Arts of Dark and Light: Book 01 - A Throne of Bones

by Vox Day

  Severa folded her arms and thought. Her anger had faded. Now she felt mostly sad and perhaps a little frightened. Father had used her, but he wasn’t the only one. She was just a tool, a weapon, something for men to use as they fought with one another for power. Without the goddess, she was nothing, and she would never be anything. But regardless, there was one thing she had to know.

  “I understand why you saw my…saw my foolishness as a chance to expose your enemy, Father. But I still don’t understand why Clusius had to die. If none of his letters were real, then why did you have him killed? He’d never done any harm to me, or to you, or even to the honor of the House!”

  “Our enemies,” he corrected her. “The boy was already as good as dead, Severa. He’d been in contact with those who were using him. He might not have known much about them, but he surely knew something, or he couldn’t have recognized you or worn your token. I have little doubt they would have killed him the moment you were in their hands, or as soon as they realized I knew about the affair, simply because he might have led me to them.

  “So you can see, they couldn’t afford to allow him to be put to the question. The boy was nothing to me, but since you cared for him, I arranged for him to fight Montanus. He never had a chance, not against such a great champion, but it was a death of which the poets are singing, a far better death than he probably imagined for himself. And the young man played his own part in that, he died like a man worthy of your regard. I honor him for it. Nor am I alone. Montanus will never forget that he owes his freedom to Clusius’s courage.”

  Severa didn’t know what to say. It was too much to absorb all at once. She had come here prepared to rage at her father, but the discovery that Clusius had never written to her, had never been in love with her, and may well not have even known who she was was more than she could comprehend right away. And the idea that Father might have been merciful, perhaps even generous, in ensuring him a fast and glorious death in the arena rather than an ignominious one somewhere in the bowels of the city was too much for her. She put her hands over her face and began to cry.

  Her father put his arms around her and patted her back, as she remembered him doing when she was still small enough to curl up on his lap.

  She sobbed into his chest, not sure exactly for what, or for whom, she was crying. Was she crying for that poor beautiful young man who had proudly bled out his life on the sands before a roaring crowd? Was she crying for herself and the way she had been deceived?

  No, she realized, as the burning flow of tears finally began to subside and her chest ceased to heave so uncontrollably. What she was mourning was the loss of her innocence.

  She dried her eyes with her hands and pushed her hair back from her face. She called upon the goddess to give her strength. Everything was backward, upside down. But she knew that there was only one way to freedom, and that was to put on the mask of repentance. And so, for the first time in her life, she consciously looked into her father’s eyes and lied.

  “I’ve been a child, Father. A stupid and selfish one. I admit it. But I’m a woman now, so I know I can’t continue behaving like that. And I won’t ever do anything that will endanger you or House Severus like that again, I promise you.”

  “I know,” he said. “You have a good heart, Severa. But a good heart and good intentions are not always enough. When we are deceived, even the best of our intentions can go terribly awry. And you are too young and too inexperienced to see through the words and actions of others to their motivations below.”

  “How can I learn?”

  “Time and observation. There is no substitute. It’s a skill most never learn, one that most never even know exists, but keep your eyes open and eventually the patterns will begin to present themselves.”

  She nodded, not entirely sure she understood what he meant, but knowing that he expected humble agreement.

  “Now, your mother and I have been discussing this, and we have decided that the best way to ensure that you don’t find yourself in similar entanglements is for you to marry. I suspect we should have married you last year to that Crescentius. He’s running for curule aedile this year and is certain to win.”

  “To marry? But I don’t know if I want to marry! To whom?” Goddess, to be forced to marry now…that would ruin all her plans.

  “That is the question, isn’t it?” Her father smiled. “You needn’t look so stricken. You’re not a prize sow to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.”

  “Will you promise me this one thing?” She took his hands and held his gaze. “I know you’ve had many provincials and nobles from the allied cities visiting you over the summer. You don’t intend to marry me to any of them, do you?”

  “There have been offers, of course. You wouldn’t like to be a queen in the north? The high prince of Epra has two sons, including his heir, for whom he would like to find Amorran wives. Severan wives.”

  “No, absolutely not! It would be an insult, Father, not just to me, but to you and our House. Will you not promise that I shall only marry an Amorran, a patrician from a good consular line?”

  “Come, Severa, you know I cannot bind myself in such a manner. Who can predict what fate will dictate? But I can assure you, the Houses with whom I am considering an alliance will not shame you. Does not your husband reflect on me, and on our House? Even if you will not trust my words or my intentions, I should think you could safely place your trust in my pride!”

  He smiled at her, and she laughed then embraced him. He was right. If there was one thing in which she could trust, it was his towering pride.

  “But father, will you see me in a nunnery? For surely there is no man in Amorr or anywhere else who could hope to meet such an exacting standard.”

  “I shall endeavor to humble myself a little, for the sake of your happiness, my dear. Now, as delightful as it is to have this all out in the open at last, I do have a tremendous amount of letters to dictate before we return to the city.”

  “We’re going back to Amorr? Soon?”

  “Yes, I intend for us to depart for Amorr the day after tomorrow. So naturally you needed to be apprised of the true situation prior to our return. Tertius’s letter seemed to be the kindest way.”

  “We’re all going back to the city?” she exclaimed, delighted. “I can go back too?”

  “I have reason to believe it is now safe. And there is much to do, even more than you can imagine. This may be the most significant year Amorr has known since the last Andronican king was dethroned. And as much as my heart longs to stay here, I cannot control the Senate from Salventum. I am like a fish out of water so long as I am here.”

  Severa was barely listening, so delighted was she at the prospect of returning home and escaping the dull tedium of the countryside. She felt a slight pang at not being able to learn more about the goddess from the old woman at the shrine of St. Malachus, but not only would there be other servants of the goddess who would be able to teach in Amorr, it would be much easier for her to slip away and visit the shrine in the city. She hugged her father, this time in genuine delight, and ran out of the library, looking for Eudiss so that she could begin her preparations for the journey back to the city.

  But when she reached her room, a thought suddenly struck her: Her father believed it was safe to return to their domus in the city. So what had he done that now allowed him to conclude they were safe when they had been in danger only a few weeks before? She shuddered. It was not only the hidden goddess who harbored dark secrets. And she was not certain which frightened her more: the mysterious secrets of St. Malachus or the lethal ones of House Severus.

  CORVUS

  After sending his majordomus outside with a sack of silver coins and strict instructions not to permit any client calls, Corvus had hopes for a quiet morning with his wife.

  But his hopes were soon dashed, as Romilia did not easily take his news that their nephew had been executed. Whether it was out of concern for the dignity of House Valerius or the reputati
on of their late son, Magnus and Julia were permitting most of Amorr to assume that Gaius Valerius had fallen in battle. Corvus would have preferred to let Romilia continue to believe that too, and he’d been putting off telling her otherwise for days, but he knew that any day she might receive a letter from Marcus or take it into her head to visit her sister-in-law. So he finally told her the truth after they had broken their fast, and any hopes that he’d had that she would see the matter his way rapidly vanished when he made the mistake of mentioning that Marcus had been present at the execution as well.

  “You forced him to see his own cousin beheaded?”

  “Of course I did. He’s a tribune, after all. The entire legion was there.” Corvus did his best to put the awful event in perspective, but he only succeeded in managing to make things worse. “My love, it was after the battle. It’s not as if he hadn’t seen hundred other men die that day, to say nothing of the thousands of goblins we killed. And considering the way the boys led that cavalry charge, I daresay he probably killed ten or more himself.”

  She stared at him, aghast. “Sextus Valerius, are you mad? First you tell me that you killed your own nephew, then you’re going to justify forcing our son watch the execution by telling me that you’ve turned him into the same sort of inhuman killer you’ve become?”

  We kill humans too, he almost said, barely managing to stop himself from digging his grave any deeper.

  “He’s an officer in the legion, Romilia. He’s not a priest anymore. He’s a soldier now. Killing is what we do. It’s what he does. You know that.”

  “But you don’t kill your own family!” she shouted at him. “How could you do this to Magnus? To Julia? Or to Marcus—you know how sensitive he is. He’ll be dwelling on it for the rest of his life! Or even to yourself!”

  “Look, I didn’t kill Fortex. I only gave the order.” He stressed the last word, only to realize, even as he said it, how pathetically unconvincing it sounded.

  “Do you really think that excuses you in the slightest!”

  “Of course not. Now wait a moment, woman. In what dirty stinking Hell do you think I am looking to be excused of anything?” He could feel his voice rising, but at this point he didn’t care anymore. He got to his feet and pointed at her. “Who are you, woman, to question a legate concerning the discipline of his legions? To question a stragister militum? Listen, not one man in the five thousand questioned Fortex’s guilt. Not one spoke to defend him! We were in battle, and they all saw what he did with their own eyes. Gaius Valerius himself didn’t dare to protest his sentence, nor did your son!

  “And if I hadn’t passed the judgment, Saturnius would have done exactly the same. He was intending to. He offered to. He begged me to let him do it, because it was his order that had placed his legion under modus austeris. He tried to take the responsibility off my shoulders. But the burden was mine! It was mine, and it will always be mine, and the idiot boy’s blood is on my hands, no one else’s! So don’t you ever try tell me that I tried to evade responsibility for it! I knew what I was doing, and I accepted the blame because it needed to be done. Do you understand me?”

  Her reaction astonished him. Instead of screaming back at him, or striking him, as he half-expected, she reached out tenderly to touch his cheek.

  “Corvus, you’re crying.”

  “No, I’m not,” he denied stoutly. He wasn’t either: A single tear didn’t amount to crying.

  She touched her tongue to her finger and smiled sadly. “Yes, my love, I’m rather afraid you are. Tell me this, Corvus: Are you sure it was absolutely necessary to…to do what you did? Wasn’t there anything you could have done to punish him in some other way?”

  He met her eyes and shook his head. “No, I had no choice. The law of the legions is simple and clear. It has to be, so that everyone in the ranks can understand it. The infantry is not filled with poets and lawyers who reflect on the meaning of things. To break it would have been to dishonor my name, my rank, my House, the legion, and even Gaius Valerius Fortex himself. The damned young fool wasn’t worth it. And that’s assuming Saturnius and the senior centurions would have even accepted my order to spare him. I suppose they probably would have. I’ve earned some leeway, after all. But they’d never trust me completely again.”

  “And is it so important for them to trust you? What if it had been Marcus, Corvus? Would you have done the same if it had been Marcus instead of Gaius who broke, what did you call it, the laws of the legion?”

  He stared at her silently for a moment.

  She looked away and shook her head. “You would, wouldn’t you? You would murder your own son for the sake of your precious honor.” Her face was suddenly a mask of contempt. “Don’t you see how small and pathetic that makes you?”

  It was no use. Trying to explain the harsh necessities of warfare to a woman was like trying to mount a cavalry charge against a city wall. It wasn’t so much that it was a futile act and doomed to failure, it was more that one didn’t even have the wherewithal to imagine the smallest possibility of success. And yet he tried.

  “Romilia, wife, as much as I love you dearly, you must understand that your opinion of me bears absolutely no weight whatsoever on how I command fifteen thousand men in battle, when every single one of those lives rest completely in my hands. If I make a mistake, they die. If I don’t do anything, they die. If I conceive a brilliant strategy that brings victory, they still die—only fewer of them do then.

  “No one is safe—not the ranks, not the centurions, not the tribunes, and not even the generals. Look at Caudinus, he may have been consul and general, but the Cynothii slaughtered him all the same. He made a mistake somewhere along the way, and he died for it, and two thousand brave men died with him. Because of him. In the legions, everyone is liable to the same fate and subject to the same discipline. There is no pass for gross insubordination on the field of battle just because your uncle or your father happens to be the commander.”

  She shook her head in denial. “I just can’t believe you are willing to sit there and tell me you would execute your own son! I wouldn’t have believed that you could possibly have given the order to kill Gaius if you hadn’t told me yourself.”

  “But that would never happen in a million years! For God’s sake, Romilia, Marcus is so damned punctilious he wouldn’t think of disobeying Saturnius’s most veiled suggestions, let alone a direct order. He keeps a diary of his patrols that looks like a bloody quartermaster’s report. He’s not a pig-headed fool who thinks he’s a hero out of legend like his idiot cousin!

  “Do you know what Fortex did that got himself killed? Do you even know? He abandoned his position, he abandoned the men he was supposed to be commanding, just so he could engage the commander of the enemy cavalry in a duel! And the damned fool did it when Saturnius had given every knight in the cavalry a direct order not to issue or accept any challenges. It would have been bad enough for any rider from the ranks to pull a stupid stunt like that, but for the tribune commanding the right wing? It was sheer madness!”

  “I don’t care,” Romilia said stubbornly. “Maybe duty demanded it. Maybe honor demanded it, if he was caught up with honor like you are. But I still think you should have found a way to save him. He was your brother’s son!”

  “Do you now?” Corvus slammed his open palm against the wall. She stepped back, surprised by his sudden fury. “Very well, do you know what your precious grandfather did when two cohorts ran during the war against the Great Orc, Romilia? He decimated them. He murdered, as you say, one man in every ten in both cohorts. At five centuries per cohort, that means he ordered the death of more than one hundred of his own men. Do you really believe those one hundred men didn’t have mothers, didn’t have fathers, didn’t have uncles and aunts and cousins too? He didn’t give them a quick, clean death by beheading either: He had them beaten to death by their comrades. Was he pathetic and small like me?”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said, but he could see the uncertainty in h
er eyes. “He would never have done anything so cruel.”

  “I was there, Romilia! I was a junior tribune on my first campaign, just like Marcus is now. I saw them run, I saw your father pronounce his judgment, and I saw them beaten into bloody, lifeless pulp by the fists of their fellows. It may have been cruel, but your grandfather was absolutely right to order it, because I can tell you that there were three or four other cohorts damn near to running themselves, and if they had, the Great Orc’s war boars would have trampled us all into the mud and eaten our bodies afterward. And the only reason they didn’t run is because our centurions were screaming at them, shouting at them, whipping them, and above all, promising that running might save them from the orcs, but it wouldn’t save them from the wrath of your grandfather!”

  Romilia didn’t answer. Nor did she look at him. She just stared at her hands, until the tears running down her face began to drip from her chin and onto her folded hands. “I suppose you’re right. It’s just so awful,” she finally said. “It’s so cruel. I don’t know how you can stand it. And I wish you hadn’t permitted Marcus to follow in your footsteps.”

  As it always had before, he found his anger washed away by her tears. He stepped forward to cradle her head in his left arm, and he dried her cheeks with the back of his right hand. “The world is cruel, my dear. You have a soft and merciful heart, and I am glad of that, but we live in a fallen world, and there is no room for mercy in the legions. That is why I give thanks, almost every night, that the Almighty is merciful as well as just. If man’s justice is colder and harder than steel, I fear to even imagine what divine justice would be like.”

  She bit her lip and shook her head. “This must just be killing Julia.”

  “She looked like an old woman when I saw her two days ago. Magnus hadn’t told her the whole story then, but she must know by now. He’s more than half-mad with grief himself.”