Somehow, despite the animal and supernatural senses of the wolves and drakes, the enemy had invaded the camp…while all its best defenders were a mile up the hillside at the chateau.
“Gods!” Lady Leda gasped. She straightened fully and stumbled back from the cot toward the rear of the tent, tripping on her skirts and whipping them back with a shaking hand. The tent canvas swayed and juddered, as if buffeted by a stiff wind, and Cassius knew she must have backed into a tent pole.
Cassius hoped she wasn’t the sort of woman prone to fainting, but could do nothing about it regardless. All he could do was stare in horror as three armored Sels entered the tent, longswords strapped to their backs, shortswords bloodied.
For a moment, Cassius was frozen. He’d known that abandoning his army would put him on the other side of it eventually, but had somehow not mentally prepared for this exact moment. He’d been trained to do many things, all of them lethal, but he didn’t possess the tools to meet this situation adroitly.
The first soldier gave Lady Leda only a passing glance; his attention fixed unblinking on Cassius. It was startling to know that his own face had once been so impassive; likely, this soldier wasn’t even shocked. Was merely absorbing the evidence of his eyes—that a Sel was chained to a post before him, clearly a Southern prisoner—and trying to decide if this was a trap.
An image of the wolf thrall Ragnar filled Cassius’s mind. If he was to survive this, if he could help the people (the woman) who had shown him mercy, then he would need tomanipulate these soldiers. In his short time away from the empire’s influence, he’d come to be acquainted with someone he suspected to be a master manipulator. How, he wondered, would the charming, sly, dangerous Ragnar handle this moment?
He would have to lie, and lie well. At least for a few minutes.
“Praise the Immortal Emperor!” he cried, in his native tongue, surging up on his knees and thrusting his bound hands toward them, palms open in supplication. “I was captured at the tower west of the Inglewood, and these heathens refuse to put me to the sword, though I’ve begged them. They’ve tortured me, beaten me, burned me with hot pokers trying to learn our secrets…” The solider had not blinked. His face, and the faces of the others, was wholly devoid of emotion.
Cassius dragged in a breath and pressed on, trying to school his features. “My brothers. Please. Release me from these monsters and I can lead you to the generals. The dukes and duchess of the South, and the king’s heir from the North. Let me help you slay them.”
“What in blazes are you saying to them?” Leda hissed. “You traitor,I knew it.”
One of the three soldiers, the last to enter the tent, glanced toward her—and then walked her way, greaves clanking with each step.
“No!” Leda shouted. “You get away from me!”
Cassius’s heart had never drummed so hard. He shuffled forward on his knees, rattling his chains intentionally. “Please, my captain,” he begged of the first solider, the one bearing a star and serpent brooch at the fastening of his purple cloak. “I have tried every moment since my capture to return to my brothers in arms. To return to the cause of Our Most Righteous Emperor.”
Please, he prayed, silently, to gods he did not know.Please let him believe me.
Over his shoulder, Leda shouted, and there followed the sounds of a struggle: short-lived. A meaty thud, and then a whimper, and then muffled grunts as the lady was subdued.
Finally, the captain spoke. “What’s your name?”
“Cassius.” He could have wept with relief.
“Of which company?”
“West Flank. My entire unit was slaughtered by the Southerners.” That was more or less the truth, although the deaths had been slow and piecemeal, more soldiers picked off at each skirmish, until the last of them had holed up in the tower that would prove their undoing.
Lady Leda made outraged sounds that suggested a hand had been pressed over her mouth. It nearly distracted Cassius from the captain’s next words.
“Why have they left you alive?”
“I don’t know,” Cassius lied. “I begged them to kill me quickly. I’ve told them nothing.” He didn’t have to fake his trembling as he lifted his hands higher, baring the clasp between the cuffs. “Please. Captain. Even if you do not trust me after my time in captivity, I pray that you will free me, and kill me yourself. It would be an honor to fall beneath the sword of my brother in arms.”
Leda continued to struggle. Cassius feared—that word again, that emotion boiling inside him, so unfamiliar, so electric—that the soldier’s patience wouldn’t last much longer; soon, he would kill her or render her unconscious.
Cassius felt as though he waited an hour there, kneeling on the floor, his breathing erratic, panic spurring his heart along like a recalcitrant horse. But it was only a matter of seconds before the captain stepped forward, and withdrew a sharp little knife from the pouch on his belt.
His first thought was that the man meant to cut him…but that was the fear taking control, warping his rationality. Then he remembered his own knife, the same as this one, and the way it could be used as a skeleton key—just as this one was, when the captain took one of his bare hands in his gauntleted one, inserted the narrow blade into the keyhole, and unlocked the cuffs.
They landed with a soft clink, muffled by the skein of pine needles that covered the ground. Those needles would make for slippery footing, he knew…especially for men wearing grieves strapped with slick leather under their boots.
“Thank you,” Cassius breathed with a smile, and lifted one knee, placed a foot on the ground. His hands trembled, and his voice shook, and his breath came in unsteady pants. The visible weakness of a prisoner. “I am ready, captain, to—”
Cassius surged to his feet, now-steady hand darting forward; in the captain’s brief moment of surprise, Cassius was able to snatch the knife from his lax fingers, and drive it straight into the man’s eye.
The captain bellowed, and staggered back; his good eye closed, and he pawed at the wounded one, blood pouring scarlet down his face.
It was a rare and violent show of pain. Cassius knew it would not last long. He had mere seconds to act, and act he did.
