by Camilla Monk
Splendid. “But what of the others? This could turn into a disaster…” For me, if I suddenly had to deal with the curiosity of a hundred idiots.
He shrugged. “Clearchos has more important shit to do than run around the camp gossiping. I think he just wanted to have a good answer ready in case someone ever asks questions.” His eyes narrowed, searching mine through the holes of my mask. “He bought you time, but you’ve still got no more than a couple of good years playing Silverlegs at best. Don’t forget it.”
Playing? I rapped my fingers on the worn leather stretching over my knees. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean.” He lowered his voice, as if worried someone might spy on us. “You can’t pass as a boy forever.”
And I could never be a reputable girl again—not with my short hair and the skin he had tattooed. “Don’t worry. I’ll get myself killed in battle long before that becomes a problem,” I muttered defiantly.
Victrix’s eyes went a stormy gray. His nostrils flared. “We’ll see about that.”
Yes. One way or another, we will, I thought, reliving in my mind the beat of absolute peace right after the explosion of Hastius’s bombs, when I’d been so sure it was over, and I was dead. There had been no fear. Only a sense of accomplishment and release. I gave a shrug. “Until then I’ll try to make some good money first.”
“For what?” he asked, his scowl easing somewhat.
“A vegetable cart.”
His eyebrows jumped. “What the fuck are you gonna do with a vegetable cart?”
“Push it around.”
This time, the last traces of Victrix’s anger dissipated like the morning’s fog. A guileless, unguarded grin lit up his face. “You’re fucking with me.”
I thought he should smile like that more, but I didn’t tell him. Instead, I said, “It’s always been my dream.”
“To sell vegetables?”
“Yeah. Peas and brassicas, mostly.”
He shook his head, but the smile wouldn’t leave his lips. “How did we end up talking about vegetables?”
“You’re the one who asked.”
He grabbed his sword belt. “I did, and I’ll have more questions about that cart of yours later, but…” He motioned to the tent’s flaps. “I’d like to hear from Clearchos what’s in our future now that Manicus’s bones rot in his mausoleum.”
I gave a firm nod. “Agreed.”
We moved at the same time, and when we reached for the flaps together and our shoulders brushed, I realized I’d gotten closer than I’d meant to. Victrix’s hand paused on the worn ibex skin. He looked at me, right through my mask, as if it weren’t even there. Perhaps for the first time, I feared that this second skin of iron couldn’t shield me after all. It might fool others, but he would always know.
His lips quirked, but his eyes weren’t smiling. “I honestly thought you might try to kill me, you know.” When I remained silent, he thought it useful to add, “Back at the villa.”
Where else? I averted my eyes. “I came close to punching you.”
“Why?”
I had no answer. My mouth chewed on empty words that wouldn’t come out, truths my pride would never allow me to speak. A vision of the graying stubble on Servilius’s cheek flashed in my mind, making me nauseous. “I just don’t want you to do that,” I mumbled, cursing myself for the tremor in my voice.
“But you didn’t punch me,” he countered quietly, a foreign softness in his voice.
“I will if you try that again,” I warned him.
He snorted a single chuckle. “Next time, I’ll ask first.”
“Next time?” I hissed.
Victrix shrugged one shoulder and patted his chest, spitting words in a croaking voice that sounded like Rascius’s. “He’s a dogged bastard, this one.”
No truer words had ever been spoken, and I almost wanted to laugh, but the sound died in my throat. “I want things to stay like they were before,” I murmured. “I don’t want you to treat me like a girl.”
He averted his eyes, considering a lone nail trimming sitting on the ground with a slow nod. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep treating you like shit.”
I parted the tent’s flap and sprang out first. He couldn’t see my smile as I replied, “Thank you.”
29
Outside, the messengers’ horses were gone, and in their place stood the brown mare Vatluna had borrowed from the equites back at the temple. Clearchos’s guards exchanged a nod with Victrix and let us inside his tent. As the presence of his new mount suggested, Vatluna was here already, sitting on a wooden stool that looked like a die under his massive body.
Leaning against the command table between Irius and Clearchos, Hastius too had joined us. I would never admit it out loud—and preferred to call him a diseased nutsack instead—but I was relieved to see him back on his legs. A fresh bandage circled his head and covered his missing eye. The wound had stopped bleeding, but the unease in my gut wouldn’t set just yet. The price of freedom and money was high, and just because we accepted that didn’t make the losses any easier.
Whatever pain his infirmity might have caused him, he hid behind a smug smile when he saw us. “Look what the wind brought in, my favorite farm boys.”
Next to me, I registered Victrix’s sharp intake of air. Hastius was still an aggravating asshole, all right. “If only that blast had taken your tongue instead,” I shot back jovially.
Vatluna slapped his thighs with a hoarse chuckle. “Girls would miss that the most.”
Victrix’s eyes narrowed in mild disgust at the implications of Vatluna’s crass joke, but his lips twitched helplessly.
“Oh, Mother Earth Tellus, is there no pity to be found in those battled-hardened hearts?” Hastius asked his audience in a theatrical sigh.
“None,” Clearchos concluded in an even voice, bringing our attention to the maps he and Hastius had been studying.
“So,” Victrix asked, moving closer to the table. “Do we stay here?”
“No,” Clearchos said. “Spurius can hold Nyos for now. We move northeast with the Twentieth.”
Victrix’s eyes lit up. “To fight Parthicus?”
“He’s marching toward Nyos.” He dragged his fingers across the map, over the Inland Sea and the tormented shapes of a scatter of lakes to the east. “The West now controls the entirety of the Inland Sea shores and the Waterlands, all the way to Palica.” He slammed his thumb against a big city southeast of the lakes, standing on an island in the middle of a large river. “Now all that’s left to do is to get rid of Parthicus’s troops. We’ll join the Twentieth Legion and force them to retreat beyond the new border.”
Hastius shook his head. “The man has no allies left, nothing to lose. He won’t go down without a bloodbath.”
“You mean Parthicus?” I asked.
He acquiesced. “Varalius and the Lorian senate are no longer behind him. They want a way out of this mess. The treasure has been drained to support the legions all around the Inland Sea in vain, and now they’re starting to realize they might very well lose their entire empire if they keep fighting.”
Clearchos’s lips pursed into a jagged line before he took over Hastius’s explanation. “Varalius has grown weary of this war he’ll never win, but the Lorian Legions idolize Parthicus, and for now he’s the one paying them with whatever loot he can get his hands on. Only Parthicus stands in the way of a peace treaty, and Varalius is powerless to stop him.”
My head snapped up. “A peace treaty?” I brought my eyes back to the map, and the cluster of pines drawn in red ink around Palica—must be what the others called the scarlet woods. If a new border was established here, the Western Empire would become twice as big as its neighbor, which would be relegated behind the safe wall of the Sepires chain. Tucked into its bay at the easternmost shore of the continent, Loria had never seemed so small…
“You really think Varalius would agree to
sign off all the land between Nyos and Palica without fighting?” I asked.
Hastius crossed his arms and gave a rueful wince. “I don’t think any of us will see that in his lifetime.” He raised his visible eyebrow to Clearchos. “But you disagree with me on that.”
Clearchos’s gaze swept over the parchments scattered in front of him. “Varalius is weak. He’ll give in, but only after we’ve gotten rid of Parthicus.”
Vatluna broke his self-imposed silence for the first time since the meeting had started. “He’ll bring at least two fresh legions with him. The Thirteenth is stuck protecting Nyos, and the Twentieth is depleted. It won’t be large enough to defeat him, even with our help. We can lead the men, but you know as well as I do that it’ll be slaughter on both sides.”
“All we need is to slow him down until the Overseer sends backup from Cispirina,” Victrix countered. “One month from now there’ll be at least three more legions stationed between Nyos and Palica, and the plains will be buried under a foot of snow. Parthicus’s troops will fall back to their winter camps; then the Overseer will have until spring to convince Varalius to bend over.”
“Indeed,” Clearchos acquiesced. “Let us drag Parthicus through the Waterlands. That should certainly slow him down.”
Victrix waved at the map. “He’ll march higher north and avoid them: too marshy down there.”
Clearchos’s mouth twisted upward. “Which is why we must give him a good reason to choose the Waterlands.”
Vatluna rose from his stool to tower over the maps, casting a long shadow over the whole table. He pressed his forefinger to what looked like a small fortified town on the map. “The Castravienma, then?”
I leaned closer. “Is it a big city?”
Silence fell over the command table. Vatluna’s eyebrows shot up and Victrix ran a hand across his mouth. I felt my cheeks heat up under the iron of my mask and instantly wished I could take the question back. Stoic in the face of my humiliation, Clearchos flicked his wrist to Hastius. “Clarify for Silverlegs.”
The latter considered me with a smile that was at once amusement and consternation. “Your candor never ceases to amaze me.”
I fought the urge to ball my fists. “What can I say? I’m just a farm boy.”
He squinted his good eye in the briefest wink. “That you are. The Castraviemna is no city. It’s one of the largest Lorian winter camps, on the southern bank of the Utur. Big enough to house ten legions, and it lies between the woods and the Waterlands. It’s not easy for them to maneuver out of there—”
“But it’s even harder for enemies to get in.” I completed. I looked at the map again and now I saw it, the plains and the woods, blue-green blotches for the Waterlands, a few villages, and across it all, the lines and words Clearchos had scribbled on the parchment, pointing to the walls of the fortress. The bait we’d be targeting to force Parthicus to change his course.
Hastius rapped his knuckles on the ink fortress. “Parthicus is probably pissed as hell about losing Nyos, but the Castravienma matters more than ever to him right now. If we burn it down, his legions will have to retreat all the way back to the Sepires to the next winter camp, and they’ll be easy prey on the way there.”
Vatluna scratched his bushy beard. “How many men in there?”
Clearchos answered, “Whatever is left of his Seventh Legion after the massacre in Palica. Eight hundred men at most, many of them wounded.”
“Manageable,” Vatluna conceded. “But once Parthicus takes the bait, we’ll have to deal with his troops too. The marshes and the woods around the Castraviemna will be hell for him, but we won’t fare any better.”
“We’ll be coming from the southwest,” Hastius countered. “If we cut through the woods, we’ll avoid the marshes on our side.”
He was right, but leading five thousand men through a forest would prove a challenge in itself—I, for one, could attest that the woods could be your sanctuary or your undoing, depending on how well you knew your way around them. As I nodded to myself and followed the movement of their fingers on the map, I caught Victrix’s eyes searching mine through the holes of my mask.
“You’ll be right at home,” he remarked.
Taken aback by this unexpected bout of mind reading, I mumbled, “I… Yes, I guess.”
Hastius said something else to Vatluna, but his voice was a distant buzz, muted by my own internal musings. Victrix was no mind reader. He simply knew me. Perhaps better than anyone else I’d ever met, I realized, as if a door had just opened before me, into a garden I hesitated to enter. Victrix wasn’t just a friend; he knew who I really was under the mask. He knew I loved to sleep in trees, and he had seen the anger rooted deep inside me, a bitter fruit so similar to his own. He knew me. There was something so troubling about this simple evidence that I chose to mentally slam the door shut and concentrate on Clearchos’s voice as he told Hastius we’d need to take a small detachment to move faster through the woods.
“It’s a very risky bet on both sides.” Vatluna noted gloomily, before he grinned and revealed a row of sturdy yellow teeth. “But I like that. If we raze the Castraviemna and Parthicus loses his men in the marshes trying to defend it, the Overseer might as well start writing down the terms of his peace treaty with Varalius.”
Hastius sighed as he considered Clearchos’s notes on the map, but the smile didn’t leave his lips. “And if we fail, it’s annihilation, and perhaps a footnote in the pages of history.”
“Better than nothing,” Victrix stated, a hungry edge to his voice. I reckoned he’d dreamed of this, a final victory over Parthicus at his father’s side, the gore and glory of it.
Clearchos seemed to barely notice we were still in the room, his eyes molten silver as he placed a tiny wooden horse painted in red north of the marshes. “Tell the men to start packing. We move before noon. Southeast, to the Waterlands.”
Behind him, Irius unfroze, his face the usual blank mask, as if his mind were barely here with us in the tent. “Consider it done,” was all he said before he exited the tent, to supervise our departure with the same economy of words.
As was his habit, Clearchos pretended to lose all interest in the rest of us to signify the meeting was over. We came out to dark gray skies and cold morning air now damp with the promise of rain. Irius had already started casting his silent spell; horns blasted over the men’s hubbub to signal the order to strike camp, and a few tents shuddered and collapsed around us.
Vatluna’s big paw fell onto my shoulder. “Go take down your tent, Silverlegs. You haven’t seen your biggest battle yet.”
“I don’t have one,” I said, patting my satchel. “All my stuff is in there.”
“Then go see Thurias. He’ll give you one,” Victrix replied.
My jaw fell slack. An entire tent for me? I tilted my head, waiting for the catch, some afterthought that I’d have to share it with seven men, including fart-boy Plescus.
“If I have to go get it for you, I’ll shove the pole up your ass,” Victrix clarified. There was no sting to the threat—only the usual level of annoyance—and, in truth, I was glad that he seemed to be keeping his promise to treat me like any other soldier.
Hastius exulted. “It’s gonna be a parade of whores in there! You know, that wench Mathula, redhead, big jugs?” He motioned to his chest, drawing the generous curves of invisible breasts—I feared he meant the overzealous girl who’d kissed my mask the night before. “She asked me about you last night, what kind of girls you like.” I prayed my neck and ears weren’t as red as they felt as he went on. “I had to tell her, ‘Sister, can we go back to that once you’re done sucking my cock?’”
Vatluna and Victrix dissolved in raucous laughter, and I tried to force a couple of deep chortles out of my throat, but what came out sounded like a bout of embarrassed coughing. I drew a discreet breath to steady my voice before I answered, “Well, next time you see her, tell her I’m not interested in her diseased ditch.” N
ow, that should dampen Mathula’s spirits. If it didn’t, I had no idea what would.
Hastius guffawed and slapped my back. “You’re ruthless, my friend.”
“But a cautious man,” Vatluna noted with a nod of approbation.
Victrix didn’t comment on my efforts to turn down Mathula. But his quivering grin spoke volumes.
30
Rain makes war worse. And slow. The first drops started falling as we were breaking camp, and soon became a downpour that put out the fires and washed away the men and tents like a tide. We left the wounded and most of the whores in Nyos to move faster, and we marched east across the plains of the Lacustra, under a never-ending drizzle that seeped under our chain mail, our tunics, and, it seemed, into our very bones. More than half of the Twentieth followed close behind us, dragging three thousand men and at least a hundred carts toward a new battle.
And the rain didn’t stop. Five days, five nights, and five camps later, hooves and feet alike still skidded in the mud, forming a weary brownish snake whose iron scales slithered with a thousand softly muttered curses.
“I don’t understand why you won’t ride with the others.” Sitting in Gemina’s wagon, safely shielded from the rain by its wooden roof, Nerie popped his head from a hatch opening and watched me traipse behind them, a frown on his face.
I stared down at my muddy boots, the sounds of my footsteps lost among those of hundreds of feet dragging on a slippery pavement indented by the wheels of countless travelers. “I prefer to walk.” Because I trusted my own legs more than those of the damn horses.
He tried to crane his neck to get a better look at our surroundings as the wagon bobbed along the road. “Do you know where we’re going?”
Sensing curious glances left and right from men who knew I attended Clearchos’s meetings with his personal guard, I contented myself with a laconic, “East.”
Nerie rolled his eyes at me. “Well, thanks. That helped.”
“You’re welcome,” I replied with a chuckle.