by Camilla Monk
“This is the life!” He laughed, looking up at the half-naked nymphs frolicking on the ceiling of a vestibule that was bigger than Servilius’s entire farm.
I tiptoed on the polished marble floor behind him. “Are you sure no one will return?”
He shook his head with a confident grin. “No. They’re done for now.”
We were cautious at first, exploring the atrium in silence, trailing curious fingers on sculpted columns and urns filled with wilted flowers. The soldiers had moved most of the furniture, but life obstinately clung to the bare walls; the air was still warm from the exiles’ presence, still carried the scent of their food and perfume. White petals drifted on the surface of a long rectangular pool at the center of the room, and the waning light of the embers in their bronze braziers bathed the villa in a dim orange hue.
Victrix found a few piris forgotten on a table in one of the rooms, pulled out bread and salt meat from his bag, and we improvised a feast by the pool to celebrate our victory. After we were through eating and drinking from his wine bottle, he revealed a small leather pouch he had brought with him and opened it. I watched, intrigued, as he retrieved a glass jar containing a black liquid, a needle, and a wooden stick.
“Is that… for tattoos?” I asked, dipping the tip of my finger into the thick ink, and considering it under the firelight.
“Roll up your sleeve,” he ordered, while he poured a little wine in his cup and pulled a somewhat clean rag from the pouch.
My left hand twitched but did not leave my lap. A tattoo? Something to brand my status as a mercenary into my skin for the rest of my life…
When he saw that I made no move to bare my arm, Victrix scooted close and pulled at the coarse fabric of my sleeve to roll it over my shoulder. “Don’t tell me you’re scared, Silverlegs.”
That did it—I held out my arm with a challenging glare. “Make it look good.”
He smeared some ink on my skin and grabbed the needle and the stick with a chuckle. “I’m an artist.”
Unlikely. But he seemed to know what he was doing. I fought a grimace when he pressed the needle to the flesh of my upper arm and started tapping it fast and hard with the wooden stick, piercing the skin to let the ink seep into it. The sting was worse than I’d expected, but still bearable. I clenched my jaw tight as beads of blood welled that mingled with the ink and ran in dark rivulets down my arms.
Silence set between us while he worked. It was unusual to see such peace on Victrix’s features, he whose anger ran through his veins and dripped through every pore of his skin. He was focused, and his gaze was sharp as usual, but there was a candor in his eyes that seemed totally foreign.
I craned my neck to watch his progress and frowned at the black lines he had traced. “Is it a drawing?”
He dipped the rag in his cup of wine and wiped the blood and ink from my reddened skin. “It’s a word.”
My nostrils flared. “You’re writing birdshit!”
An adolescent laugh shook his frame, a sound I’d never heard coming from him. “No… Trust me.”
I wasn’t sure about that. He resumed working, and I peered down anxiously at the needle hammering at my skin. The continuous bite became a dull burn circulating up and down in my arm in an almost pleasant way. I stopped worrying, lulled by the rhythmic tap of the wooden stick. Victrix’s lips were curved in a soft expression that was almost a smile. He was happy.
I watched him, sensing that something I couldn’t put words on had changed in the air between us. I noticed his touch differently; it was no longer just a series of mechanical gestures. Goose bumps bloomed where he held my arm in place with his left hand, and every contact was sharper, louder in my ears. The brush of his fingertips against my skin every time his hand moved, the way he wiped the blackened blood with the wine-soaked rag—slowly, carefully. There was never anything careful about Victrix, and whenever he grabbed my arm during training, his hand never lingered, his thumb never swiped like this. Like it was stroking my newly-tattooed shoulder.
He raised the needle and wiped his bloody canvas one last time, grinning. I thought he looked a little too pleased with himself and I bristled all over again. I twisted my arm in an effort to check the black signs, frustrated to see only a meaningless tangle of lines. It looked like a long word. “What did you write?”
He shrugged. “Who knows?”
“I knew it. I can’t believe this. I should have stopped you!”
“Easy, b—” He caught himself before uttering the dreaded moniker and burst out laughing. “All right. I wrote Silverlegs.”
I twisted to check the jumble of trembling lines on my skin. “Are you sure?”
“I was never good at spelling, though,” he conceded.
“Well, Nerie is, and I swear if he tells me you wrote something else…” Fuming, I unfolded my legs to get up, but Victrix’s hand on my wrist stopped me. I registered his ink-stained fingers reaching for my cheek, grazing it, before then he leaned forward and his face was right in front of mine, so close our noses almost touched and I could smell the wine on his breath. Before I could make sense of this sudden invasion, he tilted his head, his mouth seeking mine. But it wasn’t him I saw; It wasn’t his lips I felt brush my cheek when I recoiled in alarm. He was Servilius, Ulpinus, Arun, every monster I ever feared embodied in the one man I’d learn to trust.
I shoved him away, overwhelmed by a sudden sense of betrayal. The patch of skin on my arm I’d let him tattoo now burned like it was on fire. All I wanted was to claw it off until there was only raw, bloody flesh left.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I hissed.
Victrix sat back on his haunches. His tongue darted between his lips as if to sample whatever fleeting taste of me he’d gotten. Time stretched between us as he appraised me, unblinking. “You know… Gemina told Clearchos,” he said at least, his quiet voice deafening in the silent atrium.
I tried to breathe, to regain control of the hammering in my rib cage as he went on.
“She sold you pretty fast, not even a week after you arrived. Clearchos figured something was off and she was hiding something from him. So, he put a dagger to her neck.” He pressed a finger to the vein pulsing below his chin, and for a fleeting moment I glimpsed in his eyes the rage that never truly left him, like the silvery gleam of a knife. “She told him everything, and after that he told me.”
Around me, the atrium and the pool were spinning, and my stomach lurched as if I were about to throw up. He had known from the start, and for months, and all this time, every time he’d looked at me, he’d seen a girl. “Why didn’t you…?” Words failed me, so I left it at that. I knew he understood anyway.
The tight line of his lips quivered. I expected his usual smirk; it never came. “Clearchos ordered me to train you and watch over you. We made a deal that as long as you could keep up, you had a right to be one of ours and no one could touch you. But if you gave up or if you were discovered, I could keep you for myself.” His eyes narrowed. “I didn’t feel like sharing.”
I sprang to my feet and staggered back, overcome by sudden dizziness. “Who else knows?”
“Only the three of us, and it’s going to stay that way.” He marked a pause and seemed to hesitate before he added, “You could call it a family secret.”
I blinked over and over as the full meaning of his words sank in. Victrix, Clearchos and Gemina were… a family. My mouth opened to ask him for an explanation, but he got up before I could word the questions whirling in my head.
He picked up the ink jar, the wooden stick, and the needle and shoved them back into the leather pouch, avoiding my gaze throughout. As he turned to leave, his lips quirked, outlined by moonlight. “You see, Constanter, I know your secret, and now you know mine.”
Victrix left without another word, and I could find none myself.
26
I didn’t think; I just ran.
I raced past the empty houses, acros
s the cracks running in the Magnatura’s everwood. Harder, faster, until my lungs burned, and my muscles ached. I was almost sorry that the battle was over—my fingers itched to slash through something or someone, to watch them bleed and see my own fear and anger pour out as if I were draining an abscess.
I barreled through the shell curtain and into Gemina’s tent. She sat in the back, tending to Hastius’s eye, while Nerie lay curled on a pallet and observed her gestures.
She turned around to acknowledge my presence, but before she could greet me, I told her, “When you’re done, I want to talk to you. I’ll be outside.” I hadn’t meant to sound so cold, or even to make it an order, but my words sliced the air between us before I could stop them.
Her lips parted in surprise, and Nerie too gazed at me like I was a stranger. Gemina eventually gave a demure nod, her voice equally frosty as she replied, “Very well.”
I marched out and planted myself in front of the tent, fighting shivers in the cold night air. It was only a few minutes until she glided past the shells in her turn, tightening a gold-embroidered shawl around her bloodstained stola—another gift from Clearchos in reward for sawing his men’s legs off, I thought spitefully. Avoiding my eyes, she took slow and graceful steps toward an old stone bench that stood a little away from the tents. I figured she wanted us to have this chat someplace far enough that we’d have a measure of privacy while the men washed the blood away with honeyed wine.
I joined her on the bench. At first, we sat side by side in silence, listening to distant cheers and the whispers of a cold autumn breeze in the branches of the sigillarias.
I laced my fingers and tapped my thumbs together. “I spoke with Victrix.”
“Did you?”
“He said you sold me to Clearchos almost as soon as you knew, and that the three of you made some sort of pact to keep it a secret.”
She didn’t look at me. Her gaze was set on the quivering flames of a bonfire around which the men sat huddled and sang ribald tales to the tune of a strident flute. “Did he tell you about the deal he made with Clearchos—”
“I know,” I snapped. “I’m sure he’ll find himself another girl.”
“He doesn’t give up easily,” she remarked, her voice softening. “He’s nothing like his father. I’ve never seen Clearchos lose his temper. Not even after I burned his face.”
My head jolted up. I turned to sit cross-legged on the bench and stare at her in shock. “You’re the one… You did that?”
She looked down at the many delicate bracelets around her wrists. “I’m from the north, like Irius. From a land across the White Sea called Falnir. My father’s kingdom was barely bigger than Nyos, but the everwood trade had made us rich, or so we believed. When Manicus decided to conquer the northern shores and establish new outposts there, he sent thousands of mercenaries, instead of his legions.”
“Clearchos?” I ventured.
She acquiesced, her eyes lost to visions of the past. “His band raided our city, and we understood too late that we were nothing, that our castles were firewood, and our army a small band of disorganized lumbermen. They killed everyone, my parents, my brothers, our servants. I hid in the kitchens with my nurse. I had nothing to defend myself; I threw a pan of boiling oil at the first man who came in.”
“And it was him?”
“Yes.”
I had never suspected something like this—never really wondered about Gemina’s past, in truth. She seemed to hold so much power over Clearchos’s men… and I’d been too absorbed by my own suffering, my struggle to survive every day in Clearchos’s Legion, to consider that there might be many other broken lives among our band of outcasts. I replayed in my mind her remark about Victrix’s and Clearchos’s opposite tempers. “But he didn’t get angry?” I wondered aloud. “Even after that?”
“No. He never raised his voice, not even while they were bandaging his face. After it was done, he had me brought to his tent.” She wrenched her hands on her lap, her eyes fluttering closed for the briefest moment. “He asked me to choose between becoming his whore or being burned the exact same way he had been.”
I fought a wave of nausea. Gemina had been through this, too, the pain and the shame of having your body stolen from you. I saw her again in Clearchos’s chamber, the way her eyes wouldn’t meet mine. He still hurt her, even now, day after day. My voice was a tentative breath as I asked, “How old were you?”
“Fourteen. Victrix was born a year later, in Segester.”
“Does he know any of this? How can he hate you—”
“I didn’t want him,” she ground out. “And… I couldn’t stand the idea that he would grow up to be like his father. I found a farmer whose wife was nursing; I paid them to take him.”
“Did Clearchos know?”
“I told him the child was stillborn.”
There it was, the course of Victrix’s permanent anger, simmering under the surface of Gemina’s confession. She had abandoned him at birth, because she didn’t want this son Clearchos had forced on her. I remembered my own relief when I had bled after Servilius raped me. Some nights when I couldn’t find sleep, the memory of that fear would creep back, crawl in my veins, and I told myself that if it had come to this, if he had put a child inside me, I’d just have drowned myself in the lake, and that rotten seed with it.
I stared down at my lap as the pieces of Gemina’s story came together in my mind. “But Victrix learned about all this. He found you.”
“Years later, his adoptive parents told him about me.” She let out a derisive snort. “The witch who served Clearchos’s Legion. He set out to find me… and he did.”
“And Clearchos still didn’t get mad after Victrix showed up?”
Her nostrils flared, anger and rancor playing on her tired features. “No. He sent him to the pit, and after Victrix survived, he venerated his father, like the other idiots.” Like me, I realized, suddenly ashamed to admit that I’d been spellbound, the same way Felus and our comrades were. I had been scared, of course, but Clearchos’s hold on my heart went deeper. I had looked up at the bronze wolf on his cuirass and seen a demigod. Now I knew that no matter what I owed him, he was only a man, cruel and spiteful to those closest to him. I grazed Gemina’s hand awkwardly. “Victrix doesn’t know, right? What Clearchos did to you.”
She took my hand and gave my fingers a light squeeze. “It’s in the past. I’m not even sure he would understand.”
And if he did, he’d turn against Clearchos, and once again, it’d be Gemina who would suffer the consequences. Hastius’s words echoed in my ears. It is what it is. Like Spurius’s cruelty or what Ulpinus had done to Nerie, I was powerless to change Gemina and Victrix’s past. But could I keep serving Clearchos, now that my mind had been poisoned by this ugly truth? He had paid me like the rest of his soldiers; my work was done, after all…
“I know what you’re thinking. Clearchos won’t let you go so easily,” Gemina said softly, after a beat of tense silence. “You must be careful.”
I could try. I could take my satchel and my sword from Rascius at dawn and just vanish in the woods again. He might send men after me—no, I reminded myself bitterly, he’d send Victrix. But I could easily outrun him. And lose everything again—my friends, my purpose. Myself.
I swallowed. “Would you hate me…” I began, chewing out the words hesitantly. “if I stayed anyway? If I served him even knowing what he did to you?”
Her hand rose to caress my hair, like a mother would have. “No. But I think it will destroy you, being Silverlegs.”
I had nothing to say to that, no reassurance to offer when clouds swelled and darkened on the horizon. I could only murmur, “I know.”
•♦•
After Gemina had gotten up and vanished back inside her tent, the last thing I wanted was to return to the camp and face the noise, the wine and that false, tainted joy on the men’s faces. Easier for them to drink themselves into oblivion than
think about the prisoners Spurius would resume scourging come dawn. I lay on the lakeshore by a patch of crusamantes and stared up at the moons, brooding when sleep eluded me. I wondered if the moons were truly the eyes of a divine wolf running around the sky at night, and why Gemina had hidden the truth from Victrix and let him despise her. I wondered if Clearchos was still taking revenge on her for disfiguring him even now, or, if like Servilius and the other men, he simply didn’t see Gemina’s suffering, only his own gratification.
When the first ribbon of blue peeked over the horizon and the clouds caught fire, I stretched and sat up. I was cold, drained from lack of sleep, and a rhagamuse had shit on my satchel when I wasn’t looking. I brushed off the cluster of tiny droppings, adjusted my mask, and headed for the desolate streets of the village. Rascius would probably be done with my sword by now.
He was, and I battled the urge to head butt him with my iron mask when he emerged from behind the blacksmith shop’s filthy counter and mumbled, “Four sigli.”
Tightfisted bastard. I drew a sharp breath. “I gave you three last night. Hand over the blade, or else…” Or else what? Would I really stoop to hitting an old man who had no teeth left to punch out to begin with? I realized with no small amount of dismay that I was starting to sound like Victrix, as if in his kiss had poisoned me somehow, transferred some of his nasty temper to me along with the ink he’d etched into my skin. No, I reminded myself, it had started long before him. With Servilius.
Rascius thankfully sorted out my dilemma for me, bending to pick up a long package wrapped in dirty hide. I noticed his gnarled, blackened hands as he handed me my sword, and my irritation melted away, replaced by begrudging respect. He must have worked all night long to finish it, and the blade revealed inside the leather envelope was splendid. Lighter and a little shorter, as I’d requested of him, but also razor-sharp, and perfectly balanced. I concealed a smile under my mask as I inspected it. “What’s this?” I asked, trailing my finger along a series of signs engraved in the new blade.
