by Camilla Monk
In truth, Victrix, Irius, and I were the only ones who looked out of place in this enchanting décor, grimy warriors in their leathers and armor standing among gods and nymphs. Clearchos, for his part, was used to commanding and being served, and the sun would shine on the underworld long before he allowed the Overseer’s egregious display of wealth to impress him. He unfastened his wolf cloak and tossed it in the waiting arms of a male servant without so much as a glance for him.
A young girl brought a basin of fragrant water for us to wash our hands before eating, getting to her knees to present it to us. Seeing me hesitate, Victrix winked at me and went first, wiping his hands in the linen cloth another girl offered him. Irius and I followed his example, before another servant guided us to the couches arranged around the table. The Overseer and the young emperor lay on their side on silvery cushions whose fabric shimmered like the scales of a fish. Clearchos did the same, but Victrix and I sat cross-legged instead, while Irius chose to stand guard at Clearchos’s side, folding his arms in front of him in a rigid posture.
I swiped a glance at the white tunics and midnight blue cloaks of the legionaries discreetly guarding the dining room behind each column and urn. They must be the praetorians I’d heard about from our companions around campfires, an elite destined to protect the emperor—and more importantly, the only men allowed to bear arms around him. I laced my fingers and tapped my thumbs to fight off a speck of apprehension. It was too late to worm out of the Overseer’s invitation, though; if the winds were to turn and the emperor’s sweet wine were to sour, without our swords, we were as good as dead.
“I wager you shan’t eat much, Silverlegs.” Emperor Nisephorus’s chirp cut through my pondering, laced with the slow, mellifluous notes of a harp—a group of musicians had started to play under the piricaria. He was staring at my mask with big brown eyes, his cheeks and mouth glistening from the honeyed sauce of a plate of sweet meat in front of him.
I felt my mouth water in envy, especially when Victrix took some, too, but forced all emotion out of my voice to reply, “The music will sustain me, my revered lord.”
He gobbled a grape and laughed. “You’re such a strange fellow. Where do you come from?”
“I was born in a village at the western end of Bride’s Lake, my lord.”
“You’re lowborn,” he concluded with a haughty curl of his lips, before a servant girl diligently wiped his face and hands with a water-soaked cloth and served him a measure of amber wine and warm water in a small glass cup with a golden rim. “How well do my subjects worship Aus in your village?”
I stiffened and felt Clearchos’s silvery gaze drift to me, and his hushed exchange with the Overseer ended. The old man readjusted the folds of his toga to shift on his couch and laid kind, but expectant eyes on me.
I saw my mother again, prostrate at Meditrina’s altar in our village’s tiny shrine, with its cracked and mossy walls. Her quiet tears. She’d told the goddess he was a good husband, and that she’d need nothing else in all her life if only she could keep him. My throat went tight from an ache long forgotten, like an old arrow in my heart. “Yes, my lord, they live by Aus’s word,” I lied. “No one cares about Meditrinal water around there.”
“And you, too, follow Aus?” the Overseer probed.
“Yes. I expect nothing of the old gods.” This new lie came more easily, since it bore a seed of truth. I had prayed too long to gods who wouldn’t listen and seen with my own eyes that their so-called powers were no better than Hastius’s tricks.
His eyes crinkled, as if he were trying to see through my mask. “What do you expect of Aus?”
An easy question, even for an ignoramus like me. “Peace for the empire and justice for the people.”
I caught Clearchos’s nod and Victrix’s fleeting sneer, but those went unnoticed by young Nisephorus, who sat up and clapped his hands with a squeal of delight. “Yes, yes! This one has a good mind, Bassianus,” he told the Overseer. Then, to me, he asked, “Have you been formally anointed yet?”
I shook my head, feeling my ears grow hot. Were my lies catching up with me already? “No, my lord. The war has left me little time to pursue… spiritual goals.”
“Bassianus shall do it first thing tomorrow. He’ll anoint all of you,” the boy proclaimed. He then looked up to Irius’s stoic face. “Even you, barbarian!”
Irius bowed in apparent gratitude. But he didn’t say a word. The emperor didn’t appear to mind—or even notice; he wiggled a chubby finger at Clearchos. “I see you teach your soldiers well, but if I make you the Hand of Aus, you’ll have an entire province to educate, not just a thousand men.”
A flash of rapacious excitement passed in Clearchos’s eyes, before he wrestled his lips into the meekest, warmest smile his ravaged flesh would allow. “My revered lord, I will have no rest until Aus’s word is the law in every city and every village of the Lacustra, from the Western Marshes to Nyos.”
Victrix’s eyes went wide. I bet he must be thinking the same thing I was, mentally picturing a map of our empire and Clearchos’s future province: a rectangle encompassing the entire Bride’s Lake and the marshes that lay beyond my village, a hundred leagues wide, and twice as long, all the way to the shores of the White Sea. Maybe it was all worth a prayer to Aus, be it through a false mouth…
The Overseer raised a plucked gray eyebrow. “Nyos?”
Clearchos looked him in the eye over the gilded rim of his cup of wine. “I cannot imagine that the Lacustra would lose its capital.”
The emperor flitted narrowed eyes back and forth between the two of them, while Victrix and I held our breath. Without Nyos’s wealth and its port, Clearchos’s new fief would lose at least half its worth. Did the Overseer seriously expect him to take that kind of deal? Silence set around the table, and leather squeaked faintly behind Clearchos as Irius’s big shoulders shifted a fraction. He kept looking straight ahead though, feigning disinterest.
The Overseer said, “Ostaniva will become the capital. We need to develop our ports on the White Sea.”
“Ostaniva is a village,” Clearchos countered softly. Yet his eyes were pure ice.
The Overseer studied him, swirling the amber wine in his glass with slow rotations of his wrist. “So rash and ambitious…”
Clearchos smirked. “Hardly. I seek no more than a city I’ve conquered already.”
A chuckle rattled the Overseer’s frail shoulders. “A fair point well made.” He placed the empty glass back on the table for a servant to refill. “Tomorrow I shall consult with Aus in his temple and ask that he lets me see into your heart. Only he can say whether you are worthy of Nyos, Clearchos.”
The mention of Aus seemed to recapture the young emperor’s attention. “So be it. If Aus speaks favorably to Bassianus, you shall become His Hand over the Lacustra, and Nyos will be the capital of your province.”
Clearchos gave a nod, his good eye narrowing at the Overseer. “I will pray all night, my lord.”
The boy’s mood suddenly soured, and he considered his guest with a pout. “I expect you shall. There’s much to cleanse about you before you can be anointed.”
The comment chilled the air around the table. Next to me, Victrix’s mouth was tight with the effort to control his temper, while Clearchos welcomed the shot with that strange, meek smile I gathered he practiced for the sole benefit of his child emperor. I knew we wouldn’t gain anything with swords and threats in these walls, but it made me uncomfortable to see Clearchos debase himself like this, for nobles who flouted us, played with us. I wished he’d kept his head up.
It was the Overseer who broke the silence, his voice coaxing. “But we have great faith in Clearchos, do we not, my young lord?”
“We do,” the emperor conceded between two bites of a flaky pastry filled with ibex cheese and nuts. He gulped down the last of the treat and turned to me. “Silverlegs, has Clearchos taught you about the principle of Aus’s incarnation?”
I was taken aback as much by the question itself than by the boy’s fickle temperament. Did he ever pursue the same idea longer than the time it took him to finish his damn plate? “Not yet, my lord,” I admitted.
“Where is Aus?” he went on asking, his and the Overseer’s eyes twinkling as if it were a good joke between them.
I sneaked a glance at Victrix, secretly hoping he’d choose that very moment to be his usual competitive self and reply first, but his mouth hung open in what seemed genuine curiosity. I sighed and gave it a try. “He’s, um, in the sky. In Elysion.”
A small fist slammed on the table, sending pastry flakes flying on my lap. I went rigid; in the blink of an eye, the emperor turned a fierce shade of crimson. “In Elysion? With the old gods? Is that what you—”
“Aus is everywhere, Silverlegs,” the Overseer cooed, trailing a soothing hand in the child’s blond curls. “Understanding incarnation is the cornerstone of our relationship to Aus.” He waved to the dining room’s walls. “Aus is all around us; he’s everywhere and everything. He is not one. He is not a single entity with a mind of its own. It could be argued that he’s not even a god.” My eyebrows shot up under the iron curtain of my mask. He quickly added in a chuckle, “but god is an acceptable term to describe something the mind can barely comprehend. Aus is in every speck of dust, every leaf, and every part of ourselves. He’s in those silver legs of yours as well as in this wine.” He held up his glass to the light pouring from the hundreds of candles supported by a candelabra above our heads. “He is the very fabric of our world, of life and death.” His gaze lowered to me. “Do you understand now, why the existence of other gods is impossible?”
“Because they’d be part of Aus as well,” I ventured hesitantly.
“Precisely.”
Victrix seemed to ponder this for a while before he told the Overseer, “But people say you’re a descendant of Aus. How is that possible if he’s not… like us?”
The young emperor smacked his tongue with an air of superiority as the Overseer explained. “Because of his universal nature, Aus can, of course, sometimes incarnate himself in a human body to speak to us. How would we hear his word otherwise, he who is too vast for our eyes to see, and whose voice is not one but millions?”
Victrix nodded hesitantly. “So Aus became human, and that’s how…”
“Yes. Ancient carvings have been found in Cispirina that attest to his human incarnation two hundred years ago. We call it the Stone of the Descendants. Since then, six Overseers have seen their name carved in the stone, mine included.” He took Victrix’s hand and turned it over to trail his pale fingers across his palm. “It is perhaps his way of letting us know that we are Aus. We are his head”—he motioned to his own forehead with his free hand— “his hands.” He clasped Victrix’s hand in his, and with the other, took Clearchos’s— “his legs”—he smiled to me— “and his heart,” he concluded, gazing fondly at the little emperor.
Watching our covenant with hooded eyes, Clearchos appeared supremely pleased by the Overseer’s sermon. He held out his glass for a servant to refill, and even consented to ask some questions about the long history of the Stone of the Descendants, like a good believer ought to. Nisephorus, for his part, grew rapidly tired of their theological exchange—and fell asleep on the Overseer’s lap. Similarly bored, Victrix excused himself at nightfall to go roam around the palace’s garden. Future servitor of Aus or not, he was more at his ease lying in the grass under the moons than on a silk couch discussing grain taxes.
I found him dozing under the boughs of a sigillaria, his arms folded behind his head. The opportunity was too good to pass. Silent as a cat, I picked up a pebble from the alley and tossed it a couple of times in my palm before hurling it at his messy brown hair.
“Ow—fuck!” He jerked to a sitting position and looked around. His eyes turned to slits, but I had an intuition there was no genuine irritation behind the usual menace. “You’re lucky that Aus wants us to live in peace and silence and all that shit,” he muttered, rubbing the top of his head.
I went to plop myself in the grass by his side. “So that’s it; you’re a believer?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe not a believer. A follower, I suppose. not much of a choice.” His lips curved. “Like you. Nice show you put on back there. A real devotee, aren’t you?”
“I did it for Clearchos, so he can get his land.”
“He will,” Victrix decreed, resting his elbows on his knees. “And once he’s the Hand of Aus, he’ll probably knight us all.”
I couldn’t contain a chuckle. “Even me?”
A rare boyish smile lit up his features. “I wouldn’t miss it for all the gold in the world. If the nobles in Cispirina learned the truth, they’d never get over it.”
“I wouldn’t either…” I remarked sourly. It was easy for him to joke about that. I didn’t like to be reminded of my deception; it was enough that I had to exert caution about every single little thing I did, every word I said, every moment of my life.
Victrix went quiet, studying me from the corner of his eye. A sigh breezed out of him. “You know, you could stop it altogether and just dress like a girl again. You used to, right?”
He might as well have punched me. He who knew me, who had trained me, fought at my side. Was this all he saw in me after all? A girl who ought to wear a skirt and let herself be kissed? My jaw clenched at the memory of my days as a girl, serving men and dreading who would help themselves to my body first—Servilius had won that battle, no matter how dearly he’d paid for exerting what he believed his right. He had taken something from me that could never be mine again, nor anyone else’s. “I’m sure that would go over well,” I spat.
He rolled to his side to rest on one elbow, twirling a fallen leaf between his fingers. “It’s happened in the past. Warrior princesses and the like. I think I saw it on a mosaic. Can’t remember where.”
A warrior princess? I liked the sound of that better. Feeling my heart thaw, I chided him gently. “You’re making this up.”
“What if I am?” His tone flared up. The volcano never slept, I thought with a secret smile. “Who the hell cares if you’re the first? Our land, our rules.”
No. Aus’s rule, I corrected him mentally. I stretched in the grass with a grunt—the damn horses never failed to make my back sore. “Why are you suddenly thinking about this? Is it because Nisephorus gave us all a cold sweat back at the temple?”
“There’s that,” he admitted. “And I’m thinking that if I’m to going to be Clearchos’s heir, I could use a sturdy wife, not too whiny.”
His voice was unusually hesitant, but the words shattered between us, loud and vertiginous. I was aware of his eyes on me, watching, waiting. I listened to his breath, mine, the rise and fall of my chest, ending in shallow exhales. I looked down at my hands to check if they were shaking—they weren’t, but it felt like it, as if bees were thrumming all over my body. Victrix wanted me to stop being a boy so I could be his wife—a respectable matron even, married to a man whose father would have a title and the province to go with it. And I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure why the idea twisted my insides and made me so angry.
I shot up and rubbed my palms together to get rid of damp grass blades. “I don’t know. It’s a weird idea.”
“Wait…” I glimpsed his hand reaching for me in the dark as he got to his feet. I did what I knew best, dodge, but even after I’d put a few safe strides between us, my pulse wouldn’t settle, hammering furiously under my temples.
It was always the same. He’d take a step forward, I’d take two back, and he would want a kiss, and I’d say no, punch his shoulder maybe, and we’d dance, fly and flit around each other like birds, and it never really meant anything. Until tonight.
“So, it’s no?” he asked gruffly, hope and frustration wound around each word.
Was it? He was offering me a way out of my lies, likely the best I’d ever get, with my bl
ood-soaked sword and tattooed skin. I forced myself to look into his eyes, the color of angry clouds. Had it ever occurred to me before that Victrix didn’t just have nice eyes, but the rest of him was a little handsome too? He might not possess the sort of statuesque beauty of a heartthrob like Hastius, but he did have a good jaw and a nose that wasn’t too big and seemed in the right place on his face.
And said face was a hairbreadth from mine. I’d dropped my guard and let him too close; now our chests brushed with a slither of bronze scales. The night breeze stirred leaves in a soft rustle, and I wasn’t certain how I found myself standing against the sigillaria trunk.
I peered at the arches glowing softly beyond fragrant bushes and the statues of nymphs forever pouring water from empty jars. “Someone could come.”
His cheek pressed to that of my mask, his stubble scratching the metal softly. “Just one, Silverlegs,” he murmured.
I breathed in sweat and leather. He really needed a bath. But so did I, and that wasn’t the matter. Him, me; it was wrong. I had feared Victrix in the past, hated him even, and had once vowed no man would ever touch me again. It was all true, and yet now we were friends. Playing with fire. My fingers curled and unfurled over and over as I battled the stupid girl inside me. It shamed me to admit to myself that I didn’t mind Victrix’s body against mine, that it should be horrifying, but it wasn’t. Maybe if I closed my eyes, if I tried not to think…
Just one.
When his lips trailed across the iron to seek the lifeless mouth, I flattened my palms on his chest. But I didn’t push him back. My head was spinning, and I wasn’t sure. A tiny part of me wanted to dream his dream, where I was a noble lady with the right to carry a sword because those were our rules, and the Lacustra was our land.