Mark Paren

Thanks. An acknowledgment like yours means a lot to me.

A rider found him at the practice yard three mornings after the supper at Lucius’s table, a kinsman of his father’s sent hard on a lathered horse: the assembly had been called, and both Ingomar and his cousin were wanted home for it before the moon turned. Ingomar made him repeat it twice, standing in the mud with his own sweat still cooling on him, and felt something in his chest go still and careful in a way he recognized from childhood, the particular quiet that came before a thing he could n

Vetera had not changed in their absence, though Marcus found himself changed enough that it took him the better part of a day to recognize the camp as the same place he’d left. The same mud, the same drums marking the watches, the same smoke rising thin over the same rows of tents. He moved through it now the way a man moves through a room he has outgrown without meaning to, familiar and slightly too small at once. Training resumed the next morning as though it had never paused. Gnaeus gree

Thank you. It’s always a pleasure to know that my story resonates with readers in the way I intended.

I can tell the history hasn’t been lost on you. You’ve picked up exactly the tensions I hoped would surface. I’ve kept faith with the true story for the most part, though I’ve bent it slightly here and there, the way a story sometimes insists you must.

Loyalties will be tested.

They did not speak of leaving until it was already happening, the horses saddled and the fire's ash scattered before either of them found words for it. Marcus looked back once, at the grove's dark canopy closing over the path behind them, and felt something in his chest tighten around the leaving the way a hand tightens around something it isn't ready to set down. He did not say so. He suspected he did not need to. Ingomar rode a while in a silence that felt different from his usual unhurri

What a wonderful quote! I must admit that I was unaware of it, but yes, the poem is very fitting for this point in the story. Thank you, you’ve triggered an exploration of Walter Scott.

Thanks, this will probably be the shortest chapter of the story.

The gold had gone out of the light by the time either of them moved, sliding first to amber and then, by degrees too gradual to mark, to the deep blue-gray that meant the grove was closing itself for the night. Marcus felt it more than he saw it, a coolness settling into the air where the warmth had lain against his shoulder a moment before, and understood, with a small reluctance, that stillness could not be asked to last forever, however much he might have wished it. "We should have a fir

You’re reading it perfectly. One more contemplative chapter and things start happening.

Slow burn, but the fire is catching.

The gates of Vetera fell behind them a little after dawn, the fortress's noise thinning by degrees into birdsong and the steady rhythm of hooves on packed earth, until Marcus, glancing back once at the wooden walls receding into the morning haze, found he could no longer distinguish the shouted orders of the training yard from the ordinary business of any distant, indifferent world. "You look like a man leaving somewhere he's not certain he's allowed to leave," Ingomar observed, riding easi

Petronus is an ass and Marcus is alone and vulnerable.

Marcus is a typical horny sixteen year old with an impressive older man offering him attention. He's only human. We’ve all been there.