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“And naked shines the Goddess when
she mounts her lion among men.”
- Robert Graves



i.


She watches him in secret, protected from the filth and stink of the pits by the many layered linens wrapped softly around her. She shields her face in the hood, her youthfulness and cunning distorted, hidden, kept private. Like the women of the desert, she has no significance here, and so Augusta blends into the heat and push of the bodies around her. The deafening roar of the fights, the near-ecstatic, hymn-like chants of the lesser people, the poor, the hungry. Seeking sustenance in blood and sand.

They stamp their feet and pray to the gods of death and life. The arena has turned red already. For all their prayers, the gods have no mercy.

Augusta will smell like this for days, no matter how many times she cleans her skin. The grime and blistering sweat of fear and exultation will cling to her eyelashes, her lips, her nails. She will carry her own brand, and she will like it.

In some ways, compound life has sheltered her. She has never gone hungry, never slept outside of the warmth of her own bed, never known the terrible silence of being alone. She has eaten from silver spoons, sipped honeyed wine, sucked rare, raw, glistening oysters from their half shells. She has seen the old, forbidden films that came from the time before, held the forbidden books between her hands, studied the dead languages and forgotten history. Augusta does not understand her own privilege, just as she does not comprehend the beauty and freedom of the old times. She has no context for it. She sees the fighting pits and thinks not of gladiators but of trials and the sanguine-glossed future.

She needs not a Spartacus but a mercenary.

It is in Radomir that she has found and crafted one.

Sometimes, when she has not visited in months, the sight of him takes her breath away. The sheer size of him and his win fills the entire arena, makes even Augusta feel small, feel threatened, feel ablaze. She can hear the crowd surrounding her; their hysteria made concrete and tactile in the air, as thick as the blood that Radomir licks from his fingers after he has pinned a man to the dirt and pushed his eyes down, deep, into their sockets. There is brain under his nails and vindication on his breath.

Above him, unnoticed still, Augusta feels herself smile.


ii.


The orchestra is practicing for the wedding tomorrow, and the music lightens and brightens the compound’s stone corridors. Maximus presses his fingers to his temple, grinding the skin there, attempting to relieve the pressure that has been afflicting him for the past two hours. He has not been home, if home is what this central compound could be called, in nearly five years. To return because of a wedding, and a wedding for his eldest daughter at that, does not strike him as a necessary priority. Weddings are sentimental, and Maximus has no need for sentiment. He recognizes, however, the need for decorum; the Minister is a good match for Augusta, a better match than he would have thought possible considering the unfavorable stain that is her mother, and to not show for the ceremony would be a sleight to Baldric’s authority.

Perhaps, he thinks, Harrow was right. Perhaps Augusta simply needed a strong, constant hand to mind her, to push her through this world. She would not inherit Maximus’ title, that belonged to Harrow, but she would have his name, his legacy by his blood and reputation. A proper husband, a powerful husband, might feed her ambition. It could be enough, yes, to be a great man’s shadow. Only her letters and the latest reports make him uneasy. There has been talk of her beast, the one she had sentenced and then, irrationally, saved. He had, within his first week free from the pits, broke the arm of a guard so severely that the bone had glistened, sharp and white, four inches out of the skin and nearly killed another by trying to force his head between the bars of his holding cell. All of this he had done unshifted, in the guise of a man, with bare hands.

And now, Augusta wants him to transfer with her, to the Minister’s estate. A woman’s fancy, Maximus suspects. Only a woman’s mawkish heart could care for the wellbeing of such a creature.

Maximus lights a cigar, though he does not feel like celebrating, and leans back in his chair. The library here is his favorite room. It is seldom used, books having lost much of their meaning, and the light streaming in from the windows catches the dust in the air in a way that he finds pleasing. He is grateful for the solitude, but he is not surprised when his teen children eventually come to the doorway, one trailing the other like wayward pups.

Augusta is thinner than he remembers her being, but beautiful in a fierce, defiant way. She looks somehow out of place in her dress, the lavender color too girlish, too light. Her feet are bare, but there’s a strength about her profile nonetheless. A certain steel like quality to the way she holds herself. She does not fidget. She is iron-backed and stiff-shouldered. It’s almost masculine, Maximus realizes, as she approaches his neoclassical desk and clasps her hands behind her back as though for inspection. If she was not so impertinent, if she did not look so much like her mother, he could have warmed to her. In another life.

Harrow is more languid, more comfortable, his strides easy and his arrogance something for him to wear, like his cologne or one of his silver cuff watches. At 16, he is taller than Augusta already, but they are both hard around the eyes and mouth. His casual attire, the dirty denim jeans, the dark, threadbare shirt, belie his coldness. He sits, uninvited, at the corner of the desk, and reads one of the letters Maximus has left half-open. Augusta flicks her eyes at him, annoyance scrawled across her face, but stands and is still.

“You cannot take him, Augusta.” Maximus says it with a sigh, his voice revealing his tiredness. He half expects to see her face crumple, to see tears spring and catch her thick eyelashes, for her bottom lip to tremble and her voice to protest. Instead, and he is proud of this, she simply looks at him.

“Harrow has his swan.”

Her brother barks a laugh. “Yes, but Ita does not crush men’s skulls with her hands.”

“So you admit that Radomir is more useful than that bird of yours.”

“He is rabid. He will tear your throat and then your soon to be husband’s while you sleep. Maybe that is what you want. One day married, the next widowed. How convenient.”

“Father.” Augusta ignores Harrow, her eyes searching, her voice strained.

Maximus puffs on his cigar until the smoke is thick and he can taste it on his tongue. “I do not approve of either of you and your fondness for these unnatural creatures. I do not keep a wolf for a pet and then question why, one day, the wolf bites my hand. Similarly, Harrow, I do not envy another man’s property, no matter how rare it may be, when that property knows obedience purely from fear. But … many disagree and find my preferences outdated. These beasts, when properly conditioned, are said to have uses. If you can find a suitable use for him, and if the Minister does not disapprove, you can take your savage with you. I suggest teaching him some manners. Blood is not a suitable wedding present.”

“Isn’t it?” She quips with a grin, and Maximus feels the pain in his head again.


iii.


He thinks himself unworthy. He, with his calloused split hands. With his hatred and fury. With the deep, dark of despair swallowing him from the inside. The snap of the animal beneath his skin gnawing and twisting, clawing till he grips the sides of his head and yells back, yells loud, like a lion’s roar and thunder combined.

He’s half-mad for her, feral for the pits still, for the blood and the hunger. This cell is not his. It is too new, too silver, too clean. He broke the lights above with his fists on the first day, too accustomed to half-sun and darkness to bear the artificial brightness. He snapped a man’s arm in half. He tried to pull another’s head through the bars, to test their strength, and maybe his own.

He paces and waits. Waits and paces. Too large for the iron surrounding him. He feels suffocated. He speaks words to calm himself, but the languages are too foreign, too animal, and there is no answer. The muzzle bites into his skin, chafes his jaw, causes spit to gather and run down his mouth. Distorts his words.

So he cannot tell her, when she comes, finally, at long last, of his devotion. He cannot praise except with his hands, and those are too dirty, too stained for him to dare touch her with. But she takes them anyway, goddess that she is, kisses his fingers and strokes his head when he, on his knees, wraps his solid arms around her delicate waist and buries his face into her stomach.

He can smell the compound on her, the scents he yet has no names for, and the men he will kill for her. He does not think of Hatchet. He does not think at all, except for her name, a bell and siren, a tempest, matching the beat of his heart and rhythm of his pulse.

Augusta.


iv.


The scotch has stopped burning his throat, and his fingers are loose around the tumbler in his hand. Harrow has left a cigar burning in the ashtray to his left. His mouth tastes bitter, full of ash and resentment, and no amounts of alcohol seem to be helping. Albtraum is his, has been his, will remain his. Maximus bequeathed it to him. But here they are, celebrating his sister’s self-appointed promotion as Chief Minister of Propaganda, and all Harrow feels is spite and validation and a clench of envy.

Augusta is no longer a teenager, and that mongrel of hers has hulked, massive and threatening, as her shadow for years. Longer than he would have guessed possible, if he is being honest with himself, but Harrow rarely finds truthfulness to be beneficial. He glowers, heavy-lidded, and kicks his feet up on the table in front of him, shrugging out of his dining jacket. Nearby, perched like a statue on her white, white knees, Ita flinches around the eyes, as though sensing his poor temper. For a moment, he wants to reach over and stroke her cheek, push aside her pale hair, and turn her face to his. He wants to see love in her eyes, adoration, loyalty. He wants. He wants.

Radomir is watching Augusta from the corner, his stance militant, but there’s something Harrow cannot recognize on his face. A certain softness in his eyes. A lack of fear. And a … It angers him that he cannot identify the emotion. He feels the scotch and the blood rise to his head all at once, and he grips the arm of his chair tightly, his knuckles white from the pressure. His sister looks smug, he thinks, like the cat who swallowed the canary. She looks … he doesn’t understand what she looks like. He remembers her as the Minister’s wife, in shades of red, in dresses like slashes, with a whore mouth and sly snake eyes. She has her hair in a braid now, coiled down one shoulder like a rope, and desert-colored cargo pants. He can see the sharpness of her hipbones, they are slung so low. Her sweater is threadbare, the neckline plunging, while sand still sticks to her collarbones. Radomir, too, has sand in his jacket, on his boots. Harrow grinds his teeth. A celebration in her honor, and neither of them can be bothered to dress appropriately, befittingly. She’s a woman, not a soldier. He doubts she even showered, that they entered the compound straight from the caravans and helped themselves to the feast.

Greedy, power-hungry, incompetent whore. That’s what she is. Not a bureaucratic, no matter what her new title may suggest.

He swallows the rest of his scotch, loud, and it cracks from the force of his anger when he sets it on the table. He wishes more things would crack, would break, when he wanted them to. “So, Minister,” Harrow rubs his mouth, getting used to the weight of the name on his tongue. “Is this new attire supposed to symbolize something? Your transformation?”

“What’s the matter? Are you worried my dick is bigger than yours now?”

He laughs, the same barking tone he’s had since he was a teen, and slaps his thigh for emphasis. Ita shifts at the noise, but he pays her no mind. “Funny you should mention that, actually. I had hoped to discuss this with you after the festivities, but … no time like the present. For someone charged with handling propaganda, you should be aware of what is being said of you. Behind your back. About you and that … that …” He motions to Radomir, somehow wanting to laugh, “… that guard dog.”

Augusta, he notices, is paper-thin. She has her elbows on the table, seated to his left, her chin resting on the scaffold made by her fingers. He wants her to be curious, to be annoyed, to be something, anything, but she’s simply looking at him, blinking her eyes and waiting. Harrow decides it’s a stupid expression and lowers his legs so he can lean forward, closer, his voice like a threat. “Are you fucking him, hmm? You are, aren’t you? Did your late husband figure it out? Is that why you had to dispose of him? Because rather than having his child, a proper, normal child, you wanted to play boss with your pet? A cock doesn’t make you a man, Augusta, no matter how much you might want it to. Did you find the biggest, strongest mongrel so that you could bend him over and turn him into a pup, smooth over all those daddy issues? Tell me. Explain it. Between siblings.”

Harrow is laughing again, so he doesn’t notice when her hand strikes like lightning across his face, her nails digging into his skin, spilling blood. She knocks the laughter from his mouth, and his vision turns red. He does not have time to be startled. He feels only anger, as though his prey dared to turn predator and bared its teeth at him. But he is quicker, stronger, because she is only a woman, lesser than him, and his fingers catch the back of her hair, tangle her braid into his fist, and force her head down on the table, her cheek flat to the shining wood, her chair upturned behind her, legs scrambling to catch their balance from the suddenness of the attack.

It is Ita that shrinks first, that folds into herself. Ita who turns her face away from the swiftness of Radomir’s approach, though she is startled by how quickly a mountain can move. Harrow does not see, cannot see, because he has his sister pinned and his voice is becoming louder and louder, the scotch going to his head, the bitterness caused by her mere presence spreading like a venom in his blood, and no, not ever, would a base shifter threaten him in his own compound, but that is what is happening. Why his hands are releasing their grip on Augusta, to try and reach, to hit at the shadow behind him, but he’s too slow and Radomir is too strong, catching him by the throat in a mockery of how he had held Augusta, forcing him down, down, until his hot face is pressed to the table and he cannot see except for the blur of his sister beside him. Tossing her hair away, smoothing her shirt, flushed with color but calm, furious eyes.

Harrow may be yelling. He isn’t sure. The pressure on his throat is unbearable.

Augusta waits. She watches, and he is struck by the slyness of her gaze, the heaviness of it.


iv.


Kim calls her Minister before the punishment begins. Harrow still calls her Augusta.

Radomir knows better. He does not call her anything, because he has no need for her name. Instead, he keeps his eyes on her face, on the red of her dress, on the way she curls her fingers against her palm when Kim lifts the lash.

At the first crack, Kim splits his skin across his back and draws blood. Harrow smiles without teeth and lines crinkle around his eyes. “How fascinating.” He drawls, lighting one of Roman’s hand-rolled cigarettes. He has always enjoyed a good show, especially one for his benefit. The sound of Kim’s strikes landing their mark (they always do) is almost enough for him to feel pacified.

Augusta’s back is stern, and she crosses her legs beneath her dress as though she is watching a propagandist film rather than a punishment. In some ways, it’s all the same. She does not turn her eyes. Radomir watches her watching him. He follows her breathing with his eyes in a way that makes the small hairs on the back of her neck and arms stand on end. She watches him and is surprised to feel her face flinch when Kim strikes across his shoulders and shows bone.

He is not, she knows, a good man. He is not striving for reinvention. He does not know how to become someone else, now that she has crafted him so. He does not desire it. Because he is hers, Augusta accepts responsibility. She holds his gaze, because it is the least she can do, and does not frown when the repeated force of the whip finally brings Radomir to his knees.

But he smiles when his knees hit the dirt, and it is dark and predatory; Augusta makes a noise from the back of her throat, a wet sound that is half a whimper and half a swallow.

Later, she will clean the wounds herself. They do not speak.

Some things get lost along the way.