The Legions of Fire Read Online Free Page A

six years older, even though she was on her second husband already!—Alphena knew that underneath she was afraid, not angry.
    She was afraid for her father. Ever since he met the Hyperborean wizard, Saxa had been acting strangely. He’d always been, well, a bit of a fool about the supernatural. Her father was a senator of Carce and one of the most powerful men on earth, so it was unkind of Alphena to suspect that he was unusually willing to believe in higher powers because he knew how incapable
he
was of intelligently exercising the authority he’d been given.
    Alphena stamped into the Black-and-Gold Hall without any clearernotion than knowing that she would shock everyone by being the only woman in the audience—and that Hedia wouldn’t follow her here. As soon as she was inside, she remembered seeing Publius Corylus coming up the street a moment before her stepmother drew her aside for an unwanted discussion.
    Corylus was in the front row, so Alphena strode down the aisle toward him. When one of the wealthy freedmen seated there glanced up, she showed him her left fist with the thumb raised. That was the way the audience voted death in the amphitheater.
    The freedman shot from the bench like a lion prodded into greater liveliness with a torch; he’d obviously understood Alphena’s mood. Very possibly he had heard stories about the would-be poet’s sister when he asked about the event he’d been ordered to attend.
    The freedman to whom he’d been talking looked up in surprise; he saw Alphena bearing down like an angry weasel. He scampered also, though his fat friend’s absence had cleared enough space already.
    Corylus looked startled, then faced front and pretended not to notice that Alphena had sat down beside him. For a moment, she’d started to let fear break through her mind’s surface of anger; Corylus’s action brought the anger back to full blazing life.
    Alphena wasn’t interested in Corylus; not
that
kind of interested. He was only a knight after all, and even that by sufferance: his father had managed to stay alive for twenty-five years in the army and had his status raised from ordinary lummox to knight. She knew that soldiers were necessary on the frontiers to keep out the even cruder barbarians beyond, but it seemed to Alphena that they should stay in the border districts instead of coming here to Carce.
    Of course Corylus wasn’t a soldier himself; and though Alphena knew he intended to become one, she found it hard to imagine the youth as what she imagined a soldier was. Maybe …
    Alphena didn’t blush, but she pressed her lips together more closely. She
was
smart, not bookish smart like her brother but in the way that let her look at people and things and understand how they fit together. When parts didn’t fit, one had the wrong shape. In this case, she knew that the mistake could be in what she thought a soldier was, instead of in the shape of Corylus who planned to become one.
    She still wasn’t interested in him. Of course!
    Alphena had been the only person to use the gymnasium for over a year. Lenatus had informed Saxa that Alphena wanted the sort of lessons he’d expected to give Varus. He’d hoped his employer would order him to do no such thing. The Senator instead acted as though he hadn’t heard the statement.
    Lenatus had been angry and embarrassed to train a woman, but Saxa paid well. The first thing a new servant in his household learned was that the master wanted to have a quiet life—and that if the daughter of the house was angry, she would make her father’s life a living hell until he did what she wanted.
    Lenatus had thereupon gotten on with his job, which, in the household of Gaius Alphenus Saxa, turned out to be training a young girl as though she were to become a soldier—or a gladiator. After a while he’d more or less gotten used to it. Alphena had heard him tell the cook that it