Summer changed to fall, and fall to winter. AnnaBelinda and Andreas took the brothers on their first true Burner hunt. Daniel did well, as did Marcus and Timothy.
Ladon brought him down to the smithy “for the warmth,” but mostly so he could keep an eye on him. They rarely talked. Daniel would rub the Great Sir’s side, and wash his ridges when the soot from the smith’s fires coated the beast’s hide.
Daniel tried to teach the dragon to write. The Great Sir did his best, but nothing stuck. Written symbols made no sense to the beast.
Ladon fanned the fire and worked the metals, and one day began telling Daniel stories of Rome, of the great Fate families—the Jani, the Palatini, and the Fates descended from the Emperor Trajan himself, the Ulpi. He told Daniel of Andreas’s mother, the Shifter Progenitor, and her other son, Vivicus, the man who fathered the first morphers. He told of a tragic night on a mountain called Vesuvius, and the deaths of three Fates who had been destined to be a triad. He told Daniel of raids and wars and glory.
Ladon told Daniel how the Fates wove tapestries of deceit and denial with threads so tight they trapped everyone in their nets, and no one could escape. Not the Fates. Not the Shifters. Not the Dracae.
Which was why Ladon and AnnaBelinda would never return to the Empire—and why they needed their Draki Prime.
Daniel breathed in more calling scents. He trained. He wrote down Ladon’s stories and he taught letters to the town’s children. Some cooperated, some did not. But they all asked him to play and they all made him smile.
Winter turned to spring. Livia rode out once again, to do business with the local lords. Flowers bloomed. Crops grew. Livia returned.
Daniel stood under the smithy’s awning. He leaned against the corner support, his back to Ladon and his hammering. The Great Sir played with the children. Daniel watched the gate.
He always watched the gate when he sensed an approach, or a return, or passersby. He sometimes woke from his dreams of a too-big, too-red sun and the blood-jeweled dagger to watch the gates at night. To count the fires and to hope.
He did not carry the arrowhead, because it carried only chaos. Ladon and the Great Sir had confirmed why—it had been smithed from burndust-infused metal, which rendered it useless to Fates. Daniel gave the arrowhead to Ladon, who kept it safe.
Marcus used it for practice, though, and past-saw around the burndust enough to see the arrowhead’s making, and its launching. And, somehow, he managed to see the moment it bit into Antonius’s shoulder.
Daniel did not know, with certainty, if Antonius died in the river. He only knew that the Fates responsible had cheated him out of his answers.
Nor did he understand the spy’s question of who was Legion and who was not. The spies had their own agenda, of that Daniel was sure, and he could not see how it aligned with the Dracae.
But he was better. He lived his life and he helped the people of his town, as Antonius would have wanted. He honored his love by not giving Faustus what he wanted—death by the unknown.
He watched the gate every day, anyway.
Three Legion men rode in first, followed by several carts carrying wares for the market. A family walked in next, an older couple with six children in tow ranging in age from adult to toddler. They gaped at the town as if they’d walked into a grand cathedral.
Daniel’s seer whispered that they were normals, but that two of the children showed exceptional inventive, tool-building capabilities. Livia wanted them educated here, in Dragontown, before sending them out to the Frankish courts.
Another cart followed the family, then a single man on foot wearing hunting leathers. Livia rode in last.
The man limped slightly, and carried one arm close to his body, as if an old wound still troubled his shoulder. A quiver rested against his back and a hood shielded his eyes from the bright midday sun.
Livia dismounted and tapped the man’s arm. He turned toward her and listened. She pointed in the direction of Daniel’s home. The man nodded, then disappeared into the crowd. Livia handed off her horse to one of the stable hands and turned her attention to the family who had entered first.
Daniel jumped up to the rail attached to the support beam and peered over the crowd. Who was the man? His seer whispered nothing, as if this particular man was hidden in the what-was-is-will-be.
“What are you doing up there?” Ladon wiped his hands on a rag. He glanced at his beast. “Dragon says Livia has returned.”
“She has,” Daniel said. He swung around the post, but he’d lost sight of the man.
Ladon chuckled. “Dragon says if it’s important enough to have you climbing the walls, you should go investigate.”
Daniel jumped down. “Tell the children we’ll pick up their lessons tomorrow.”
Ladon patted his shoulder. “Go on. Enjoy the beautiful day. I’m sure they would rather play this afternoon than draw their letters.”
Daniel grabbed his satchel and ran between the buildings. He shouldn’t get his hopes up. He shouldn’t. He should look and ask the correct questions of his seer and feel his way around the blocking chaos the same as Marcus had.
He couldn’t. Even if the man wasn’t Antonius, even if he was someone sent by his aunt, he would not look. He still needed that hope.
He would never look. Never.
His past-seeing brother’s seer blossomed into Daniel’s mind just as he rounded the corner into the alley in front of their shared house.
Marcus stood on the packed pebbles and dirt, his face ashen as if he’d seen a ghost, his hands on the cheeks of the man with the quiver, and his seer blazing like the sun itself.
Timothy leaned over the rail of the porch surrounding their rooms. His seer, too, blazed in full glory.
The man untied a string from around his neck and pulled off a pendant. Marcus held it for a moment, then dropped it onto the ground.
The cloud over the future fell away. It bounced up as the pendant bounced, then dropped again as it hit the dirt.
Marcus pointed at Daniel.
The man’s hood fell away from his face. He blinked in the bright sun, and held up his hand to shade his eyes.
He smiled.
Daniel dropped to his knees. He gulped in his breath and closed his eyes because the man could be a morpher. He could be an enthraller making him think he saw what was not there. What wasn’t real.
The town moved around him. People chattered. His brothers’ seers blazed but Daniel wouldn’t look. He needed his hope.
A shadow moved over his face. Fingers touched his cheek. “Please open your eyes,” Antonius said. “Please.”
Daniel pulled the fingers to his lips. His skin still carried faint hints of incense. “We couldn’t see you. I would have come if I’d seen a way.”
“Their present-seers stitched. They used the dust. There was Plague. A man dressed like your Papa helped me get away. I took that amulet because I figured if it hid me from you, it would hide me from them, too.”
Daniel’s eyes wouldn’t open. What if it was a lie?
“I was trying to find my way back to the village. Livia found me. I came for you. I knew you’d need me. I knew. Please open your eyes.”
A kiss touched Daniel’s forehead. “Please.”
Daniel opened his eyes. Antonius smiled. His Antonius. The real man.
The future smiled, too.
Chapter Twenty-Six
They were no longer the same sixteen-year-olds they’d been before Daniel’s activation. Pain would do that, as would capture.
Livia’s calling scents continued to provide balance for them both.
Antonius currently lived with Marcus in the lower level of their collective home. He supped with the entire family most nights. He also spent most of his days with Daniel, helping to design lessons for the town’s children, and to train other teachers.
They were getting to know each other again, and it felt good. Real.
Daniel never spied too much into the future. Not because Antoni
us asked him not to, but because he wished to heed Papa’s warning.
The journey was just as important as the outcome.
Marcus confirmed that the spy had something to do with Antonius’s escape. Getting out of Constantinople was difficult enough as it was, and Antonius had a Parcae-laid bounty on his head—a bounty the Dracae were about to permanently counter.
Antonius drew a red circle on Daniel’s chest. “I think I like the old ways better.” He nodded out toward the naked, dancing townspeople, and specifically Daniel’s heavily pregnant sister-in-law and her decorated belly. “Ingund looks happy.”
Daniel spread blue paint over Antonius’s shoulders, but made a point of leaving his scar visible. “It’s a boy,” he said. He leaned closer. “Timothy has decided that we are all to take the surname Drake. He says it’s the way of the future.”
Antonius watched the festivities. “I like it,” he said.
“I do, too,” Daniel said.
Drums filled the town with their hypnotic beat. The town was changing, too, and many of the newer additions were not as naked or painted as the long-lived Shifters. But they danced and they accepted inclusion, so Daniel’s seer did not see too many issues.
“Now,” he said as he painted a red swirl around Antonius’s navel, “I say you kiss Ladon.”
“Ingund said her kiss was well worth it.” Antonius looked out over the crowd. “She said it made Timothy jealous.”
Righteously so, if Daniel remembered correctly. He tapped Antonius’s chest. “You don’t have a husband to worry about,” he said.
Antonius laughed. “Not yet.” He kissed Daniel full on the lips, then danced away into the crowd.
Not yet echoed in Daniel’s head, and in his seer, and in his soul. He, too, laughed and smiled, and would have danced into the crowd as well, but the Great Sir nudged his side.
He placed his hand on the beast’s neck. “We’re ready,” he said.
A mostly-naked Ladon walked by, complete with black soot swirls on his shoulders and face. He wore his bracers, though, because Ladon understood how covering his forearms accentuated his shoulders. Ladon, for all his leadership and godling-ness, did know how to put on a good show.
He tossed Antonius over his shoulder. The crowd roared. Daniel laughed.
And together, they welcomed the future.
Conpulsio
Mount Vesuvius, August 23, 79 AD…
Chapter One
The girl didn’t fight.
Ladon held her firm, one hand on her elbow and the other gripping her forehead. He twisted her in the center of her family’s villa, on the exquisite tiles of the open courtyard, under the bright Roman sky. In this place a family such as hers tasted only the best wines and chewed only the best meats. They twirled in rich fabrics and laughed at slaves.
This rich Roman’s paradise. The lands where the Emperor’s favorites thought themselves safe from dragons.
But now, here, the girl’s cheeks trembled and her lips fluttered as she tried to gasp one last time. She tried to breathe, her body unwilling and surprised, even though he knew she’d taken this act of retribution as her fate. That she’d offered it up to the gods.
The hot noon sun seared the back of Ladon’s neck and crawled like wasps—stinging and biting and screaming that he served justice. Her hands loosened. Her eyes blanked. His actions were correct.
They had to be correct.
Retribution held him firm. Obligation lurched through his body like a bolt lighting the inside of his skull. The demand for balance raged and set him into slicing motion.
These engagements—these solid weights of retribution, obligation, and balance in his soul—they churned. They wound his muscles and spun in his ears and he had no choice but to set them free here, in this villa.
So Ladon held the girl, this child whose name he did not know and whose death would right the scales tipped by his niece’s murder. One hand gripped her elbow. The other wrapped tight around her forehead as he pulled back her head at the correct angle to expose as much of her neck’s flesh as possible. He performed this movement over the swirling ocean colors of the villa’s tiles with his companion beast Dragon behind him on one side, his tribunus at his other.
The beast pranced under the sun’s glare. His mimicking hide refracted in the brightness of midday. He vanished as he imitated the walls of the villa, then reappeared, then rolled and jolted around Ladon’s tribunus, Andreas. The big man stepped into the shadows, his gladius drawn. He’d said nothing, done nothing to stop their descent onto the villa, only followed behind, his face the flat mask of a warrior’s response.
Ladon turned the girl’s body away—an instinctive and adept move of someone whose life brimmed with violence and death and murder—to keep the smear from his skin. But blood coated his armor. Blood muddied his sandals. He gripped the dagger and blood touched his fingers. Death wafted from the girl in waves of metallic stench. Death he tasted.
But she’d angled herself toward him anyway and the sky-like shade of her eyes flashed vivid as the day. Her hand lifted to his arm in a conscious arc, as if she’d practiced the movement. As if she danced with him, this child who was not quite a woman. This child of a murdering Fate.
The girl was one-third of a Fate triad meant to be the Emperor’s own. They were to bring glory to Rome by seeing all there was to see: what-was, what-is, and what-will-be.
Ladon snatched away the promise of her kind and the future of the Empire. It bled out onto the tile mosaic of her father’s country villa at the foot of a smoking mountain. And his actions, the weights in Ladon’s soul, they spun high. They pushed into his veins and out across the energy connecting him to Dragon. Both he and the beast ripped and tore and Rome paid for the crimes of this girl’s father.
On his arm, her fingers let go. First one, then another, then another. Then her palm lifted off his elbow.
He dropped her corpse. Her head hit first with a sharp snap. The rest of her rolled on the grit. Ladon stepped back.
Behind him, Dragon roared out a high plume of fire.
The girl’s future-seeing father should have seen this moment in his visions of what-will-be. His triad was the best of their kind.
Yet death lay as a pile of girl at Ladon’s feet. Thirteen years old. Not yet a woman.
Ladon had done what he needed to do—a child for a child. He’d taken the light from this girl to balance the dark hole that had once been Sister’s daughter. His niece.
He served justice. Behind him, Andreas nodded once, and sheathed his gladius. He understood. He hadn’t interfered.
The Fates had brought this war. Ladon had done his duty.
Dragon stepped over the dead girl, the pressure of his forelimbs sinking his talons into the sand under on the edge of the courtyard’s tile. He swung his big head left, then right, and a pulse of light burst off his hide. Human, he pushed into Ladon’s mind. We must leave.
Yes, Ladon pushed back. They would leave. Go west, away from Vesuvius’s flank, now that they’d fulfilled their promise to his sister.
Ladon stared at the dead girl. Her blood formed a crescent on the tile—a shadow that curved toward his feet. Above the rim of the villa, dust rising from Vesuvius’s cone bent in the opposite direction, another shadow mirroring an ended life. They coiled like the gates to Hades, one to its depths, one to its brightness.
If the gate opened for her, or for him, Ladon did not know.
Andreas clasped his shoulder. “Come.”
Ladon nodded. He dropped the dagger from his fingers and it rattled across the tile. He’d leave it. He had no use for it now.
He glanced one more time at the stillness in the center of the spreading bloodstain, what had been a girl, and stepped away.
She hadn’t fought.
Chapter Two
Four days prior, on the open piazza tiled with scenes of a sea god’s anger, Mira of the Jani Prime, a Fate bound to the fabric of Rome, clenched her hands and stared at the wisps rising abo
ve Vesuvius. At that moment, in the now of what-is, her present-seeing ability swirled inside her head and screamed Run! Go! Get as far away from the mountain as possible, even if you must crawl.
Even if you must scrape your skin raw or take another of your brother’s punches.
Mira would have danced her fingers over the deepening purple-green of her tender cheekbone, but her hands held tightly to each other. They would not cooperate.
Yet wincing filled her every motion. The flinches jiggling her vision and added pressure to the bites she pressed into her tongue. The smoke rising from the mountain made it worse.
The sky behind the cinder cone was a deceptively brilliant blue—and the same a color as her niece’s eyes. Last evening, when Mira had spread the new silk over the Minerva’s shoulder, she’d smiled. The soft drape and the vivid green-of-the-leaf of the fabric had brought some joy to the heart of a young woman who most days—most weeks and years—knew very little happiness.
Her father, Mira’s brother, was not a man who offered caring.
Faustus had left the day before, gone east toward the mountain to attend to their father and Minerva’s grandfather. Janus was the man from whom all Fates descended, even if most would rather slice open their own wrists and bleed away their life than be what he made them.
Mira and her sister Ismene were to follow their brother today, to complete their triad. A future-seer such as Faustus lost value when separated from his triad’s present- and past-seers. What-will-be only became clear when its foundations were laid bare.
Yet Mira’s seer screamed again—Take the children! Run to Rome!
She knew why. Beware the dragons. Beware the war your father started.
The beasts did not venture away from the city other than to lead their legion north, into barbarian territory, which was why her brother had brought the children here, to this town against the sea.
How Minerva, and Mira’s two nephews—Ismene’s boys Junonius and Jupiter—were safe here under Vesuvius, Mira did not see.
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