Jim Butcher - Cursors's Fury

“As you were,” Tavi told them. “Get back to work.” He nodded at Marcus. “First Spear. And Centurion…?”

“Cletus, sir.”

“Centurion Cletus. I know your men are tired. We’re all tired. We’re going to get more tired. But crows take me if I let the Legion be tired and hungry. So find a storage building and secure the food.”

Cletus clearly did not like the notion. No centurion would want his men to be forced into action while bone-tired from physical labor if he could possibly avoid it. But he was Legion to the core and nodded at once. “Yes, sir.” He turned to leave.

Tavi nodded in approval. “Take one of the fish centuries to help you haul. Grains and dried meat first, the perishables after.”

Cletus paused and bowed his head to Tavi in silent thanks, then departed.

The stocky First Spear had lost most of the short-cropped hair from one side of his head due to the fire, and the fresh-healed skin, where the healers had been able to help him most, was pink and shiny and slightly swollen. It made his scowl no less ferocious, his ugly, craggy face even uglier and craggier.

“Captain,” Marcus growled. “Glad to see you back in one piece. Antillar said something about you scouting out the Canim.”

“Not quite,” Tavi said. “A scout picked up on a trail and tracked it back to…” Tavi glanced at the fish sitting at the tables.

“Right,” Marcus said. “Boys, get out. Get some food and report back to your century.”

“Magnus, send for Tribunes Antillar and Antillus, please,” Tavi said. “I want them here for this.”

“Right away, sir,” Magnus said, and slipped out of the tent, leaving Tavi alone with the First Spear.

“You look like something the crows have been at, Marcus,” Tavi said.

The First Spear narrowed his eyes at Tavi, then grunted out a muted chuckle. “Since I was a boy, sir.”

Tavi grinned and sat down on one of the stools. “What’s our status?”

The First Spear waved an irritated hand at the parchment-covered tables. “Difficult to say. Gracchus was a good Tribune Logistica, but his records were organized about as well as your average forest fire. We’re still trying to sort out where everything is stored, and it’s making it hard to get anything done.”

Tavi sighed. “My fault. I forgot to appoint a replacement Tribune Logistica to coordinate before I left.”

“To be fair, they wouldn’t have gotten much done yet in any case.”

“Ill take care of it. What about the militia?”

The First Spear scowled. “This is a major smuggling town, sir. “

Tavi grunted. “Graft, I take it?”

“They have the best council money can buy,” he confirmed. “There weren’t two hundred full suits of armor, and they hadn’t been maintained very well. I think odds are pretty good that some of Kalarus’s outlaw legionares are wearing the rest of the town’s stores. Little bit better on swords, but not much. There are a lot of privately owned swords here, though. Placida sends them home with his legionares when they finish their service, and there are a lot of Placidan freemen that move out this way.”

“What about the steadholts?” Tavi asked.

“Word’s been sent, but it’s going to take a while for any volunteers to arrive. So far, only men from the nearest circle of steadholts have showed up.”

Tavi nodded. “The defenses?”

“In the same shape as the armory, pretty much. Give us two days and we’ll have them up to code.”

“We won’t get them,” Tavi said. “Plan on fighting before afternoon.”

Marcus’s expression became more grim, and he nodded. “Then I recommend we focus the engineering cohort on the southern wall. The Legion may be able to hold it long enough for the engineers to finish the other positions.”

Tavi shook his head. “No. I want fortifications on the bridge. Stone, sandbags, palisades, whatever you can get that will hold up. I want five lines of defense on the bridge itself. Then put the engineers on our last redoubt at the northern end of the bridge and tell them to make it as big and nasty as they possibly can.”

The First Spear stared hard at him for a moment. Then he said, “Sir, there are a lot of reasons why that isn’t a very good plan.”

“And more reasons why it is. Make it happen.”

A heavy silence fell, and Tavi looked up sharply. “Did you hear me, First Spear?”

Marcus’s jaw clenched, and he stepped close to Tavi, dropping into a loose crouch to look him in the face. “Kid,” he said, in a voice that would never have carried from the tent. “I might be old. And ugly. But I ain’t blind or stupid.” His whisper turned suddenly harsh and fierce. “You are not Legion.”

Tavi narrowed his eyes, silent.

“I’m willing to let you play captain, because the Legion needs one. But you ain’t no captain. And this ain’t no game. Men will die.”

Tavi met the First Spear’s eyes and thought furiously. Valiar Marcus, he knew, was perfectly capable of taking command of the Legion from him. He was well-known among the veteran legionares, respected by his fellow centurions, and as the senior centurion present was, rightfully, next in the chain of command since no actual officers of the Legion were capable of exercising authority. Short of simply killing him, Tavi had no way to prevent him from seizing Legion command if he chose to do it.

Worse, the First Spear was a man of principle. If he thought Tavi was genuinely going to do something uselessly idiotic and kill legionares who didn’t have to die, Marcus would take command. If that happened, he would not be prepared to face the threat that was coming. He would fight with courage and honor, Tavi was sure, but if he tried to apply standard Legion battle doctrine, the Legion would not live to see another sunset.

All of which meant that the next battle Tavi had to fight was right here, right now, in the mind and heart of the veteran First Spear. If he had Marcus’s support, most of the rest of the centurions would follow. Tavi had to convince Valiar Marcus so thoroughly that he actively supported Tavi’s course of action instead of merely accepting it as one more distasteful order he had to obey. The tacit, indirect resistance of unwilling obedience to orders perceived as foolish could kill them just as thoroughly as the Canim.

Tavi closed his eyes for a moment. Then he said, “I asked Max once how you won your honor name. Valiar. The Crown’s House of the Valiant. Max told me that when he was six years old, Icemen came down and took the women and children from a woodcutter’s camp. He told me that you tracked them for two days through one of the worst winter storms in living memory and assaulted the entire Iceman raiding party. Alone. That you took the captives from them and led them home. That Antillus Raucous gave you his own sword. That he appointed you to the House of Valiar himself, and told Gaius to honor it or he’d call him to juris macto .”

The First Spear nodded without saying anything.

“It was stupid of you to do that,” Tavi said. “To go into the storm. Alone, no less. To attack what? Twenty-five Icemen on your own?”

“Twenty-three,” he said quietly.

“Would you send Cletus there out to do that?” Tavi asked. “Would you send me? One of the fish?”

Marcus shrugged. “No one sent me. I did what I had to do. Truth be told, I waited until most of the Icemen were asleep and cut the throats of half of them before they could wake up.”

“I figured it was something like that. But before you left, you didn’t know how many of them there were. Or that you’d have a chance to take them while they were asleep. You didn’t know if the weather would worsen and kill you. There, at that time, it was an act of insanity.”