The aide was already hurrying away, shuffling another armload of wax tablets. “Enjoy the rain, Tribune!”

“Dacia’s a bad place,” Titus heard one of the legionaries whisper to another, the first week on the road. “Bad, and getting badder. That king of theirs, he wears a lion skin and he’s eight foot tall!”

“Ten,” another legionary disagreed. “Counting the horns.”

“You know what he does to Romans when he catches ’em? I heard the last scouting party came back without their heads!”

A hoot from behind Titus. “If they lost their heads, then they wouldn’t be coming back from anywhere, would they?”

“Just sayin’…”

Titus turned to look over one shoulder at the legionaries. Six of them, hulking and identical in their armor and muffling cloaks, faces so wrapped against the cold in scarves and helmets that he couldn’t tell them apart. A double guard, because Germania had been restless lately with Dacia looking troublesome again. Trajan had drubbed the Dacians into submission a few years back, but Titus knew the submission hadn’t lasted long. Already there were rumors of scouts picked off in Dacia, supply lines harassed, messengers shot at from the trees… but the six legionaries guarding Titus and the centurion on their expedition to the Dacian garrisons didn’t look worried. They laughed and they joked, they cursed and they sang filthy songs, and Titus envied them. At least they had someone to talk to. Whenever the scouting party stopped for the night at a way station, the legionaries put up their booted feet and passed around wineskins and dirty stories. Titus watched wistfully from his own table—alone, of course, because officers and legionaries didn’t mix on the road any more than they did in the fort. He couldn’t even take his father’s little bust out of his pack and talk to that. The men already despised him enough for his brand-new plumes and his soft hands and his utter uselessness; he wasn’t going to give them something else to jeer at by talking to a statue.

Soon enough the firm roads and traveler way stations of Germania gave way to the muddy tracks and forested hills of the Dacian border. The centurion had the tents pitched close every night and began posting sentries on watch. “No one’s going to catch us napping,” the centurion said shortly, and Titus wondered if he’d heard the rumor too about the heads.

“I can take a shift,” Titus volunteered.

They all looked at him blankly. “Why, sir?”

Titus couldn’t think of a reason either. Gods, I want to go home.