The raspy bark of the subcenturio rose into the biting air, sharp enough to cut through the whistling wind. The Crown’s Hounds were a different breed from the heavy Legions; as a cavalry host, their blood and bones were tuned to the saddle. They didn’t bother with the granular ranks of the infantry; their smallest unit was the subcenturio, and the notion of a decurio was as foreign to them as a plowshare. They were built for the charge, for the lightning raid, or for the unified thunder of a nearly a thousand hooves.

They were as shifty as water, there would be no use in enforcing on them such discipline, for one cannot hold water in his hands without it slipping away.

Ratto shifted his weight, feeling the strange, soft give of the grass beneath his boots. To a Hound, the earth was usually just a blurred floor seen from the back of a galloping stallion, leveraged only for mounting steel. Now, he stood as a common footman, clutching a javelin in his right hand while three more bristled from the leather sheath on his back.

Around him, the formation was a mess of grumbles and clashing shields. They were trying to form ranks ten men wide and five deep, a geometry that felt entirely unnatural to men who measured distance by horse-lengths.

"Oi, Robett! Over here, you half-wit! Step to your right and stay there!" Screw-nose growled, jerking his companion into place with a violent shove of his shoulder. "The rest of you, get in line behind him. Don’t be shy, you ain’t virgins. Nut to butt, move it!"

"Oi, I ain’t no woman!" Boyle Ass-boil barked back. He turned around, shoving the man behind him just as the ranks began to close.

The tension of the coming battle suddenly buckled under the weight of a soldier’s boredom. Someone in the second rank started a lewd, rhythmic humping motion against the man in front of him, and within seconds, the crude humor caught like wildfire.

"Nut to boil! Nut to boil!" the men chanted, the cadence picked up by a dozen throats. The line dissolved into a ridiculous, swaying mess as men began mock-humping the backs of those in front of them, their laughter barking out over the emerald field.

Boyle, usually the first to complain loudly about the weeping cyst that had earned him his name, turned purple with rage. He swung the butt of his javelin at the shins of the men surrounding him. Apparently, talking about his ass was fine, but having a dozen Hounds grinding against it was where he drew the line of his dignity.

When in Romelia, do as the Romelians do, Ratto thought with a wry grin. He joined in the absurdity, jostling the man in front of him while the soldier behind did the same to him.

Many said the Legions were the sons of the state, and that the Prince was the father of the nation. Ratto looked down the line, watching Limp-dick challenge Red Eye to a pissing contest. Red Eye won handily, his stream arching over the grass until the wind caught it, whipping the golden spray into a shimmering curve that vanished into the green.

Truly, Ratto thought, the Prince of Yarzat has sired a most peculiar progeny.

Yet, for Ratto, the "Father" title wasn’t a joke or a poetic flourish. To the others, Alpheo was a commander; to Ratto, he was the man who had pulled him out of the gutter. Were it not for the Prince, Ratto would still be a shivering rat in a back alley, pickpocketing for copper until he was old enough to be tossed into a dungeon for forced labor.

That was a kindness he intended to repay in blood. He had been fifteen when he was shipped off to Egil’s command, and he had spent the last six chasing the hunger from his chest. His life of starvation had ended the moment the Prince’s coin touched his hand. It was a debt he would never truly settle, so the best he could do today was stand his ground, hold his javelin, and make sure he didn’t get in the man’s way while the world tried to kill him.

Ratto still remembered the day Alpheo had pulled him aside, away from the din of the drying racks and the sharpening stones, to confide in him his next task. It had been a beautiful day, the sun high and indifferent, but the weight of the Prince’s hand on his shoulder had changed the world. To lead a wing of his own? He had never expected it, not even while he was growing up under the Butcher’s bloody wings.

A pang of pain came as he thought of him.

He still missed the Butcher. Everyone who had known the man did. He had been a friend to anyone he could bother, and a terror to everyone else. His loss had been a stone in the Prince’s heart, but that was the nature of their trade. For men who made their bread by the sword, it was the height of folly to expect anything but a harvest of steel and sorrow.

Ratto was no different. Perhaps today was the day he finally settled the debt he owed the man who had caught him pickpocketing in a muddy alley years ago. He hoped not, he had finally found a reason to keep his blood inside his veins. A girl, receptive enough to his clumsy courting and above him station, though he knew he’d need the Prince’s permission before he could truly call her his own.

A voice that sounded like gravel being ground in a mortar reached upon his ears.

"Get serious you fucking curs!"

The shout belonged to Rykio, their commander. His snarling hound-helmet was a bit too fitting at the moment, his eyes peering through the steel maw with a lethal intensity. "This is a battlefield, not a gods-damned brothel! Straighten those ranks before I straighten your spines!"

"But Cap," Red Eye shouted back, his face splitting into a grin as he wiped a stray drop of piss from his boot, "you can’t hasten love, that’s a known fact. We’re just getting well-acquainted."

"My axe is going to get real passionate with your ass if you don’t stop fucking around!" Rykio roared, his hand white-knuckled on the haft of his weapon. "We have six thousand Oizenians coming to tuck you in, and I don’t think they brought any grease!So clench your butt and bury your steel in their chests!"

"Aye, Cap’s right," Robett chimed in, though he had been the one to start the humping in the first place. "Save the thrusting for the bastards in the gold spurs. I hear they squeal like virgins when you stick ’em."

"I heard they don’t even have balls," Boyle Ass-boil added, twisting his head and spitting on the grass. "Just smooth skin between their legs like a doll. That’s why they need such big horses, to feel like men."

The crude laughter flared up one last time, a desperate, vulgar shield against the looming terror.

"I’ll show ’em balls," Limp-dick muttered. "I’ll show ’em mine right before I cave their chests in."

’’No one want to see your Limp dick!’’ Called Ass-boil.

Limp Dick seemed about to shout something in response but he could not. For then, it happened.

The air went still,and silence went riding as it they were on a crypt.

Aooooooooooooo

A war-horn, deep and mournful, erupted from the Oizenian lines. It wasn’t the sharp, biting call of the Yarzat signals; it was a long, low bellow that sounded like the earth itself was moaning in pain.

The laughter died instantly. The crude jokes vanished into the cold wind, silenced more effectively than any threat from Rykio could ever manage. The humping stopped. The pissing stopped. The men suddenly remembered they were standing with their backs to a deep river, thinned out like a piece of overstretched hide.

Ratto gripped his javelin until the wood groaned. The slick, damp air made his palms feel cold, but his blood was beginning to hum. The thud of the Oizenian drums began to roll across the plain, a slow, rhythmic heartbeat of doom.

On the horizon the once needle-like figures began to grown, and the rain finally started coming down.

Driplet fell form the sky, silent at first then strongly the more the time went.

He felt the water going to those small nicks in the armor where skin gave way beaneath the armor.

They were not the third, behind the iron there soft flesh. They were not the Primogenia with the proud awareness of the first-made. They were not even the Fourth with their self-burning rage.

They were the hounds and their bite was hard.

Their wolf’s pelt became nest for trembling driplets of water that with time fell from the open snarl, like the saliva of a waiting predator readying himself for the pounce.

But this time they were not the wolf waiting in bushes, but instead the rabbits waving their butt at the enemy.

The prince had laid a bait, and they plaid their part.

The play was over. The Hounds were on foot, the battle was soon to be opened, and the Prince was watching, trusting in his own men to held the line.

And they were damned if they let that trust go under,

"First rank!" Rykio’s voice was no longer a snarl, simple cold professionalism.The line went still, men gripped javelins and got into position without much fanfare.

They after all were man of war, and they had been tasked with by the Prince for the first lines.

And so with firmness in their heart, they set themselves to do their bloody-damn duty.

And as Ratto stood in his own position, the word of his father came unabated to his restless mind.

’’Follow me into this night of evil and darkness , and I swear you, morning waits on the other side!"

And as the horses thundered down the green expanse, like the hungry tide they were.

As some of the men whipped out their prayers. As the rains come falling down on them.

As the man readed themselves to be the wall against which the Flower of Souther chivalry would break against.

They howled.

They howled like wolves.

They howled like the family and pack they were.

They howled like men given a reason to live and take pride.

They howled for they would pay for their name with their own pounds of flesh.

For they were the Prince Hounds, their bite was hard and none on that field could take that away from them.