Chapter 7. Now Luca
NOW: LUCA
The goddess of death did her work in threes. That was all I could think about as I stood at the opening of my tent, watching the tribune work my armor.
He was hunched over the bench with a cloth in one hand and a tin of oil in the other, and he didn’t look up when I stopped at the entrance.
His attention was narrowed and focused, as if the only things that existed were the tools set at his side and the task before him.
My armor was separated into pieces so that he could clean it, painstakingly oiling the leather until the grit from the last battle was gone.
Even the worn straps of the belt’s baltea had been replaced with new material and the brass studs polished.
Iola stood behind him, setting down a bowl of fresh water before she smoothed the blanket neatly over the cot.
Without the fine silks she wore as a servant in the Citadel District, she looked like any number of the women I’d grown up with in the Lower City.
She glanced from me to the tribune, judgment in her eyes.
When she showed up in the New Legion’s camp looking for work, I’d made sure she secured a place where I could keep an eye on her, because that was what Maris would have wanted.
But she never passed up an opportunity to cast her disapproval on me.
She caught my eyes for another moment before she slipped back outside, leaving us.
Even I couldn’t deny that the sight was a humiliating one.
To see a legionnaire of his caliber occupied with such a menial chore almost made me cringe, but the thought was immediately replaced by another—no one died cleaning armor.
Kali, the goddess of death, was equally attentive in her work, and along with ushering souls from this world to the next, she was tasked with deciding the precise moment a life would end.
But every life was a tether entwined, and when death touched you, it came three times.
After watching two of my tribunes die, I was keenly aware of the fact that I was due the third.
The first tribune who had been assigned to me was forty-six years old.
Deriti was his family name—one I’d recognized because it wasn’t an uncommon one in the Lower City.
He’d enlisted in the New Legion only days after the rebellion began, emboldened by the death of the Philosopher.
He’d quickly gained notice at the front line of nearly every battle we fought in those first weeks.
I’d avoided having to take on the place of Commander, but I was made a Centurion almost as soon as we took the gates, and soon after Deriti was posted as my tribune.
Only six weeks after that, he took a javelin to the gut that was meant for me.
I could still feel the way his hot blood had bubbled beneath my hands as I pressed my palms to his wound.
I could still see that empty look in his eyes as he stared at the clouds overhead.
The second tribune was named Proctes, a nineteen-year-old legionnaire who wasn’t a stranger to me.
I recognized him from the training grounds, because he’d risen in the ranks below me before the Philosopher was killed.
Then he joined up with the New Legion. He’d been a strong-willed, passionate nephew of a Magistrate who’d turned his back on his family in the Citadel District.
Just like me and Vale. I’d thought more than once that he and I were the same—angry and vengeful.
Self-righteous and stubborn. But he’d been with me for only three weeks when he was killed at the battle for the Illyrium, crushed beneath the crumbling wall of a building hit by a ballista.
It took three and a half days to recover his body and it was already rotting when I burned it.
That was a memory that still followed me, too—the smell of decaying flesh in the air. The way it had clung to my clothes.
Watching my new tribune now, that sick feeling was turning in my gut again.
I couldn’t see a young, zealous believer in the rebellion or a lowborn son of some Magistrate’s servant.
The only thing I could see was a boy just barely turned man who was days or weeks away from becoming the third strand in the tapestry of death that Kali was weaving.
The tribune picked up one of the brooches that I wore at my shoulders, tilting it toward the light and checking the metal for imperfections.
I hadn’t asked him for his name or paid much attention to him since he was posted with me, convinced that the moment I did, his fate would be sealed.
But I let myself really look at him now, realizing that he was at least a few years younger than me.
That made him twenty-three, maybe twenty-four years old, a fact that unsettled me even more.
His light brown hair was cut short on the sides and back, but the length on the top was knotted in a style that reminded me of the boys I’d grown up running through the streets of the Lower City with.
A pointed nose and chin made his brown eyes appear sharper, and the set of his mouth was tense with concentration.
“I didn’t ask you to do that,” I said, breaking the silence.
The tribune’s hands fumbled with the brooch, nearly dropping it before he rose from the bench, straightening to attention in front of me.
“I’m sorry, Centurion, I was…” He swallowed. “I was just…”
“You don’t touch someone’s armor without permission,” I reminded him.
There were legionnaires who would draw their own blood before they let someone else handle their armor.
The armor and weapons were the same ones we’d worn as new recruits in the Isarian legion, freshly plucked from the noble families of the Citadel District to try our hands at glory in the hopes that we’d buy ourselves favor and win our own seats in the Forum.
Only a lazy Centurion would trust the job to someone else rather than do it himself.
I’d known Centurions like that, but they were all dead now.
“I noticed it needed repair and thought I could make myself useful.”
I clenched my teeth, stepping inside. It was a polite way of saying that he had nothing else to do. That I’d given him nothing else to do. He wasn’t wrong.
“It needs to be done before we cross the Sophanes,” he added.
We. As in, he and I. Together. I didn’t like the sound of that.
“I can manage it myself.”
The tribune set the brooch down on the table, dropping his eyes to the ground by my feet. To his credit, I hadn’t caught him glancing up at the mark of the gods that hung over my head even once since he’d been assigned to me.
I could see the argument trapped in his mouth, the way it made the muscle in his jaw twitch. He had enough self-control to keep it unsaid. “Yes, sir.”
I took a step toward the table, eyeing the armor he’d already finished with.
It was good work. Skilled work, even. But the moment I wanted to ask what his trade had been in the Lower City, I swallowed the question down.
The less I knew about him, the better. It might even spare me the weight of guilt that would follow the moment I had to find the dry wood it would take to burn his body.
“Are you feeling better, sir?” he asked.
It took me a moment to realize what he was referring to. Only hours ago, he’d stood watch on the street as I vomited my guts onto the cobblestones.
I let the silence stretch out between us, waiting for him to look at me.
When he did, his eyes met mine without blinking.
There was something unnervingly certain in them.
He was too steady for a legionnaire of his age and experience, too calm, and I wondered not for the first time how exactly he’d managed to get appointed to me.
“Why did you take this post?” I asked.
The tribune didn’t react, but he shifted on his feet just slightly. That was as close to seeing him falter as I was going to get.
“Every Centurion has a tribune.”
“That’s not an answer.”
He lifted his chin. “It’s an honor to serve as your—”
“If this is about that insignia out there”—I lifted a hand toward the opening of the tent—“or some childish idea of winning the favor of the gods, you’ll be sorely disappointed.”
“I don’t care about favor.” His reply came more quickly this time, taking on the slightest edge. “Not from the gods. Not from you.”
My hand dropped to my side. He wasn’t afraid to disrespect me, and I liked that. But it made me even more curious how he’d ended up here in the first place.
“Then what are you doing here?” I asked.
“The same thing you are,” he answered, gaze still not wavering from mine.
The words felt like a trick. Like a thread asking to be pulled. The look of him changed as he spoke, sharpening enough for me to see the fierce warrior that lay beneath his armor. It wasn’t zeal or fervor I heard in his voice. It was something more deeply anchored than that.
He was already taking up the scale armor as I stepped past him to the small desk erected beside the cot.
The pages I’d been writing were carefully stacked, the stylus cleaned of ink.
I didn’t like the idea of him seeing my work.
My pathetic attempt at salvaging some of what Rhea Vitrasian had taught me had become a fixation I didn’t want anyone knowing about.
I reached into my tunic for the message I’d taken from the Citadel’s falcon.
Again, I let my eyes scan the blank parchment before I opened the small wooden box on the table and stowed it inside.
When I turned back to the tribune, he was waiting with my scale armor lifted in his hands. I raised my arms out to the sides, and he moved quickly, dropping it over my head and positioning it over my chest before securing the straps over my shoulders and across my back.
I studied him as he worked, but he was unreadable, unflinching in his expression. My gaze dropped to his throat, where only the chain of his medallion was visible.
“You don’t wear a talisman,” I said, meaning it as a question.
“I don’t worship the gods.”
That caught me by surprise. Maybe the tribune wasn’t mad after all.
“Good,” I said. “Because they can’t protect you. Not from what’s coming.”
The tribune’s hands slowed, his chin lifting just a little. As if he were daring that fate to come. I wondered if he had any idea that it really would. He returned his focus to the armor and worked methodically, tightening the straps and cinching the ties until everything was in its place.
The sequence was too familiar now—my gaze fixed on the opening of the tent with a tribune’s hands tugging at the seams of my armor and checking for the imperfections that might get me killed.
I let myself look at his face for a fraction of a second, thinking that this tribune was definitely Kali’s third.
“Come with me.”
I stalked out of the tent and the tribune followed, fixing his sword to his belt as he tried to catch up.
The sun was setting behind the mountains in the distance, but the view was obstructed by the western wall.
I turned when I reached the end of the row of tents, headed for the riverbank.
The crowd that had been gathered at the bridge that morning was gone, the bodies still hanging, but that wasn’t where we were headed.
I followed the path I took every night, ignoring the way the legionnaires stared as we passed. Every few steps, I could see the glow of the gods’ mark just barely visible in the air around me, and they could see it, too.
Slowly, the lights of the camp faded behind us and the air grew quiet.
In this corner of the Lower City, so many buildings had been damaged that they were almost all uninhabited.
I stopped when I reached the statue of Alkmini, goddess of wisdom and enlightenment.
The stone that shaped her right shoulder was busted, half her face missing from the hit of a scorpio’s ammunition.
She looked out at the Citadel District with one eye.
The tribune came to a halt beside me, following my gaze across the water.
But I didn’t move. I didn’t speak. My eyes were fixed on the villa in the distance, on a shadowed terrace covered in sprawling vines.
It was here I sat every night as the sun went down, waiting for Maris to finally get up and light the oil lamps.
Any moment now. But this was also always the time each day I held my breath.
Terrified the lamps wouldn’t light. Because one day, they wouldn’t.
The water lapped below as we watched, the draining sunlight cooling the breeze.
And the moment the amber glow ignited in the window, every muscle coiled tight around my bones instantly relaxed, the breath unevenly leaving my lungs.
She was there. Behind that window, beneath the roof of Villa Casperia, in a city that was dying, Maris was there.
I turned to the tribune. “You want to be useful? Consider this your most important task.” I lifted a hand, pointing to the small square of orange light.
“Each night at sundown, I want you to come here. And if that light does not appear, if that window ever stays dark, you tell me. Wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, you come tell me. ”
The tribune’s brow wrinkled, his eyes studying me. “Yes, sir.”
“Now get some sleep. In the morning we’re going to the gates.”
“The gates? But we cross the Sophanes any day,” he said.
“The Commander has asked me to deliver a message to Centurion Roskia. We’ll leave after dawn.”
Still, the tribune stared at me. “And you’d like me to come.” He couldn’t quite manage to hide his confusion. After weeks of me bogging him down with pointless errands and chores fit for a servant, he didn’t know what to make of this.
“I would,” I answered.
For maybe the first time, the tribune visibly reacted. He stood a little taller, shoulders drawing back before he gave me a single nod.
I moved past him, headed back the way we came, but I glanced once more to the window across the river.
I could feel it all bearing down on me, the scales tipping farther and farther, ready to come crashing down.
We were days away from winning the war I had started.
With the tip of a single blade, I’d bled all of Isara dry.
But the closer we came to crossing that river, the less sure I was of what it had all been for.