He fell to his knees, hearing the noise of the legion outside the tent walls. Not the family he’d been born to but the one he’d made himself, and he’d condemned them.
The world was spinning, an attack constricting his chest with aviolence he hadn’t experienced in so long. How unfair it would be to die now, leaving his men to fight this battle without him.
“Shit!” Felix snarled. “It’s one of his attacks.”
We cannot fall back.
“What’s wrong with him?” Agrippa demanded.
We cannot fall back.
“He can’t breathe!”
We cannot fall back.
“I know what this is,” Agrippa said. “I’ve seen it before. Felix, get Racker and tell him to bring the bee medicine!”
Marcus was on his hands and knees in the dirt, darkness pooling in his vision.
We cannot fall back.
Hands were rolling him onto his back, and then he heard the surgeon’s voice. Heard him shouting instructions, faces blurring, fading.
Now everyone would know. Yet another secret he’d fought so long and hard to keep, now out in the world.
Then smoke was wafting into his face.
“Breathe, you idiot!” Racker shouted. “Breathe it in!”
He couldn’t.
Agrippa slapped him. Once. Twice. Three times, the pain giving Marcus a heartbeat of clarity in which he managed a small intake of breath.
Then another.
And another.
He coughed on the smoke, the taste strange, but the tightness in his throat and chest was easing enough that he could get air into his lungs.
“How long?” Racker demanded. “How long has this been happening?”
He still didn’t have the capacity to speak, so Felix did it for him. “All his life. This one was bad, though.”
“And why,” Racker demanded, “was this never brought to my attention?”
“Because he wanted to keep it a secret,” Felix said. “It’s a weakness. You know how it goes.”
“So you pair of idiots have been helping him hide it? It’s a bloody miracle he’s still alive!”
“There’s no cure,” Marcus finally managed to get the words out. “Every physician in Celendor was consulted when I was a child. There is no cure.”
“But there is a treatment!” Racker screamed the words. “You cursed fool of a man; did you think you were so special that you were the only one? You have dozens and dozens of men in your ranks who suffer this, and I treat them all the time with a medicine I create. All I need to make it is bees!”
“Bees,” Agrippa repeated, nodding sagely. “This used to happen to one of my men. I carried a package of that stuff about with me, just in case.”
“Bees?”
“Yes!” Racker looked ready to hit him. “You’re too stupid to live, Marcus. I should have let you die so that you might learn a lesson about trusting the men who follow you.” Then he stormed out.
