Captain's Fury (5 page)

Tavi brought his armored knee up in a savage blow that struck home between the scout's legs, and, for a single instant, the power in that deadly arm faltered. Tavi slammed his helmet against the scout's face again, then again, and the man sagged limply back to the ground.

The entire fight had taken all of three or four seconds.

Tavi fell back from the man, his throat on fire. It was hard to suck air in through his mouth, and for a second he feared that the enemy scout had managed to crush his windpipe, but after a few seconds more he was able to gulp down great breaths of air.

Max had his sword out and had been on the way, but Tavi's reaction had been the swifter, and the big Antillan's face was pale. "Bloody crows," he hissed. "Captain?"

"I'm all right," Tavi choked out. "Did they see? Did they hear anything?"

Max rose to a low crouch and looked slowly around, then dropped down again. "There'd have been some noise by now." He met Tavi's eyes. "Captain. You have to signal the attack
now
."

Tavi stared at the senseless young man lying limp in the grass. He reached up to touch the front rim of his helmet, and his fingers came away wet with blood.

"I know," Max said, his voice low and hard. "I know you don't like killing. I know that they're our own people. I know this is hard and horrible. But that's what war
is
, Captain. You've
got
to order the attack."

Tavi continued, wiping his hands clean of blood on the dry grass. "Get word to the Battlecrows to abandon their position and fall back."

Max remained still for a moment. "Captain," he said quietly. "We aren't going to get another opportunity like this one."

Tavi narrowed his eyes as he looked up at his friend. "We're leaving, Tribune. You have your orders."

"Yes, sir," Max said at once, and very quietly. Then he paced off through the grass where he would, Tavi knew, begin flashing hand signals down the line of riders.

Max returned a moment later and watched the enemy forces below begin to march out of the ambush area and beyond their reach. "Bloody crows, Calderon. Why?"

"Why not burn four thousand of our own people to death?" Tavi asked. He gestured at the downed scout. "Look at him, Max. What do you see?"

Max stared down at the unconscious man for a moment. Then he frowned, leaned closer, and tugged aside the man's tunic a bit before he rose again. "Muscles are all lopsided, misshapen. He's been chained to a wheel or a plow, for them to develop like that," he said quietly. "He's got lash scars." His right cheek twitched in a tic that Tavi thought Max didn't know he had. "Curling over his shoulders. More on his belly. Collar scars on his neck, too. He's a slave."

"He
was
a slave," Tavi replied quietly. "No collar now." He nodded down at the army below. "We wanted to know what could make an Aleran fight beside a Cane, Max."

"Can't be too many," Tavi said. "They don't have a lot of gear, if this man's equipment is any indication. And if they were raising really large numbers, Ehren's spies would have heard something about them. Which makes sense."

"How?" Max said.

Tavi nodded at the slave Legion below. "Those men know that if they lose, they're dead men, Max. Some slaves have it bad, but a lot of them don't. My guess is that the ones willing to fight are a lot less common than the ones who just want to stay low and quiet until the fighting is over."

"But those are going to fight like the crows are coming for them," Max said, his voice grim.

"Yes," Tavi said quietly.

Max was silent for a minute. Then he said, "All the more reason to order the attack. I know why you didn't do it. Great furies know I agree with your principles. But a lot of men are going to have to die to stop them now. You could have done that without a loss. It's going to cost us."

"It won't cost as much as creating a Legion of martyrs," Tavi said quietly. "If I'm right, then right now, four thousand slaves have taken up arms. If we'd wiped them out, Max, if we'd proven to every slave in the occupied territory that Alera didn't give a crow's feather about their lives, Nasaug wouldn't have four thousand fresh troops ready to fight. He'd have forty thousand terrified, outraged volunteers. Read history, Max. The Canim have." Tavi shook his head. "Men fight hardest for their lives—and for their freedom."

Max drew in a slow breath, his rough, appealing features drawn into a pensive frown. "This was a trap," he said quietly. "We were offered those warriors as bait."

"This could have been a trap," Tavi said, nodding. "But Nasaug doesn't plan operations with only one purpose if he can possibly help it. I think this was something else, too."

"What?" Max said.

"A message." Tavi rose, nodding to the downed scout. "Come on. We'd better clear out before his friends notice that he's missing and come looking for him." Tavi leaned down and rolled the limp man onto his side.

"No," Max said. "I bloody well know you did, Calderon. I know you. But we're at war. I'm not sure you can afford that. I'm not sure the men can afford it."

Tavi paused beside Acteon, one hand on the saddle, one on the reins, and stared at nothing in particular. "I think," he said quietly, "that I have a duty to Alera, Max. All Alerans." He took a deep breath and mounted. Then he said, his voice distant and very calm, "And yes. That's why I didn't kill them all."

Max mounted a moment later and rode up beside Tavi as they moved back toward the rally point. "That works for me." He glanced back at the ridge behind them and let out a low chortle.

"What?" Tavi asked.

"Your
singulare
has been walking around in your shadow for almost two years now. The first day he's not here, you charge out into the field and get yourself half-choked to death. He's going to be furious. So's Kitai."

Tavi let out a rough-sounding chuckle. It grated painfully in his throat. "Don't worry, Max. I'll deal with them."

Max's smile faded. "Senator Arnos was hoping to put a big new feather in his cap for this conference with the First Lord. He and the War Committee are not going to be happy about you letting those regulars get away."

Tavi felt his eyes narrow as his smile turned into a simple baring of his teeth. "Don't worry, Max," he said. "I'll deal with them, too."

Chapter 2

"First Spear!" bellowed a
legionare's
voice.

Valiar Marcus had spent more years in the Legions than many of the volunteers in the First Aleran had been drawing breath. Though he'd had the third watch, and been asleep for less than an hour, his feet swung off his cot and hit the cheap rug that he'd thrown over the bottom of his small, but private, tent. He already had his tunic and boots on by the time the
legionare
reached his tent.

"Centurion," panted Vilius, a young
legionare
in the cohort's third century. "We've got reports of movement on the road to the east. A large force."

"Bloody crows," Marcus swore. "The relief column." He struggled to draw conclusions, but his sleep-fogged mind wasn't cooperating. He shook his head with a growl and forced it to do its duty. "Captain will have the cavalry, the Knights, and the Battlecrows on the road. He'll try to hold the Canim off long enough to get the column into the city's walls." Fidelias turned to his armor and strapped into it, fastening the row of ties down its center front with fingers that flew with the effortless speed of long practice. "Prime Cohort will form up on the earthworks on the far side of the refugee camp. Tell Tribunes Martinus and Kellus that I recommend that they form up the Seventh and Ninth on First Cohort's flanks. We march in five minutes."

Vilius slammed his fist against the armor over his heart and dashed from the tent.

Once he was gone, Marcus grimaced and rubbed savagely at the clenching cramp that had formed on one side of his neck. He must have pulled a muscle, sitting up that fast out of a dead sleep, but crows take him if he was letting any of those young men see it.

Maybe he was getting too old for this sort of thing.

Five minutes later, the Prime Cohort, double the size of any other cohort at eight centuries strong, moved out of the heavily fortified gates of the town on the northern side of the Tiber. They went out at a run, boots striking hard in unison on the paving stones, then becoming a muffled thunder as the column wheeled out over softer earth. Marcus led the column beneath the wan, cloud-obscured morning sun, running beside the first rank and calling the pace. They passed through the tent-and-shanty-filled warren that stretched for half a mile in every direction around the town of Elinarch.

The earthworks at the far side of the refugee camp were not the simple packed-earth walls that the Legions had used for time out of mind. Instead, they had been built from clay taken from the bed and banks of the Tiber, then baked into a substance harder than most stone via the use of firecrafting. Those walls were fifteen feet high and twenty thick, and if they didn't have the sheer, obdurate strength of furycrafted battlement stone, they were far more serviceable than standard earthworks or a wooden palisade.

Marcus led the cohort up onto the walls over the wide-mouthed gate, where the men took up positions with practiced speed. He bellowed at the few who performed with slight imperfections, and had the entire Prime Cohort in position and standing ready before the
legionares
of the Seventh and Ninth cleared the city walls and came pounding toward them.

Half an hour passed in nervous silence while, behind them, refugees began a slow, confused retreat into the safety of the city's walls. Overhead, several Knights Aeris went flashing by, driven by torrents of wind, flying to and from the east. Marcus felt the familiar singing tension of fear that always came with preparation for a battle. Defending the city from an attack from this particular flank had been a worst-case scenario, and no one had thought it would actually come to that—but if the Canim had crossed the river, then he and the other men here, at the forward defenses, were about to have a very bad morning. Worse, every one of them knew it.

So Marcus spent his time pacing steadily up and down the wall, berating troops for an improperly fastened sword belt here, a small patch of rust on a breastplate there. His growled imprecations were creative, gratuitously foul-mouthed—and familiar. They were all the reassurance he could offer his men. They were all he could offer himself, as well.

Tribune Tactica Kellus, who had himself been a centurion when he first signed on with the First Aleran, paced briskly down the wall from the Ninth's position and nodded to Marcus. "Centurion."

Though as the First Spear, Marcus exercised command of the Prime Cohort, made up of its finest
legionares
, Kellus still outranked him. Marcus saluted, and nodded. "Sir."

"Have you any idea what's going on?"

He shrugged. "Reports of an unknown force east of here."

Kellus grimaced. "I know
that
."

Marcus turned to find a dapper, aging little man in the livery of a Legion valet standing below. "Good morning, Magnus."

"Permission to come up and speak to you?" called the valet.

"Granted." Marcus beckoned the valet, who hurried up the stairs and arrived on the battlements, laboring to catch his breath.

"Centurion, Tribune," Magnus panted, nodding. "We just got a messenger in from the captain. He wanted me to tell your men to stand down."

Marcus lifted his eyebrows.

"It
was
a drill, then," Kellus said.

Marcus frowned and turned to stare intently at the road to the east. "No," he said quietly. "I don't think it was."

For a moment, there was nothing but the haze of a morning that had not yet become warm enough to burn off all the mist. Then, ranks of marching soldiers appeared in the east. Two long, broad columns of them, in fact, came marching along on either side of the road, leaving room for the relief column's wagons and draft animals in the center. Marcus frowned, and began counting, before he realized what he was actually looking at.

"
Two
Legions?" he murmured.

"Yes," Magnus said quietly.

"And flying the blue and red," Marcus noted. "Like us."

The senior valet squinted out at the approaching troops. "Ah, I thought as much. These are the Senate's new toys. The Senatorial Guard."