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“You’re counting the cost now?” Oreth countered. “This isn’t some business investment, where you want to see the balance sheets before you get involved.”
Sartes could hear the annoyance there. When he’d first come to the rebels, he’d expected them to be some big, unified thing, thinking of nothing but the need to defeat the Empire. He’d found out that in a lot of ways they were just people, all with their own hopes and dreams, wishes and wants. It only made it more impressive that Anka had found ways to hold them together after Rexus died.
“It’s the biggest investment there is,” Yeralt said. “We put in all we have. We risk our lives in the hope that things will get better. I’m in as much danger as the rest of you if we fail.”
“We won’t fail,” Edrin said. “We beat them once. We’ll beat them again. We know where they’re going to attack and when. We can be waiting for them every time.”
“We can do more than that,” Hannah said. “We’ve shown people that we can beat them, so why not go out and take things back from them?”
“What did you have in mind?” Anka asked. Sartes could see that she was considering it.
“We take villages back one by one,” Hannah said. “We get rid of the Empire’s soldiers in them before Lucious can get close. We show the people there what’s possible, and he’ll get a nasty surprise when they rise up against him.”
“And when Lucious and his men kill them for rising up?” Oreth demanded. “What then?”
“Then it just shows how evil he is,” Hannah insisted.
“Or people see that we can’t protect them.”
Sartes looked around, surprised they were taking the idea seriously.
“We could leave people in the villages so that they don’t fall,” Yeralt suggested. “We have the conscripts with us now.”
“They won’t stand against the army for long if it comes,” Oreth shot back. “They’d die along with the villagers.”
Sartes knew he was right. The conscripts hadn’t had the training that the toughest soldiers in the army had. Worse, they’d suffered so much at the hands of the army that most of them would probably be terrified.
He saw Anka gesture for silence. This time, it took a little longer in coming.
“Oreth has a point,” she said.
“Of course you’d agree with him,” Hannah shot back.
“I’m agreeing because he’s right,” Anka said. “We can’t just go into villages, declare them free, and hope for the best. Even with the conscripts, we don’t have enough fighters. If we join together in one place, we give the Empire an opportunity to crush us. If we go after every village, they’ll pick us apart piecemeal.”
“If enough villages can be persuaded to rise up, and I persuade my father to hire mercenaries…” Yeralt suggested. Sartes noted he didn’t finish the thought. The merchant’s son didn’t have an answer, not really.
“Then what?” Anka asked. “We’ll have the numbers? If it were that simple, we would have overthrown the Empire years ago.”
“We have better weapons now thanks to Berin,” Edrin pointed out. “We know their plans thanks to Sartes. We have the advantage! Tell her, Berin. Tell her about the blades you’ve made.”
Sartes looked around to his father, who shrugged.
“It’s true I’ve made good swords, and the others here have made plenty of passable ones. It’s true that some of you will have armor now, rather than being cut down. But I’ll tell you this: it’s about more than the sword. It’s about the hand that wields it. An army is like a blade. You can make it as big as you want, but without a core of good steel, it will break the first time you test it.”
Maybe if the others had spent more time making weapons, they would have understood how seriously his father meant his words. As it was, Sartes could see they weren’t convinced.
“What else can we do?” Edrin asked. “We’re not just going to throw away our advantage by sitting back and waiting. I say that we start making a list of villages to free. Unless you have a better idea, Anka?”
“I do,” Sartes said.
His voice was quieter than he intended. He stepped forward, his heart pounding, surprised that he had spoken. He was all too aware that he was far younger than anyone else there. He’d played his part in the battle, he’d even killed a man, but there was still a part of him that felt as though he shouldn’t be speaking there.
“So it’s settled,” Hannah started to say. “We – ”
“I said I have a better idea,” Sartes said, and this time, his voice carried.
The others looked over at him.
“Let my son speak,” his father said. “You’ve said yourselves that he helped to hand one victory to you. Maybe he can keep you from dying now.”
“What’s your idea, Sartes?” Anka asked.
They were all looking at him. Sartes forced himself to raise his voice, thinking about how Ceres would have spoken, but also about the confidence Anka had shown before.
“We can’t go to the villages,” Sartes said. “It’s what they want us to do. And we can’t just rely on the maps I brought, because even if they haven’t realized that we know their movements, they will soon. They’re trying to goad us out into the open.”
“We know all this,” Yeralt said. “I thought you said you had a plan.”
Sartes didn’t back down.
“What if there were a way to hit the Empire where they don’t expect it and gain tough fighters into the bargain? What if we could make people rise up with a symbolic victory that would be bigger than protecting a village?”
“What did you have in mind?” Anka asked.
“We free the combatlords in the Stade,” Sartes said.
A long, stunned silence followed, as the others stared at him. He could see the doubt in their faces, and Sartes knew he had to keep going.
“Think about it,” he said. “Almost all combatlords are slaves. The nobles throw them in to die like toys. Most of them would be grateful for the chance to get away, and they can fight better than any soldiers.”
“It’s insane,” Hannah said. “Attacking the heart of the city like that. There would be guards everywhere.”
“I like it,” Anka said.
The others looked at her, and Sartes felt a rush of gratitude for her support.
“They wouldn’t expect it,” she added.
Another silence fell over the room.
“We wouldn’t need mercenaries,” Yeralt finally chimed in, rubbing his chin.
“People would rise up,” Edrin added.
“We’d have to do it when the Killings were on,” Oreth pointed out. “That way, all the combatlords would be in one place, and there would be people there to see it happen.”
“There won’t be more Killings before the Blood Moon festival,” his father said. “That’s six weeks. In six weeks, I can make a lot of weapons.”
This time, Hannah fell silent, perhaps sensing the tide turn.
“So we’re agreed?” Anka asked. “We’ll free the combatlords during the Blood Moon festival?”
One by one, Sartes saw the others nod. Even Hannah did, eventually. He felt his father’s hand on his shoulder. He saw the approval in his eyes, and it meant the world to him.
He only prayed that his plan would not get them all killed.
CHAPTER THREE
Ceres dreamed, and in her dreams, she saw armies clashing. She saw herself fighting at their head, dressed in armor that shone in the sun. She saw herself leading a vast nation, fighting a war that would determine the very fate of mankind.
Yet in it all, she also saw herself squinting, searching for her mother. She reached for a sword, and looked down to see it was not yet there.
Ceres woke with a start. It was night, and the sea before her, lit by the moonlight, was endless. As she bobbed in her small ship, she saw no sign of land. Only the stars convinced her that she was still keeping her small craft on the right course.
Familiar constellations shone overhead. There was the Dragon’s Tail, low in the sky beneath the moon. There was the Ancient’s Eye, formed around one of the brightest stars in the stretch of blackness. The ship that the forest folk had half built, half grown seemed never to deviate from the route Ceres had picked out, even when she had to rest or eat.
Off the starboard side of the boat, Ceres saw lights in the water. Luminous jellyfish floated past like underwater clouds. Ceres saw the faster figure of some dart-like fish slipping through the shoal, snapping up jellyfish with every pass and hurrying through before the tendrils of the others could touch it. Ceres watched until they disappeared down into the depths.
She ate a piece of the sweet, succulent fruit the islanders had stocked her boat with. When she’d set off it had seemed as though there was enough to last for weeks. Now, it didn’t seem like quite so much. She found herself thinking of the leader of the forest folk, so handsome in a strange, asymmetrical way, with his curse lending him patches where his skin was mossy green or roughened like bark. Would he be back on the island, playing his strange music and thinking of her?
Around Ceres, mist started to rise up from the water, thickening and reflecting fragments of the moonlight even as it blocked out her view of the night sky above. It swirled and shifted around the boat, tendrils of fog reaching out like fingers. Thoughts of Eoin seemed to lead inexorably to thoughts of Thanos. Thanos, who’d been killed on the shores of Haylon before Ceres could tell him that she hadn’t meant any of the harsh things she’d said when he left. There in the boat alone, Ceres couldn’t get away from just how much she missed him. The love she’d felt for him felt like a thread pulling her back toward Delos, even though Thanos was no longer there.
Thinking of Thanos hurt. The memory felt like an open wound that might never close. There were so many things she needed to do, but none of them would bring him back. There were so many things she would have said if he were there, but he wasn’t. There was only the emptiness of the mist.
The mist continued to coil around the boat, and now Ceres could see shards of rock sticking up out of the water. Some were razor-edged black basalt, but others were in rainbow colors, seeming like giant precious stones set in the roiling blue of the ocean. Some had markings on them that swirled and spiraled, and Ceres wasn’t sure whether they were natural, or if some long distant hand had carved them.
Did her mother lie somewhere beyond them?
The thought brought a thrill of excitement in Ceres, rising up through her like the mist that swirled around the boat. She was going to see her mother. Her real mother, not the one who had always hated her, and who had sold her to slavers at the first opportunity. Ceres didn’t know what this woman would be like, but just the opportunity to find out filled her with excitement as she guided the small boat along past the rocks.
Strong currents pulled at her boat, threatening to pull the rudder from her hand. If she hadn’t had the strength that came from the power within her, Ceres doubted that she would have been able to hold on. She pulled the rudder to the side, and her small boat responded with an almost living grace, slipping past one of the rocks almost close enough to touch it.
She sailed on through the rocks, and with every one she passed, she found herself thinking about how much closer she was getting to her mother. What kind of woman would she be? In her visions, she’d been indistinct, but Ceres could imagine, and hope. Maybe she would be kind, and gentle, and loving; all the things she’d never had from her supposed mother back in Delos.
What would her mother think of her? That thought caught at Ceres as she guided the boat onward through the mist. She didn’t know what was ahead. Maybe her mother would look at her and see someone who hadn’t been able to succeed in the Stade, who had been nothing more than a slave in the Empire, who had lost the person she loved most. What if her mother rejected her? What if she were harsh, or cruel, or unforgiving?
Or maybe, just maybe, she would be proud.
Ceres came out of the mist so suddenly that it might have been a curtain lifting, and now the sea was flat, free of the tooth-like rocks that had jutted from it before. Instantly, she could see that there was something different. The light of the moon seemed brighter somehow, and around it, nebulae spun in stains of color on the night. Even the stars seemed changed, so that now, Ceres couldn’t pick out the familiar constellations there had been before. A comet streaked its way across the horizon, fiery red mixed with yellows and other colors that had no equivalent in the world below.
Stranger than that, Ceres felt the power within her pulse, as though responding to this place. It seemed to stretch within her, opening out and allowing her to experience this new place in a hundred ways she’d never thought of before.
Ceres saw a shape rise from the water, a long, serpentine neck rising up before plunging back beneath the waves with a splash of spray. The creature rose again briefly, and Ceres had the impression of something huge swimming past in the water before it was gone. What looked like birds flitted through the moonlight, and it was only as they got closer that Ceres saw that they were silvery moths, larger than her head.
Her eyes suddenly growing heavy with sleep, Ceres lashed the tiller in place, lay down, and let sleep overcome her.
***Ceres woke to the shriek of birds. She blinked in the sunlight as she sat up, and saw that they weren’t birds after all. Two creatures with the bodies of great cats wheeled overhead on eagle-like wings, raptor beaks wide as they called. They showed no signs of coming closer though, merely circling the boat before flying off into the distance.
Ceres watched them, and because she was watching them, she saw the tiny speck of an island they were heading for on the horizon. As quickly as she could, Ceres raised the small sail again, trying to catch the wind that rushed past her to push herself toward the island.
The speck grew larger, and what looked like more rocks rose out of the ocean as Ceres got closer, but these weren’t the same as the ones that had been there in the mist. These were square-edged, built things, crafted in rainbow marble. Some of them looked like the spires of great buildings, long sunk beneath the waves.
Half an arch stuck out, so huge that Ceres couldn’t imagine what might have passed beneath it. She looked down over the side of the boat, and the water was so clear that she could make out the sea bed below. It wasn’t far to the bottom, and Ceres could see the wreckage of long past buildings down there. It was close enough that Ceres could have swum down to them just by holding her breath. She didn’t, though, both because of the things she’d already seen in the water and because of what lay ahead.
This was it. The island where she would get the answers she needed. Where she would learn about her power.
Where she would, finally, meet her mother.
CHAPTER FOUR
Lucious swung his blade overhand, exulting in the way it glinted in the dawn light, in the instant before he cut down the old man who had dared to get in his way. Around him, more commoners fell at the hands of his men: the ones who dared to resist, and any stupid enough to simply be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He smiled as the screams echoed around him. He liked it when the peasants tried to fight, because it just gave his men an excuse to show them how weak they really were compared to their betters. How many had he killed now in raids like this? He hadn’t bothered to keep count. Why should he save the least speck of attention for their kind?
Lucious looked around as peasants started to run, and gestured to a few of his men. They set off after them. Running was almost better than fighting, because there was a challenge to hunting them like the prey they were.
“Your horse, your highness?” one of the men asked, leading Lucious’s stallion.
Lucious shook his head. “My bow, I think.”
The man nodded and passed Lucious an elegant recurve bow of white ash, mixed with horn and set with silver. He nocked an arrow, drew back the string, and let it fly. Away in the distance, one of the running peasants went down.
There were no more to fight, but that didn’t mean they were done here. Not by a long way. Hiding peasants, he’d found, could be as amusing as running or fighting ones in their way. There were so many different ways to torture the ones who looked as though they had gold, and so many ways to execute the ones who might have rebel sympathies. The burning wheel, the gibbet, the noose… what would it be today?
Lucious gestured to a couple of his men to start kicking open doors. Occasionally, he liked to burn out those who hid, but houses were more valuable than peasants. A woman came running out, and Lucious caught her, throwing her casually in the direction of one of the slavers who had taken to following him around like gulls after a fishing vessel.
He stalked into the village’s temple. The priest was already on the ground, holding a broken nose, while Lucious’s men gathered gold and silver ornaments into a sack. A woman in the robes of a priestess stood to confront him. Lucious noted a flicker of blonde hair straying from under her cowl, a certain fine-featured resemblance that made him pause.
“You can’t do this,” the woman insisted. “We are a temple!”
Lucious grabbed her, pulling away the hood of her robes to look at her. She wasn’t the double of Stephania – no lower-born woman could manage that – but she was close enough to be worth keeping for a while. At least until he got bored.
“I have been sent by your king,” Lucious said. “Do not try to tell me what I cannot do!”
Too many people had tried that in his life. They’d tried to put limits on him, when he was the one person in the Empire on whom there should be no limits. His parents tried, but he would be king one day. He would be king, whatever he’d found in the library when old Cosmas thought he was too stupid to understand it. Thanos would learn his place.
Lucious’s hand tightened in the hair of the priestess. Stephania would learn her place as well. How dare she marry Thanos like that, as if he were the prince to be desired? No, Lucious would find a way to make that right. He would split Thanos and Stephania as easily as he split open the heads of those who came at him. He would claim Stephania in marriage, both because she was Thanos’s and because she would make the perfect ornament for someone of his rank. He would enjoy that, and until then, the priestess he’d grabbed would make a suitable substitute.
He tossed her to one of his men to watch, and set out to see what other amusements he could find in the village. As he got outside, he saw two of his men tying one of the villagers who’d run to a tree, arms spread wide.
“Why have you let this one live?” Lucious demanded.
One of them smiled. “Tor here was telling me about something the northerners do. They call it the Blood Eagle.”
Lucious liked the sound of that. He was about to ask what it involved when he heard the shout of one of the lookouts, there to watch for rebels. Lucious looked around, but instead of an approaching horde of common scum, he saw a single figure riding on a mount easily the size of his own. Lucious recognized the armor instantly.
“Thanos,” he said. He snapped his fingers. “Well, it looks as though today is about to get more interesting than I thought. Bring me my bow again.”
***Thanos spurred his horse forward as he saw Lucious and what his half-brother was doing. Any lingering doubts he’d had about leaving Stephania behind burned away in the heat of his anger as he saw the dead peasants, the slavers, the man tied to the tree.
He saw Lucious step out and raise a bow. For a moment, Thanos couldn’t believe that he would do it, but why not? Lucious had tried to kill him before.
He saw the arrow fly out from the bow and raised his shield just in time. The head struck the metal facing of his shield before clattering off. A second arrow followed, and this time it punched through, stopping only inches from Thanos’s face.
Thanos forced his horse to a charge as a third arrow whizzed past him. He saw Lucious and his men diving out of the way as he careened through the spot where they’d been standing. He wheeled and drew his sword, just as Lucious regained his feet.
“Thanos, so fast. Anyone would think you were eager to see me.”
Thanos leveled his sword at Lucious’s heart. “This stops now, Lucious. I won’t let you kill any more of our people.”
“Our people?” Lucious countered. “They are my people, Thanos. Mine to do what I wish with. Allow me to demonstrate.”
Thanos saw him draw his sword and start toward the man tied to the tree. Thanos realized what his half-brother was going to do and set his horse in motion once more.
“Stop him,” Lucious commanded.
His men leapt to obey. One stepped toward Thanos, jabbing a spear up toward his face. Thanos deflected it with his shield, hacking the head from the weapon with his blade and then kicking out to send the man sprawling. He stabbed down as another ran at him, thrusting down through the shoulder of the man’s mail and drawing his blade out again.
He forced himself forward, through the press of opponents. Lucious was still advancing on the victim he’d chosen. Thanos swung his sword down at one of Lucious’s thugs and hurried forward as Lucious drew his own blade back. Thanos barely managed to interject his shield as the blow came in a ring of metal on metal.
Lucious grabbed his shield.
“You’re predictable, Thanos,” he said. “Compassion was always your weakness.”
He pulled, hard enough that Thanos found himself yanked from the saddle. He rolled in time to avoid a sword blow, and pulled his arm free from the straps of his shield. He took a two-handed grip on his sword as Lucious’s men closed in again. He saw his horse run clear, but that meant that now he didn’t have the advantage of height.
“Kill him,” Lucious said. “We’ll blame it on the rebels.”
“You’re good at trying that, aren’t you?” Thanos shot back. “It’s a pity you aren’t any good at finishing the job.”
One of Lucious’s men rushed him then, swinging a spiked mace. Thanos stepped inside the arc of the blow, cutting diagonally, then spinning away with his sword extended to keep the others at bay.
They came in quickly then, as if knowing that none of them could hope to defeat Thanos one on one. Thanos gave ground, putting his back against the wall of the nearest house so that his opponents couldn’t surround him. There were three men near him now, one with an axe, one with a short sword, and one with a curved blade like a sickle.
Thanos kept his sword close, watching them, not wanting to give any of the mercenaries a chance to tangle the blade long enough for the others to slip in.
The one on Thanos’s right tried a thrust with his short sword. Thanos partly parried it, feeling it clatter off his armor. Some instinct made him spin and drop, just in time for the left-hand man’s axe to pass overhead. Thanos slashed at ankle height to bring the thug down, then reversed his blade and thrust backward, hearing a cry as the first man ran in.
The one with the curved blade attacked more cautiously.
“Attack him! Kill him!” Lucious demanded, obviously impatient. “Oh, I’ll do it myself!”
Thanos parried as the prince joined the fight. He doubted that Lucious would have done it if there hadn’t been another man there to help him, and maybe there would be more on the way. Really, all Lucious had to do was delay things, and Thanos might find himself overwhelmed by sheer numbers.
So Thanos didn’t wait. Instead, he attacked. He threw blow after blow, alternating between Lucious and the thug Lucious had brought with him, building the rhythm of it. Then, suddenly, he paused. The sickle wielder parried empty air. Thanos cut into the gap, and the man’s head went flying.
He was on Lucious in an instant, binding blade to blade. Lucious kicked out at him, but Thanos swayed aside from the blow, reaching over the guard of Lucious’s sword to get one hand onto the pommel. Thanos yanked upward and wrenched the blade from Lucious’s hands, then struck sideways. His blade clanged from Lucious’s breastplate. Lucious drew a dagger and Thanos changed his grip on his blade, swinging low with the hilt end so that the cross-guard hooked around Lucious’s knee.
He pulled and Lucious went down. Thanos kicked the dagger from his hand with crunching force.