by Camilla Monk
Hastius was the quickest to voice the only possible conclusion. “Clearchos, this is suicide! We need to retreat while we still can.”
And our time was running out already. Across the clearing, the forest roared and vomited the first red banners, bloodred, with wolves whose eyes were silvery moons. When the horses followed in a tidal wave of fog and steel, I tried to breathe, but my bones turned to brittle ice, and I pictured myself frozen, dying here, unable to move or fight, as I had in Nyos. But I remembered that we had won that battle, weathered the storm and seen dawn.
I looked up at Clearchos. We all did, waiting for his orders as time trickled down like the sweat on our temples. “Clearchos!” Hastius urged when he remained mesmerized in the face of his enemy’s army.
His eyes went wide, as if he’d been whipped awake from a nightmare. “Hastius, open a way back to the road. And the rest of you, don’t let them encircle us!”
A fighting retreat then. Above me, Vatluna steered his horse and raised his massive Spathian sword. “For gold and glory! For Clearchos! Bring me Parthicus’s balls!”
By then the Western Legionaries must have figured Spurius the younger wouldn’t be their guide to the fields of Elysion: their war cries mingled with our own in answer to Vatluna’s command. I yelled, too, fed on the power of the throng to fuel my rage and give me strength.
The wall of red shields, of spears and horses grew ever closer. In this sea of noise and smoke, it was too late to be afraid. His shoulder to mine, Victrix grinned at me, madness blazing in his eyes. “Fuck them up, birdshit!”
His command was fire in my veins. The cohort facing us raised and gathered their shields into a tight carapace. I closed my eyes briefly, letting the energy accumulate in my legs, surrendering to the pounding under my skull. The whirling chaos of the battlefield and its acrid stench ceased to exist for a moment. It was just the horses and the men standing beyond the sea of red shields, calling to me. Preys.
The others around me rammed against the wall of wood and metal with hoarse shouts. I leaped atop it, dashing across the shields toward a unit of archers we needed to get rid of. I vaguely registered surprised yells and insults under my feet, and a few of them tried to skewer me with their spear—they were too slow for that. No wonder their formation of choice was a tortoise.
I landed between two Lorians and swung my sword in a single arc to slash their throats before racing toward the cluster of archers readying flaming arrows aimed at Victrix and Vatluna’s flank. Mere steps away from my goal, a short and thick blade slashed the air a hairbreadth from the nose of my mask. I jumped back and saw the crimson crest of a centurion helmet, the wings of an eagle on a bronze phalera.
His beard was shot with silver, but he was still strong. My feet skidded in mud as I parried a few powerful blows—he seemed to have figured that my narrow blade wasn’t designed to defend, but rather to inflict a quick and fatal wound. When he raised his blade to strike me down with the exact same move for the third, maybe fourth time, I crouched to dodge and sliced the tendons of his right knee. His leg gave way under him and he had time only to gasp before I plunged my sword into his neck, all the way down to his heart.
I drew back my blood-soaked sword and spun around to the gleaming tip of a spear rushing toward me. I sliced the wooden shaft in two neat halves before it could hit my chain-mail shirt. The Lorian staggered back and reached for his scabbard, giving me an opening to slash his sword arm. Blood arced and splattered on my mask. He howled, and I made it stop by drawing my blade through his gullet.
The archers were mine. A couple of them aimed at me; I grabbed a discarded scarlet shield from the ground to block a volley of arrows. I was about to spring forward for the kill when a familiar cry of anguish drew my attention to a small Lorian cavalry unit tearing through the Twentieth’s troops with redoubtable skills. They were going for Spurius and his decurions… and I almost considered abandoning the cunt to his fate.
But Victrix and Luna were backing Clearchos against a cohort of Lorians hiding behind their damn red shields, and Hastius and Irius were nowhere in sight in this hell. Using my own shield, I shoved my way toward young Spurius and his men in a chaos of gore and iron. Ahead of me, the Lorian equites were hacking their way through his personal guard, slashing necks and limbs, spearing panicked horses. I used my shield to knock a dying soldier out of my way and moved close enough to pick up the scent of fresh blood, and that’s when I saw him.
Neither young nor an old man yet, riding a rearing stallion, like those engraved on the walls of Nyos. He had just decapitated one of Spurius’s decurions in a cloud of blood that stained his white crest—the only one on the battlefield. When he steered his horse in my direction, a gorgon head with her hair of slithering snakes stared me in the eye at the center of his golden cuirass. Someone had missed a good opportunity to kill him before: an ugly diagonal scar divided his face, slicing through the bridge of his nose all the way down to the corner of his mouth. I couldn’t have known for sure, yet my blood roared with the certainty that I was looking at Parthicus, First Legate of the Lorian army.
But he wasn’t looking at me. He had cornered Spurius, who tried to parry a hail of powerful blows that soon bent his small bronze shield. Parthicus wasn’t an elegant fighter, but I could appreciate the strength and precision of his moves. Moves that would kill that idiot Spurius very soon if the fight went on any longer. I discarded my shield to run faster, gathered some momentum and leaped onto the horse of one of Parthicus’s unsuspecting equites, using his shoulders as a prop to cartwheel myself over their heads. I’ll never forget that breathless instant when Parthicus saw me for the first time, the way his eyes widened like moons before I barreled into him and sent him flying from his horse.
We rolled together to the ground, and immediately his men dismounted to run to his rescue. One of them collapsed to his knees with a gurgling groan, a foot worth of blood-soaked steel jutting out of his chest. Vatluna pulled his long blade out of the Lorian’s disarticulated body and smiled down at the rest of Parthicus’s guard. A new and bloodstained phalera had made its appearance on his bronze cuirass, right above his tooth necklace. I jumped back to my feet to face Parthicus with a secret smirk; his men were about to enter Elysion.
His helmet had fallen off earlier, and now with his short, sweat-soaked blond hair, I saw that he was no legendary monster, just a man I was about to kill. He kept his sword in a low guard that reminded me of Clearchos’s. I flourished mine threateningly, tasting the tension between us, the blood to come. I didn’t care about the battle raging around me, the muted screams of agony. Only this glorious kill mattered.
Parthicus sneered, revealing a broken incisor—maybe by the same blade that had failed to slice his skull in half like a pepo. “My spies spoke of a masked boy who took down the Magnatura.”
“Some even say I punched it down.” I taunted him.
Then the pleasantries were over. He covered the distance between us in a single stride and struck. No art to it, only brute strength that made my blade sing as I parried the attack with gritted teeth. The bastard held nothing back; I wouldn’t either. I whirled around to his open right side, but when I hoped to strike his thigh, my blade met his instead. This reminded me too much of my defeat against Clearchos; I shoved him back and reversed my grip to take a vicious slash at his side. My edge ripped across the gilded metal, slicing one of the leather straps tightening the armor to his body.
He retaliated with a heavy blow and crushed his weight down on our crossed blades. His eyes bored into mine, seeking them through the holes of my mask. I saw his hazel irises, specked with gold, and the determination burning in their depth. “I will not be killed by a boy,” he gritted out.
Whetted by his arrogance, the strength I needed desperately exploded in my veins, coiled my muscles like ropes made of steel. I pushed back with all my might, flitted to his right side faster than he could comprehend, and found that single weakness, the broken strap th
at would allow the tip of my blade between his ribs. “No,” I whispered, leaning perilously close to his own blade to push my own deeper into his side. “You’ll be killed by a girl.”
His proud golden eyes went wide. The shock painted on his face sent a shiver of pleasure coursing through me. Blood seeped between us, warm on my hand. He’d never live to tell anyone. His teeth clenched to filter a whistling breath. His left hand clasped around my arm, crushing my muscles like a vise. His lips quivered as if he might speak, but he remained silent. It was when I tried to free myself of the spell of his dying gaze that my own pain ignited and blazed, concentrated in a single spot in my own side. I looked down where his blade had effortlessly pierced through my chain mail. My last clear thought before we tumbled together to the ground was that his sword must have been made of orichalcum, and in learning this crucial lesson, I had gotten myself killed.
Nothing can cut through it… Harder than any metal… Anything.
Invulnerable.
I could feel my own blood pool under me, thick and hot, soaking up my tunic. It hurt, but there was unexpected peace, too, a sense of finally giving up on that dirty, aching body Servilius had damaged and which could never be whole again. My eyes grew hot and my vision blurry as I stared at the starless sky. Black. I tried to get up like an old reflex, but when I did, the pain shooting through my side was beyond anything I had ever known, a raw, hot pulse in tune with the beat of my heart. I listened to the final throes of the battle, the horns blaring for retreat. Theirs, ours… both?
Something grazed the side of my face. I turned my head slowly, sucking an agonizing breath. Parthicus wasn’t dead yet. He had fallen to his knees. His bloodstained fingers reached for my mask. Faltered. Gave up.
33
Our crockery was one of the very few things that didn’t belong to Servilius in the house. They were simple clay bowls and plates, and a pitcher, too, with a nice iron glaze. My mother had received them from my father’s family when they married. They reminded me of him, sitting at dinner table and eating corn soup from the same plate I was now washing, the one that lacked a little glaze on the side and revealed a patch of brownish clay. I liked the sleek feel of them in my hands, and I found them really pretty too.
Sprawled on a stool in our kitchen, Servilius watched me plunge the plates in a bucket of water, rinse off the last traces of our meal, and scrub them with a sponge. He should have been working, inspecting our crop. My mother was still in the field with the boys, helping them remove spotted leaves before the disease spread to others. But I knew better than pry into Servilius’s business and what he should or should not do. I kept to myself and set on wiping the crockery.
He wouldn’t stop watching me, scratching the graying hair on his temples, running a hand across his bristly jowls. Over and over. Every breath he took sounded ragged and too loud in the silent room. I tried to ignore him, wiping the plates with a damp rag before placing them back on the wooden shelves on the wall. His gaze was the same as Arun’s, and I hated it. It was a poison that seeped under my skin, raised goose bumps on my forearms as if he were touching me.
“Come here.”
The pitcher was already dry, but I kept wiping, made the glaze a shiny brown. Almost black.
His palm slammed on the table, hard. I jumped a little. “I said, come here.”
I did.
It’s wrong. He shouldn’t. You shouldn’t. It’s wrong that he’s touching you.
But his hand was on my hip and I didn’t move. I willed myself out of my skin, my mind, away from here. His hand had never been on my breast. I thought he just wanted to touch it, squeeze it. His fingers on my neck, his cheek, abrasive against mine. He said I was pretty, almost a woman. Almost.
I knew what came next, as if I’d already lived that moment a thousand times, here in the kitchen with him when his hand reached under my skirt. He would touch between my thighs, open his trousers. Unless I stopped him. I listened to his breath, mine, the blood in my temples. I reached blindly for the pestle, my nails scraping the table’s ancient wood.
I closed my eyes, curled my fingers around the heavy stone handle. His fingers were everywhere, on my legs, my forehead, my cheek. He was sweating a lot, or maybe I was. My head hurt and I wanted to kill him and be covered in his blood, so I struck his face, smashed the bones, the teeth. Everything became red. He howled, like a beast, like Tia in the woods. Like he was a wolf, or maybe a golden gorgon with snakes writhing in her hair.
“Ow, shit!”
Over the deafening pounding of my heart, reality rushed back to me at once. Cold, wet fabric under my fingertips, shards everywhere on the tent’s floor, from a broken clay bowl. I tried to move to assess the damage, only to be stopped by a searing pain in my side. I blinked frantically in the shivering light of an oil lamp. I was in my tent, my bed, crushed under another body, trapped. Victrix. His eyes were wide, his irises thick silvery rings around the black of his pupils. I wasn’t wearing a tunic and he was touching me, gripping my shoulders. Holding me down.
I didn’t recognize the sound that ripped from my throat, a shrill scream drenched in hate. “Don’t touch m—”
His hand clasped over my mouth, making the final syllable a muffled roar. “Shut the fuck up,” he hissed. “Do you want the whole camp to hear a fucking girl scream in Silverlegs’s tent?”
I jerked under him in panic, panting, suffocating. He let go and sat back on his ass, his face ashen and his hair slick with sweat. I grabbed my blanket with shaking hands and covered myself. I could have wept from equal shame and relief when I registered that my breast-band and trousers were still on me. Pain tore through my side again when I tried to sit up. That’s when I saw the blood on my stomach, a red flower blooming fast under a thick white bandage.
Victrix ran a hand across his face. “Shit, shit, shit! I can’t believe you fucking reopened it!”
Shards of memories shimmered behind my eyelids like broken glass. I saw myself again, fighting Parthicus. I’d seen the scar across his face as he plunged his sword into me, and I plunged mine into him. He had bled, like I had. But I was still alive… “Is he dead?” I rasped.
Victrix seemed taken aback. “Parthicus? I don’t know. They took him away when they retreated. I hope so.”
I lay flat on my pallet, reduced to a sack of meat and pain. I had been so close I could see the golden-specked fear in his eyes. So damn close. What if he was still alive? Would Clearchos blame me for missing such an opportunity?
“I’ll go get Gemina,” Victrix spat. “Don’t you fucking touch that bandage until I get back.”
“Yes,” I said absently, staring up at the blurry shadows playing on the tent’s walls.
He got to his feet, but as his hand parted the tent’s flaps, his fingers quivered and paused. He turned around. “I didn’t really touch you,” he said in a low breath. “Just your face… I liked that you weren’t wearing that fucking mask for once.”
My fingers flew to my cheek, meeting bare and clammy skin. Skin he had touched. I wasn’t so much mad at him than at myself for being weak, wounded, useless. My mask lay discarded on the side of my pallet; I fumbled and clawed at the tent’s floor to drag it closer, fighting stabs of pain. I placed it back on my face in a trembling exhale. I could barely raise my head from the bedding to fasten the leather laces, but I needed this, the shelter of iron, being Silverlegs inside out.
Victrix didn’t help me. He just watched, his eyes sunken in defeat. Once I was done, he left, and I felt a little better.
•♦•
“I should never have given you that mask.”
Ignoring my hiss of pain, Gemina gave a final tug at the thread as she finished redoing half of the stitches on my side.
“I like it,” I groaned, my eyes rolling back in my skull when she applied a wine-soaked rag to clean up blood from the raw, freshly sewn flesh.
“Am I ever going to see your face again?” she asked, her voice softening.
I coughed a chuckle—which I regretted instantly when white-hot pain shot up my ribs. “Do you need to?”
“Yes. I’d like to see your face when I speak to you,” she said sternly. I walled myself in stubborn silence, lying still on my pallet. But she wouldn’t give up just yet. “Half a thumb deeper, he’d have sliced your guts. There’s no way to stop that kind of wound from festering. It’s a slow and ugly way to die, you know.”
Of course, I knew. I’d seen men die this way—killed some myself, in truth. I curled to my side, shrugging her touch off. “You’re the one who once said you didn’t want to have to treat me after I’d been raped by a hundred men. Why is it so hard to understand that I prefer to die like a soldier instead of dying like a whore?”
She flinched at my use of the word, and I instantly wished I could breathe it back. “I’m sorry,” I murmured. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
She tossed the bloody rag into a bowl of water. “Never mind. Did you feel noble back there?” she said in a tight voice. “Did you feel like a soldier when Victrix picked you up and brought you to me?”
My chest went tight from shock. “He did?”
Her eyes softened. “Didn’t I tell you once that he’s nothing like his father?”
It was the way she said this, the veil of tenderness over the words. Had I been too selfish before, too self-centered to see that Gemina loved her son despite it all? And maybe the reason Victrix’s anger ran so deep was that a little part of him loved her too, like a cut that would never heal. I wanted to be stronger than this, to be Silverlegs, but I thought of my mother, of all the times I would have wanted her to protect me instead of averting her eyes when Servilius and Arun looked at me. I didn’t want Gemina to see, but already the tears were blinding me and rolling down my cheeks under my mask, and I was powerless to stop them. They collected on the iron edge and dripped down my neck, one by one.