Flamesworn (Immortals Descending Book 5) by Iris Foxglove

Author:Iris Foxglove [Foxglove, Iris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Belladonna Press
Published: 2024-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter

Nine

Theron may not have been one of Ares’ supplicants, but he could have been an excellent spy if he put his mind to it. Ares sat on the roof of a storage building, feet swinging, as Theron flirted outrageously with the guard on duty. He had an easy charm that any commander would appreciate, but he seemed determined to use it for things like sticking his tongue down the pretty guard’s throat while Kataida slipped quietly into the storage building and snuck back out again with spare uniforms.

How many mortals would die at the Needle this time, wetting the sand for the sake of a few miles of earth? Without the call to be on both sides of the war at once, Ares had the time to watch soldiers train in plazas and retired elders complain that they could no longer raise a sword. They sat on the high, open gates of Axon as haggard groups of people from Elixi, the city hidden in the Soldiers, begged for shelter.

They had to stop supplies from the north, Evander said one morning, in the crowded civic building. “The farmers, it seems, were unaware of their change in government.”

“We should expect more refugees soon enough,” Atlas said, but Stavros was quiet, and Ares slipped out of the building later to find him speaking softly to a soldier behind a tea shop, their heads close together.

“Stavros?” Kataida asked, when Ares found her hauling boxes of supplies into a fortified warehouse. “There’s no reason he can’t be at a teahouse. He visits them all the time.”

“It looked like he was giving orders,” Ares said. Kataida frowned, easing the box onto another in the back of the warehouse. “I would watch him, that’s all. Wars are lost from within just as they’re won from without.”

Kataida looked uncertain, but she didn’t argue. She slept less, lying awake with her gaze fixed in the dark, like so many soldiers before her who felt had the encroaching heat of battle, the suffocating terror and the heavy weight of grief. But unlike the soldiers who wept in their quiet homes, Ares could feel Kataida trembling with anticipation and shame.

Ares came to her then, crawling over the bed like the inhuman creature they had been at the start of all things, and she dug her nails in their neck and whispered what she would do to them, wicked and hot and horrible. Ares no longer felt the desperation of an uprooted god, but they craved her all the same, and they could at least give her this—the warmth of them without shame, burning the guilt away while drummers practiced their war marches in the cool evening air.

The day the army marched out, Kataida stood stonelike in her proper uniform as her father gave his equally stiff farewells, both of them sinking into formality to hide the grief that even Ares could taste on the air. Theron was quiet and sulky, and he pulled Kataida behind a house after their father left as though to light a cigarette and speak privately.

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