No. Tavi found himself shaking his head. The list came pouring back through his thoughts. This was too much. It was all far, far too much. He had barely slept in the past two days. He was already faced with an enormous and most likely insoluble dilemma in his assignment from the First-from his grandfather. Thousands of lives were dependent upon him. If he truly was the Princeps's son and heir, it meant that millions of lives were or would become his responsibility. Not only that, but he had just gained a veritable pantheon of foes who were more like demigods than human beings.
And his aunt-his mother-had been lying to him for his entire life.
The voice of reason, of understanding, lost the battle to govern Tavi's decisions.
"She had twenty years to talk to me if she needed it so badly," Tavi said, his voice rough. "She had a lifetime. And I have a Legion to move."
"Tavi-" Araris began, his voice a gentle protest.
"Captain Scipio," Tavi snarled. "I have a job to do. Either come with me or get out of the way. Or was the loyalty you pledged me another lie?"
Araris stiffened at that. His eyes flashed with sudden anger. Without a word, he unlocked the door, stepped back, and opened it for Tavi, coming to rigid attention.
Tavi started to stride angrily out the door, but hesitated. He didn't- couldn't-look at Araris, but he could see the man regarding him on the periphery of his vision. Tavi went quiet, listening to the silence. There were no more footsteps above, no sound of voices or doors opening and closing. The command center felt eerily empty.
"It was right there in front of me," Tavi said. "All the pieces. Even inside my name."
Araris said nothing.
"I can't," Tavi said quietly. "Not... not now. There's too much." The geyser of confusion and hurt threatened to roar out of control again, and Tavi struggled to slow his breathing, to control it. He glanced aside at Araris.
The singulare's face remained impassive as a stone.
"I'll talk to her when I get back."
Araris said nothing.
"I have duties that must come first," he said quietly. "So do you."
Araris was silent for an endless moment. Then, quite deliberately, he lifted his fist to his heart, knuckles thumping gently against his armor. When he spoke, his voice was barely more than a whisper, and his words sent a shiver running down Tavi's spine.
"Hail," he said quietly. "Hail, Gaius Octavian, Princeps of Alera."
Chapter 11
"Cohort!" Marcus bellowed in a voice that every single legionare in the Prime Cohort could hear. "Halt!"
The men's steady steps thudded twice more, then fell silent, as the ranks of the First Aleran reached the crest of the low ridge overlooking the Canim's first defensive position. The Prime occupied the center, of course, as it always did. The Fourth, holding his cohort's right flank, took a moment to dress its ranks. The Seventh, whose Tribune spent more time in drill, had no need to straighten out its lines.
"Three days to get here," muttered one veteran to another, as Marcus passed. "We'd have done it in one. Senatorial Guard. Bunch of tenderfoot pan-sies, can't march without a causeway."
Marcus snapped his baton back against the veteran's shield, and growled, "Quiet in the ranks." He gave the man a glare, and said, "You might hurt the pansies' feelings."
No one actually laughed (and great furies help any man who had), but several muffled snorts puffed out of the men of the Prime, and Marcus could sense them settling into the tense, familiar silence of prebattle. No joke or song or stirring oration could take the fear away from soldiers. Oh, it made for a fine story, no question, the stirring speech upon the edge of battle. But when facing an enemy as determined to survive as you were, talk was cheap, and the men on the ground knew it.
The joke had helped, though, providing a small release of tension, and helped the men settle down into the mind-set of victorious legionares: that they were professionals with a job to do, and that it was time to get to work.
Marcus stalked up and down the front rank, doing his best to look like he had more interest in his men's discipline than he did in the battle raging five hundred yards away. The sound of the fight washed up to their position like distant surf, mercifully indistinct, a distant rumble of drums, a clamor of horns, an ocean of individual cries and shouts. Marcus glanced at the battle as he paced the front rank, his steps steady and unconcerned.
A few moments later, horses thundered up through the gaps between the cohorts, and the captain, his singulare, one of the First Aleran's Knights Aeris, and an escort of Marat cavalry troopers rode along the front rank of the Legion. Marcus turned and saluted as the captain drew his horse up. The captain dismounted and returned the salute. "Good morning, Marcus."
"Sir," the First Spear replied.
The captain swept his eyes over the battle below. Marcus took note of where the young man looked and for how long. Excellent. He was paying attention where he should. He'd always possessed the talent to be a skilled battlefield commander, but even so, he'd come a long way since Marcus had seen him in that first frantic defense of the walls at the Elinarch.
After a silent moment, he nodded once, and said, "What do you think, First Spear?"
"It's their first dance, sir. No telling until it's over."
The battle was being waged along a road-a common trail, not a furycrafted causeway. The gentle, rolling terrain of the Vale narrowed, at that point, where a pair of old stone bluffs faced one another across an open gap. A small town called Othos filled that opening but sported only a modest defensive wall. The town was overlooked by a small steadholt high upon the eastern bluff. The omnipresent crows found on any Aleran battlefield whirled overhead in enormous numbers, like a great, dark wheel circling high above the embattled town.
The Canim had gone to work on the defenses, throwing up earthworks outside the walls of Othos itself, and the wolfish creatures now fought tenaciously to hold the outer wall. The First Senatorial had assaulted up the middle, driving hard down the road for the earthworks. Even as Marcus watched, the first assault began to falter, as legionares failed to bull past the enormous defenders. A moment later, the trumpets began to sound a retreat, and the First Senatorial pulled back, falling into interspersed columns.
More trumpets sounded, and in the gaps between those columns, the Second Senatorial charged, hurling fresh troops into the defenders without giving them a chance to recover from the first assault. The Second almost immediately began to push forward, breaching the earthen wall in two places before the Canim managed to plug the gap, driving the Second back. Just as they did, the First Senatorial, having reorganized its ranks and given its legionares a chance to breathe, charged forward in turn, smashing into the weary defenders like an axe into rotten wood. They crested the defenses in half a dozen places in the first minute, and then it was the deep, braying horns of the Canim that sounded the retreat.