Aquilla
My hands shake as I roll the parchment up. Would that I’d received these messages a few days ago. Perhaps I would have realized the cost of failure and taken Elias into custody.
Now, what Father feared has begun. The Gens turn against each other. Hannah is that much closer to marrying the Snake. And Marcus is trying to get to Livia—she never would have mentioned it if she didn’t think it was significant.
I crush the letters. Father’s message is loud and clear. Find Elias. Give Marcus a victory.
Help us.
“Lieutenant Harper,” I say. “Tell the men we move out in five minutes. Dex—”
I can see from the stiff way that he turns to me that he’s still angry. He has a right to be.
“You’ll handle the interrogations,” I say. “Faris will search the desert to the east instead. Let him know. Get me answers, Dex. Keep Mamie and Shan alive in case we need them as bait. Otherwise, do what you must. Even … even in regard to the children.”
Dex nods, and I quash the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach at speaking the words. I’m Blood Shrike. It is time to show my strength.
«««
“Nothing?” The three squad leaders fidget under my scrutiny. One stamps his foot in the sands, antsy as a penned stallion. Behind him, other soldiers in our encampment, some miles north of Nur, watch surreptitiously. “We’ve searched this blasted desert for six days, and we still have nothing?”
Harper, the only one of the five of us not squinting from the punishing desert wind, clears his throat. “The desert is vast, Blood Shrike,” he says. “We need more men.”
He’s right. We must search thousands of wagons, and I have only three hundred men to do it. I sent messages to Atella’s Gap, as well as to the Taib and Sadh garrisons requesting backup—but none has soldiers to spare.
Strands of hair whip around my face as I pace before the soldiers. I want to send the men out once more before nightfall to search whatever wagons they find. But they are too exhausted.
“There’s a garrison a half day’s ride north in Gentrium,” I say. “If we push hard, we’ll make it by nightfall. We can get reinforcements there.”
Evening nears as we approach the garrison, poking up over the top of a hill a quarter mile to the north. The outpost is one of the largest in the area and straddles the forested lands of the Empire’s interior and the Tribal desert.
“Blood Shrike.” Avitas shifts a hand to his bow and slows his horse when the garrison comes into view. “Do you smell that?”
A western wind brings a whiff of something familiar and sour-sweet to my nose. Death. My hand goes to my scim. An attack on the garrison? Scholar rebels? Or a Barbarian sortie, slipping through the Empire unnoticed because of the chaos elsewhere?
I order the men forward, my body coiled, blood rising, yearning toward the battle. Perhaps I should have sent a scout ahead, but if the garrison needs our aid, there’s no time for reconnaissance.
We clear the hill, and I slow the men. The road leading to the garrison is littered with the dead and dying. Scholars, not Martials.
Far ahead, beside the garrison’s gate, I see a row of six Scholars kneeling. Before them paces a small figure, instantly recognizable, even at a distance.
Keris Veturia.
I nudge my horse forward. What in the bleeding hells is the Commandant doing all the way out here? Has the revolution spread so far?
My men and I pick our way carefully through the bodies left in haphazard piles. Some wear the black of Resistance fighters. But most do not.
So much death, all for a revolution that was doomed before it even began. Anger flares as I stare at the bodies. Didn’t the Scholar rebels understand what they would unleash when they revolted? Didn’t they realize the death and terror the Empire would rain down upon them?
I swing down from my horse at the garrison gate, a few yards from where the Commandant observes her prisoners. Keris Veturia, her armor splashed with blood, ignores me. So do her men, who flank the Scholar prisoners.
As I draw myself up to reprimand them, Keris plunges her scim into the first Scholar prisoner, a woman who crumples to the ground without so much as a whimper.
I force myself not to look away.
“Blood Shrike.” The Commandant turns and salutes. Immediately, her men follow suit. Her voice is soft, but as ever, she manages to mock