Captain's Fury (69 page)

That was why Max went by Antillar. His father, High Lord Antillus, had never legally recognized him. Never accepted him. It was fair to say that Max had been driven to a few extreme behaviors, largely in reaction to that fundamental insecurity, the old wound in his soul.

Tavi himself knew what it was like to grow up without a father. The absence had left an enormous hole in him, one that never seemed to completely fill again, and when something touched it, it was agony.

"You can't win this fight," Tavi said quietly. "If you beat me, these walls will be overrun with Canim. Everyone will die."

Navaris stared. The miasma of her diseased spirit and mind thickened on the word
father
.

Tavi had been right.

He knew how much the slightest touch upon that old heartache could send him into a rage if he was not careful to contain it. Navaris bore a similar wound, but unlike Tavi, the cyclone of fury and hate that roared through her was barely under control on the best of days. True, her will was harder than diamonds— but Tavi was about to hit it at precisely the right angle.

The fight was over. She just didn't realize it yet.

"You aren't going to prove anything to your father, you know," Tavi said. "Even if you defeat Araris and me, you'll die here. The story of what happened will die here."

The tip of Navaris's long blade trembled.

"He didn't want you, Navaris. Do you think a mound of corpses will make him seek reconciliation? Do you think he'd run to wrap his loving arms around a bloodthirsty murderess?"

Navaris's eyes widened until Tavi could see the whites all the way around them, and she gnashed her teeth as an even greater wave of agony ran through her. The cutter's voice shook. "Stop it."

"He won't," Tavi said, pitiless and precise. "He never will. You've become a monster, and you'd bring nothing but shame to his House, just as you bring nothing but suffering to the world."

The cutter began to shake her head slowly, and her wide, mad eyes suddenly glistened.

The woman was in pain—old, old pain, the pain of a wounded child who couldn't understand why it was happening or how to recover from it. Tavi knew it. He'd known it all his life, and it suddenly became difficult to tell where Navaris's torment stopped and his own began.

The woman's pain fed upon itself, and Tavi felt his stomach turn with involuntary sympathy—but he forced himself to continue. "It doesn't matter how many you kill or whom you kill. You'll never be welcome."

She started taking heavy, labored breaths, though neither one of them had moved.

"Your entire life has been a lie.
You
are a lie, Navaris." He lowered his voice, and said, gently, "You're nothing to him. You are
nothing
, Navaris. Nothing but a mad, miserable animal who's got to be put down."

She let out a guttural moan through her open mouth, and the childlike grief suddenly fused with the berserk intensity of her hostility and rage, her self-control shattering into chips and shards.

Something strange happened.

Tavi, his crafting senses, both water and metal, focused simultaneously and more intently than ever before,
felt
the next stroke coming before the center of Navaris's body ever moved, as if her physical intentions had somehow been transmitted to him through her emotions.

Tavi could not say what had changed, precisely, but he knew, he absolutely
knew
that she was about to fling the dagger at his face and follow up with her sword in the instant of distraction it afforded her.

Tavi called upon the wind, and watched as Navaris's arm slowly rose and flicked forward. The dagger flickered end over end—but Tavi had already raised his
gladius
and cut the dagger from the air. Navaris's throat erupted in a howl of feral rage as she came forward, a lightning slash aimed for his throat.

It was the opening Tavi had been waiting for.

He'd practiced it so many times that he had no need to think about it, his body moving with automatic precision. As Navaris surged forward, Tavi let his weight drop, falling under her blade, his body angled on a diagonal to Navaris's line of attack. As his left hand hit the ground, he extended his right arm back, along his side, then snapped it forward in a single, deadly thrust.

His sword sank through her armor and body with effortless ease.

Navaris gasped, her tearing eyes widening. Tavi felt the motion of the exhalation travel up the blade to his hand.

She turned her eyes to him and swept her sword at him, but Tavi released the hilt of his long blade, leaving it buried in her body, and rolled away from the attack. He came to his feet at once, shifted the
gladius
to his right hand, and stood ready.

Phrygiar Navaris took one step toward him. Then another. She bared her teeth in a grimace of madness and hate, lifted her sword—

—and sank down like an emptied flagon. She lay on her side for a moment, eyes staring, and her arms and legs made fitful, twitching motions, as though she believed that she was still fighting.

Then she went still. Tavi felt the rage and pain and grief and terror continue to pour from her. In a few seconds, it died down to a trickle.

Then it stopped.

Tavi stared down at the cutter's corpse. Then he knelt and gently closed her empty, staring eyes. He couldn't remember ever feeling so weary—but his work wasn't done.

Tavi heaved himself to his feet and closed his eyes. He lifted his head to the stars and let the breeze blow the perspiration from his skin.

The wind blew, and silence ruled the night.

Chapter 56

Marcus did not find it difficult to reach his shooting position unseen.

There were grass and brush and trees enough to provide him with a frail woodcrafted veil, and shadows enough to cover what his crafting did not. Over the past two weeks, he'd managed to slip out of camp at night to practice with the Canim balest, and found the weapon accurate enough for his purposes.

Once he'd reached his position, he took a pair of clay jars from a belt pouch. He opened each one, careful to keep his nose and mouth well away from them, and took a single heavy steel bolt from the pouch. He dipped the tip of the bolt into each jar, then waved a hand, calling upon his earth fury, and the two jars and their lids sank gently down into the ground.

He set the bolt aside. Then he summoned up strength enough to haul the balest into its prepared position. It was an enormous strain, even with his fury-born strength, and he had to be cautious, move slowly, so that he wouldn't slip or lose his grip on the weapon, betraying his position as the bow staves snapped straight again.

Chapter 57

Isana told herself that she would not go to the duel, when there were still so many wounded to tend to. She threw herself into the work, sending her senses with Rill through each wounded body. A man named Foss, the officer in charge of the healer's corps, watched her with the first man he brought over, nodded his head, and promptly started barking orders.

Isana shortly found herself tending to men with the most dire and delicate of injuries. One poor soul's eyes had been viciously slashed by some weapon. Another young man had suffered what looked like a spear thrust through the genitals. A third had been treated for a cracked sternum, but hadn't regained consciousness—his first healer hadn't felt the bruising on his heart that made it labor unsteadily and insufficiently. Isana poured herself into her efforts and, at a steady pace, restored each man to health and exhausted sleep.

She didn't know how many men she worked on, but between efforts she dimly realized that she should have pushed herself to exhaustion after only a handful. She felt tired, of course, but the work seemed easier, swifter, as if her "touch" had become a dozen times more sensitive, allowing her to pinpoint precisely where the damage was, then to direct her fury's healing power with more precision and grace. Her talents had not grown, so much as she was taxing herself less to do the same amount of work.

"Last one," grunted an orderly, lowering another battered young body into the healing tub Isana was using. He was a young man, large and well muscled, and his legs, belly, and chest were covered in savage burns.

Isana winced, and was grateful that the poor
legionare
was unconscious. Burns like that would have left any conscious mind blind with agony, and if her ability to help the wounded had grown, their suffering had been that much more difficult to bear.

The
legionare
settled into the tub, and Isana supported his head, making sure he didn't slip under the water, and was startled to realize that she recognized the man.

It was Tavi's friend, Max.

She closed her eyes and went to work with steady, determined patience. Burns were some of the worst wounds to heal—she would have said
the
worst, until she had spent weeks in nearly constant crafting, dealing with an infection brought on by rancid garic oil introduced into a wound.

Though burns were not that festering nightmare, they were bad enough, and the drain upon the wounded Max would be tremendous, even dangerous. She turned her attention to the maimed flesh and, with Rill's help, got things sorted out. She reduced the damage as much as she could, to the point where she believed it would leave no hideous scarring, but felt the young man's strength waning and dared not press for more.

She leaned back from her efforts and nodded wearily to the orderly. She sat back as Max was taken to a bed, and dried her hands on a towel.

"My lady," said a voice behind her. "If you ever want a job, I can offer you the rank of senior subtribune and start you at the maximum pay grade."

Isana turned to find Foss watching them carry Max off and shaking his head. "Crows," the Legion healer said. "In a rational world, you'd get
my
job."

She smiled wearily at him. "Thank you, Tribune. I'm sure you could have done as much."

Foss snorted. "You gave a man back his
eyes
, my lady. That's fine work, and I've known maybe two or three healers in my
life
who could do that, and one of
them
was a High Lady. You did more work than any three of my healers, and in half the time. You have a remarkable gift." He bowed his head to her. "Thank you."

Isana frowned and shivered. As she worked, she'd all but forgotten the duel. Perhaps she'd been hoping that it would be over by the time she'd emerged from all the crafting.

If so, she thought, then she had been wrong to think it. Her son was about to fight for his life—for all of their lives—and she should be there.

The duel was the most elated, ecstatic nightmare she had ever experienced.

The crowd's emotion was a violent sea, a seething cauldron. If she hadn't worked herself to near exhaustion, she would have run screaming for the nearest dark hole—which would have looked rather unladylike, all things considered. As it stood, a bodyguard of eight
legionares
waited outside the healer's tent, evidently assigned as her escort. Each of the men was rather young, though they all had the hardened look of men accustomed to war, and the breast of their armor was decorated not with the red-and-blue eagle of the Crown, but with a similarly depicted black crow.

The crowd parted for her as she approached, and she felt them all around her, people buzzing with excitement and hope, with despair and fear—and with interest.

For her, specifically.

Faces turned toward her, and voices were raised in excitement.
Legionares
and trapped camp followers alike pressed closer, trying to see her, and to her intense embarrassment, the crowd actually sent up a cheer.

The solid forms of her guards gently kept the onlookers from getting too close, but a slender figure slid between the two in front, and Ehren smiled at her. "My lady," he said, bowing his head as he went to her side.

"My goodness," Isana said, looking around her uncertainly. "Ehren…"

"They know," he said. "Everyone in the camp knows, my lady, since all the truthfinders took testimony. No story that juicy was going to stay secret for long."

"I see," she said.

"Tavi—" Ehren caught himself and shook his head. "Octavian asked me to stand with you."

"I'd be glad of your company," Isana said quietly. She kept walking, as more people gathered around, staring at her in the dim light of both torches and small, household furylamps. "This is a very strange experience."