Page 3 of Scorched Earth

Commandant Wex cleared his throat. “Gone.”

Teriana drew in a steadying breath that did next to nothing to calm her nerves. She’d slept not a wink since Marcus had shattered her heart and abandoned her in Senator Valerius’s villa last night, all her hours dedicated to piecing together exactly what had happened from the bits of information she’d gleaned from Austornic’s men, who were just as keen to gossip as the Thirty-Seventh.

Central to what she’d learned was that Legatus Hostus of the Twenty-Ninth had been tasked with hunting Marcus down.

Marcus had told her dark things about Hostus. Austornic’s men had told her worse. The legatus of the Twenty-Ninth was not only a sadist, but apparently also acannibal,and more than a few of his men had adopted his proclivities. Each time she blinked, Teriana saw Hostus’s green eyes. Felt his hands on her as he’d restrained her,his breath hot. The line his knife had scored down her neck was still sore.There will be a reckoning for this.

“Be more specific,” she said between her teeth.

Neither answered. Which was so gods-damned typical. There were dozens of players in this political mess of power games, all with agendas she couldn’t begin to keep straight, but despite the fact that Teriana was at the heart of it all, everyone wanted to keep her in the dark. For her own gods-damned good.

To keep hersafe.

The only thing they had told her was that blame for everything fell at the feet of Lucius Cassius. The proconsul of Celendor aimed to rule all of Reath and did not care whether he had to blackmail, murder, or subjugate everyone he crossed paths with to do it. Cassius had tried to have Marcus and his family murdered, but Marcus had killed the assassins. One, apparently, by caving in his skull with a marble statue—the description of which Teriana could have done without. All of which had been quietly cleaned up by his mother and sister while his father argued Marcus’s case in the Senate, because apparently Cassius was trying to claim Marcus’s unsanctioned departure was treason and deserving of execution.

And it was not yet midmorning.

Teriana’s scowl grew, but beneath her anger, panic loomed. “At least tell me if he’s safe.”

“Domitius convinced the Senate that while Marcus’s choice to depart against orders was impulsive and deserving of reprimand, that it is not treason,” Valerius finally said. “A stern letter will be drafted. The precise language is currently under debate.”

A stern letter.

Teriana tucked a loose lock of hair back into the wrappings holding it off her face, already sick of the bureaucracy. Knowing that was all she’d get from Valerius, she shifted her glare to Wex. Marcus’s mentor was unreadable, but she suspected the man who ran the legion school of Lescendor had a soldier’s opinion of politicians. What’s more, sheknewhe had a soft spot for his library mouse. “Does that mean Hostus will stand down?”

Wex exhaled slowly, then said, “No. With Hostus’s men dead by Marcus’s own hand, the Twenty-Ninth will be on the hunt with vengeance in their hearts. There was bad blood between them before and this will only have made things worse.”

“But as long as Marcus makes it to the stem here”—Teriana held up her roughly sketched map showing the xenthier stem that ledfrom Celendor to Bardeen—“before Hostus’s men, then there is no catching him. They won’t pursue him through the Bardeen stem to Arinoquia. Correct?”

Wex’s eyes flicked to Austornic, who shifted uncomfortably because the location of the stems was supposed to be a secret.

“Marcus showed me a master document with all the mapped and unmapped stems across the East. Your men only confirmed what I already knew.” Not entirely true, because while Marcushadshown her the map, it had only been for a moment. But the pretense had been enough to loosen the lips of Austornic’s primus on the matter.

“Teriana,” Austornic said gently, “sharing that particular map is considered—”

She gave him a flat stare, and he broke off.

Wex circled the library, occasionally taking sips from the glass of cucumber water in his hand. “This is a good lesson for you, Austornic. You’re used to functioning within the confines of Lescendor, where everyone plays by the rules. Not so in the real world, where the rules are broken for any number of reasons. Where the players on the board are not pieces of marble but human beings with their own goals, ambitions, and”—he glanced at Teriana—“lusts motivating their moves.”

She scratched her chin with her middle finger, but rather than taking insult, Wex gave her a sad smile. “Hostus might well hold the distinction of being the cruelest legatus in active service. That said, he’s no fool. He was trained to have contingencies in play, which means that he’d be prepared for Marcus to escape. Prepared for him to head to Bardeen. Which is why Marcus”—he tapped her map—“didn’t take this route.”

The palms of her hands turned cold. “But it’s the fastest route to Bardeen.”

“No,” Austornic said. “It’s just the most direct.”

“Madness.” Valerius shook his head even as Austornic walked to the map of the Empire framed on the library wall, running a hand over his shorn dark hair as he considered it.

“Why madness?” Their reaction made her stomach roil with tension. “You think he’ll make a mistake? That Hostus will catch him?”

Visions of Marcus being dragged before the Twenty-Ninth’s legatus filled her mind’s eye, and it was all Teriana could do to keep from vomiting as her imagination supplied all the awful things Hostus would do to him.

“There are options.” Austornic’s eyes moved over the unlabeledmap as though it bore every xenthier stem that the Empire had ever found, which, in his mind’s eye, it obviously did. “But I can’t find a path with less than eight jumps.”

“Impossible.” Valerius ran a hand through his thinning blond hair. “The strain is too great for anyone to bear. He’ll die if he tries.”

Die?

“It’s been done,” Wex replied. “It’s not impossible, else I wouldn’t have allowed it.”