Mara narrowly dodged the tap on the side of her head from Gaius's book, spinning around on the stool at the rough table he'd pulled into the sunlit part of the kitchen. "Be grateful for the gifts I give you," her teacher groused.

Gaius was a study in contrast. She knew him foremost as a fearsome warrior able to break any challenger with an effortless savagery, but secondly as a devoted scholar, the only one besides her mother who could not only write his name but go on at length about histories and philosophies in his precious books. He always had a trade for any merchant who brought a volume with them. The man was in his middle years, but had yet to go grey, and very much rough around the edges. He was always clean, clothes mended, but his manners were brusque and foreign.

It was easy to adore Gaius when his harshest words were critiques, not insults. Even at ten years of age, Mara knew the difference. "I am," she said, though she didn't feel particularly chastised. Her spirits were high and she couldn't really push the thoughts of war out of her head.

Everyone spoke so highly of her father, particularly on the battlefield. He was an eldritch knight, one who could devastate a field of warriors with a spell before cutting challengers apart with his own blade. They had never allowed her to see such a thing. There had been a great argument about the strange army that had neared the Red Mountains and her father had joined the other lords in setting forth to drive them away.

"Then the least you could do is focus," Gaius growled.

"But Father will be back today," Mara said. Outside of her father's earshot, she used the full, formal mode of address even though it was not normally permitted.

Gaius's jaw tightened grimly. "I hope he weeps as he rides," her teacher said bluntly.

Mara's brow creased in confusion. "Why?"

"I warned him against this idiocy," Gaius said with uncharacteristic anger. Normally he was a placid figure, even in battle, wielding an unassailable calm. "There may come a day when the children of the Red Mountains bitterly rue the day their fathers drew the cold machinations of Void onto their soil."

"But they won," Mara said, fighting the sudden urge to curl up. Gaius's anger reminded her of the tempers of others, whose scars she already bore.

"Did they?" Gaius said bluntly. "That remains to be seen."

The sound of horses pulled both of them to the door and Mara couldn't help a quiver of excitement through her body. Her father had returned, stopping out in the square with his soldiers with captives in tow. Without waiting for Gaius, she sprang from her stool and darted outside, almost colliding with Sabine on the street.

"Mara!" her sister squeaked in protest. Sabine was only six, but already favored their mother with fair hair instead of the brown that Mara shared with their father. The blue eyes they held in common, but Sabine's face was already marked to match their mother's.

Mara traced her fingertips over her own cheekbone. So far, her own face was unmarked. Her mother had gently tried to say that maybe it would take more time, but everyone else whispered a crueler answer: never.

Gaius stepped out into the square his house adjoined, grabbing Mara by the shoulder and wrenching her back from the soldiers. He didn't manage to grab Sabine, who let out a squeal and ran straight for their father, a tall and muscular man with the tattoo-work of a dragon swirling up one arm and curling around his neck. His face bore an intricate pattern of runes. His shoulders were squared, wearing pride as a mantle in a way Mara wished she could.

Everything in his stern face softened as he scooped up Sabine. "How's my princess?" he said fondly, spinning his younger daughter around.

Mara's fingers dug into Gaius's arm when he wrapped one around her and pulled her into his side. "I want to see him," she said, looking up at her teacher.

"I know," Gaius said, his expression unreadable. "Now is not the time."

"But—"

Gaius gave her a hard, meaningful squeeze. "No."

Mara's hopes deflated. She looked past her father and the jeering, laughing warriors to the captive they had. The man stood with the crooked back of an archer, dark-haired with bronze skin. His short beard was crusted with blood from the beating he had received, no doubt on the field of battle or perhaps since. Some of the cuts to his face could have come easily from a rider's whip.. His arms were in front of him, where he'd been tied and forced to follow a horse, but one looked to be more hanging than normal. Everywhere, he was covered in untended wounds.

"Poor bastard," Gaius muttered.

The man seemed utterly serene even after all of his mistreatment. He stared at his captors without a trace of fear.

"A fine offering for Tharsas," Mara's father said.

It was an old tradition, one seldom-used these days, but sometimes particularly recalcitrant prisoners of war were killed, to serve the god of war in the next life. Mara clung to Gaius, looking up at her teacher. His expression was as soft and yielding as iron.

"Your arrogance will be the end of your people, Luukas," Gaius said, his voice rolling out across the square like thunder.

Mara's father handed Sabine off to her uncle and strode forward, his eyes fixed entirely on Gaius. He didn't have a glance to spare for his eldest child who was clinging to the warrior-scholar now. Luukas's blue eyes narrowed. "You know nothing of our people or our ways, Gaius," the eldritch knight said. "I could end you with a thought, as easily as I shattered the black shields of your demon-kissers. There is power enough in the Red Mountains to protect every soul within for thousands of years against any enemy."

"Your ignorance is even more vast than that you assign to me," Gaius said coldly. "I know little of magic, but you know nothing of the dragon you have nicked in its tail. When it rounds on you, it will devastate your world."

Luukas's lips twitched into a scowl, anger and contempt mingling. "Gareth, take my daughter inside," he ordered. Immediately, his brother departed with Sabine, as he was no doubt well aware of what was coming.

"Mara, go inside," Gaius said, giving her a shove back towards the door to his home. She scurried that direction, but turned to see the confrontation between the two men.

"I will prove you wrong, Gaius. Find comfort that I have not treated you as I did this," he said. Magic flashed around his fist as he clenched it. Behind him, the prisoner fell to his knees with a cry of agony, ribs snapping in a sickening crack. The breaking of bones seemed to spread further, ripping apart his body beneath his skin. "Tharsas, Lord of War, your servants bring you victory!"

Gaius did not lower his eyes, no matter how sickening the sight was. "All you have wrought is ruin."

Mara watched, horrified. Hearing the man cry out and the nauseating sounds of splintering bone was almost more than she could stand. Her stomach churned like she was going to vomit and she closed her eyes tightly, covering her ears with her hands. Her mother had told her many times that magic could be as dangerous as it was wonderful, but this was...horrible.

She barely heard the draw of steel and opened her eyes again. Gaius had pulled the knife he wore along the back of his belt, but made no move towards Luukas. Instead, he stepped to the prisoner before anyone could react and knelt beside the man.

The archer looked up at Gaius and said something that hit Mara's teacher like a thunderbolt from the blue. The warrior interrupted the torture of the captive by killing him with a single blow, snapping his neck with a crack as he brought the blade down. He stood and turned to look at Luukas. "Are you satisfied?" he snarled. There was an unusual roughness to his voice, a raw pain. "Or shall I tell your beloved what horrors you have been working?"

"The gods remember deeds, Gaius."

Gaius gave no answer, not even when Mara's father ordered the body be displayed outside the settlement. Instead, he collected Mara. "You should not have had to see that," he said as he scooped the crying girl up into his arms and took her back into his house.

Every twitch and contortion of bone under skin played out behind her eyes like it was happening anew. She would have nightmares for a long, long time to come. "What did he say?" she asked weakly when the sobs subsided.

"The archer?" Gaius said. He gave her a tight squeeze, holding her against his chest in a rare embrace. "That he was sorry, to the one he loved."