Chapter 5 - The Boy Who Became A Wolfe
They called it a "minor punitive campaign."
Of course they did.
The words sat wrong in Ivander's mouth from the first briefing.
"Bandit activity in the foothills," the tribune had said, tapping the map as if the little scratches of ink were the whole truth. "Disrupting supply. Harassing tax collectors. You'll march, scatter them, burn whatever rat nest they're using, and be back in time to drink your pay."
He'd smiled when he said it.
Men like him always smiled when they spoke about burning other people's homes.
Ivander watched the map.
Watched the tribune's finger.
Watched the little wooden tokens laid out in tidy rows.
He thought of his village. Of Meid. Of the tribunal legion that had called that massacre "necessary pacification."
His jaw clenched.
No one noticed.
He was just one more face in the line.
***
The Third Legion's formation, as their current commander liked to boast, was "balanced."
Five out of every hundred soldiers wore the white strips of healers, pouches stuffed with herbs, bone needles and gods-knew-what hanging from their belts.
Ten in a hundred were mages, cloaks marked with faded sigils, eyes hollow from too many nights spent staring at things men weren't meant to see and calling it power.
Fifteen in a hundred wore cavalry plumes: horseboys and mounted officers, all swagger and saddle sores.
Ten were archers, lean and squinting, fingers callused in clean rings from bowstrings.
The rest were the line.
Ivander was the line.
Sword. Shield.
One more body in the human wall.
At least, that's what he'd signed up to be.
The universe, as usual, had other plans.
***
They hit trouble on the third day into the hills.
It came with the rain.
Not a downpour. A thin, steady drizzle that soaked into cloak and leather and padding, turning the world into one long, grey smear.
The foothills were wrong. Too quiet. No shepherds. No smoke from cookfires. No sound of dogs.
Ivander's unit marched in tight formation, shields covered, spears slanted back, boots squelching in mud.
He shifted his grip on his shield and glanced along the line.
Eric was three ranks down, laughing at something a fellow legionary muttered, the sound damped by the rain.
Ivander's commander, Centurion Darius—square-faced, competent, not particularly imaginative—rode along the flank, horse picking its way over the rock-studded ground.
"Eyes open," Darius called. "Bandits like weather like this. Think it hides them. It doesn't. It just makes them die wetter."
The joke got a few dutiful chuckles.
Ivander's eyes stayed on the ridge lines.
He'd hunted in hills like these.
He knew how quiet wrong could be.
He frowned.
"Sir," he called, not too loud.
Darius reined in closer.
"What?"
"The shepherd huts," Ivander said. "We should have seen at least one by now. And dung heaps. And goats. There's nothing."
Darius snorted.
"They heard we were coming and ran," he said. "Good. Less to get in the way."
Ivander hesitated.
He wanted to say more.
He didn't. He didn't have the rank, or the proof.
He kept walking.
In his head, Meid grunted disapprovingly.
If the deer tracks stop, boy, you don't say, 'ah, the deer just learned to fly.' You ask who else is walking the path.
The hills funneled them into a shallow valley.
Mud sucked at their boots.
The cavalry had to fall back; the ground was too treacherous for horses.
The mages walked hunched, cloaks pulled tight.
Ivander's skin itched.
The signal came from the front.
Not the horn.
The scream.
One high, cut short.
Then the muddy air exploded.
Arrows fell from the ridges in a hiss like angry rain.
Not bandit arrows.
Too many. Too well-coordinated.
Something whistled past Ivander's ear and thunked into the shield of the man behind him.
"SHIELDS!" Darius roared, voice cracking into a bellow. "UP!"
Training took over before thought.
Ivander yanked his shield up, braced, opened his stance.
The world shrank to the curve of wood and bronze in front of his face and the muddy boots of the man next to him.
Arrows pounded into the wall.
The impact drove through his arm.
A few found gaps: a grunt here, a gurgle there.
Someone went down.
"Forward!" Darius shouted. "Out of the kill zone! Forward!"
The horn tried to repeat the command, but the sound was shredded by the sudden crash of something heavier than rain against the dirt.
Catapults? No. Too small.
Chunks of stone and glass filled with burning pitch exploded around them, splattering fire.
Mages cursed, raising flimsy shields that only caught some of it.
Ivander squinted through the narrow gap above his shield rim.
Silhouettes moved along the ridge.
Not bandits.
Armour. Formations. Banners he didn't recognise snapping wet in the wind.
"Empire?" someone gasped.
"Traitors," someone else spat. "Rebels."
Arrows stopped.
The hammer came down.
They charged the valley from both sides, sliding down the slopes in a coordinated rush.
Trapped. Funnelled.
The kind of fight you start if you want to crush a legion and have friends in the officer corps telling you where they'll march.
Darius swore, words Ivander had never heard a centurion use in public.
"Reform!" he yelled. "Into block! Anchor on the streambed! Mages, smoke, now!"
The first impact of enemy shields against theirs rattled Ivander's teeth.
This wasn't a raid. This wasn't a few hungry would-be bandits.
This was a damned army.
The line buckled.
Then held.
For now.
***
He didn't remember much of the first hour.
Just flashes.
A man in front of him falling with half his face gone.
Mud turning red underfoot.
His sword—the Zel, Meid's blade, still plain bronze in his grip—biting into a gap in an enemy's armour. The shock up his arm as metal met bone, then nothing.
He realised his mouth was open, teeth bared.
He didn't know if he was shouting or just breathing.
"Hold!" Darius roared somewhere to his right. "Hold, you sons of tired gods! They break first or we die!"
They didn't break.
They pressed.
Whoever they were had planned this well. They kept up the pressure, rotating fresh attackers into the front ranks while the Third's formation slowly, inexorably, tired, lines fraying as men slipped in the mud.
"Healers!" someone screamed. "Healer! Please—"
"No time," a voice snapped back. "Stuff that up. If it's not spurting, you're walking."
At some point, cavalry tried to flank them and found their horses sinking in the muck, legs breaking.
The screams of animals cut across human noise like knives.
The mages cast.
Fire fizzled damp on wet ground.
Someone managed a wind spell that shoved a group of enemies sideways, buying breath.
It wasn't enough.
Bit by bit, they were pushed back.
Not in a clean, controlled withdrawal, but in a slow collapse.
When the arrow took Darius, Ivander wasn't looking.
He just heard the cut-off shout, the wet thud, the ripple of sudden uncertainty in the line.
"Centurion down!" someone yelled. "Centurion—"
The right flank shuddered.
A gap opened.
Not big.
Just enough.
The enemy saw it.
Smelled it.
They pushed.
"CLOSE!" a lieutenant screamed, voice shrill. "CLOSE THE RANK—"
He went down too.
For a heartbeat, the Third Legion's line lost its spine.
Fear slithered through men who'd been standing like posts a moment before.
Ivander felt it.
He saw the breaking point.
He'd been inside it once, when fire swallowed his village and Meid was nowhere in sight.
This time, he refused.
His body moved before his brain caught up.
He stepped forward, banging the rim of his shield against the shields beside him.
"BACK!" he roared, shocked to hear his own voice carry. "BACK TO ME! ANCHOR HERE!"
The men on either side of him turned, eyes wide.
"I said ANCHOR!" he snarled, slamming his shield against theirs again. "You fall, we all fall! PUSH, YOU COWARDS!"
They pushed.
Not because of his eloquence.
Because he gave them something, anything, that sounded like a plan.
He looked for the streambed Darius had mentioned.
There. A shallow cut where water trickled, slicking the earth.
"Four steps back!" Ivander shouted. "On my count! ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!"
He counted louder than the screams.
He drove his back into the man behind him, forcing him to step.
They gave ground.
Not in a rout.
In a slow, grinding retreat.
Shields up.
Spears out.
He took the hit for the man on his left when the poor bastard's arms faltered.
"Up!" Ivander snapped, feeling the enemy's blade skid along his own shield. "You drop that again, I kill you myself."
The man grunted something that might have been a laugh.
They hit the slightly higher, slightly drier ground near the stream.
It wasn't much.
It was enough.
The enemy's rush lost some purchase as they tried to scramble up out of the mud.
"Left flank, pivot!" Ivander yelled. "You there! You're the hinge! Turn! Turn, damn you!"
He'd watched enough drills.
He knew how a block was supposed to move.
He'd never been in charge of it before.
He was now.
No one else was shouting orders that made sense.
He filled the silence.
He shoved with his whole body.
He cut.
The Zel sang in his hand, a low, ugly song of bronze through flesh.
At some point, his arms stopped aching.
They went numb.
His muscles moved anyway, fueled by a deep, chewing fear and something else.
Not glory.
Not rage.
A plain, vicious refusal to die like livestock.
Every time an enemy sword hacked at his shield, he imagined Ivy's deserter.
Every time an enemy face loomed in the gap above the shield wall, he saw Meid walking out the door.
He killed them.
Not cleanly.
Not beautifully.
He stabbed into legs when he could, into groins when armour parted, into throats when they were stupid enough to lift their chins.
The Zel slid in and out, slick.
Too slick.
He lost his grip once.
Almost.
His fingers tightened around the hilt.
The sword felt warm.
Ridiculous.
Bronze didn't warm like that this fast.
He had no time to think about it.
He moved.
Hours bled.
The sky shifted from flat grey to the darker smudge that meant evening.
The enemy had expected the Third to break quickly, with the centurion down.
They hadn't planned on a furious, half-broken legionary with too much stubbornness and a voice like a drum deciding he refused to move any further than the streambed.
Little by little, the press eased.
He heard shouted orders from the enemy side.
Saw them start to pull back, dragging their dead and wounded when they could, leaving the rest as meat for crows.
They hadn't crushed the Third.
They'd hurt them.
Badly.
But they hadn't broken them.
It was, technically, a failure.
The legion hadn't reached the supposed "bandit nest."
The hills weren't pacified.
Whatever grand plan the tribune had sold the capital had turned into a bloodbath in a muddy valley.
The officer corps would call it a "costly engagement." A "setback."
Ivander called it something else in his head.
A lesson.
About who you followed.
And what you did when no one was left to tell you where to stand.
***
They staggered back to camp in the dark.
The healers moved along the line like ghosts, splinting, binding, pouring bitter brews down throats.
"Sit," one told Ivander. "If you fall over on my watch, I'll hit you myself."
"I'm fine," he lied.
He tried to keep walking.
His legs disagreed.
They folded.
He landed on his arse, shield still strapped to his arm, sword still in his hand.
The healer sighed and squatted beside him.
"Open your fingers," she ordered.
He realised he couldn't.
They'd cramped around the Zel's hilt.
The healer pried them off, one by one.
He hissed.
The sword dropped into his lap.
In the torchlight, the bronze looked darker than it should.
Not the bright, clean dark of oiled metal.
Something else.
The healer followed his gaze.
"Nice blade," she said. "Old. Family?"
"My father's," he said.
She nodded, satisfied with the brevity.
Her hands moved to his arm.
Bruises. Cuts. A slice along his shoulder that needed stitching.
"Hold still," she said.
He held.
When she pulled the needle through, he thought of Ivy's words.
You're nothing. You're pathetic.
He thought of the men who'd pressed into his shield and found nothing yielding.
The line had held.
He'd held.
What did that make him, if not something?
"Who was giving orders?" someone asked nearby. An officer. Sick of hearing his own voice on the field, maybe, and wanting to know whose had replaced it.
"Centurion fell," came the answer. "Some Ghede lad from Meid's brood started shouting. People listened. Seemed to work."
"Meid's boy?" the officer said. "Huh. Didn't think the old goat had any more pups worth the leather on their shoes."
Ivander closed his eyes.
The healer tied off the stitch.
"What's your name?" she asked.
"Ivander," he said.
"You did good, Ivander," she said, surprising him. "We didn't all die. That's a win where I'm from."
"Doesn't feel like one," he muttered.
"Ew," she said, borrowing Nikolia's tone without knowing it. "You want clean victories, go join the poets. In the line, 'we didn't all die' is a feast."
***
The tribune called him to his tent the next day.
Ivander's body felt like it belonged to someone else.
He walked like a man made of leftover parts.
Eric tried to come with him.
The guard at the tent flap stopped him.
"Just him," he said. "Orders."
Eric frowned.
"I'll wait," he said. "In case they're stupid."
Ivander managed a twitch of a smile.
Inside, the tribune sat behind a table, map spread.
He looked cleaner than any of the men who'd been in the valley.
He hadn't gone down into the mud with them.
Of course he hadn't.
"Ghede," he said, as if tasting whether the name fit in his mouth. "Son of Meid."
"Yes, sir," Ivander said.
"Centurion Darius is dead," the tribune said, as if Ivander might somehow have missed that. "So are two of his lieutenants. The right flank should have collapsed."
"It didn't," Ivander said.
"No," the tribune agreed. "Because someone shouted loudly enough."
He steepled his fingers.
Reports were stacked by his hand.
Ivander recognised a few scrawls as Eric's.
He resisted the urge to lean forward and read.
"You pulled the formation back to the streambed," the tribune went on. "You pivoted the left. You held for… what, four hours?"
"Didn't count," Ivander said.
The tribune's mouth twitched.
"Some men break in a fight like that," he said. "Some men freeze. Some men look after their own skin and let the line rot. You… didn't."
Ivander said nothing.
He didn't know what to say.
He'd wanted to run more than once.
His legs just hadn't known how.
"Do you know what a wolfe is, Ghede?" the tribune asked suddenly.
Ivander blinked.
"A… what?" he said.
"Old tongue," the tribune said, waving a hand. "From before the Empire. A kind of hunting pack. Animals that don't look like much alone. Together, they pull down things bigger than them."
Ivander frowned.
"I thought that was just a story," he said.
"Everything is 'just a story' until it eats you," the tribune said. "Point is, legions like that image. They like to think of themselves as wolves. We train them as such. But most packs fail when the lead animal goes down. You didn't. You picked up the scent and kept running."
He leaned back.
"I need a new centurion," he said. "Darius is dead. His second is an idiot. His third is bleeding out in the healer's tent and will never hold a shield again."
Ivander's stomach dropped.
"Sir," he started. "With respect, I'm—"
"Not ready?" the tribune suggested. "Not talented? Not like your brother?"
Ivander shut his mouth.
The tribune's gaze sharpened.
"I've seen talented men fold in their first real battle," he said. "I've seen clever ones overthink themselves into a spear. You don't have the makings of a shining hero, Ghede. You don't have the pretty white teeth the bards like."
He tapped the map.
"What you have," he went on, "is the ability to stand where you've been told and refuse to move even when the world tries to tear you out of the ground. Men follow that. Not because they love you. Because you're there. Again. Still. After others fall."
Ivander looked at his hands.
They still shook, faintly, when he held them palms up.
He curled them into fists.
"You're giving me Darius's line?" he asked.
The tribune snorted.
"Don't flatter yourself," he said. "I'm giving you part of it. A cohort. See how you do when the next mess lands in your lap. You fuck it up, you die with them, and I find some other poor bastard. You hold, and maybe we paint a wolf on your banner."
Ivander swallowed.
"I'm… twenty," he said.
"Yes," the tribune said. "You'll either be a dead twenty-year-old or an old soldier one day. Pick which."
He slid a small, carved token across the table.
The symbol of a centurion's rank, stylised crest and all.
It felt too heavy in Ivander's hand.
"Report to the armourers," the tribune said. "Get the proper crest for your helmet. Talk to my clerk about pay. Try to look like you didn't just shit yourself."
Ivander hesitated.
"Sir," he said.
"Yes?"
"The men in that cohort," Ivander said slowly. "They're not… mine. Not yet. They're still Darius's. They might not listen."
"They'll listen to whoever keeps them alive," the tribune said. "You did that once. Do it again. Dismissed, Centurion Ghede."
The title sat on Ivander's shoulders like a cloak a size too big.
He left the tent feeling like he was wearing someone else's skin.
Outside, Eric straightened.
"Well?" he demanded.
Ivander stared at him.
"I'm a centurion," he said.
Eric's jaw dropped.
Then he laughed.
Loud. Joyful. Half disbelieving.
"Ew," he said finally, grinning. "Our useless little brother is leading men now. The world really is ending."
"I'm younger," Ivander muttered on reflex.
"Not where it counts," Eric shot back. "Come on, then, 'Centurion.' Let me see the fancy crest. So I know who to make fun of in front of the others."
Ivander managed a weak shove to his shoulder.
Eric shoved back, gently avoiding his stiff side.
For a moment, in the muddy chaos of a failed campaign, in a camp that stank of fear and poultices, Ivander let himself grin.
Not because he'd been recognised.
Because he hadn't broken.
Because for the first time, someone had handed him responsibility not out of pity or manipulation, but because he'd simply refused to fall down.
***
He stood in front of his new cohort two days later.
Men he'd bled with.
Men he'd barely spoken to.
Men who'd watched him shout in the valley and had, for reasons he still didn't fully understand, decided to listen.
They stared back.
He could read them.
Suspicion. Curiosity. A few smirks.
He cleared his throat.
"Centurion Darius is dead," he said. No point gilding it. "He held the line as long as he could. We're still here. That means we do his job now. All of us. Together."
A few nods.
A few hard faces.
"You know me," he went on. "Ivander Ghede. I shout. I swear. I hit shields. I don't have talent. I have stubbornness. You don't need my life story. You just need to know this: I don't want to die. I don't want you to die. The enemy will try to make both of those things happen. I intend to disappoint them."
A ripple of low laughter.
He lifted his shield.
"I'm not going to promise you glory," he said. "I'm going to promise you work. We're going to drill until you hate me. We're going to practise pivots until you can do them in your sleep. We're going to learn every inch of each other's steps so that when the next trap snaps shut, we move together instead of apart."
One of the older legionaries spat into the dust, then shrugged.
"Sounds better than dying because someone else panicked," he muttered.
Ivander nodded.
"Exactly," he said. "We're not heroes. We're not wolves from the stories. We're just tired men in bronze who refuse to be the first ones to fall. Do that long enough, and people start calling you something else."
"Like what?" someone called.
He thought of the tribune's word.
"Wolves," he said. "I don't care what they call us. As long as we're still alive to hear it."
They laughed again.
It wasn't much.
It was something.
He strapped the Zel at his side.
The hilt felt.. different.
Familiar, but more so.
Like a hand that had finally decided how it wanted to fit into his.
Stupid.
It was a piece of bronze.
It had no thoughts.
But as he drew it to demonstrate a cut, the blade caught the light in a way that made some of the men murmur.
"Old sword," one said. "Seen some work."
"It'll see more," Ivander replied.
His fingers tightened around the grip.
He could have sworn, just for a heartbeat, that something tightened back.
***
The next raid they went on didn't end in a mud-soaked stalemate.
It was smaller.
Meaner.
No grand rebel army, just a fortified hamlet that thought the Empire too busy licking its wounds to respond.
Ivander led his cohort at the front.
The archers softened the palisade.
The mages brought down a section of wall in a crunch of earth and splintered wood.
He raised his shield.
"Forward!" he shouted. "Line! With me!"
They hit the breach like a ram.
The Zel cut.
Again.
Again.
It slid under ribs, hooked behind knees, slashed across forearms.
He held the line when the defenders tried to swarm around their flanks, pivoting, blocking, shouting for the rear ranks to turn and present a new wall.
They did.
Not perfectly.
But they did.
When it was over, the ground inside the palisade was a mess of bodies, dropped weapons, overturned furniture.
Smoke rose from a granary.
Women wailed.
Children stared with wide, blank eyes.
Ivander's stomach twisted.
"Leave them," he told the men who were starting to paw through the houses for spoils. "Take food, take weapons, burn the empty buildings if you have to. Do not touch the people."
"Orders said–" one began.
"I'm your centurion," Ivander snapped. "Those are your orders. If the tribune has a problem, he can take it out of my hide."
The man hesitated.
Looked around.
The others watched.
Ivander's hand settled, very lightly, on the Zel's hilt.
The legionary spat on the ground.
"Fine," he said. "Less to carry anyway."
They took grain.
Tools.
A few terrified young men who'd been stupid enough to take up arms; they'd be marched back in chains and offered the choice between the mines and the legions.
They left the rest.
As they marched away, Ivander felt eyes on his back.
Not just the villagers.
His own men.
Weighing him.
He held his head up.
He was not Meid.
He was not his mother.
He was… something else.
Something in between.
A boy who became a wolf not by hungering for blood, but by refusing to let the pack be dragged into a pit.
***
When they returned to the city, the tribune got his token of victory.
Not a triumph; this wasn't that grand.
But enough.
A cart with confiscated weapons.
Isolated heads from the most stubborn defenders, spiked as a warning.
Men in armour marching in step.
People lined the streets.
Cheered.
Boos and curses from those who had lost someone to the Empire's long reach, swallowed under the noise.
Ivander marched at the front of his cohort.
Helm crest newly brushed. Armour polished as much as field conditions allowed.
The Zel rode at his hip, its weight a constant, grounded presence.
Eric marched a rank back, grinning like an idiot.
Nikolia watched from a rooftop, waving something that might have once been a clean cloth.
Their mother wasn't there.
She was on some distant road, holding some other line.
As they passed under an archway, a drunk shouted:
"WOLVES OF THE THIRD!"
The men around Ivander howled on reflex.
It started as a joke.
Then it caught.
One by one, voices joined: a ragged, raw-throated sound, part laughter, part warning.
Ivander didn't howl.
He smiled.
Ew, he thought, amused at himself. Look at you. Mud-soaked village boy, playing at wolf.
But he'd earned this much.
He'd held.
He'd led.
He hadn't died.
Yet.
Later, scholars would write of the Wolves of the Third, the cohort that never broke, led by a young centurion with a plain bronze sword that bit deeper than it had any right to.
They'd say the sword had a mind.
They'd whisper that it drank the will of the fallen and grew sharp on it.
Ivander would know the truth was simpler and worse.
The mind was his.
The sword was just the thing he chose to put between himself and the void.
For now, that was enough.