by Cass Morris
“Why?” Neitin demanded. “What is it you’ve seen?”
The magic-woman’s thin lips curled into a smile. “Information has a price. See to it that I go no further from my homeland, erregerra’s wife, and I will tell you what I know, and do my best to protect that boy of yours, conqueror’s whelp though he may be.”
Neitin bristled a bit to hear her son described so. “Why should I trust you?”
“You have no reason,” the woman admitted, still holding Neitin with that unblinking stare. “But I will make you a solemn vow by the star that has watched over me since the hour of my birth. I have heard your story on the wind, little wife, little mother. I know that not all here pleases you.” Only now did she look away—to nod in the direction of Bailar’s tent, all its flaps tightly closed despite the heat of the day.
Neitin swallowed. “And you are strong enough to stand against him?”
The woman laughed. “I wasn’t strong enough to protect my people. But one woman and one child?” She wagged her head in consideration. “I can give you the knowledge the stars have passed to me. There is protection of a sort in that, is there not? And it would be far easier to break this fiend-waker’s power if I had the chance to observe him.” A quick cloud of sorrow dimmed her expression. “We had no chance to defend ourselves. No one knew how to counter his magics when he descended upon our village.” Her cheeks tightened as she looked back to Neitin, the defiant fire again in her eyes. “But here, I might stand more of a chance. I think you would wish that, yes, little wife? To free your husband from the seduction of blood?”
Neitin’s son fidgeted, sputtering nonsense syllables, and she had to readjust her hold on him. “I am a loyal wife,” she said. “I do not wish my husband harmed. But yes, I would wish him to find a different path to the glories the gods intend for him.”
The woman’s upper lip twitched. “Then take me in your service, and I swear by every star in heaven, my magics shall work only against the fiend-waker and his helpers. I shall lift no finger against you, your babe, or even your warlord husband.” She nodded at the child. “And I shall do what is within my power to protect the innocent.”
Distrust warred with temptation in Neitin’s breast. Her uncle had proved a disappointment, unwilling to stand against Bailar, passively standing by and letting the atrocities go on. More than anything, Neitin wanted it all to stop. Free from the blood-haze, she was sure that Ekialde would see sense and return home, bringing the Lusetani back to their mendi, the mountains to the west that had sheltered them for generations. ‘If achieving that goal means trusting a stranger, and one with reason to hate us . . .’
Whatever the wisdom, Neitin wanted to believe in this woman. “You will swear again, beneath the stars, with all the appropriate rituals,” she said. “If you betray us, my sisters will slice out your kidneys to feed their dogs.” The woman nodded, with a slight smile that looked almost like approval. “And I will have your name.”
“You ask much and little all at once, as befits a queen,” the woman said, still smiling. “The people of my home know me as Sakarbik. What the stars call me is my own business.”
“Sakarbik will do.” Neitin turned on her heel and marched over to the man who seemed to be in charge of this knot of slaves. “That woman with the black hair and the markings on her arms. Untie her,” Neitin commanded. “I lay claim to her.”
“Lady . . .” the man said, his eyes rolling slightly. “These Cossetans are spoken for. There’s a captain in Olissippo willing to pay top coin for them. I can’t just—”
“You can and you will,” Neitin snapped. “I am the wife of your erregerra, and you will obey me in his absence.” Her sharp tone startled her son, who set up a cry, but that seemed to remind the man of who had given him an order: not just the erregerra’s wife, but the mother of his child. “I desire this woman for my service. Cut her bonds, and do it now.”
Her fierceness did the trick; he cut the woman’s bonds, then knotted the spare ends back together, securing those she had been tethered to. Neitin felt a pinch of shame, that of all this tribe, she had only chosen to spare one. ‘But if I said, strike all their bonds, send them home, who would listen? And with their men dead, their village plundered, where could they go? They’d only be recaptured and sold anyway, by Tyrians or Aventans if not by us.’ Her position as erregerra’s wife only earned her so much, and Ekialde himself had marked the Cossetans as enemies. Looking at the drawn faces of the bound Cossetans, though, it was harder than ever for Neitin to understand why.
XI
Stabiae
Sandals dangling from her fingers, Latona cast a long shadow as she walked along the beach with the setting sun warming her back. Aulus had insisted she bring two lads along, to carry a shade and protect her skin, but she had left them behind, where the path down from the Vitellian villa met the sands. Merula, too, waited there, though with a disapproving scowl and folded arms. ’As though some great danger will swarm up out of the deep to claim me.’
Latona needed to be alone—as alone as a lady of her station ever could be—and she needed to think.
The days since finding the remnants of Discordian ritual in the grove had had lingering effects. Restless nights with unsettling dreams—not nightmares, precisely, nothing so acute, but twisting whorls of light and half-heard voices that had her waking every hour. During the day, she twitched at every unexpected noise. She could hardly keep up conversation. Aula had commented on her preoccupation but had not pressed her on it. Perhaps the Discordian taint had affected her, too, though not as strongly. But then, Latona was the mage, and Latona had actually interacted with the miasma.
Walking alone helped to clear her head of the muck that seemed to have settled over it. Almost directly to the north rose the great hump of Mount Vesuvius. To the west, the brilliance of azure waters stretched to the horizon, turning to tourmaline foam here at the shore. Latona let the waves lap at her feet, her skirts tucked up in her belt to keep them from dragging through the wet sand. ‘Venus was born from the sea, after all.’ Maybe treading in her waters strengthened the goddess’s power inside Latona, scouring away the wretched Discordian influence.
Even with her mind clearer, though, her thoughts still dwelt on what she had seen and what she knew. ‘Ocella banished the Discordians from the city . . . And what did we think happened? That they simply melted into nothingness?’ In truth, no one in Aven had given it much thought at all. Surviving the predations of the Dictator had absorbed most families’ attention. If the strange cult was gone from under their noses, that had been good enough. One less thing to worry about. ‘The men Ocella proscribed crept back after his death. Why would not the banished cultists?’
At least one had made it as far as the Temple of Janus, after all. Small wonder others were making themselves known.
‘But what could be done?’ She could summon the Augian Commission, perhaps, the civil servants who ensured that Aventan citizens adhered to the lex magiae, those laws governing the use of magic. All men with talents to see magical signatures, they could both investigate and punish magical transgressions. Yet Latona misliked the idea. Too many of them had once been on Dictator Ocella’s payroll, their sacred purpose turned sour as they acted as his hounds. Some had abdicated their positions after his death the previous year, but not all, and Latona was not sure she could trust those who remained. ‘And who knows where else Rabirus might have allies? He found one in a temple . . . why not the Commission?’
The thought of Lucretius Rabirus prickled Latona’s skin, despite the warmth of the evening. Pinarius and Rabirus—both had menaced her, but Latona was not certain who troubled her more. Rabirus’s cold gaze haunted her, his threats and his insinuations. She had managed to avoid Rabirus in the time between the fire and when he left for Baelonia, but she could only assume that he had been less than pleased to learn of her survival and his pet mage’s downfall, even if he could not exp
lain quite how it had happened. ‘That he did not seek vengeance immediately hardly means he will fail to do so . . .’
A sudden dizziness struck her, swelling like the rush of the tide. Spirit magic, rising unbidden from her stress and worry. ‘Down, damn you, down.’ Latona stopped walking and concentrated on her surroundings, taking a moment to feel the sand grinding under her heels and shifting beneath the balls of her feet. ‘Breathe.’ She forced the tension from her fingers, trying to quell the rising unease inside her chest.
‘Strange . . .’ Usually Spirit magic gone turbulent made her susceptible to the emotions of others, but she could not sense Merula and the others, so far down the beach. The energy suffusing her now was less focused yet more intense, seeming to wrap her from all around, as omnipresent as sunlight. ‘What are you? Where are you coming from?’ But as soon as Latona reached for it with her own tendrils of magic, the sensation faded, leaving her with nothing more than a slightly aching head.
As she turned back toward the villa, her eyes scanned the wide waters. ‘All may look calm, but there are storms on the sea, for sure.’
When she returned to the path at the base of the hill, Merula tsked through her teeth as she repinned Latona’s mantle into her hair. “You will be freckling, Domina.”
“There are worse things, Merula.” The fabric of the mantle stuck to Latona’s skin, damp with sweat and the sea breeze, and it itched. She plucked it back off as soon as they were inside the villa.
She hardly had time to settle on a couch, though, before Aula rushed in and grabbed her hands, dragging her back up again. “Bona Dea, you’re finally back!” Aula exclaimed.
“I wasn’t gone that—”
“I’ve been out and about at the market,” Aula rolled on, tugging Latona out into the back garden. Unlike the peristyle garden in their home in Aven, their garden in Stabiae was not hemmed in by walls, but opened out toward the cerulean expanse of Crater Bay. “It’s starting to fill in properly, you know, as the season gets going.” Summer heat had sunk over Truscum and was starting to drive the wealthy out of the city and to their summer estates, even though Junius was not yet over. And where the wealthy went, so too went those with goods to sell them. “I spoke to many of the merchants whose goods come from around the bay and the woods to the south.” Her eyes gleamed with eagerness, as they ever did when Aula latched on to an intrigue. “There’ve been all sorts of strange tales. Crows behaving oddly, sudden storms, that sort of thing.”
“It is nearly summer,” Latona pointed out as Aula steered her along the paths of white pebbles that criss-crossed among the patches and hedgeways, meeting in the center around a burbling marble fountain. The pink oleander was not yet fully in bloom, but hyacinth and narcissus gave their colors to the garden. “Changeable weather isn’t out of the ordinary.”
“True.” Aula’s next words caught on her tongue a moment, until they reached the ambulation, a shaded avenue of packed earth between overhanging cypress and mulberry trees—the best place to have a conversation without fear of it being overheard. “The season hardly explains the story about a dog whelping a litter of snakes, or of a farmer’s chickens who will only walk backward.”
Latona’s brow furrowed. Such things were troubling omens—if they could be verified. Many had occurred in Aven in the days before Ocella had claimed the city and his Dictatorship by force. Lightning strikes, dogs struck mute, frogs swarming up from the Tiber River, owls shrieking at midday, sparrows flying into temples and there dropping dead. The mages with prophetic gifts and the other augurs had been at their wits’ end trying to keep track of all the ill omens. Other signs had been directed more to individuals than to the state. Their friend Maia Domitia’s altar had begun to drip blood shortly before her husband’s proscription and subsequent murder, and Proculus Crispinius swore that, at the very moment of dawn on the day the Dictator had brought up charges against his brother, every door and shutter in the house had banged open at once.
“The most consistent tale I’ve heard, though,” Aula went on, “involves a plague of bad dreams.”
“Bad dreams?”
“Not just bad—horrific. Haunting, really. It mostly seems to be afflicting farmers. Some of them on latifundia, others on smaller holdings, mostly between here and Pompeii.”
Latona frowned. The latifundia were enormous agricultural estates, owned by patricians in the city but generally operated by local overseers. “Any of Father’s tenants?”
“Not that I heard, but that doesn’t mean none have been afflicted.”
A new voice made Aula and Latona both jump. “Afflicted by what?” Alhena asked, striding forward from between two tree trunks.
“Alhena!” Aula exclaimed. “Darling, what are you—”
“Mus said she’d seen you drag Latona down here. Were you talking about the Discordians without me?” Reproach colored her voice.
“We—well, yes, pet, but it was only—”
Alhena scowled, her hands settling on her hips in a gesture that was very like Aula. “I cannot believe you would leave me out of whatever it is you’re discussing. Even now?”
Aula’s cheeks had pinked. “Dearest, we didn’t want to trouble you—”
“I’m not a child.” Alhena’s irritation was directed at Aula, but Latona felt the cut. It was so easy, still, to think of Alhena as the baby of the family. Looking at her now, Latona could see bits of herself and her other siblings, there in the youngest of them: Aula’s ivory skin; Gaius’s long limbs and serious brow; Latona’s unfashionably tip-tilted nose; then, that reddest of red hair, shockingly bright, all her own. She was a woman grown now; she had turned seventeen in Aprilis. It had been Alhena whose dreams had summoned Latona to Stabiae, Alhena sneaking texts from the temple libraries so that Latona could study, Alhena who brought Vibia to her rescue during the Aventine fire.
“You’re absolutely right, dear one,” Latona said. “I’m sorry.”
“I understand you want to protect me,” Alhena said, “but ignorance won’t keep me safe.”
Latona reached out to squeeze her hand. “We must get into a better habit of including you. We will.”
“You’d best,” Alhena said archly, “or I won’t tell you what I found out.”
By way of apology, Aula left Latona’s side and went to loop her arm through Alhena’s. “Very well, pet, I promise. I was only telling Latona that the countryfolk near here are complaining of a plague of bad dreams.”
“That’s no surprise to me,” Alhena said, lifting her nose a touch. Her face had taken on a stubborn, superior set that Latona was actually glad to see; it reminded her more of the girl Alhena had been before the death of her betrothed had broken her heart, and it was preferable to the frantic waywardness her visions often induced. “A man came to the temple today, begging intercession from Proserpina, because his farm has been haunted by a fiend.”
“A fiend?” Aula and Latona echoed in unison.
Alhena nodded tightly. “An evil shade has been terrorizing their nights. It invades their sleep and keeps them from rest. But then they wake, and see it still, looming in their houses. It has no respect for walls or doors, but comes and goes as it pleases.”
“How long has this thing been troubling them?” Latona asked, at almost the same moment as Aula said, “Are they sure it is only one?”
“Ten days, the man said. And he only mentioned one.”
Latona’s fingers twisted in a loose lock of her hair. ‘I have had a taste of this Discordian magic now. I know its character. If this fiend is a Discordian’s doing, I might be able to dispel it. And I could see if it has the same signature as what we found in the grove.’ The heavy air pressed at her from the outside, and within, she felt the call to action.
“You want to go see, don’t you?” Aula asked.
“I do,” Latona confessed. “And if I can help, I should.”
“It only visits them at night,” Alhena said. “I’m not sure what Father will think of us wandering out into the countryside after dark.”
“‘Us?’” Aula echoed. “You can’t really be thinking—”
“You can’t be thinking I’ll be left behind while you and Latona—”
“My honey, I have no intention of visiting strange farms in the middle of the night.”
“But you’ll let Latona—”
“I clearly have no control over Latona, as numerous events in the past year demonstrated—”
While they bickered, Latona continued to twine her hair around her finger, tugging gently on the lock. A year ago, she would have passed the problem along. Perhaps to some well-connected priest, if not the potentially duplicitous Augian Commission. A younger Latona would not have welcomed the challenge, and she would have shied away from the potential attention her interference might draw. ‘No more. I can act, so I must. Juno requires this of me.’
Juno, and herself.
As they strolled closer to the upper gardens, Aula and Alhena still trading arguments, the villa’s steward appeared, trotting toward them. “Domina,” he said, first to Aula, then in repetition to the other two sisters, “the Lady Vibia is arrived.”
“Well,” Aula sighed, her eyes casting briefly toward heaven, “what fine timing.”
* * *
Near Toletum
“I tell you, I do not like this, sister.”
Neitin ignored Reilin’s objections as they tramped out into the woods. Most of the brush had long since been cleared to feed the campfires, so their feet kicked up only ocher dust as they moved between the trees. In Neitin’s arms, her son babbled happily to himself, oblivious to the tension between his mother and his aunt.
“It is dangerous,” Reilin continued.
“Nonsense,” Neitin replied. “There are no Aventans between here and the river.”
