Chapter XXXIV
XXXIV
The magistri were trying to kill him. That was the only explanation Felix had for the way he felt when he nearly collapsed onto the floor of his cell at the end of the fifth day of training.
There was only one training day left before the games, and it was clear, Jovan wanted them to feel endless.
He lay flat on his stomach and let the coldness of the stone soothe his aching muscles. It even hurt to breathe.
Adel’s cell clanged shut, keys clinking in the lock. She said nothing until the guard’s footsteps retreated, leaving them in silence and dim lantern light.
“How’s your leg?” he asked, trying not to move.
“Better than you.” A rustling from her cell.
“I think I’m going to die.”
“You are not going to die.” Her voice sounded closer, just on the other side of the bars separating them. “That would be too great a mercy for Jovan.”
He grunted in agreement. It did sound like a mercy just now.
“Your hand is full of blisters.”
And it throbbed and burned. How did they expect him to wield a sword in two days? Not well. Perhaps that was the point. Torment now, death later.
Fabric tore on the other side of the bars.
“Give me your hand.”
He rolled his head to face her. Adel knelt at the bars and reached toward him, wiggling her fingers impatiently. A strip from her tunic dangled from her other fist.
“You don’t have to—”
“You spent hours patching me up. It is time I repay the favor.”
Pain speared his muscles as he pushed himself up and tried not to flop toward the edge of his cell.
Her fingers closed around his wrist.
“Touch me and it’ll be the last thing you do.”
She started, blue eyes jolting into his. “What?”
He lifted an eyebrow. Even that hurt. “Isn’t that the customary greeting for something like this?”
Adel stared at him a moment before her lips cracked into a smile of recognition. “Well, as you are about to die from these blisters, and I am the only one who can save you, if you kill me, it will be the last thing you do.”
His chuckle was cut short as Adel wrenched his arm from its socket—or perhaps she’d only lifted his arm and worked his hand through the net of bars. Her thumb swept across his palm, brushing away bits of grit, before beginning to wind the fabric around it.
The new guard had been the one to lock them in the punishment cells last night and he’d taken a few whispered minutes to explain the revised plan involving his pater. Lord, be in this plan. Grant us success.
His fingers curled, trapping Adel’s inside. “I will do everything in my power to ensure you live.”
Her eyes slid to his and she gave a sad shake of her head. “You keep saying things like that, Felix, but I am not a good person.”
“None of us are, not really—”
“You said your mater did not approve of you choosing the hard way of things, and my aipei was the same.” Her chin lowered.
“She urged me to give the desires of my heart to God and He would fill them in time—but I could not. I wanted a husband, so I slept with Eadric. I wanted to regain my honor and I joined Alaric’s war band.
I wanted wealth and fame and security, so I fought and schemed for it in the ludus.
Not once did I surrender anything to God.
I clutched my dreams in my fists, too afraid of losing them to let Him hold them.
” Adel circled a hand in a vague gesture at their cells.
“And I cannot help but think that this is what I deserve for trying to get it all on my own terms.”
He swallowed, her words finding a stinging hold in his own heart. Hadn’t he done the very same? Compromised his beliefs to work in the ludus, justified his unforgiveness and lack of church attendance and Scripture study—and hadn’t they led him to this moment too?
“We are not so different, you and I,” he admitted softly. “So I cannot sit here and tell you all the things you should have done, because I have a list of my own failures—and we both know what we should have done, anyway.”
Adel shrugged. “Why does it feel wrong to pray now that I’ve gotten myself into a mess I cannot escape? As if I should make things a little better before I take it to God, so He does not have quite so much to undo . . .”
A wry laugh escaped. He felt that too.
She continued talking in a voice weighted with memory.
“Telemachus loved to tell the story of a son who left his father, went his own way, and ruined everything. And when he finally came home, intending to beg to be a slave in his father’s house, his father ran to meet him instead.
Restored him to his place as son. He said God was that Father for us.
Waiting and ready for us to turn to Him.
” She sighed. “How can turning be so hard and too easy all at once?”
Felix said nothing. He knew that story and knew there was another son too. Self-righteous and unforgiving, believing he’d done everything right and could judge his brother. Was it possible to be both the prodigal and the older son?
God forgive me.
They lapsed into a silence, thick with their own prayers and contemplations. How could the most obvious component of the plan feel like a last resort, when it should have been their first action?
It was Adel who broke the silence. “I do not know if anyone can survive what is coming,” she whispered. “But you have given us hope, Felix. And that is a better gift than any I have ever received.” She swallowed, the next words coming slowly. “Thank you.”
He reached through the bars, clasping her other hand in his unblistered left one. “It will work, Adel.” His voice dropped somewhere toward a whisper.
Warm light played across her features from the lantern dangling from the ceiling outside their cells. Her expression was one of pity for him over his belief in something good at the end of all this. Her fingers shifted and tightened around his, painful and sincere.
“How do you know? How do you know the others will do what you expect?”
“It is my pater’s plan.”
“And do you trust him?”
Did he? Did he trust that his father would come through on his promise of rescue, even when Felix could not see the outcome, could not see all that he was doing outside of these close walls?
For so long, Felix had carried the weight of mistrust, the weight of all that needed doing on his shoulders.
And he’d done it. Worked and schemed and compromised, and still he’d ended up here.
And he could not do this alone. Not now.
He was forced to trust. To trust Telemachus and his pater and God. And did he? Could he?
He met her gaze and held it. “I do.”
She blinked, swallowed. “I do not trust easily.”
“I know.”
“I can always find a reason not to. Everyone has always let me down. But you have not given me reason to doubt your character.”
Her words might have filled him with a swell of pride a week ago but now left him wanting to weep at her heartbreak. At the walls she’d built to avoid further damage.
“And I have been waiting for you to betray me. To let me down. To prove that you are no different than everyone else.”
He knew that too.
“And then Jovan . . . and you . . .” Her eyes flashed back to his, glimmering in the lantern light, confusion and admiration tangling in their depths. “No one has ever fought for me before.”
Something in his chest snapped and broke at her admission. “Everyone else is a fool.” A statement he knew she would agree with.
A tear slipped past the dam of her lower lashes, tracking a streak of golden light down her cheek.
She tried to turn her face away, to hide it, but he reached up and cupped her face in his hands swiping the tear with his thumb.
Her eyelids flickered at his touch but she didn’t pull away, not even when he gently turned her face toward his.
“You, Adelgard, are a woman worth fighting for.”
She chewed her lip and he could see that she still didn’t believe it. Determination rose up, swift and strong and he knew if it took his whole life, he wouldn’t stop telling her until she believed it too.
Finally, she lifted brimming blue eyes up to his. “They do not mean for you to survive.”
He leaned forward, drawing her close enough that their foreheads touched between the bars. “Then it’s a good thing you’re worth dying for.”