His voice lowered, resonating with an odd tone that sounded like compassion. “If you insist on training, you will injure yourself further and be unable to fight for a much longer time, perhaps not ever.”
Adel broke from his steady gaze, hers sliding away toward the jars on the shelf that reminded her of the one in her room that spoke of hope. Future.
Futility, if the medicus was right. Several weeks might as well be a lifetime.
“I have to fight. If I do not...” She took a breath. Ordered the iron back to the front lines of her tone. “I have worked too hard to fall now. If I do not fight for my place at the top, no one else will. I cannot imagine you would understand that.”
His hands stilled as she spoke, and when she raised her chin, his eyes searched hers, the twin furrows between his brows deep enough to plant seeds in.
“I understand.” Carrying the mortar in one hand, he closed the space between them in two steps.
His quiet admission sent the prickle of gooseflesh racing over her arms. How could two words bring both the comfort of being seen and the terror of it all at once? Or perhaps, considering her stance on Romans, he was lying. Whatever it was, something about him unnerved her.
“I do not trust you.”
He lifted a wide shoulder and extended a hand as if she should join a line of others. “Think what you will about me, but you’re the one claiming your arm doesn’t hurt.” His expression was impassive, even defiant, as he leveled his gaze on her.
“It does not.” It did. A little. More than a little, maybe. But she certainly wasn’t going to admit that now.
“Stubborn.” The medicus leaned closer, reaching past her to set the mortar on the table, his granite eyes warm as hearthstones.
Adel tried to hold his gaze, refusing to be the one to look away, but her gaze snagged instead on the dark stubble on his jaw, and the way his mouth tipped almost imperceptibly when he noticed.
“Despicable.”
She felt the low rumble of his laughter in her chest.
“One of us is lying, gladiatrix.” His whispered breath brushed her cheek. “And it isn’t me.”
Arrogant.
He stepped away, cool air rushing between them, and she could breathe again. The smell of calendula, thyme, and olive oil struck her. Berit sometimes had difficulty breathing around certain flowers. Perhaps she had the same condition as her cousin?
He busied himself at the worktable again, picking up a tiny wooden box and shifting through its contents with one finger. “What are you called?”
Many things. Few of them good. Shame crawled up the center of herchest, dragging with it the memory of Eadric, surrounded by a group of young men. He’d called her beautiful, murmured a host of honeyed words into her desperate ears. They had flooded the cracked and empty places in her heart until she could no longer heed the warnings over the rush of his affection. That rush had stilled days later, beginning to trickle out through the cracks when their eyes had met briefly across the village green, and then draining with a destructive force when his honeyed words turned to brutal barbs as he recounted the intimate details of his conquest to the circle of laughing men around him.
Adel cleared her throat, shoving aside the memory in search of her voice. She willed it not to waver. “They call me the Amazon, as you well know.”
“I am Felix Cassianus, same as my pater.” He lifted a needle to the light and squinted one eye as he drew a length of linen thread through it.
She’d heard that a Roman man would give his children his own name, no matter how many he spawned, binding them tightly to family and legacy. Not like her own family. Felix was a good name. And she hated that she liked the sound of it. That it seemed to rest well on his sturdy shoulders.
“I was born in Rome.” He didn’t seem to mind her silence, filling it comfortably with his own voice. “But somehow it was never home to me, never... enough. As soon as I could, I went to Alexandria to study medicine. I thought I might find...” He shook his head with a slight shrug, as if he couldn’t quite find the word to describe the very longing she felt in her soul.“It.”
“And did you?” She pinched her lips, annoyance prickling that he’d baited her into a question.
A smile. “I did. Though it was not what I expected.”
Liar.“But you came back here.”
“My family is here.”
A pang struck her chest at his mention of family. Did he have a wife?Children? A sudden image of him with a clan of noisy children bounding at his heels sprang to her mind. Did he save his smiles for home? Would he love his daughters as well as his sons? Somehow she could believe it of him.
“And does it feel like home now?” She wasn’t sure why she wanted to know. Didn’t truly want to hear him speak of a devoted wife, his houseful of children. And yet... if he could find home, belonging, perhaps she could too. Her family’s patch of dirt in the Balkans had felt as much like home as the series of war camps had. This place, decidedlynothome, had been the only stability she’d known. And there was a comfort in it, belonging. A place where her tarnished past need not affect her present worth. A place where she could make something of herself all on her own.
“I’m not sure I know what home feels like,” Felix admitted, moving toward her. The needle pinched between his fingers trailed a thread like a spider’s silk before he set it on the table beside her and picked up a tiny blade. “But I have heard the priests say that is a good thing, since we are made for a higher home.”
