Chapter Forty-Seven
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
By the end, Alaric was too exhausted, too hollowed out from killing to know dream from reality. The night in Noricum bled into day, burning projectiles filling the sky, lightning streaking the horizon, and army fires dotting the plains beyond.
Weeks ago, his people had been many thousands strong. Now there was only a few hundred left, mostly in the citadel. Much of the lower city had been taken. The granaries were still on fire; Alaric had tried hard to preserve those, in three nights of vicious hand-to-hand fighting in the narrow streets. In the end, he could not. He’d done all he could.
Now he stood on the wall of the citadel and contemplated the drop from there.
Do it , Calthrax whispered at his back. Join us.
No. It was not a good end. Not a warrior’s end.
Better than being dragged back to Ravenna and tortured to death before a screaming crowd.
The drop pulled at him. Alaric looked out across the plain, and instead of Roman fires, he saw a vast army of ghosts; those he’d killed and who’d died following him.
All but Julia. She would have none of him even in death.
“Alaric.” It was Hengist behind him, dead on his feet, smudges of dark beneath his eyes. Hengist had been leading raids into the city, dangerous raids to find food. For a moment Alaric’s heart clenched, thinking of the danger he’d subjected Hengist to, and his brother fatherless and alone in the wilderness. He’d betrayed Gaufrid’s deathbed promise in a fit of temper. Self-loathing choked his throat.
“What.”
What he answered was not to be believed.
* * *
Alaric followed the boy at a run to the top of the parapet. Beyond the ruined walls, beyond the Roman army, he saw a wave of men and horses rolling in like a terrible tide.
Riga was waiting for him at the top of the wall, and he turned, the lightning flashing behind him in a sky that was black on black. “It’s the Huns,” he said, testing the tautness of his bow. “Either they’ve come to join the Romans in picking over our corpses, or they’ve come to our rescue.”
Alaric found pessimism more rational than optimism. It was easier to believe that the Huns were coming to feast on the Romans’ leavings. He knew his own would not last more than two days under the assault of both.
So he stood on the walls with Riga and Hengist, watching the Huns thunder through the Roman camp and hit their undefended flank. He had seen this happen to his people, driving them far from the pine-tree island in the middle of the
Danube—the Huns riding in on their ferocious little ponies, arrows flying farther and faster than any had thought possible. Even his stalwart father had fled before them.
Which was why it shocked him to the core when, hours later, it was clear the Huns were harrying the Romans. Even Riga could not say why.
With the Romans outside the walls fighting off the Huns, it was up to him to drive the occupiers out of the city. It was easier said than done.
* * *
Alaric’s warriors were exhausted and starving, their numbers dwindled.
He led raid after raid. The fighting was vicious and their margin for error nonexistent.
Alaric lived only in the present, each moment a tapestry of blood and pain and fear, his steps haunted by the throat-cut ghost of Calthrax. Somehow he and his survivors beat the Romans back street by street, snatching sleep in scraps that felt stolen from death.
And as the bloody days passed, Alaric caught wind of a rumor. At first he did not believe it. In the daytime, he dismissed it. At night, he could not let it go.
Rumor said that a redheaded woman rode among the Huns.
* * *
By the end of three days, the streets were piled high with corpses, the buildings half-burned and the walls little more than rubble. But when the sun finally rose on the fourth day, the Romans had pulled out of the city.
That morning, Alaric walked to the southern gate, Ataulf following behind, both of them exhausted almost to the point of hallucination. Ahead there was laughter and shouting, a raucous ricochet off the walls as survivors came out of the ruined buildings where they had taken refuge. And down at the demolished western gate, a contingent of Hunnic warriors was spilling into the city, their shouts of victory mingling with those of his own.
What they wanted was still not clear. It was time he found out.
A tall warrior woman he did not recognize strode through the crowd, a bow slung over her shoulder. She halted in front of Ataulf. “Are you Alaric of the Goths?” She looked him up and down, her lips curving into a mocking grin. “They said you would be taller.”
Alaric stepped forward. “I am Alaric. Are you the chieftain I owe my thanks to?”
“I am no chieftain yet. I’ve come to take that title out of my brother’s hide.” Her gaze rose over his head and she shouted in a voice that ricocheted off the walls. “Riga!”
Alaric glanced behind to see Riga on the rooftop, his face pale beneath his tan. The woman took off running after him, furious. She looked ready to scale a building.
“Am I to believe,” Ataulf said quietly, “that Riga’s kin just fought through a Roman legion to settle some family dispute?”
Alaric bit back a laugh. It seemed past believing. “I didn’t know he had a sister.”
He was too damn tired to sort it out. And Ataulf seemed dead on his feet. There was more to do—no doubt nests of Roman survivors to rout out before the city would be fully safe.
Alaric and Ataulf had just turned back up the hill when a tumult arose at their backs. Shouting at the gate. He turned to see another woman fighting her way through the crowd—two curved blades at her hips, her black braided hair trailing down from beneath her helmet.
He recognized her at once. Brisca’s little sister.
“Ehre? What the hell are you doing here?”
She rushed forward, her face flushed. “Thank the gods I’ve found you. The Romans are attacking the hill to the west, where the Huns had their camp.”
“And what are we to do about it?” Ataulf frowned. “We barely won this battle in the streets. Anyone who goes out in defense of that hill will be going to their own death.”
“You do not understand.” She turned fierce, reddened eyes to Alaric. “Julia is there. She lives.”
* * *
According to the lore, the Huns moved fast—sweeping in to shower their opponents with a deadly barrage of arrows, then galloping off into the dust, outriding and outshooting their opponents at every turn. There was no room for the slow, for the weak. For noncombatants. That was why they did not take prisoners.
Julia found that was not entirely true.
Kreka’s people traveled in wagons, pulled by sturdy little ponies. There were healers and children and craftspeople, and although everyone could ride a horse and handle a weapon, not everyone was a warrior.
Since she had not been killed immediately, Kreka’s people welcomed Julia and her friends readily enough. Ehre and Horsa fit in as if born among them, both proficient with their own horses and weapons. There was little room for anyone who could not hold their own. Julia was far more uneasy about her own place—but she quickly found her riding skills were better than she thought.
There would be no sharing a horse here. Kreka allowed her a mount of her own—a tough, rawboned little mare who barely came up to Julia’s waist. After months riding before Alaric, Julia found her body moved with her horse like water moving downstream. It was easy enough when the group was galloping across the plains; all she had to do was hang on. The horse would not leave its kin. Her thighs had built up a kind of iron-hard strength, and instead of fear, Julia felt an intense exhilaration, the wind whipping her hair and the entire plain spread out before her. This was freedom —a freedom she had never felt in her constrained life in Ravenna.
This, too, was a kind of home.
* * *
Long before Noricum came into view, the wind brought the smell of it over the plains. Stink of battle and ash; fire and siege smell. They made camp behind a ridgeline out of sight of the Roman army, and the warriors prepared for battle.
That night, Ehre and Horsa took her aside.
“There will be no noncombatants if the Romans come over that rise,” Horsa told her, grimly. “You will need to defend yourself.”
Julia already had a knife snug in her boot. To that, Ehre added a lightweight Hunnic axe. “Its weight is in its head, so it adds strength to your swings,” Ehre said. “Your arm will be as strong as a man wielding a sword.”
And then he and Ehre spent several hours—until the day fled before the dark—making sure she could keep herself alive. They showed her how to stab and where to slice, the weak points in an infantryman’s armor, a handful of underhanded tactics.
Julia ended that day more convinced than ever that if she ever stepped foot on a battlefield, she would be the first to die on the end of a Roman pike.
But that was not the only possibility. The others included being captured and sent back to her brother, or killed by Alaric himself. It seemed the more likely scenario than all her fantasies about him falling to his knees before her.
Maybe it was better to be killed in the first seconds of battle. It would save her the humiliation of whatever would inevitably happen next.
* * *
The next day, Julia watched Horsa and Ehre ride off with the Huns in their hundreds, galloping down the rise toward the great, glinting Roman army spread out on the plain.
There was no time to wait or worry. The camp was a hive of activity. A group of wizened women marshalled those remaining to set up a field hospital, and everyone—even the children—fell into what seemed like well-worn roles. Julia kept herself busy boiling water and preparing bandages, making poultices and mixing medications for pain.
Then the wounded came streaming in, and now she was busy in earnest, helping hold thrashing men and women down as arrows were removed and broken bones set. Julia kept moving, never letting her eyes linger too long on the horrors she saw, never allowing herself to think of her friends. Only a few times did she withdraw to a private place to void the contents of her stomach, and once, after the death of a young woman with a sword cut in her neck, to weep.
* * *
For two days, Julia helped with the wounded and listened desperately for news of the battle. She worked until she was too exhausted to stand and snatched sleep anywhere she could get it, wrapped in her cloak under whatever shelter she could find.
News trickled in with the wounded. Julia heard that the walls were about to fall, that the Romans had slaughtered all the Hunnic warriors, that both sides were near overwhelmed, the balance of the battle turning in the space of hours. At the dawn of the third day, the news swept the camp that the Huns had made it into the city and the Goths had come down from the citadel.
News of Alaric was wild and contradictory. Some said he was dead, his body hanging from the walls of Noricum. Others said he was fully mad, holed up in his citadel, that none had seen him in weeks. Still others said that he was in the city, fighting as though he were the embodiment of battle fury come down to earth. There was no consensus.
Julia took refuge in the frantic activity and chaos of the medical tent. She was helping to stitch up a gash on a man’s forehead when shouts rose up at her back.
Her hope rose wildly. But it was not Alaric. A contingent of Romans had broken away from the retreating legion and was riding toward the rise with all speed.
Within the space of an hour, this place would be a battlefield.
* * *
Not an hour later, Julia lay on her stomach on the ridgeline, just one in a line of defenders, gripping a recurve bow as she stared down the slope at the approaching Roman soldiers. She was floating above herself with fear.
Two fingers on the string , one of the wizened old women who’d led the camp had told her. She had the cool gaze of a warrior decades younger. Do not waste time trying to aim. Point your arrow into the line of men and shoot.
Julia would die here; she knew that. A hot, fierce ache kindled in her chest. She would never see Alaric again.
The Romans were close now. Julia could see their breastplates sparking in the hot sun as they ran up the hill. The woman next to her loosed her arrow in one fluid motion and Julia followed suit, a cold, vast place inside her where her fear should be.
Her first arrow went high over the Romans’ heads. Her second went higher. Her third hit a man in his chest and sent him tumbling into his fellows.
Julia bit back a gasp. She’d killed a man. A Roman soldier. How her father would—But there was barely time to think as her hands scrabbled for another arrow. Draw; loose; load. Over and over, she fired into the ever-approaching line.
The Romans crested the hill anyway.
* * *
Now the enemy was in the camp, cutting down anyone they came across.
Somehow Julia survived the initial rush, fleeing before the enemy, barely avoiding being trampled. But the Romans were everywhere now, the noncombatants fighting with anything they had—weapons, shovels, broken-off chair legs. There was no refuge.
A centurion loomed grinning out of the chaos, his red horsehair helmet a ridiculous embellishment. He stared at her and his eyes widened. “Princess?”
Shit. Shit shit shit. He reached for her and Julia swung her axe wildly, sending his hand flying in a gleaming arc of blood. The man screamed and Julia ran , ducking behind an overturned cart just as an arrow slammed into the wood by her head.
They knew her.
Something blocked the sun above her. She glanced up to see the shadow of a man, no centurion this time—some infantryman who wouldn’t know her from a camp follower. There was no offer for safety as his sword swung down to split her from neck to pelvis.
In the next instant, a thrown axe split the man’s skull with a wet thunk . The man’s knees gave out and Julia just barely scrambled out of the way as a huge black horse trampled his still-twitching body beneath dinner plate–sized hooves. She raised her eyes to see a rider whose shadow blocked out the sun, the horse’s bloodied hooves lashing at the air, encrusted with brains and bits of skull, the rider’s blue eyes blazing with the light of a thousand siege fires.
Hannibal came back to all fours and shoved his nose into her chest.
Well. At least someone was happy to see her. “Hello, Hannibal.” Julia petted the snuffling warhorse awkwardly.
She could feel the weight of that gaze on her.
She was afraid to look at him. Afraid to even acknowledge him. But when she finally did, the force of his gaze stopped the breath in her lungs. He was beautiful and terrible as a heathen god of war, come down to ravage the earth.
“Get under that cart,” he commanded, his words murderously soft. “And stay there.”
Then he whirled Hannibal and plunged back into the battle.
* * *
As soon as it was safe, Julia crept out from under the cart.
Alaric’s men had flooded into the camp, fighting alongside the Hunnic defenders, trampling the Roman infantry and sending heads flying with their axes and skewering the deserters with their spears. Now the hilltop was piled high with the dead and she could not see Alaric—not anywhere. She did not want to run to him like a lovesick fool and hurl herself into his arms. He was still angry at her—or perhaps still insane. She had no idea what to do.
The medic tent was in chaos, half-collapsed, the surviving wounded huddled behind a makeshift wall of cots. Julia threw herself into helping the healers. He could come to her . Hadn’t he treated her like war spoils the last time they’d been together? Hadn’t he refused to believe her when she’d told him she’d burned a hole in his chest only to save his life?
Fuck. What if he was injured? Dead?
A heavy hand landed on her shoulder and she nearly started right out of her skin. She turned, ready to bite his head off and hurl herself into his arms all at once. But it wasn’t Alaric. It was Ehre, eyes narrowed against the glare.
Relief and joy flooded through her and suddenly the two women were in each other’s arms. “I thought I’d never see you again!” Julia cried.
“I thought the same of you!” And then for a moment they just screamed like wild animals and clung to each other, Julia half-insensible with relief as the story tumbled out of Ehre in a torrent of vulgar Latin, of how she’d convinced Alaric to come with her on a battle-mad chase through enemy territory to stop the Romans from taking the ridgeline.
Just then Julia caught sight of Alaric across a bloody field strewn with bodies, his red cloak snapping about his heels. He was turned away from her, the Hunnic warriors and his own men crowded around him, all of them staring down the slope.
Something was wrong. The earth seemed to tilt beneath her feet.
“That first wave was only a scouting party,” Ehre said beside her. She understood the situation at a glance—much faster than Julia did. “No doubt they also heard rumors of the red-haired woman who rides with the Huns.”
As she spoke, Julia realized what she was looking at. The entire legion had changed direction and was swinging toward them at a gallop.
She thought of that handless soldier.
For a moment Julia stood staring down into the juggernaut. “There’s no way we can fight that. No possible way.”
Horror rose in her throat as the enormity of what Alaric had done hit her. He could have stayed behind his walls, and let the ridgeline go. She would have died or gone back with the Romans—to her brother—but he would have lived.
“Damn him.” She strode toward Alaric, ready to give him a piece of her mind. She didn’t come all this way only to watch him die. How dare he?
She’d only managed a few steps when Ehre caught her arm again. She pointed out across the battlefield, over the bodies and broken siege engines, above the glittering threat of the Roman army, to the great plume of dust that rose like smoke just beyond the horizon. “Look.”
A second army. And above it, a great flag with a green oak tree shining in the sun. Thorismund’s army.