Chapter 21. Now Maris
NOW: MARIS
I could feel him. Even in sleep, I could feel him.
My mind was pulled from the black by the tether of my knowledge that Luca was there.
There were a few slippery seconds when I could believe that we were still in my room at the villa, waking in tangled sheets with the warm sun on our faces.
When I could slide my hands across the bed with my eyes closed and find him.
I blinked, the blurred world coming into focus until I could see his face.
He sat on the stool only feet away, his elbows propped on his knees as he looked at me.
He was still fully dressed in his armor, his weapons strapped to his hip.
But when I saw the glimmer of gold that hovered in the air over his head, I swallowed hard.
I’d seen with my own eyes the moment it appeared. In the very second that he avenged Vitrasian, the faint glow of a halo suddenly hung over the crown of his head. Luca, the man who hated the gods, had been gifted.
“How hurt are you?” he said, that voice like a barbed thing cinching around my heart. He was watching me intently with a look I recognized in his eyes—it was fear.
My head was still swimming, and the fact that Luca was only feet away made it all feel less real than it already did. Only yesterday morning, I’d been sitting for my Magistrate portrait. Taking my oath. How could that be? How had any of this—the last six months—been possible?
I sat up slowly, eyeing the length of the space between us. If I reached out right now, I could touch him. That was something I thought would never be true again.
“Maris?” The sound of him saying my given name was a riptide. “How hurt are you?” His eyes were moving from my mouth to the broken skin that covered my hands and wrists.
I shook my head only once, my dry throat like sand as I swallowed. A cut lip and scraped knees were nothing to the wounds inside me.
Luca exhaled with a visible relief that made him look more familiar.
I couldn’t help studying him, and I realized that he was doing the same to me.
There were marks on his skin where there hadn’t been before.
His face needed shaving, and his hair was longer than I’d ever seen it.
He was still so achingly beautiful that I almost wished that he would vanish into thin air and I’d wake again only to realize that this was the dream.
How many times had I prayed to the gods that I’d wake and find him there?
How many times had I stared out across the river, wishing I could go back and change it?
What differences he noticed when he looked at me, I didn’t know. On the outside I probably still appeared to be the arrogant, stubborn Magistrate’s daughter who’d given him her scarf at the First Feast. But on the inside, I was something else entirely now.
“You shouldn’t have done that—lied for me,” I said.
Covering for me was a risk with too high a price. If the legionnaires outside knew he was protecting a Magistrate, they’d string him up on the bridge like the others.
He stared at my hands as they curled into the fabric of my chiton. “I was wondering when you’d finally try to get out,” he said. “I wish you would have listened to me months ago and left the city when I asked you to.”
“I told you I wouldn’t,” I whispered.
That day in the Forum, I’d watched in horror as Luca tore down the steps to reach Vitrasian.
But he was too late. He wept as he pulled the sword from the legionnaire’s belt, screamed as he drove it into the man trying to drag her body away.
Then they were dragging him away, and the next night I’d held him through the bars of the catacomb’s cell.
“If you aren’t trying to leave, then what are you doing in the Lower City?” he asked.
“I came to see you.”
Luca pressed his mouth into a straight line. There was a split second when I thought he was going to reach for me. But his fingers curled into fists, his muscles tensing.
“You wish I hadn’t?” I said, voice tight.
Luca’s eyes flashed. “You think I don’t want to cross that bridge every single day? You think it hasn’t killed me to not see you?”
“No one made you leave, Luca.”
“We’re not having this argument. Not again.” He pressed a knuckle to the crease between his eyes. He looked so tired. “We’re crossing the Sophanes in a matter of days. Then all of this will be over.”
“That’s why I’m here,” I said.
He waited.
“I want to negotiate a peaceful transition of power. On behalf of the Citadel.”
Luca’s eyes lit with a question he didn’t ask.
“My mother died seven days ago, Luca.”
He swallowed hard, stiffening. The news was clearly a shock to him, but he didn’t say he was sorry because he wasn’t.
“She dropped a vial of poison into her wine and died the same way she lived—buried in her scrolls.”
A long, tortured breath escaped him. “So, you…”
“Took her seat. Yes.”
He closed his eyes, raking his hands over his face before they went into his hair. “You’re a Magistrate.”
“That was the plan, wasn’t it? You take your seat, I take mine?”
He shook his head, voice rising. “All this time, I’ve been trying to keep you alive and then you take a fucking Magistrate seat. Why don’t you just walk out into the middle of that camp and show them your medallion?”
“What exactly did you expect me to do? You’re the one who crossed the river and didn’t come back!”
“I couldn’t. You know I couldn’t.”
“You didn’t take me with you, either!” I shouted.
The tribune was suddenly in the doorway, eyes fixed on Luca in a warning. A silent exchange passed between them before the tribune stepped back out.
Luca stood, pacing the ground before me. I could see his mind racing. Looking for a way to make this something it wasn’t. But we weren’t the idealistic people we’d once been. We hadn’t just been born on opposites sides of a line. We were stuck there. I could see that now.
“Exile for anyone in the district opposed to the New Legion.” I steered the conversation back on subject. “When you cross the Sophanes, you take the district without bloodshed. In return, those in the district will forfeit their citizenship.”
“It’s too late for that,” he said. “We’ve already agreed on an offer to bring to the Consul. That was before I knew you’d taken the seat.”
I stood, taking a step toward him. “What offer? What exactly are you planning to do with us once you get there?”
Luca’s tense gaze was answer enough. They would take the district with one last massacre.
“Do you remember what we said?” My voice wavered.
Luca stared at me.
“We said we wouldn’t be like them. We swore to each other.”
A pained look crossed his face, but he didn’t respond.
Instead, the muscle in his jaw clenched, his eyes cast to the ground.
We’d made the plan one night while we lay naked in each other’s arms, half covered by the warm weight of his legionnaire’s cloak.
I remembered that the sky was studded with so many stars that they nearly outshone the moon.
We hadn’t known then what was to come. We hadn’t known that none of our plans mattered.
“That was before they killed Rhea,” he said.
Rhea, Vitrasian’s given name, was a reminder that she hadn’t just been a mentor to Luca. She’d been a mother, like Iola had been to me. A guardian. A teacher. And the only thing my own mother and Luca’s uncle had ever agreed upon was that she had to die.
Luca fell quiet, and I knew what he was thinking of.
Vitrasian’s chambers at the Citadel. The diagonal light that cast from the high windows.
The suspended orbs that drifted through the air and the glass cases of seashells that lined her shelves.
Before it had all burned to ashes. Maybe that was what he was doing with all the work written out on his desk.
He couldn’t resurrect Vitrasian, but he could try to resurrect her work.
“There may be a way to get them to make an exception for you,” he said.
“What? How?”
He looked down at me. “What do you know about the messages coming from the Citadel?”
“What messages?”
He gave me a skeptical look. “Come on, Maris.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He walked to the desk in the corner, picking up the small parchment I’d seen earlier.
He seemed to hesitate before he handed it to me, and he watched as I unrolled it.
Still, the parchment was blank, the shimmer of godsblood like a thin layer of gilded light painted on its surface.
Now, I was sure that I’d seen one like it before. More than one. In my mother’s study.
“Falcons have been leaving the aviary, almost a dozen a day now. We’ve been shooting them down, but I know we’re missing some in the night.”
I took the parchment. “I don’t know anything about messages.”
“Think, Maris. You must have heard something.”
The idea that the Consul was sending messages from the Citadel didn’t make any sense.
There were only a handful of Magistrates outside the walls and Isara didn’t have any allies.
Nothing had been discussed in the tribunal, and there’d been no vote.
I also couldn’t remember my mother or my uncle having said a word about anything like that.
A creeping feeling of dread bled through me. Was this why the gods had brought me here? Was this what Ophelius meant when she said that Luca would need my help?
“We need to know who he’s talking to,” he said.
My eyes widened, understanding slowly sinking in. “Are you asking me to spy for you?”
“I’m asking you to make yourself valuable to the New Legion. Before we cross the river.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I can’t stop this, Maris. I can’t keep these legionnaires from killing the Magistrates. In a few days, the Citadel District will fall and I will lose my ability to protect you. I already have if you’ve taken an oath in the Forum. If you have something to give—to trade—maybe there’s a chance.”
“You stopped protecting me when you left the district.”