“You could say that,” Tavi said.
“Hah! Did you finally figure out how to do a simple earthcrafting?”
“Better,” Tavi said. “We have a Romanic war engine.” He turned and glanced at the wreckage, wincing. “Had,” he corrected himself.
Max’s mouth opened, then shut again. He was a young man come into the full of his adult strength, tall and strong. He had a solid jaw, a nose that had been broken on several occasions, wolfish grey eyes, and while he would never be thought beautiful, Max’s features were rugged and strong and had an appeal of their own.
He sheathed his weapon and dismounted. “Romanics? Those guys who you think didn’t have any furycraft, like you?”
“The people were called Romans,” Tavi corrected him. “You call something Romanic when it was built by Romans. And yes. Though I’m surprised you remember that from the Academy. “
“Don’t blame me. I did everything I could to prevent it, but it looks like some of the lectures stuck,” Max said, and eyed Tavi. “You nearly took my head off with that rock, you know. I fell off my horse. I haven’t done that since-”
“The last time you were drunk,” Tavi interjected, grinning, and offered Max his hand.
The big young man snorted and traded a hard grip with Tavi. “Furies, Calderon. You kept growing. You’re as tall as me. You’re too old to grow that much.”
“Must be making up for lost time,” Tavi said. “Max, have you met Maestro Magnus?”
The old man picked himself up off the ground, brushing away dirt and scowling like a thunderstorm. “This? This mental deficient is Antillus Raucus’s son?”
Max turned to face the old man, and to Tavi’s surprise his face flushed red beneath his tanned skin. “Sir,” Max said, giving an awkward duck of his head. “You’re one of the people my father bid me give his regards should I see you.”
Magnus arched a silvery eyebrow.
Max glanced at the wreckage of the engine. “Uh. And I’m sorry about your, uh… your Romanic thing.”
“It’s a war engine,” Magnus said in a crisp tone. “A Romanic war engine. The carvings we’ve found refer to it as a mule. Though admittedly, there seems to be some kind of confusion, since some of the earlier texts use the same word to describe the soldiers of their Legions…” Magnus shook his head. “I’m wandering again, excuse me.” The old man glanced at the ruined war device and sighed. “When is the last time you spoke to your father, Maximus?”
“About a week before I ran off and joined the Legions, sir,” Max said. “Call it eight years or so.”
Magnus’s grunt conveyed a wealth of disapproval. “You know why he doesn’t speak to you, I take it?”
“Aye,” Max said, his tone quiet. Tavi heard an underpinning of sadness in his friend’s voice, and he winced in sympathy. “Sir, I’d be glad to fix it for you.”
“Would you now?” Magnus said, eyes glinting. “That’s quite generous.”
“Certainly,” Max said, nodding. “Won’t take me a minute. “
“Indeed not,” Magnus said. “I should think it a project of weeks.” He lifted his eyebrows and asked Max, “You were aware, of course, that my research compels us to use strictly Romanic methods. No furycrafting.”
Max, in the midst of turning to the war engine, paused. “Um. What?”
“Sweat and muscle only,” Magnus said cheerfully. “Everything from harvesting timber to metal fittings. We’ll rebuild it. Only the next one needs to be about twice as large, so I’m glad you’re volunteering your-”
Tavi got nothing more than a flicker of motion in the corner of his eye to warn him, but suddenly every instinct in his body screamed of danger. “Max!” Tavi shouted, even as he dived at the Maestro again.
Max spun, his sword flashing from its sheath with the speed only a wind-crafter could manage. His arm blurred into two sharp movements, and Tavi heard two snapping sounds as Max cut a pair of heavy arrows from the air with the precision only a master metalcrafter could bring to the sword, then darted to one side.
Tavi put a low, ruined wall between the attackers and the Maestro and crouched there. He looked over his shoulder to see Max standing with his back to a ten-foot-thick stone column that had broken off seven or eight feet above the ground.
“How many?” Tavi called.
“Two there,” Max replied. He crouched and put his hand to the ground for a moment, closing his eyes, then reported, “One flanking us to the west.”
Tavi’s eyes snapped that way, but he saw no one among the trees and brush and fallen walls. “Woodcrafting!” he called. “Can’t see him!”
Max stepped out to one side of the column and barely darted back before an arrow hissed by at the level of his throat. “Bloody crowbegotten woodcrafting slives,” he muttered. “Can you spot the archers?”
“Sure. Let me just stick my head out and have a look around, Max,” Tavi said. But he fumbled at his belt pouch and withdrew the small mirror he used for shaving. He lifted it above the ruined wall in his left hand and twisted it back and forth, hunting for the reflection of the archers. He found the attackers within a second or two-though they had been under a woodcrafting when they attacked, they must have dropped it to focus their efforts on precision archery. Half a second after Tavi spotted them, another arrow shattered the mirror and laid open his fingertip halfway to the bone.
Tavi jerked his hand back, clutching at the bleeding finger. It only tingled, but there was enough blood that Tavi knew it would be quite painful momentarily. “Thirty yards, north of you, in the ruin with the triangle-shaped hole in the wall.”
“Watch that flanker!” Max shouted, and flicked his hand around the column. Fire streaked from his fingertips, blossoming into an enormous cloud that reached toward the archers. Tavi heard Max’s horse scream in panic and bolt. Max sprinted around the far side of the column in the flame’s wake.
Tavi heard a crunch of stone on stone to the west and rose to a tense crouch, sling in hand and ready. “Hear that?” he whispered.
“Yes,” Magnus grunted. “If I reveal him, can you take him?”
“I think so.”
“You think so?” Magnus asked. “Because once I draw him out, he’s going to send an arrow at my eye. Can you take him or not?”
“Yes,” Tavi said. Somewhat to his own surprise, his voice sounded completely confident. To even more surprise, he found that he believed it. “If you show him to me, I can handle him.”
Magnus took a deep breath, nodded once, then rose, flipping his hand in the general direction of their attacker.
The earth rumbled and buzzed, not with the deep, growling power of an earthquake, but in a tiny if violent trembling, like a dog shaking water from its fur. Fine dust rose from the ground in a cloud fifty yards across. Not twenty paces away, the dust cloud suddenly clung to a man crouched beside a row of ferns, outlining him in grime.
The man rose at once and lifted his bow, aiming for the old Maestro.
Tavi stood, whipped the sling around once, and sent the heavy lead sphere whistling through the air.
The attacker’s bow twanged.
Tavi’s sling bullet hit with a dull smack of impact.
An arrow shattered against a tumbledown rock wall two feet behind Maestro Magnus.
The dust-covered woodcrafter took a little stagger step to one side, and his hand rose toward the quiver on his shoulder. But before he could shoot again, the man’s knees seemed to fold of their own accord, and he sank to the ground in a loose heap, eyes staring sightlessly.
From several yards to the north came a ring of steel on steel, then a crackling explosion of thunder. A man let out a brief scream cut violently short.
“Max?” Tavi called.
“They’re down!” Max called back. “Flanker?”
Tavi let out a slow sigh of relief at the sound of his friend’s voice. “Down,” he replied.
Maestro Magnus lifted his hands and stared at them. They trembled violently. He sat down very slowly, as though his legs were no more sturdy than his fingers, and let out a slow breath, pressing a hand to his chest. “I have learned something today, my boy,” he said in a weak voice.
“Sir?”
“I have learned that I am too old for this sort of thing.”
Max rounded a corner of the nearest ruined building and paced over to the still form of the third man. Blood shone scarlet on Tavi’s friend’s sword. Max knelt over the third man for a moment, then wiped his sword on the man’s tunic and sheathed it on his way back to Tavi and Magnus.