Princeps’ Fury

At last, Raucus turned to leave the tent. There. Duty done. At last he could get a few hours of rest. The increased pressure on the Shieldwall, of late, had left him wishing that he had demanded that Crassus serve his first Legion hitch at home. Great furies knew, the boy could make himself useful now. As could Maximus. The two of them, it seemed, had at least learned to coexist without attempting to murder one another.

Raucus snorted at his own train of thought. He sounded, to himself, like an old man, tired and aching and wishing for younger shoulders to bear his burdens. Though he supposed he would rather grow old than not.

Still. It would be nice to have the help.

There were just so many of the crowbegotten savages. And he’d been fighting them for so bloody long.

He walked toward the stairway leading down into the fortifications within the Shieldwall itself, where a heated chamber and a cot waited for him. He’d gone perhaps ten paces when a scream of wind, the windstream of an incoming Knight Aeris, howled in the distance.

Raucus paused, and a moment later, a Knight Aeris soared in, escorted by one of the Third Aleran’s Knights who had been flying patrol. Night had fallen, but the snow always made that a minor inconvenience, particularly when the moon was out. All the same, it wasn’t until the man had landed that Raucus spotted the insignia of the First Antillan upon his breastplate.

The man hurried to Raucus, panting, and slammed his fist to his heart in a hasty salute. “My lord,” he gasped.

Raucus returned the salute. “Report.”

“Message from Captain Tyreus, my lord,” the Knight panted. “His position is under heavy attack, and he urgently requests reinforcements. We’ve never seen so many Icemen in one place, my lord.”

Raucus looked at the man for a moment and nodded. Then, without another word, he summoned his wind furies, took to the air, and headed west, toward the First Antillan’s position, a hundred miles down the wall, at the best speed he could manage for the distance.

His men needed him. Rest would have to wait.

It was what one did.

* * *

“And I don’t care how hungover you are, Hagan!” said Captain Demos, in a perfectly conversational voice that nonetheless carried the length of the ship and up and down the dock. “You get those lines coiled properly, or I’ll have you scraping barnacles all the way across the Run!”

Gaius Octavian watched the surly, bleary-eyed sailor turn back to his work, this time performing more to the liking of the Slive’s captain. The ships had begun leaving the harbor at Mastings on the morning tide, just after dawn. It was near to midmorning, and the harbor and the sea beyond looked like a forest of masts and billowing sails, rolling over the waves to the horizon. Hundreds of ships, the largest fleet Alera had ever seen, were now sailing for open sea.

The only ship still in port, in fact, was the Slive. It looked stained, old, and worn. It wasn’t. Its captain simply chose to forgo the usual painting and piping. Its sails were patched and dirty, its lines dark with smears of tar. The carved female figure on the prow, so often made to resemble benevolent female-form furies and revered ancestors on other ships, looked more like a young riverfront doxy than anything else.

If one didn’t know what to look for, the sheer amount of sail she could hang and the long, lean, dangerous lines of the Slive might go completely overlooked. She was too small to be matched squarely against a proper warship, but she was swift and nimble on the open sea, and her captain was a dangerously competent man.

“Are you absolutely sure about this?” rumbled Antillar Maximus. The Tribune was of a height with Tavi, though more heavily muscled, and his armor and equipment were so scratched and dented by use that they would never have passed muster on a parade ground. Not that anyone in the First Aleran Legion gave a bloody crow’s feather about that.

“Whether I’m sure or not,” Tavi replied quietly, “his ship is the only left in port.”

Maximus grimaced. “Point,” he growled. “But he’s a bloody pirate, Tavi. You have a title to think about now. A Princeps of Alera shouldn’t have a vessel like that as his flagship. It’s… dubious.”

“So’s my title,” Tavi replied. “Do you know of a more competent captain? Or a faster ship?”

Max snorted out another breath and looked at the third person on the dock. “Practicality over all. This is your fault.”