Chapter 6
Lea stretched her legs out, idly patting Nyx with the hand of her good arm. The cat was sprawled on the bench next to her, soaking up a patch of afternoon sunlight.
On her other side sat Ferox. The two of them spent most days planted on this bench together, both injured and unable to do much else. Ferox occasionally barked corrections at Achilles, his student, as the red-haired idiot practiced boxing or swordplay in the training yard before them.
Lea, though, had no novice to shout at, so she was dreadfully bored.
She’d even taken to working on mending, first her own clothes, then those of others in the ludus.
Like some sort of housewife, she thought ruefully as she yanked a needle through one of Jason’s ripped tunics.
Next she’d be embroidering flowers on anything she could get her hands on.
Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a small figure approaching their bench. She set the needle down and turned to see a boy, perhaps twelve or thirteen, with a cloth-wrapped bundle in his arms. Nyx raised his head and fixed the newcomer with a forbidding yellow stare.
The child froze when she looked at him. “Are you the lady P-Penthesilea?”
“Lady,” Ferox muttered with a chuckle next to her.
The boy’s gaze slid to Ferox, and the package slipped from his arms, falling halfway to the ground before he fumbled to catch it. An expression of awe glazed his young face. Ferox’s fame was at its height after three memorable victories in the recent games—even though he’d retired once and for all.
“I’m Penthesilea,” she replied.
The boy snapped his attention back to her. “This is for you.” He took a step forward, proffering the package. Nyx hissed, and the messenger stopped dead.
“For me?” Lea asked. “What is it?”
“I-I don’t know, lady. A Greek physician paid me to deliver it.”
Kallias. What could he possibly have sent her? Interest piqued, Lea extended a hand, guiding the boy in a wide arc out of reach of Nyx’s claws. Finally, he dropped the bundle into her hands, then ran off.
Lea set the package on her lap. It was soft, but something clinked from within. She untied the string that bound it and reached inside. Her fingers brushed delicate fabric, and she withdrew a folded length of what could only be silk, dyed a brilliant shade between emerald and turquoise.
Her breath caught. She wasn’t one to moon over finery, and it was just a piece of cloth, but she found herself struck dumb by the beautiful item. Why would Kallias send her something so precious?
Ferox leaned forward. “A gift from the physician? He must mean for you to wear it at that dinner party he’s making you attend.”
Ferox’s words cut through some of her wonderment.
Of course—at their last meeting Kallias had been concerned that she had nothing suitable to wear.
This gift was just so she didn’t embarrass herself.
“It’s just a piece of fabric,” she puzzled.
“What am I supposed to do with it? Am I meant to make it into a dress?” The fabric, she noticed, was already hemmed, an almost invisible line of stitching running around each edge.
Ferox frowned at the fabric. “Don’t ladies wear things like that on their heads? Maybe that’s what it is.”
He was right. Lea flushed. How embarrassing that she hadn’t immediately recognized the garment as a palla, the long covering that respectable women—those who hadn’t spent the last eight years in a ludus—wore pinned to their heads and draped over their shoulders.
There was something else in the package, rolling around at the bottom.
Lea retrieved a necklace and bracelet, made of glimmering green stones that looked like…
emeralds? Her stomach lurched—but as she examined them further, she realized they were simply glass beads.
She slid the bracelet onto her wrist with relief.
Another beautiful gift, but not worth the fortune she’d briefly feared.
Jason ambled over, sweat gleaming on his chest and shoulders. “What’s this?” He lifted a waterskin to his mouth, drank deeply, then splashed the rest over his head.
“Equipment for attending a dinner party at the imperial palace.” Lea couldn’t help admiring the way the beads shone against her skin. They caught the sunlight and seemed to glow from within, casting shimmering green shadows.
“A gift from the physician,” Ferox clarified.
“Oh?” Jason reached out as if to touch the fabric that lay draped over her lap.
Lea snatched it back, not wanting his sweaty fingers all over it. Nyx reinforced the sentiment with a low growl.
Jason raised his hands in surrender, but gave the fabric and jewelry an approving nod. “He pays attention, I see.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s exactly the perfect color for your complexion,” Jason explained.
He was an amateur artist in his spare time and understood things like color.
“You favor blues and greens. If it were darker, it would blend in too much with your hair. Any lighter would make you look ill. And the jewelry—he didn’t include earrings, did he? He noticed your ears weren’t pierced.”
Lea lifted a hand to her unpierced ears, strangely warm at the inexplicable idea that Kallias had noticed her ears. And her complexion.
“My physician never sends me gifts,” Ferox said with mock offense.
“That’s because you’re not a beautiful woman he wants to tumble,” Jason said with a knowing smirk.
“Jason!” Lea spluttered in outrage. Heat flooded her face at the thought of Kallias and tumbling and his gifts…
“He doesn’t—that’s ridiculous!” But was it?
On one hand, she had noticed him eyeing her breasts the first time they’d met, after all.
And he kept coming back, every few days…
Surely that many visits weren’t necessary for one simple wound.
On the other hand, no doubt there were crowds of beautiful, sophisticated women at the palace who’d trip over themselves to share his bed. He could do far better than someone who barely knew what a palla was.
“The gifts are just for the party,” she insisted. “Nothing more.”
Jason raised his eyebrows, glancing once more at the fabric and jewelry. “That’s an I-want-you-in-my-bed gift if I’ve ever seen one. Trust me, I’m a man. I’m only sending a gift like that to a woman I want to sleep with.”
“No,” she protested. “It’s an I’m-forcing-you-to-attend-a-fancy-party-and-you-have-nothing-to-wear gift.”
Jason rolled his eyes. “Perhaps a woman’s opinion is required to settle this.” He waved at Velia, who was chatting with Achilles a little ways away, and called her over.
Velia headed toward them. “What’s all this?” Interest sparked in her eyes when she beheld the finery in Lea’s lap. “Oh, how beautiful!” She reached out to take hold of the edge of the silk, which Lea permitted as Velia’s hands were clean.
“If a man sent you these gifts, what would you think?” Jason asked.
Velia sifted the string of glass beads through her fingers. “A man?” She shot Lea a sidelong glance. “Well, I’d be preparing to lift my skirts at the earliest opportunity.”
Ferox made an outraged choking noise, which caused Velia to burst into a peal of giggles. She slid into his lap, perching her slight frame on his unwounded leg, as if to reassure him he was the only one she’d lift her skirts for.
Lea glowered at them, then focused on folding up the fabric and stowing it back in the wrapping cloth, along with the necklace and bracelet. Thankfully, Jason lost interest in teasing her and returned to his training, and Velia soon followed, called away by her uncle on an errand.
“You weren’t really upset by the teasing, were you?” Ferox asked in his quiet rumble once they were alone. “Only—I know it might not be easy to discuss such things after…” His voice trailed off.
She knew what he was referring to. Ferox was the only person who knew that she’d been sleeping with their late friend Hector, dead for nearly two years now.
She and Hector had been friends first, bed-partners second, and their arrangement had been casual in structure, though that didn’t make his death hurt any less.
“It’s not that,” she murmured. She did miss Hector; like her mother, she expected she’d never stop missing him.
But in the eight years since her mother’s death, and the two years since Hector’s, the grief of both losses had turned from a dust that choked her with each breath to something that lay over everything in a fine layer—still there, but easier to ignore, only noticeable if something stirred it up.
Sometimes it amused her to think of Hector and her mother together in the afterlife, though they’d never met while alive. She imagined them sitting together, watching her life play out as if it were a performance at the theater.
She bet they couldn’t wait to see how this dinner party was going to go.
Lea passed a hand over the bundle of gifts.
Thinking of Hector made her realize how long it had been since she’d been intimate with someone.
She was well-accustomed to satisfying her physical urges on her own, but there were limits to her abilities.
What she missed most of all was the feeling of being able to trust another person with her body and her mind.
But she knew how much it hurt to lose someone she cared about, so she’d carefully tucked away the part of herself that wanted those things.
Even so, her stomach gave an irritating lurch at the idea of bedding Kallias.
He seemed altogether too perfect from the outside—his appearance so elegantly handsome, his manner so cool and assured, with occasional flashes of arrogance.
What would it be like to bed someone like that?
Did he have an inner well of fierce, unbridled passion that a coupling would expose?
The idea was all too intriguing.