In battle, they were skirmishers and javelin throwers, not recognized as formally belonging to any group. They had been sent to scout precisely because they were expendable. They knew it and did not like it. Flavius could scarcely blame them for retreating from whatever they had seen. They had to watch out for their own backs. One of the men was wet to the waist. The other man spoke. “We couldn’t see all of it, sir. But what we saw was, well, immense. We saw a piece of its side moving past us through the tall river grass. It was the diameter of a hogshead, sir, and that was close to the end of it. We aren’t cowards. We went toward it, for a better look. And then, close to a hundred feet away, this head reared up from the reeds.”

“Glowing eyes!” broke in the other scout. “On my word, sir, big glowing eyes. And it hissed at us, but the hiss was more like whistling. I had to cover my ears. It kept to the water, and the reeds hid most of it from us, but what we could see was immense. From the size of its eyes and head, it had to be—”

“That’s twice now that you’ve admitted coming back to report to me on something that you haven’t completely seen,” Marcus had observed coldly. “It is the function of a scout, is it not, to see things and then come back to report? Rather than to come back to report what he has not seen?”

The first man scowled and looked at his feet. The second scout flushed a deep red. He didn’t meet Marcus’s gaze, but there was no shame in his voice as he said, “Some things are so strange that even a glimpse of one should be reported. That is no ordinary snake, sir. And I’m not just speaking of its size, though it dwarfs any other snake I’ve ever seen. Its eyes glowed when it looked at us. And it more whistled than hissed. It didn’t flee at the sight of us, as most snakes would. No. It challenged us. And so we came back to report it to you.”

“River dragon,” someone said into the silence that followed the scout’s words.