Chapter Sixteen
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
One hour bled into another and they rode like the devil himself was at their backs. Julia sat still in Alaric’s arms and tried to come apart as silently as possible.
Watching him kill had made every hair on her neck stand up in recognition. All this time, she’d heard his violence whispering beneath his laugh and seen it flashing out of every grin; now she’d seen it bare. One glance from her and Origenes had died.
And then he had kissed her. Her body still tingled like the aftershock of a lightning strike. She had never been kissed like that before. She would have kissed him back until she died from it. She’d wanted to rip him open and crawl inside.
But then Cornelius had risen behind her shut lids. Red, rending death.
The sun was long past its zenith by the time they climbed a high, twisting trail to a meadow surrounded by towering cliffs. At one end, spilling down like a veil over black rock, was a waterfall. “It’s beautiful,” she breathed.
“It’s safe. For now.” He said it like a man who never believed he was safe, not ever.
There was a cave behind the waterfall. The twins secured the horses beneath an outcrop—Bura with them, the little mare well enough despite being kidnapped by bandits—while Alaric and Riga disappeared into it with knives drawn.
Thorismund pulled her aside. “Listen. He won’t teach you this, but you must be taught.” He offered her a small knife, pommel-first, and turned it in her hands until it was pointed at her breast. “You thrust it in here,” he said, positioning the tip just under her rib cage. “Point it upward, like this. Hard and fast. Don’t hesitate. You’ll die quickly and with a lot less pain.”
Her mouth went dry. “Less pain than what?”
“Being raped by all those men. I wouldn’t wish that on a woman. Even a Roman one.”
Julia took the knife and turned it in her hands uneasily. She thought of how he’d thrust her behind him and gone running toward the enemy as if he’d been an army all by himself. “Thank you,” she said quietly. “For what you did at the temple.”
Thorismund looked offended . “I was only keeping my oath.”
Julia sighed. He just stood there, an irascible wall of a man, all battered leather and faded tattoos and suddenly, terribly dear to her. “Well, it was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” She managed an unsteady smile. “Now when I tell everyone you saved my life in a courageous fashion, I won’t have to lie.”
“Thank Alaric if you need a place to put your gratitude. He’s done things to make my blood freeze.”
Julia flinched at the suggestion. She didn’t know why it was so easy to show her gratitude to Thorismund and so difficult to do it with Alaric.
“Don’t tell him you have the knife,” Thorismund said quietly, showing her how to hide it in her boot just as Alaric and Riga emerged from the cave. “It’s designed to be hidden. More trouble if Alaric knows you have it.”
* * *
Inside, the cave was barely large enough for everyone and strangely warm, a passage at the back inhaling humid wind. The others were already curled in their cloaks. Alaric settled closest to the entrance, long legs stretching across the cave floor with his knife across his lap. Keeping watch. The only place to sit was next to him.
Julia couldn’t take her eyes from him. His profile was a thing of harsh beauty against the moving backdrop of the waterfall and she found herself staring unabashed as he began to polish his knife. She was still shaking. Up until now, this had all seemed like an adventure—almost a game. It wasn’t. She saw how much her life depended on Alaric’s protection. He had come for her, killed for her.
She wished ferociously that he would kiss her again.
But already it seemed as if she’d dreamed it. And she’d been the one to push him away. This time she would have to ask for it.
How do I do this at court? The game was easy in Ravenna. All she had to do was deliver the right kind of look from beneath her lashes, along with an encouraging, secretive little smile. Lean forward just a little, to make her intentions known. But Alaric had cut someone’s throat for her and she had no idea how to flirt with a man like that.
“You should sleep.” His hands worked over the blade, even and smooth. She couldn’t stop staring at them.
“I’m too cold.”
He slanted her a glance. Flash of brilliant blue in the dark; it burned her eyes. “How can you be cold? This place is stifling.”
Her shaking wasn’t from the cold. “Can I have my cloak back?”
“It’s my cloak.”
“No, it isn’t. You gave it to me on the first night, remember?” It felt good , to banter with him like this. Julia felt an urge to giggle wildly and never stop.
He was looking at her impassively. “I loaned it to you.”
“No,” Julia said loftily, her lips curved in a teasing smile. “You gave it to me, because you felt guilty about tying me up and leaving me to sleep on the ground.”
“You put nettles in my bower, Julia. I didn’t feel guilty at all.”
“You are horrible.”
“So they tell me.” Clearly this didn’t distress him in the least. “Come here,” he said then, and hooked an arm around her shoulders and pulled her in, engulfing her in his warmth and the warmth of the cloak. It overwhelmed her. Julia laid her head against his shoulder and breathed in. Leather and pine trees and wide-open spaces.
Somehow, with her head on his shoulder, she slept.
* * *
Julia lurched into wakefulness. She was curled in Alaric’s lap, swathed in his cloak. Moonlight through the waterfall illuminated the cave in an uncanny glow.
Cornelius. Already the dream was fading, and she snatched at the bloody scraps.
“What is it, Julia?” It was Alaric. His voice dark silk. Endlessly gentle. “What’s wrong?” It was the exact tone he used to quiet horses.
“It was a dream.” A shiver ripped through her, violent.
“You really are cold.” She nodded. “Come with me.”
He helped her rise. Now the men were stirring, and dimly she heard Alaric speak to them, in low, rough Gothic. They settled back to their cloaks and he led her deeper into the cave.
It took her a moment to realize it was not pitch-black here. A faint blue light gleamed on the walls, and when the passageway opened, Julia halted in wonder. Tiny pinpoints of blue light covered the walls and ceiling, outlining hanging forests of stalactites. In the center was a pool, almost perfectly circular, its water a brilliant, impossible blue. The exact shade of
Alaric’s eyes. Steam rose from the surface in ghostly tendrils. Hot water. A godsend.
“Why didn’t you tell me this was here?”
“It was more important that you sleep.”
“Nonsense. Nothing is more important than hot water.” She sat at the edge of the pool, testing the surface with one bare toe. Hot. She closed her eyes in pleasure.
Cornelius was waiting for her in the dark.
Alaric sat down beside her, and Julia let out a low, animal sound and collapsed against his chest. She was trembling so hard—and now she was sobbing, the tears coming rough and harsh. “I’m sorry. I must have woken everybody—even the bats in this place.”
“There is no shame in it. Every one of us wakes up screaming occasionally. Hengist still cries for his mother sometimes.”
“You never have, surely.”
“Me most of all.”
That was a shock. “What dream on earth could frighten you ?”
“There are many,” he said. “The worst is from a battle I fought fifteen years ago. By a river called Frigidus.”
* * *
Ever after, when Alaric thought of the Christian hell, he would think of that place. Waterless cut in the earth, walls melting out of a red-soaked sky. He remembered letting his men off their leash, racing down into the canyon’s throat. No sign of trouble until it was too late.
Julia listened, curled in the curve of his arm, and he understood now why she had reacted as she did when he’d tried to kiss her. Alaric knew well how violence could leave scars on the inside that hurt . He had enough of those himself. An invisible map beneath his skin of all he had lived through. He had assumed Julia’s status as a princess would have sheltered her from pain and violence. He had been wrong about that. He wondered what else he had been wrong about.
She could not bring herself to talk. Not yet. So he told her the story of who had lived and who had died. He described the blood that soaked the earth as he fought, how his feet had slipped in it. The screams of men and arrows echoing off the walls.
“That’s what I remember most,” Julia said in a small voice. “The screams.”
Her story was eating her alive. “You don’t have to tell it,” he said. “But sometimes these ghosts lose their power when we make them stand in the light.”
As if it was that easy. As if he didn’t wake up every day with the past burning a hole in his chest. He waited, gave her space to speak. Then all at once she was telling him.
He put it together in pieces. There was a man, someone she’d cared about—and that made him go tense. Did her heart belong to someone else? He tried to divine her feelings as the story wrenched itself out of her, this other man now jumbled with her hateful intended and her brother’s staggering malice.
Then she got to the part with the wolves. He made me watch , she told him, wracked with sobs, and suddenly he was ready to torch that city to ash.
“I understand this burden far too well,” he told her finally. “Do not pick it up when it is not yours to carry.”
“You don’t understand. My brother—”
“Your brother is a needlessly cruel little shit who deserves every ounce of blame in this,” he said. “You were right to come to me.”
“I was a fool to come to you.” She turned her face into his chest as if she’d trusted him her whole life. “If I’d offered myself instead, perhaps Honorius would have thrown me in there. I didn’t have the courage.”
Didn’t have the courage. He thought of Julia at that banquet, the vision of her lover being ripped apart still burned on the backs of her eyelids, pressing a knife into his hand to save them both. Now he understood what she had been running from that night. The raw, brute nerve it had taken to do what she had done.
“You are not without courage, Julia.” The words were entirely inadequate to what he felt. “I’ve never seen anything so brave and wonderful as you.”
* * *
Brave. He’d called her brave.
Suddenly she would walk into an arena full of wolves for him.
A princess of Rome should not lose her virtue in a cave , she told herself sternly. But oh—she wanted to. She wanted nothing more than to sink into the warmth of this steaming water, and she wanted Alaric in it with her. She didn’t care what she would get in exchange.
Hastily she rose to her feet and stripped off her layers. Tunic, undertunic, strophium , followed quickly by her leggings. Warm air curled around her naked breasts.
The silence in the cave raised hairs on her arms. She felt his gaze, fierce and devouring.
Without turning, she slipped into the pool. Warm water closed over her head and she sank down, her toes grazing rock. Relief. She pushed up from the bottom, staying under until her lungs burned.
When she finally came up for air, Alaric stood on the other side, blue eyes blazing through the steam.
In one smooth gesture, he pulled off his tunic over his head.
She’d never, in all the days since she’d first seen it, forgotten what he looked like with his shirt off. She’d been starving for that sight ever since—the powerful, stunningly muscled contours of his chest. His stomach, flat and ridged with muscle, crisscrossed with scars. Julia’s fevered gaze traveled down his sculpted abdomen to the thick, hard shape of him straining to be free of his trousers. A thrill shot through her. Anticipation mixed with fear.
Then he removed the trousers. He was naked now, and there it was, right in the open, as proud and perfect as the rest of him. “You just—stay over there.” Her eyes fixed on an area distinctively south of his waist. “Alaric—do you hear me?”
He laughed. “Woman, do you honestly want me to stay here?”
“I’ll die if you do.”
She said it so low she could barely hear it herself. But of course he knew. He always knew. That barbarian smile lifted his lips and he slid easily into the pool.
The water came up to his chest; he strode through it until he stood before her, close enough to feel the heat rising off his skin. Trembling, Julia laid a hand flat on his chest. He felt exactly like she’d imagined. Like warm, breathing marble.
“Julia—” There was a raw ache in his voice. Then he pulled her hard against the length of his arousal and seized her mouth in a searing, soul-destroying kiss.
She’d been warm in the water; now she was scalding everywhere he touched her. And he was touching her everywhere , kissing her endlessly, a hand buried in her hair, clenching hard enough to cause delicious pain at the scalp. Julia buried her lips in his neck and tasted him there, sweat and salt and him , and she heard him suck in a sharp breath, every muscle in him tensing beneath her touch.
The world dissolved into skin sliding against skin and Julia never wanted it to stop. His hands slid beneath the curve of her ass and he lifted her. Weightless, effortless, he carried her through the water. Cool stone at her back now, and her legs were around him, his mouth on her naked breasts— yes —closing around a nipple. The hard, heavy heat of him was nestled right between her legs, the ridge of his erection pressing against the white-hot pinpoint of her desire.
Slowly, with excruciating control, he rocked himself against her even as he deepened their kiss. Julia pressed desperately against him as everything dissolved except sensation—the profound, drugging heat of the water, bright sparks rising everywhere under her skin. His hands were everywhere, his mouth everywhere, and beneath it all, the slow, heady stroke of his arousal against the place where her need was greatest.
A ravenous ache began to build in her. He followed her movements relentlessly, possessing her utterly with his deep, masterful kisses. Her nails dug into his back, and for a moment she twisted on a line of taut, building pleasure until a tremor ripped through her, pulling her apart. She heard herself cry out. Wordless, inarticulate sounds. His name.
Then she was water. Boneless.
He laughed softly, a sound of pure male satisfaction. The message in his eyes was undeniable. Say yes. It was not a question.
She turned away from him, tried her teeth on the rise of his shoulder. He growled and pressed his hand to the nape of her neck. She spoke the word against his throat. Yes.
She was going to do it. She was going to lose her virtue in a cave.
He pressed her up against the wall and kissed her again, the heat of him melting right through her, and he was right there , huge at her entrance. For a panicked instant, she didn’t know if she would live through what he’d do to her and didn’t care. He was whispering her name now; his free hand clenched in her hair and he groaned against her neck as he stroked against her, slow and strong, his shoulders tensing beneath her hands as he gathered himself to surge forward.
* * *
Shouting at the mouth of the cave. His name. Fuck.
Alaric tensed, Julia’s legs wrapped around his waist and her eyes dazed with desire. Soft and willing, her lips swollen from the onslaught of his kisses, and it was better than he’d dreamed all those feverish nights. He took her mouth again, plundered it, pressed her up against the rock wall as if she might dissolve in his arms.
Let the enemy burn the mountain down. Let them riddle his back with arrows.
Another shout. Alaric braced an arm against the stone wall, sheltering her from view. Breathing hard from the effort of stopping. “What.”
“Pardon the interruption, Alaric.” Riga’s amused drawl drifted in from the entrance. “Your presence is requested outside.”
He rested his forehead against Julia’s. Their breaths mingling. “Handle it yourself.”
“We tried. Horsa is about to get beheaded and Thorismund is waving his axe around and bellowing. At this rate, we’ll all be stuck like pigs by the time you, uh— finish .”
“Go.” There was amusement in Julia’s whispered voice. “You’ll regret letting Horsa lose his head.”
“No, I won’t.” But she was shoving at his shoulders now, her silken legs sliding down his thighs. He turned, ensuring his body blocked her from sight. “Wait for me outside, Riga.”
A muffled snort from the cave entrance. “You ruin everyone’s fun.”
Julia’s mouth curved, bare shoulders slicked with water and glowing. For an instant he was overwhelmed with a feeling that went beyond protectiveness. She had been the one to insist he rescue Horsa from whatever trouble he was in; he’d been ready to let the boy sleep in the bedroll he’d sewn. He kissed her ferociously. “Don’t come out until I send for you.” The gods only knew what was going on out there.
Her husky laugh rang in his ear long after he’d pulled his trousers on and stepped out into the narrow passageway. Riga was waiting for him there, tossing a dagger hand to hand and trying to peer around his shoulder. “It’s about damn time you took that girl somewhere private and showed her what’s what. She’s been unsubtly hinting at it for weeks .”
Alaric threaded an arm around the other man’s shoulders and turned him toward the entrance. “Riga, glance behind you again and you’ll find your guts on the floor.”
“Message received.”
Alaric strode out of the cave into a night flooded with moonlight and the pool at his feet, a perfect lens of stars. Thorismund stood with his back to the cave, his two-handed axe in one hand. Beyond, lining the encircling cliffs, stood a number of distinctly unfriendly warriors. A dozen arrows were pointed at Thorismund’s heart. Ahead three men stood in the clearing, one holding Horsa by his hair. Blade to the boy’s neck.
“Alaric,” Thorismund bellowed, splitting the sky. “Get out here.”
Alaric put a hand on his shoulder. “Put your axe away before you get us killed.”
“They think we’re bandits. We told them who we are and they don’t believe us,” Hengist whispered at his back. “They said they’d kill Horsa if anyone moved.”
Alaric took in the dark, lime-stiffened hair of the intruders, tattoos that kept count of how many they’d killed. He knew those tattoos.
“It will be all right, Hengist.” He strode out into the path of all those arrows. “To what do we hold the honor, warriors?” He slipped into the language of Brisca’s village. An old-fashioned Celtic, with the thick burr of the high valleys. “What did the boy do?”
“We caught him hunting in our forests.” The man gave
Horsa’s hair a hard jerk. “The penalty is death.”
“I told him no hunting.” Alaric spoke to Horsa, switching to Gothic. “Apologize to the men, Horsa.” He said the words in the peculiar arcane Celtic of the hill tribes.
Horsa glared balefully at him but repeated the apology readily enough. The man who held him loosened his grip, and Horsa swaggered away as if his pride hadn’t been pricked. “I’ll deal with you later,” Alaric muttered. The men ringing the cliffs had not put up their arrows. The harm had not been rectified. “What reparation can we give?”
The tallest one’s eyes narrowed. “How come you to speak our tongue?”
“I have spent much time in Acerrae.” The village’s name rolled easy off his tongue. “We come to pay our respects to Brisca.”
“He says you are Alaric of the Goths,” the tallest said, jerking his chin at Thorismund. “There have been many pretenders these past weeks.”
“I know. I killed one on my way here.”
“Prove you are not one of them. Else you will share his fate.”
Alaric shrugged easily. “Very well.”
He glanced behind, and Thorismund handed him a small cylinder of bone, carved with birds and animals. It was no bigger than a finger bone, because it was a finger bone. He brought it to his lips and played the song Brisca had taught him. Three long notes, two short, and accompanying trills, a haunting melody.
With great solemnity, one of the archers raised a small flute to his lips and played a snatch of birdsong. Identical to his own. Only then did he relax.
The tallest spoke, and the tension seemed to evaporate like mist. “It would seem you are who you say—” He paused. “Who is that ?”
Julia stood at the cave entrance wearing her too-large tunic and loose trousers, having flagrantly disobeyed his orders. She shaded a hand over her eyes, and even in that gesture—neat and elegant—there could be no question of who she was.
“She is my guest,” Alaric said blandly.
The warriors exchanged glances. “I think you had better come with us,” the tall one said.