Chapter VII #2
“If you cannot attend the Dacian matches this time, I’m sure Jovan and the others will understand.
And you will face another school in the coming weeks.
” His back remained to her as he spilled herbs and oil into the bowl of the mortar, then picked up the pestle and pressed it into the mixture in circular motions.
Had this man any clue what it took to be a fighter? To be the top gladiatrix of the Ludus Gallicus? It did not come by sitting about, waiting for something like healing. If you wanted to be the best, you went out and claimed it, fighting through the pain until it was in your hands.
“We fight our greatest rivals at the Ludus Dacicus next week. If you think for a moment that I will not do my part for my fellow fighters and my school, you are the greatest fool in Rome—and that is saying something.” She jerked her arm toward him as he turned.
“This is no joke. So wrap it up, or I will train without a bandage.”
His voice lowered, resonating with an odd tone that sounded like compassion. “If you insist on training, you will injure yourself further and be unable to fight for a much longer time, perhaps not ever.”
Adel broke from his steady gaze, hers sliding away toward the jars on the shelf that reminded her of the one in her room that spoke of hope. Future.
Futility, if the medicus was right. Several weeks might as well be a lifetime.
“I have to fight. If I do not . . .” She took a breath. Ordered the iron back to the front lines of her tone. “I have worked too hard to fall now. If I do not fight for my place at the top, no one else will. I cannot imagine you would understand that.”
His hands stilled as she spoke, and when she raised her chin, his eyes searched hers, the twin furrows between his brows deep enough to plant seeds in.
“I understand.” Carrying the mortar in one hand, he closed the space between them in two steps.
His quiet admission sent the prickle of gooseflesh racing over her arms. How could two words bring both the comfort of being seen and the terror of it all at once? Or perhaps, considering her stance on Romans, he was lying. Whatever it was, something about him unnerved her.
“I do not trust you.”
He lifted a wide shoulder and extended a hand as if she should join a line of others. “Think what you will about me, but you’re the one claiming your arm doesn’t hurt.” His expression was impassive, even defiant, as he leveled his gaze on her.
“It does not.” It did. A little. More than a little, maybe. But she certainly wasn’t going to admit that now.
“Stubborn.” The medicus leaned closer, reaching past her to set the mortar on the table, his granite eyes warm as hearthstones.
Adel tried to hold his gaze, refusing to be the one to look away, but her gaze snagged instead on the dark stubble on his jaw, and the way his mouth tipped almost imperceptibly when he noticed.
“Despicable.”
She felt the low rumble of his laughter in her chest.
“One of us is lying, gladiatrix.” His whispered breath brushed her cheek. “And it isn’t me.”
Arrogant.
He stepped away, cool air rushing between them, and she could breathe again. The smell of calendula, thyme, and olive oil struck her. Berit sometimes had difficulty breathing around certain flowers. Perhaps she had the same condition as her cousin?
He busied himself at the worktable again, picking up a tiny wooden box and shifting through its contents with one finger. “What are you called?”
Many things. Few of them good. Shame crawled up the center of her chest, dragging with it the memory of Eadric, surrounded by a group of young men.
He’d called her beautiful, murmured a host of honeyed words into her desperate ears.
They had flooded the cracked and empty places in her heart until she could no longer heed the warnings over the rush of his affection.
That rush had stilled days later, beginning to trickle out through the cracks when their eyes had met briefly across the village green, and then draining with a destructive force when his honeyed words turned to brutal barbs as he recounted the intimate details of his conquest to the circle of laughing men around him.
Adel cleared her throat, shoving aside the memory in search of her voice. She willed it not to waver. “They call me the , as you well know.”
“I am Felix Cassianus, same as my pater.” He lifted a needle to the light and squinted one eye as he drew a length of linen thread through it.
She’d heard that a Roman man would give his children his own name, no matter how many he spawned, binding them tightly to family and legacy. Not like her own family. Felix was a good name. And she hated that she liked the sound of it. That it seemed to rest well on his sturdy shoulders.
“I was born in Rome.” He didn’t seem to mind her silence, filling it comfortably with his own voice.
“But somehow it was never home to me, never . . . enough. As soon as I could, I went to Alexandria to study medicine. I thought I might find . . .” He shook his head with a slight shrug, as if he couldn’t quite find the word to describe the very longing she felt in her soul. “It.”
“And did you?” She pinched her lips, annoyance prickling that he’d baited her into a question.
A smile. “I did. Though it was not what I expected.”
Liar. “But you came back here.”
“My family is here.”
A pang struck her chest at his mention of family. Did he have a wife? Children? A sudden image of him with a clan of noisy children bounding at his heels sprang to her mind. Did he save his smiles for home? Would he love his daughters as well as his sons? Somehow she could believe it of him.
“And does it feel like home now?” She wasn’t sure why she wanted to know.
Didn’t truly want to hear him speak of a devoted wife, his houseful of children.
And yet . . . if he could find home, belonging, perhaps she could too.
Her family’s patch of dirt in the Balkans had felt as much like home as the series of war camps had.
This place, decidedly not home, had been the only stability she’d known.
And there was a comfort in it, belonging.
A place where her tarnished past need not affect her present worth.
A place where she could make something of herself all on her own.
“I’m not sure I know what home feels like,” Felix admitted, moving toward her.
The needle pinched between his fingers trailed a thread like a spider’s silk before he set it on the table beside her and picked up a tiny blade.
“But I have heard the priests say that is a good thing, since we are made for a higher home.”
She barely kept her jaw from dropping. The man gathered with the church? What was he doing in a godforsaken place like the ludus? He stepped closer, his sandalwood scent doing something odd to her ability to breathe. Definitely the herbs affecting her.
“I am called Adel—” Her own name emerged from her lips on a string bound to her heart. The syllables tugging painfully as it burst into the open. “Adelgard.” A piece of herself floating in the air between them that she could not reclaim.
“Adelgard.” He repeated her name in a voice that seemed to cradle it, to hold it up to the light like a jewel. She’d never heard her name spoken like that before. “What does it mean?”
“Noble protector.”
She felt his assessing gaze as his fingers slid beneath her arm, gently lifting it. “It suits you.”
“Not here.” Adel flinched as he cut the torn stitches and tugged them free of her skin.
“Yes, well, Rome has never called things as they truly are.” His gaze flicked up to her, then dropped to his work again. “Do you . . . miss your home?”
Her home was as elusive as his. If she found herself liberated, if she went home .
. . what would she find? A starving mother and sisters?
Was her atta even alive? Word had reached Rome that Alaric had suffered yet another defeat at Verona and had been pushed back to the Balkans.
Could she slink home too, like an unwanted dog? There was nothing for her there.
But here?
She lifted her good shoulder. “Why would I go back to that scrap of dust the emperor crowds us on like cattle awaiting slaughter? I am far better off in Rome. Here, I have made a name for myself.” Not her own name, perhaps, but a name nonetheless. “Rome loves me.”
“You’re a slave.”
She sucked in a breath, fighting back the sudden swell of tears. “I am protected, fed, revered, and cared for.”
“That isn’t love.”
His words cut deeper than his scalpel. “How would you know?” She tried to jerk free of him, but he held her firm in a grip that said he was used to wrestling gladiators to the operating table. And yet, he used none of that force with her.
“Hold still, or this will hurt.”
“Life is pain,” she spat. “There is nothing else.”
“There is so much more, Adelgard.” His quiet words stilled her.
She drew in a breath, let it out. Control yourself, Adel. Guard yourself. She stared into a corner where a worn broom waited to be put to task against the floor and struggled to replace the armor over her heart.
To feel nothing.
“Hurry up. You are wasting my time.”
“I could argue the same, since you’ve refused to follow my instructions and I am stitching you up yet again.” He did not sound as though he minded. He bent over her arm, keeping the same methodical pace as before. “I’m trying to be gentle and not hurt you more.”
A single huff of laughter escaped her chest as she stared over his bent head at the shelves of carefully labeled jars and lidded pots. “In case you have not noticed, the ludi are not places for a weakness like gentleness.”
“There is always a place for gentleness. It isn’t weakness. Rather a . . . power under control.”
She assessed him, as if the size of his arms or thickness of his chest would determine if he spoke true.
Like most who worked in the ludi, his build suggested that he spent time in the gymnasium.
Lifting weights most likely, if his shoulders and arms were any indication.
Even so, she couldn’t accuse him of using his strength to dominate.
“My atta would disagree.”
“Atta . . .” He squinted at the cut as he tugged the needle through. “I don’t know that word.”
“You say pater. He . . .” She shifted. Shut her mouth.
He looked up, dark hair waving over his brow. She averted her gaze, trying to smooth her features into something cold and indifferent. Rome loved her. Her atta could not. It was as simple as that.
“You miss him.”
There he went again, poking and prodding at things, trying to assess injury. And this time he’d gone too far.
She lifted her chin, swallowing down any emotion that dared weaken her tone. “If you do not want your own heart abandoned in one of your jars, may I suggest you finish so I can be on my way?”