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The sun in Arizona did not shine so much as it punished, but within the thick, stone walls of the Malpais Legate’s estate, the air was perpetually chilled. It was a tomb for the living, a place of hard angles and sharp edges. For a boy of fourteen, a candidatus whose name was still being forged in the dirt of the training pits, life was a binary of pain or study. If he was not bleeding on the sand under the watchful, disappointed eye of a centurion, he was hunched over scrolls in the library, memorizing the geography of a world he was not yet permitted to see.
The Malpias Legate demanded perfection because he viewed weakness as a personal insult.
The day the new shipment of servi arrived, the boy stood at attention in the courtyard. He was thin, all wire and burgeoning muscle, his auburn hair cropped close to a skull that felt too heavy for his neck. He watched the Legate dismount. Joshua was a towering shadow, his armor caked in the red dust of the frontier, his presence a suffocating weight. Behind his sleipnir, a line of bedraggled tribals were led in on chains.
Among them was a girl.
She was no older than he was, perhaps a few seasons younger. Her skin was a deep, rich copper, glowing even under the grime of the trail, and her hair fell in a matted, dark curtain down her back. When the guard yanked her chain to make her kneel, she lifted her head.
Her eyes were hazel. Not just brown, but a shifting, bewitching amber that caught the light like polished flint. For a heartbeat, those eyes swept over the courtyard, landing on the boy in the white tunic.
His heart gave a sudden, violent thud against his ribs. A frantic, irregular beat that he had only ever felt during a lethal ambush. Heat flooded his face, a deep, traitorous flush that turned his ears crimson. He looked away, staring intensely at a crack in the stone, his breath hitching.
Witchcraft, he thought, his pulse still racing. It is a curse. A tribal hex.
He had heard the priestesses speak of the strange, foul customs of the wastes. They spoke of women who could weave spirits into the air to daze a man’s senses. This girl, with her copper skin and her honey-colored eyes, must have been a practitioner. Why else would his stomach feel as though it were full of stinging flies? He would have to seek the temple later; he would ask what salt or prayer could ward off such a targeted malady.
--
Weeks bled into a blur of discipline. The girl was named Camila. She had been assigned to the domestic duties of the main house, a ghost in a grey tunic with a raw brand on her neck. She was a graceful spirit, haunting the halls with her head bowed.
Yet her witchcraft persisted, whenever the boy was within sight of her his stomach twisted. It was a powerful curse that he should really make time to ask the priestesses about.
The boy was coming back from the library, his mind heavy with the logistics of Caesar’s front lines, when he passed the great hall. The hearth was cold, the morning fires having burnt down to nothing. Camila was there, kneeling in the soot. She was small, her frame dwarfed by the massive stone fireplace, her hands grey with ash as she scooped the remains of the night into a bucket.
He stopped. He shouldn't have stopped. A candidatus did not linger to watch a slave.
She turned her head to reach for a brush, and he saw it. A smudge of black ash across the curve of her cheekbone. It broke the perfection of her copper skin. It was a blemish, an error, a mistake in the geometry of the room.
A strange, overwhelming desire surged through him. It was a physical ache in his fingertips. He wanted to reach out, to press his thumb against her skin and wipe the soot away. He wanted to feel the heat of her face against his hand. He wanted to see if the skin beneath the ash was as soft as it looked.
The girl noticed him. She froze, her hazel eyes widening in that familiar, quiet terror that all the servi wore.
He didn't move. He stood there like a fool, his hand half raised before he realized what he was doing. He snapped his arm back to his side, his face burning once more. He turned on his heel and marched toward the study, his boots echoing like hammer strikes.
Foolish, he hissed to himself. Pathetic. You are a soldier of the Legion, do not let her hex control you.
--
Dinner was an ordeal. It was always an ordeal.
The boy did not know why the air felt thinner when the girl was in the room. He assumed it was a malady of the humors or a tribal hex cast from the shadows of the slave quarters. He sat at the far end of the table, his spine a rigid line of wood and nerves, watching the candlelight reflect off the dark surface of the obsidian-washed oak.
The Legate was displeased.
He sat at the head, a monolithic presence that seemed to swallow the light. Joshua Graham did not look like a man; he looked like a judgment. He was still armored, the leather and bronze of his harness creaking with every measured breath. He did not eat. He only watched the boy with a cold, terrifying stillness.
"You are a soft creature," the Legate said. His voice was not loud, but it had the edge of a serrated blade. "I look at you and I see the rot of the old world. I see a boy who thinks that because he can read a map, he is entitled to the air he breathes."
The boy kept his chin up, though his throat felt like it was closing. "I followed the maneuver, Dominus. I reached the flank."
"You reached the flank and you hesitated," the Legate spat. He didn't rise, but the violence in his posture made the boy flinch. "You stood over a fallen opponent and you looked for permission to finish. A true soldier of the Legion is the permission. You are a stutter. A hesitation in Caesar's sentence."
Across the room, the girl moved.
Camila was attending to the sideboards, her copper skin glowing in the amber light of the braziers. Her long hair was tied back tonight, exposing the delicate line of her throat. To the boy, she was a terrifying variable. Whenever she entered his periphery, his skin grew hot and his thoughts became a jumbled, useless mess. It was a curse. It had to be. He had planned to ask the priestesses for a ward against her, but he always pushed the task off for another day. Wondering why she’d choose him to cast a spell on. He wondered if she thought he was special, maybe that’s why she continued to use her magic on him.
"Look at me when I speak to you, ingrate." the Legate commanded.
He snapped his gaze back to Joshua. Cruel in his gaze as he was with everything, his irises like shards of blue glass, devoid of any warmth.
"I have spent fourteen years pouring resources into you," Joshua hissed, leaning forward. The scent of lye and old blood rolled off him. "I have given you the best tutors, the best steel, and the finest accommodations. And for what? So you can play at being a tactician while your heart remains as weak as a suckling pig's? You are a waste of the space you occupy. If I were to put a blade in your hand and tell you to end your own life, you would likely fumble the grip out of sheer, pathetic cowardice."
The boy’s face burned. The humiliation was a physical weight, pressing him down into his seat. He felt small, microscopic.
He risked a glance toward the girl. She was approaching the table now, the silver pitcher held in her hands. She stood just behind the Legate, her face a mask of nothingness. Her hazel eyes were fixed on the ground, low and blank. She wore the dead stare of a seasoned serva, her mind clearly leagues away from this room.
The boy felt a wave of agonizing embarrassment. He wished she were anywhere else. He didn't want this witness to his shame. He didn't want the girl who made his pulse thrum like a war drum to hear the master of the house describe him as a useless, parasitic creature. He wanted to be the wolf the Legate demanded, but under Joshua's verbal lashing, he felt like a mangy dog.
Deep down, he feared if she knew how weak he was, she might not cast her spell on him anymore.
"Perhaps the problem is the environment," the Legate mused, his voice taking that edge that usually ended in lashings. His skin had only just closed from the last one, he wasn’t ready. He didn’t want more.
"You have grown too accustomed to the comforts of my estate. You think you are a son of the house, you are not. You are a tool I am attempting to forge, and currently, the iron is full of impurities. Should I send you to the pits with the other dogs? Should I have you sleep in the dirt until you remember what it is to be hungry for a kill?"
The boy didn't answer. He couldn't, his jaw was locked tight.
Camila stepped forward to refill the Legate’s goblet. As the wine splashed against the silver, she didn't look at the boy. She didn't acknowledge the cruelty hanging in the air. She remained a ghost, silent and obedient.
The boy watched the smudge of ash on her sleeve, his mind reeling. He hated her for being here to see this. He hated the way his heart stuttered when she got too close. Most of all, he hated the Legate for being right. For seeing the "softness" in him that allowed a mere girl to distract him from the glory of the Legion.
"Answer me," the Legate whispered, the sound like a snake in the grass. "Are you a waste of my time, candidatus?"
"No, Dominus." the boy managed, voice cracking.
"Then prove it tomorrow. Leave me, do not return to this table until you have proven your commitment to the title you bear. I find the sight of your failure ruins the taste of the wine."
The Legate gestured dismissively. Camila retreated back into the shadows, her eyes never once shifting toward the boy. He stood, leaving his plate and marched out of the room. Thankful for the lack of corporal punishment this time.
The echo of the insults ringing in his ears, wondering how a curse could make a boy who was so hollow feel this full.
--
The seasons turned, and the leaves of the ancient, imported trees in the villa’s inner garden began to fail. They carpeted the grass in brittle gold and deep red.
The boy was on the balcony, supposedly memorizing the tactical failures of the ancient Greeks, but his eyes kept drifting to the garden below. Camila was there with three other women, bent double as they gathered the fallen leaves into woven baskets.
She had not braided her hair today. It hung loose, a shimmering, chestnut and gold river that brushed against the small of her back as she moved. It looked heavy. It looked thick. From the balcony, it seemed to catch every stray beam of light, glowing with a health that the stone walls usually smothered.
He leaned over the railing, his book forgotten. He found himself wondering about the texture of it. Was it soft like the silk the Legate imported for his formal robes? Or was it coarse, smelling of the sun and the dry earth? He imagined his fingers tangling in those dark strands, pulling her head back to see if those hazel eyes still held that hex-like shimmer.
He stayed there until the sun dipped below the wall, watching the way her hair moved with her body, a silent witness to a beauty he was not yet equipped to understand.