’re almost done.”
I watched as they bustled in and out of heavy wooden doors framed by tendrils of hederia. “Why did you want to come here?”
He went to sit on the ledge on a fountain at the center of the place. “Just wait five minutes.”
Fighting an eye roll, I went to sit cross-legged by his side, and waited. One of the soldiers held a wax tablet where he listed every piece of furniture that was being taken. The others carried them, one by one. Finely sculpted chairs and tables, gilded crockery, oil lamps… So much wealth. For nothing. The power was in the hands of the West now—or rather in the hands of Aus.
“They won’t be long,” Victrix remarked, perhaps more to himself than me, since his feet tapped the pavement impatiently as the men worked.
I trailed my fingertips in circles in the water. You could see all the way to the intricate lace of silvery lakes and rivers of the Waterlands from up here. Farther beyond, you could even make out the snow-coated peaks of the Sepires, hundreds of leagues away. Loria stood beyond that impassable wall. Once the capital of our entire empire, long before I was born, now only the capital of the East.
“Do you think we’ll march all the way to Loria?” I asked Victrix.
“No idea. They’re gone,” he announced, springing to his feet.
He was right: the villa’s doors remained ajar, but the soldiers were already halfway down the street. They turned right, toward the Prefectural palace, and vanished out of sight. I followed Victrix across the street and we slipped inside the pillaged house like a pair of rhagamuses.