Gilded Serpent by Danielle Jensen (top 10 novels txt) 📕

The blue of Teriana’s eyes dimmed to grey. “The Thirty-Seventh do much of this sort of labor?”

He made a face. “Hardly. It’s for legions on the verge of retirement or weak ones that can’t handle a real fight. Anyway, the idiot of a legatus in charge thought that he’d be clever and apply the same practice to the Sibernese evading the child tithes.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I’m quite serious. In the places that didn’t provide any children, he took all the boys who appeared the correct age, regardless of their birth order. He took them even in places where it was quite feasible they didn’t have any boys to tithe that year. Rounded up four times the number of boys Sibern usually tithes and delivered them to Campus Lescendor.”

“My gods…”

“The Senate couldn’t precisely go returning boys without admitting what had caused the problem in the first place,” he said. “So they kept them. And since then, the resistance to the tithes in Sibern has only worsened, along with the refusal to pay taxes. Violence against the legions has increased, whole patrols going missing only for their heads to be found staked up for their comrades to find.”

It was a bloody mess was what it was. For the number of men it would take to collect the boys and the taxes, it would cost the Senate more than it would receive in revenues. But they couldn’t risk ignoring it lest the problem spread.

“When did this happen?”

“About six years ago,” he answered, doing the math in his head. “The boys they took—those that survived, anyway—will just have graduated from Campus Lescendor.”

Teriana rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “Doesn’t the Senate ever stop to consider that arming hundreds of boys with a valid reason to hold a grudge against them might not be the wisest idea?”

Every boy sent to Lescendor had a valid reason to hold a grudge against the Senate, but fear was a powerful motivator. “For that to be the case, they’d have to see us as human beings, not as numbers. And I assure you, the majority of senators do not.”

Shaking her head, Teriana returned to her mending. “Your people are awful.”

“The Senate is not the sum of the Cel people,” he countered. “It’s a few hundred men. Even if you count the patrician class, we are talking about perhaps ten thousand out of four million.”

“It’s those four million people who allow those few hundred men to rule them.”

“Those few hundred men control a military with over two hundred thousand soldiers, so I’m not sure allow is the correct term.”

The noise she made was noncommittal, but then she said, “If they did rise up and the Senate ordered you and yours to quell them, what would you do?” She lifted her face to meet his gaze. “Would you fight your own people? Would the rest of the legions?”

He was saved having to answer by the sound of something heavy walking outside the shack.

“Wolf?” Teriana whispered, rising to her feet.

They hadn’t had much contact with the creatures since the two packs had clashed, the Revenge Pack, as they’d taken to calling it, having been driven back. The new pack, plus those whose territory they’d passed through, would occasionally sniff around the shacks, but they showed none of the dogged determination to get inside as the Revenge Pack.

Holding his finger to his lips for silence, Marcus listened to the sound of the animal’s tread. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. A slow plod over the snow of a much heavier beast than a wolf.

“Bear,” he muttered. “Damn thing should be hibernating by now.”

“It clearly doesn’t agree,” Teriana said under her breath. “What do we do?”

Marcus tossed several pieces of wood in the stove, building the fire.

In response, the bear let out a loud grunt and leaned against the door of the shack.

The heavy beams holding the door in place groaned, and with them watching in horror, the brackets began to give, the nails sliding out of the wood.

“Shit!” Marcus flung himself at the door to brace it, knowing that it would do little good. But the second his shoulders hit the wood, the animal grunted and ceased its pushing, returning to its slow saunter around the shack.

Heart hammering in his chest, Marcus moved to Teriana’s side, both of them rotating as they tracked the bear’s progress.

It circled the shack twice, then stopped. A loud crack of wood split the silence.

Teriana held her breath, waiting.

“Please tell me that wasn’t—” Marcus broke off as the sound of chewing filled the air.

Dawn greeted them with clear skies, a foot of fresh powder, and the shattered remains of the icebox that contained their supply of wolf meat. Or rather, had contained it, for the bear had devoured every last morsel.

“One less thing to carry, I suppose,” Teriana muttered, then started in the direction of the distant mile marker of the Via Hibernus, her feet sinking deep into the fresh snow.

Marcus didn’t move. All they had to eat was the wolf meat that had been intended for breakfast and the few handfuls of grain that had been in the supplies at the prior shack. And against his will, his gaze shifted from Teriana to the Teeth in the distance.

He’d read about them, but words on the page did not do the mountain range justice. Unlike other places he’d been, where ranges were made out of peaks and valleys and it was possible to find passes that led through them rather than over them, the Teeth appeared like shards of shale standing on end, all razor-sharp ridges and narrow ravines that he knew dead-ended against sheer walls. There was no pass through them. The Teeth were a maze that consumed men like it were a sentient beast.

Which was why the route through them wasn’t on the ground.

It was dangerous, but they could be on the far side of them in days. And on the far side there were forests and rivers, which meant food. On the far side, there was civilization.

“Teriana!” he called.