Fidelias debated on how to respond to the moment of vulnerability the Princeps was showing. He finally just began chuckling.
Octavian frowned at him and lifted an imperious eyebrow.
“Long odds,” he said. “Bloody crows, sir. Long odds. That’s bloody funny.”
“I don’t see what’s so amusing about it.”
“Naturally, you don’t,” Fidelias said, still chuckling. “The furyless boy from the country who stopped an invasion.”
“I didn’t really stop it,” Tavi said. “
Doroga
stopped it. I just . . .”
“Completely demolished an operation backed by the most dangerous High Lord and Lady in the Realm,” Fidelias said. “I was there. Remember?” The last words were not bereft of irony.
Octavian gave a small inclination of his head in acknowledgment of the touch.
“The boy who personally saved the First Lord’s life in his second term at the Academy. Who took command of a Legion and fought the Canim to a standoff—and who then stole Varg from the most tightly guarded prison of the Realm and brokered the first truce in history with the Canim to get them out of the Realm. The young upstart Princeps who pitted himself against a continent full of vord and hostile Canim and won.”
“I got my people and Varg’s out alive,” Octavian corrected sharply. “I haven’t won anything. Not yet.”
Fidelias grunted. “Sir . . . honestly. Suppose you defeat the vord here. Suppose you unite our people again, take Alera back. Will that be a victory?”
Octavian raked his fingers through his hair. “Of course not. It’ll be a good start. But there will be severe repercussions for the balance of power in our society that must be addressed. The Canim will, probably, be settling here, and we’ll have to reach some kind of mutual understanding with them, and the Free Alerans are never going to back the same set of laws that allowed them to be enslaved. Not to mention the fact that—”
Fidelias cleared his throat gently. “Young man, I submit to you that your standards of victory are . . . set rather high. If you continue that way, no matter what you do, it will never be enough.”
“That is exactly correct,” Octavian replied. “Are the men and women the vord have already killed only partially dead? Are they only technically dead? Only legally dead? Can a compromise be made wherein they are given back some portion of their lives?” He shook his head. “No. No compromise. My duty to them, and to those still alive, demands nothing less than everything I can give them. Yes, old soldier, my standards are high. So are the stakes. They’re a matched set.”
Fidelias stared at him, then shook his head slowly. Gaius Sextus had held an air of absolute authority, of personal power that arrested one’s sense of reason, at times, to extract support and obedience. Gaius Septimus had been a vibrant figure, driven and intelligent, always looking to the future. He could have inspired men to follow him down any path of reason, no matter how winding.
But Octavian . . . men would follow Octavian into a leviathan’s gullet if he asked it of them. And crows take him if Fidelias himself wouldn’t be one of them. The headstrong lunatic would probably discover some way to lead them all out the other side draped in the rings and crowns of a devoured treasure ship and somehow emerge clean.
“I couldn’t lead the Legions and the Canim,” Fidelias said quietly. “Not alone. But . . . if you made your will known to Varg, then Valiar Marcus could serve as Crassus’s advisor, his huntmaster. Varg would give him the chance to stand on his own merits in that case. And I would direct him as best I could.”
“You know the Canim,” Octavian said. “Better than anyone else I have.” His eyes glinted. “You’ve spent time with Sha, I think.”
“I’ve met the Cane,” Fidelias said calmly. “He seems most professional.”
“And have you ever met Khral?”
“I do not believe my duties as First Spear ever brought me into contact with him, my lord.”
“Oh,” Octavian said, smiling suddenly. “Very smooth.”
Fidelias inclined his head, his mouth touched with amusement at one corner.
The Princeps turned to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Thank you, Marcus.”
Fidelias dropped his eyes. “My lord . . .”
“Whatever else you’ve done,” Octavian said gently, “I have
seen
you. I have trusted you with my life, and you have trusted me with yours. I have seen you work tirelessly to serve the First Aleran. I have seen you give your body and heart to the Legion, to your men. I refuse to consider the idea that it was all a ploy.”
Fidelias looked away from him. “That hardly matters, sir.”
“It matters if I
say
it matters,” Octavian growled. “Crows take me, if I am to be First Lord, we’re going to establish that from the outs—”
The earthcrafting went beneath Fidelias so swiftly, so softly, that he hardly noticed it. He froze in place and narrowed his eyes, sending his own awareness into the ground beneath them.
A second passed by him. And a third.
They were all heading in the same direction—toward the command tent, the center of the camp.
“. . . if I have to crack every skull in the Senate to . . .” Octavian frowned. “Marcus?”
Fidelias’s hand went to his side, where his sword would normally be. It was, of course, gone. “Sir,” he said, his voice tight, “there are earthcrafters passing beneath us at this very moment.”
Octavian blinked. Powerful the young man might be, but he didn’t have the subtlety, the awareness, that could only come from decades of experience. He hadn’t sensed a thing. But once he closed his own eyes for a moment, frowning, he let out a blistering curse. “Friendlies would never attempt to enter the camp like that. The vord had a number of Citizens in their control.”
“Aye.”
“Then we can’t send
legionares
against them. It will be a bloodbath.” He “listened” for a moment more, then opened his eyes. “They’re heading for command,” Octavian said shortly. Only his eyes showed strain. “Kitai’s there.”
“Go,” Fidelias said. “I’ll bring the Pisces after you.”
“Do it,” Octavian snapped, and before he was finished speaking, he took a single bounding step and leapt into the air on a roaring gale of wind. Within another heartbeat, he had drawn his sword, and white-hot, furious fire burned forth from the blade.
Fidelias turned to sprint toward the center of the camp. As he went, he began bellowing orders that carried even over the hollow roar of Octavian’s monstrous windstream.
He did not need to be doing such things at his age, but he tried to focus on the positive: At least he wasn’t running in full armor. And, thank the great furies, the Princeps hadn’t taken Fidelias
flying
alongside him. Even so, some part of Fidelias noted with amusement that he wasn’t simply following Gaius Octavian, unarmed and unarmored, into the leviathan’s mouth.
He was
sprinting
.
CHAPTER 42
Tavi didn’t know how many earthcrafters the vord had collared and enslaved, but given how quickly Alera said that they had affected repairs upon the causeways, it was either a great many Citizens with lesser gifts or a few very powerful ones. Either way, Kitai was in the command tent, averting friction between the Antillan brothers and the Canim, and between the command staff of the Free Aleran and Maestro Magnus, and unaware of what was coming.
Tavi dived at the command tent, a dangerous maneuver when flying so low—but he managed to land perhaps twenty feet off without breaking his legs or ankles, then promptly redirected his windstream to catch the command tent and tear it neatly up off its posts and stakes like an enormous kite. A dozen people in the tent, staff and guards, Aleran and Canim, came lurching to their feet. Half a dozen of them, including Kitai, had already drawn steel before Tavi got a clear look at them.
“To arms!” he thundered, before either the guards or the people within the tent could react. He ran toward the tent, the sword in his hand sending out sparks that threatened to catch his own bloody cloak on fire, and shouted, “Enemy earthcrafters coming in low!”
“Oh crows
take
it,” muttered Maestro Magnus in a positively offended tone. He had to gather up his long tunic to show pale, scrawny legs as he stepped up onto a wooden camp stool. “Of all the ridiculous nonsense.”
“Where?” Kitai snapped, taking several rapid steps from the others, looking left and right at the ground beneath her.
Tavi focused his thoughts upon the earth beneath him. Subtle though such travel might be, his flight to the command tent had been far swifter, and he felt the foremost earthcrafting coming toward him, several yards away. Instead of answering, he stopped, took a quick pair of steps, and with the power of the earth itself behind his arms and shoulders, thrust the burning blade straight down into the soil beneath him. The blade struck home, though he could tell only from the sudden quivering jerks that ran through the steel to his hand, like the wriggling motion of a fish caught upon a hook that ran through the line and pole to the hand of an angler. He withdrew, the motion effortless with the burning sword, and struck again only inches from the first blow.
The earth beneath him suddenly collapsed downward in a circle perhaps ten feet across. One moment, he was standing upon solid ground, and the next it was falling from beneath him. One hand, formed into a stiffening claw, thrust up from the loose soil. Tavi tried not to take note of the fact that the hand was a woman’s and not young, forcing the fact of what he had just done to the back of his mind.
“Aleran!” cried Kitai’s voice. Her anxious face appeared at the top of the sudden pit Tavi found himself in.
“I’m all ri—” Tavi began.
The enemy earthcrafter following in the wake of the first suddenly stumbled out of the earth five feet from Tavi, abruptly finding himself standing in the open air at the bottom of the pit. Tavi stared at him for a motionless instant of recognition. He hadn’t seen the massively muscled, lank-haired man who had appeared, a thug named Renzo, since commencement activities at the Academy. The enormous young man was perhaps a year older than Tavi and weighed two of him. An extremely accomplished earthcrafter, Renzo had been stupid enough to be a friend of Kalarus Brencis Minoris, which doubtless explained the steel slaver’s collar about his mountainous neck. Tavi had beaten Renzo into screaming surrender before he’d had use of any furycrafting at all, and the act still shamed him in his memory.
The instant of hesitation gave Renzo a chance to react. He flicked a hand, and the earth surged up around Tavi, as if to bury him alive.
Tavi recovered his balance and immediately drew strength from the earth—specifically, from the earth trying to smother him, weakening the furies responding to Renzo’s command. He waded forward, through the failing power of those furies, and, with an instant of razor-sharp focus, cut cleanly through Renzo’s hastily raised blade, the steel collar about the huge man’s neck—and the neck beneath it. Renzo’s body dropped like a slaughtered hog’s, still quivering.
Time slowed.
There was little blood. The blazing sword in Tavi’s hand had cauterized the cuts even as he made them. The courtyard bully’s broad hands twitched and spasmed. His head had fallen facedown, and Tavi could see his mouth moving for a few seconds, as if to spit out the dirt upon his tongue. That didn’t last long. A heartbeat, two, then there was stillness.
Renzo had been an appallingly petty evil from the last days of Tavi’s childhood.
Tavi felt sick at how easy it had been to murder him.
His thoughts and focus were, for a few seconds, entirely shattered, and so, when the vord Queen exploded from the earth behind Renzo’s corpse, she nearly killed him in the first instant of their meeting.
Tavi seized upon a windcrafting, weak though it was down in the sinkhole, to speed his perceptions. Even with the crafting, there was time for no more than a bizarre, flash impression of a beautiful face, glittering black eyes, a tattered old dress—and then there was a flicker of motion as a shadowy blade darted toward his heart.
Tavi had enough time to think,
I didn’t feel it coming, it’s not made of metal.
Fortunately, his reflexes hadn’t had any metalcrafting to rely upon when he first trained with a weapon, and they hadn’t needed the advance warning. His own burning blade caught the dark weapon in the vord Queen’s hand, defeated the Queen’s disengage, then suddenly slipped and wobbled as the resistance of the other weapon vanished. The dark blade curled in her hand like a striking serpent and drove into his belly. It pierced his armor as though it were made of soft cloth instead of battle steel, and he felt himself thrown back hard against the layers of a stone shelf lining the pit wall behind him.
The vord Queen came at him, her eyes shining with a terrible intensity, but he responded with the instant, deadly reflexes of a man who had been wise enough to embrace the cold, insensible strength of his armor and weaponry, who felt no pain though his body was trapped against the rough wall, impaled upon a deadly blade. The vord Queen was swift enough to avoid having her head taken from her shoulders, but only just. Tavi’s burning sword left a wound in her scalp and seared away a mass of thin white hairs. She blurred away from him, letting out a metallic shriek, and simply bounded up out of the pit.
An explosion of light and furious sound bright enough to hurt his eyes—odd, that metalcrafting didn’t seem to offer any protection from
that
source of pain—made the shape of the disappearing Queen a silhouette and left her profile burned onto his eyes in bright color as the rest of the world went dark.
Every instinct in him screamed to get out of the hole, get into action, move, move,
move
. But he didn’t. When the Queen had leapt from the pit, she hadn’t been holding a sword. Whether he could feel the pain or not, given the rock at his back it was almost certain that there was a preternaturally sharp weapon still thrust into his belly, sunk into the stone behind him like a nail into wood. If he simply tore his way free, he could all but cut himself in half.