We caught up to the men in the plaza in front of the Hall. It was a battlefield. I smelled the dust. In that moment it smelled like home. The same dryness. Here, there was blood in it. I had no memory of those two things being combined.
Ahead of us was a soup of gray Hoplite tunics. And amidst them, the Legate in white and gold. His escort of Imperial Legionnaires was already in motion. Their defense was good. They wrapped shoulder to shoulder around him like a fist, ready if needed to become a wall.
"To the compound!" he shouted as his men carved a path through the crowd. "Double time!"
I went forward toward the Imperial company. Bastien put his shoulder into the gaps in the chaotic crowd as if he'd done it before. My men and I went through the gaps he opened before they closed again.
"Legate!"
He flinched from the effort of having to acknowledge me. He couldn't have stopped without losing the momentum his men were hauling him along with. His breath came in short, damp bursts. He didn't even turn his head all the way. He threw his voice back over his shoulder. "Not now."
I kept pace instead. "Please." I said it plainly, because there wasn't time to dress it as anything but what it was. "Heliqar is part of the Empire. We are in good standing. We claim Imperial sanctuary."
"Denied."
He squeezed the word out. He'd meant the refusal to sound imperial, but it came out like he was refusing a second helping because he was already too full. Aside from the physical effort of saying that, it was kind of bureaucratic cowardice. Refuse before the question finishes, so there's never a moment he could be blamed for the considering.
I had no idea how to respond to that. I was still composing something useless when the centurion at the Legate's shoulder closed a hand around his commander's arm.
The Legate rounded on him. "What?"
The compact, gray-stubbled centurion who'd said nothing at all until now kept his voice low. He was in a crowd, making an effort to be heard by exactly one listener. "Sir. That man is a Wielder. If Ruvuk gets him back, he'll have regained his most powerful weapon."
"A Spartovan Wielder isn't ours to take in the first place." Flat. Immediate. Just reciting a rule. "We don't reach into another person's house and walk off with what it keeps in the cellar. That's how you get a war."
I realized then what I should have understood when I saw the other man with the black stone in the special uniform. He had only been brought out when the Tribunal needed a verdict too clean to argue with, and put away again after. That man was usually unnamed and unseen, exactly the way they preferred it. That was what Spartova did with a Wielder it owned. It didn't free him. It buried him down deep and protected him with other specially uniformed soldiers. Any state with a Justice Stone would be frightened of what someone could do with one. They would have to bury their Wielders, because one answering to no one was a blade with no handle. No empire reached into a rival's armory for the one weapon both sides had quietly agreed to leave sheathed lest they both be destroyed by it. I finally saw the shape of the cage I'd been in since the day Ruvuk found me.
"That's my point, sir. He isn't Spartova's." The centurion hadn't let go of the argument, or of the Legate's arm. "Not anymore. He's Ruvuk's. And Ruvuk answers to no Strategos and no Tribunal. That's the entire reason half that hall just tried to put a spear through him."
"That's a matter for the Strategoi to settle among themselves."
"It was, sir. Until twenty minutes ago."
Silence.
"Because of him." He didn't point. He didn't need to; we both knew whose name was sitting in the space where one would have gone. "Every man on those tiers just watched Ruvuk condemn himself in front of five hundred witnesses. Whatever becomes of this starts with one question: who gets him."
He took a breath, hoping that the Legate would figure it out. But apparently the Legate was spending all his mental energy putting one foot in front of the other.
"Hand him back to the rebels and we hand Ruvuk his weapon back with our own arms, when it matters most. Keep him out of both sides' hands instead, and the Strategoi fight this war with Ruvuk's biggest weapon sitting in an Imperial compound. What the Emperor decides to do with him after is the Emperor's business. Today, he's worth more to Olympos in our hands than properly accounted for in someone else's."
He was arguing for our lives with the only tool the Legate would listen to: self-interest. That centurion was solving two problems with one decision.
The Legate had come to a standstill, but something had changed.
"Very well." The Legate huffed. He turned to the officer nearest him and gave an order I couldn't hear. Then, for the first time since I'd gotten in his way, he actually looked at me.
"Prince of Heliqar." He said the title carefully. "You are under Imperial protection."
A beat. Then, quieter, almost to himself, in a tone I don't think he meant for me to hear at all:
"Sun preserve me. My ancestor has suffered enough for my failures."
I had not fully understood his reference to the Imperial religion since I had not read their books or consulted with their priests. We donated to Heliqar's Temple out of political obligation. I only knew, standing in that plaza with the dust and the wrong smell underneath it, that I had just changed owners rather than circumstances. The only thing anyone in that conversation had actually asked was whether I would be useful. It was, at least, the first sentence in twenty minutes that hadn't ended in the word no.