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.”
“It wasn’t insane,” Marcus said. “I knew them. I knew what I could do. I had advantages.”
Tavi nodded. “So do I.”
The old soldier’s eyes narrowed. “This isn’t a gang of angry Marat we’re talking about, kid. This isn’t a Lord’s personal soldiery, or an outlaw Legion. We’re going up against the Canim. You don’t know them. You’ve never seen anything like them.”
“You’re wrong,” Tavi said.
The First Spear lifted a lip from his teeth in a sneer. “You think you know them? You trying to tell me you’ve fought them, kid?”
Tavi met his gaze steadily. “Fought them, side by side with legionares and alone. I’ve seen them kill legionares I knew by name, and felt their blood hit my face. I’ve seen Canim killed. I killed one alone.”
Marcus narrowed his eyes in suspicion.
“More than that,” Tavi said. “I’ve spoken to Canim. I learned to play Indus from a Cane. Learned about their society. I even speak a little of their language, First Spear. Do you understand any Canish, Valiar Marcus? Do you know anything about their homeland? Their leaders?”
Marcus was silent for a moment before he said, “No. Every Cane I ever saw was too busy trying to kill me to give me any schooling.”
“They aren’t monsters. They aren’t anything like us, but they aren’t mindless killing machines, either. You know the difference between their raiders and their regulars, I take it?”
The First Spear grunted. “Raiders are bad enough. I never faced their regulars, but I know men who have. They’re worse. Bigger, stronger, better fighters. You don’t take them down without Knights and casualties.”
“The raiders are their conscripts. They’re not even their active military. The regulars you’ve heard about are their soldiery. Specifically, they come from an entire social class of hereditary soldiering bloodlines. Their warrior caste.”
He grunted. “Like our Citizens?”
“Something like,” Tavi agreed. “But there’s another caste that’s usually at odds with them. The ritualists. Like the ones who called this cloud cover down. Like the ones who struck the captain.”
“Hngh,” Marcus said. “They have furycraft?”
“I don’t think so,” Tavi said. “Or at least, not like Alerans use it. But they have some kind of power that lets them do similar things. Three years ago, they threw a series of storms at the coasts. The First Lord himself had to assist in stopping them. Fantus told Cyril that these clouds overhead were definitely not a windcrafting. However they do it, it works.”
The First Spear pursed his lips. “Sounds like these ritualist dogs are dangerous. Kalarus would never have made a bargain with them if he didn’t think he could crush them later.”
“I think the Canim betrayed him.”
“Why?”
“Because the scout I followed found Lady Antillus’s trail,” Tavi said. “We found her camp. The two of us couldn’t have captured her alone. I’d have gone for the kill, but what I learned was too important to chance losing.”
Marcus shook his head and blew out a breath. “All right, kid. I’m listening.”
“I got close enough to listen in on a watercrafted conversation she was having with her brother. It turns out that he made a pact with the Canim.”
“What?” Marcus snarled.
“Kalarus offered a Cane named Sari, a ritualist, a bargain. Kalarus wanted this cloud cover, to help paralyze the Crown’s communications and Legions. Then he wanted the Canim to hit the coastline and draw off Aleran troops from the theater between Ceres and Kalare. He thought they would cripple Ceresian crops and prevent the local militias from being called up to help the Crown against him.”
The First Spear scowled in thought. “Might have worked.”
“Except instead of several hundred Canim, Sari showed up with tens of thousands.”
“How’s he going to feed that many mouths?” Marcus said. “Armies march on their stomachs, and landing here, they can’t possibly reach one of the major cities before they start starving. He couldn’t have brought more than a few weeks’ supplies with him on the ships, and we won’t let him seize enough to feed an army that large. They’ll have to fall back to the ships before summer is out. ‘