“The Emperor wants it,” I said helplessly. If the king himself wasn’t alive to be marched back to Rome, then Trajan had vowed to have the head for identification—and the hand that had been raised against Rome.

“Take him my right hand. He won’t—won’t know. Not many left-handers, eh?” He chuckled, and his teeth were black with blood. One of the lion’s paws flopped back, and I could see the horror of the wound beneath. The dead legionary had torn out half the king’s guts before going down himself.

Decebalus dropped the eagle, and it rattled with a clang against the stones of the solar disc. He hugged the ax against his chest a moment, then patted it and fumbled instead for the dagger at his belt. His teeth bared again like a skull, and I remembered the garrison he’d burned on the fringe of Dacia, the four sentries he’d left dead in the road, the men who had been tortured inside, and the skull that had been set up in the niche of the gate.

“You should have stayed here,” I said as he fumbled the dagger from his belt. “You should have minded your own business.”

In the end, his fingers wouldn’t close on the dagger’s hilt. He might have had the strength of ten once, but the river of blood had carried it all away. He looked at me, and I took the dagger from his hand. I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what prayers the Dacians had for their dying warriors, so I just touched the amulet at my neck, given to me by another warrior who’d had the strength of ten too, in his day. I touched the amulet, and then I put my hand on the forehead of the dying king and I cut his throat.

“Vix?” Titus blinked at me, as I stumbled into the immaculate little tent my friend called his own. “Aren’t you supposed to be getting drunk up there in Old Sarm with the rest of the legion?”

“See that the Emperor gets this.” I dropped a bundle at Titus’s feet. A lion’s paw with bloody claws flopped limply over his sandal. He looked gingerly into the bundle and leaped back.

“This too.” I jammed the eagle’s standard pole into the ground. “Take care of her. She’s had a hard night.”

“Vix?”

“She needs cleaning,” I said, not too distinctly. “The eagle shouldn’t be all bloody like that.”