Chapter XLIV
XLIV
FELIX WOKE TO BARS OF GOLDEN LIGHT streaming into a rocking room that was warm and smelled of fish. Fish? He blinked, trying to focus on something other than the blinding light. Was he dead now? Was this heaven?
“He’s not dead!” a voice beside him shrieked. Feet slapped against the floor, followed by the crashing of a stool. “Mater! Come quick! He’s awake!”
He felt his lips sliding upward. “Hello to you too, Oppia.”
The impish face appeared above his, smile tremulous and wide. “I’m so glad you’re not dead.” Her braid swung down over her shoulder and smacked him in the mouth.
He blew dark hairs free. “Me too.”
“Felicia was sure you wouldn’t survive but I knew you would!” She grinned, the triumph of being right over her older sister nearly rivaling the joy that he was alive.
“Oh, Felix.” Mater’s voice burst from the doorway and then she was there, resting a palm against his forehead, Cassia and Felicia flanking her, voices all tumbling at once with their thankfulness that he was alive, their sureties that he wouldn’t make it.
“Where am I?”
Mater chewed her lip. “On a ship bound for Gaul.”
“Gaul?” That explained the smell of fish. Felix felt his brow pinch. “Why Gaul? Where’s Pater? Adel—the others . . .” He shifted, a faint clink of chains drowned by the dull pain throbbing through his stomach.
Mater gently pressed his shoulders down. “Emperor Honorius ordered that all volunteer gladiators be sent home, and that the remaining prisoners be sent to the mines in Gaul.”
He let his eyes drift shut, dread curling in his gut at the thought of Adel in the mines.
He had no doubt she’d put up a good fight if any tried to harm her, but for how long?
He tried to recall if she’d been wounded in the arena and couldn’t.
His mind held only a vague image of her with a bloody knife. “What of the Visigoths?”
“We rescued a dozen or so, the day of the games.” Pater’s voice rumbled from the doorway.
Floorboards creaked as he made his way to the bedside.
“It might have been more, but we had so many intercepted by their own trainers and guards on the way. The monks had no choice but to pretend to be lost or mistaken so they would not endanger the mission. The ones who made it through the battle were shuffled out of the city under cover of night. Honorius sent them back to Alaric with a delegation optioning for peace, though no one is to know.”
The knowledge that Adel was gone forever cut through his chest like a rusted scalpel, leaving a jagged gash. Was she with her family? Had they welcomed her home? Was she happy? At peace? Lord, let it be so.
“Will Alaric agree to peace?”
Pater shrugged. “Perhaps for now. But I do not see the peace lasting.”
Felix closed his eyes, the rocking reminding him that all was not answered. He looked up. “Why are we on a ship to Gaul?”
Pater’s gaze flicked to Mater’s and resettled. “You were convicted of stealing two imperial slaves from the ludus, and the attempt to steal others. You’re sentenced to a year in the mines for each unrecovered slave.”
“Two years . . . ,” Felix murmured. “And you?”
Pater smiled, “We were discovered—not with any gladiators, thankfully—but no one was interested in questioning a poor plumber in the sewers—nor out of them. But we decided to leave Rome. My prospects were not promising to begin with and now my name is tarnished for good.”
“Sorry.”
“We couldn’t be more proud of you.” Mater smiled and wrapped her hand around Felix’s.
“Not everyone has a brother convicted of saving people,” Oppia added, wedging herself between Felix and Mater. “I told everyone.”
Felix couldn’t hold back a smile. “Perhaps we should keep that part to ourselves, once we reach Gaul. It might be a bigger detriment to your marriage offers than telling everyone Felicia is bald.”
“Ilias told me what you said.”
Felix winced as Felicia pushed her way into the circle.
“But I’ll have you know, I accepted his marriage proposal anyway.” She sniffed and lifted her chin, slanting a smile over her shoulder to where Ilias leaned against the doorframe.
Had everyone abandoned Rome after the games?
“Telemachus?” he spoke the man’s name knowing the answer, but needing to hear it again, to confirm what he thought he remembered.
“He is with God,” Mater said gently. “Some say the emperor was shouting for the games to cease when he leaped into the arena. Others say as soon as he fell, they could not utter a word. That shame and revulsion washed over them all like a flood. They could not leave the amphitheatre soon enough. Something tells me these games will be the last.”
The smell of damp woodsmoke and earth nearly brought Adel to her knees. Emotion surged to her throat. The place of her dreams, her longings and unspoken hopes, lay spread across the valley below them in an array of huts and cooking fires.
Home.
She’d not seen Felix since Jovan ordered Sergius out of the infirmary and found another medicus on the street.
Or wherever one found medici. After food, bandages, and a trip through the bathhouse, Adel and the others were confined to their rooms for nigh on a week.
If ever she’d felt like a prisoner in the ludus, it was then.
The church in Rome had taken up Telemachus’s fight—in his stead or alongside him, she’d not been certain.
She knew only that when word came that Emperor Honorius would release the Visigoth captives into Alaric’s custody, it was a troop of monks who appeared after dark to usher them out of the city and escort them on their way.
They had been trundled out of the city of Rome under cover of darkness, wrapped in dark cloaks, dressed in the tunics and stolas of ordinary men and women.
No one who happened to see them would have assumed they were the fighters of the ludi. The last gladiators in Rome.
And now, peering at the village through oak branches, the feeling she always got before a fight slid into her knees, shook the breath in her lungs.
And the thread she’d felt tethering her to Rome yanked at her heart so painfully, she felt it might jerk free as easily as a child’s tooth on a string.
Had Felix survived the prison ship to Gaul?
The question ate at her. Every time she closed her eyes, nightmares assailed her.
The pugio lodging in his gut, the spear flying toward Telemachus, Berit collapsing.
In every dream she was there with them, so close, and yet her sword arm was weighted beyond lifting, and she was forced to watch their bodies jerk with the impact and fall.
She would awaken drenched in sweat, heart pounding, chest aching as if the blades had lodged within her instead. Over and over, night after night. Would they ever end, or would she suffer forever? Why were some spared and not others? It was a question she might never know the answer to.
“Ready?” The short monk called Gaius edged up beside her, dark eyes crinkled in concern. He’d been a good friend in Telemachus’s absence.
She fiddled with her atta’s ring, running her thumb over the twisted knotwork and the smoothness of the amber. The most valued possession of her family. “Yes.”
Two of the monks who had been sent into the village ahead of the group emerged at the edge of the collection of huts, drawing a group of fair-haired warriors behind them.
Adel’s knees wobbled as she took one step forward and then another.
Now or never. The others followed, tentative steps quickening, turning eager, thumping into a trot, then a run.
The two sides crashed together in a melding reunion of sharp cries and welcoming arms. Adel pushed past faces familiar and strange, but none dear.
Her heart swelled into her throat, hope and dread nearly choking her.
And then the emptied village was before her, the hugs and cries of reunited families at her back. And she was alone.
The weight of her hope nearly crushed the breath out of her chest. She turned around, watching the wild embracing, the clutching of faces, and the pounding of backs.
And then, between the shoulders of a father and son, the face of her own atta appeared, his brow creased with an age she did not remember.
She held her breath, half expecting to see him turn away, pretend he hadn’t seen her. He faltered, and then his face crumbled into trembling lines held together with firmed lips. He shouted over his shoulder while he shoved through the crowd, pushing into the open with arms wide and voice breaking.
“My daughter.”
And his arms were around her, holding her close with a love she’d longed for and never imagined possible. Especially not now. When he pushed her to arm’s length, to look at her, his eyes and cheeks were wet. “I thought I’d lost you.”
Adel swallowed back the tremors in her throat and held out the ring. “I brought this back to you.”
His large hand covered hers, closing her fingers over the ring.
“You are more valuable to me than any shiny stones dug from the earth. You . . . It is you . . .” He crushed her to his chest again, words tumbling fast as a spring stream, frozen and held back for far too long.
“I . . . I confess I did not know how to act at the news of you and Eadric. I reacted poorly. Forgive me, daughter.”
His confession washed over Adel with a welcome shock that made her suck in a breath. “Of course, Atta.” She rolled her lips between her teeth, tasting the tremble of salt. “But I was wrong to do what I did—”
“Shhh, all is forgiven. All is past.” Atta’s eyes crinkled as he smiled, pushing the hair from her face with calloused fingers. “You are home, and that is what matters now. We must celebrate.”
A yelp and bark from the camp made Atta’s eyes shut with a sigh that attempted annoyance. Adel whirled as a gray-and-white blur leaped at her, giant paws on her shoulders, warm nose pressing against her cheeks and neck. She laughed.
“Hello to you too, Linde.” Adel buried her face in the warm fur of the wolfhound’s neck, breathing in her familiar scent that, oddly enough, made her think of Felix.
Not that he’d ever smelled like a wolfhound, but he too had been loyal, barely tolerable.
An odd sense of homesickness swelled in her throat.
Gaius had said he’d been bound for a stone quarry to pay for the slaves he’d stolen from the emperor.
An unfair punishment when the emperor had released the Visigoths anyway—albeit secretly.
“That hound has been nothing but trouble with you away,” Atta grumbled.
“I’m sure,” Adel murmured. Linde dropped her paws and circled Adel, prancing and pausing only long enough to lick Adel’s hands and press her face against her legs before circling again.
A shout pierced through the noisy reunion. Adel turned at the sound of her name and was thrown backward into her father as her mother flung arms around her, enveloping her in the scents of bread and spring earth.
“Aipei.” The tears could not be held back now. “I’ve missed you.”
“And I, you,” Aipei murmured against her hair. “We prayed every day for God to—and you’re here. You’re home.”
Her sisters were there next with glimmering eyes and tight squeezes.
“Come, rest now.” Atta gestured toward the village. “Tonight we feast to celebrate and honor the men who have brought you back to us.”
Images battered her mind. Telemachus with a spear lodged in his chest. Felix crumpling with a dagger in his stomach. Both sacrificing greatly for this moment.
“Not all the men worthy of honor are here tonight, Atta.” A lump formed in her throat around the words.
He nodded. “Many of our men fell in the arenas to appease those Roman dogs.”
“If you speak of dogs as loyal and kind, then yes, some Romans are dogs.”
Aipei shook her head, annoyance and amusement in her huff. “You and your dogs.”
“He is being punished for my sake,” Adel whispered, imploring, though what she was begging for, she hardly knew. “For Ilona, for Berit. For everyone else he tried to save.”
“Then we will honor him too.”
“Honor is not enough, Atta.” She placed a hand on his arm, resolution growing firm. “We must save him.”