The altar had been raised at the edge of the camp, a flat stone dragged from the riverbed and blackened by a hundred such nights. Before dawn, the air held the chill of bronze left in shadow.

Damianos knelt with his helm set beside him, and the throat of the ram lay open over the stone. The blood ran dark into the channel. Other men in the army made their offerings to Zeus, to Apollo, to whichever god the seer favored that season. Damianos had only ever brought his to one.

He spoke the words low. They were his own, shaped over years from what his father had beaten into him.

Ares, bronze-clad, mighty of spear. Ares, who walks in the dust of the fallen. Give me strength. Give me courage. Hold the fury from my own hands.

The last line he had added in his twentieth summer. He had never said it before the men.

He fed the fat to the fire until the smoke rose straight and thin. He did not hear you come. That alone should have warned him.

You stood a few paces behind the altar, wrapped in the himation he had ordered brought to you, the gilded fibula catching the first grey light. You did not kneel and did not speak. You watched the way one watches a man at his most unguarded, and then you watched the fire.

He poured the wine. Rose.

"Do you believe Ares loves you?"

His head came up sharply.

The question was not an insult. He might have borne an insult. It was quieter than that, and it went in like a splinter under the nail.

"Gods do not love men," he said. The words were flat, and they were his father's. "I have seen what they take. They accept what is owed. They weigh it. Nothing more."

It was not what the poets sang, and he knew it. The poets gave heroes gods who wept for them. Damianos had stopped believing in those gods on a field outside a town whose name he no longer spoke.

"Then why do you pray?"

Because my father prayed. Because the men watch. Because victory requires it.

The answers rose easily, and he found he could not give any of them to her.

The fire popped. Somewhere down the lines a horse stamped and blew. Damianos stood with the ram's blood drying on his hands, and for the first time in many years, he had no ready word.

You smiled, faint and without triumph.

"Perhaps," you said, "you are not praying for victory."

His expression hardened, an old reflex, a shield drawn before the blow. His fists closed at his sides.

"And what," he said, each word set down like a stone, "do you think I pray for?"

You did not answer at once. You looked at the gash across his cheekbone, and at the hand that had drifted, unbidden, to the place beneath his cuirass where the charm lay hidden.

The smoke bent.

Not toward him. Toward you.

He had asked Ares for a sign, as he always did. He had expected it in the bite of the wind, or the way the victim fell, or the cry of a hawk over the ridge. A war god answered in war's own tongue.

He had never once imagined the answer might come in a gentler one.