Adel nodded, forcing Felix from her mind and feeling her heart begin to thrum in anticipation of what was coming. She hated this part. The waiting. Just throw her in the ring, start the fight. Anything to keep her out of her own head. She rolled her shoulders and shook out her sword arm.
“Easy.” Ignacio jumped back. “Watch the point.”
Her lips twitched in a smile he could not see, and the bars on the gate swung wide. Ignacio gave her a little push.
“The crowd loves you.”
Love. A fickle thing. Offered one day and withdrawn the next. She knew she should not trust it. And yet the truest love she’d known had been shown from this crowd. Match after match they came for her, cheered for her. Threw flowers and tokens into the ring. For her. She lifted her chin, warmth radiating against her legs as she stepped into the ring. The roar of the crowd increased as the breeze tugged at the fabric billowing behind her, the green and gold signaling her identity to all who watched.
“Am-a-zon, Am-a-zon!”
Adel drew in a breath and the name that was hers and was not hers. The cheers and whistles dripped and trickled into the deep empty places of her heart. Each syllable a droplet that echoed in an illusion of fullness.Soothing the ache. It would return by morning. But for now, she drank it in.The crowd loves you.In the muffled confines of her helmet, she could almost believe they called her name. Her real name. The way Felix had.
A-del-gard, A-del-gard!
Gates clanged around the ring and the cheers and shouts morphed into a cacophony as other gladiators and gladiatrices joined her in the arena.
“Strix!”
“The Hammer!”
“Boudica!”
“Wulfula!”
Footsteps swished in the sand behind Adel as the green-clad fighters from the Gallic School joined her in the ring for the initial parade of the gladiators. This was only a shadow of what the Victory Games would be. That opening parade would find the fighters costumed and carried around the amphitheatre in gilded chariots. Today they simply walked. Sunlight glinted on curved dimachaerus swords and Thracian helms as the blue-clad Dacian School paraded into the arena, pumping fists in the air. The roar of the crowd grew deafening, echoing against her helmet. When the trumpets broke through the cheers and finally sent them to silence, Adel raised her gladius, saluting the spectators. A second short blast of the trumpets announced their cue, and she shouted with the rest.
“Morituri te salutant!”
Those about to die salute you.
XIII
FELIX HADN’T STAYED TO WATCH.Couldn’t stay to watch. For more reasons than how the violence assaulted his conscience.
He descended into the tunnel and began the trek back to the Ludus Gallicus. Trying and failing to focus on the determined clap of his sandals on the stone floor and not on the roar of the crowd screaming her name as she entered the ring.Amazon, Amazon!It echoed through the tunnel after him, clanging into the names of the other fighters as they joined her.
The responding shout of the gladiators came as both a taunt and a warning.
Morituri te salutant.
“Protect her, God,” he murmured. “Preserve the lives of all the fighters today.”
The image of Adelgard being injured again—beingkilled—played over and over again in his mind. He’d seen too many fighters carried into the clinic to ignore the risk that one of the fatalities could be her. But why it bothered him so much, he couldn’t say. Or wouldn’t say. Because she reminded him of one of his sisters? No, definitely not.
Felix had told Jovan from the moment he’d accepted the job that he wouldn’t remain to observe the school matches or private fights. Being present at the public spectacles was Sergius’s job, and it was Felix who waited at the ludus, ready to attend to the aftermath. The violence of the fights and the intoxication and addiction of men and women witnessing it, cheering it on, made him sick. Could they not see it for what it was? How could the most powerful empire in the world value life so little? Be entertained by such destruction? How could a people governed by leaders who claimed to follow Christ continue to revel in such violence?
And was he enabling these senseless deaths by his work here?
The request from Gaius and Telemachus had plagued him for days. But how could he get involved? Freeing—stealing—imperial slaves, prisoners of war, out of the Ludus Gallicus was an insane request. Not to mention impossible. There were two ways out of the school: through the front gate—guarded and locked at all hours—or through the tunnels. Since they only led to the other schools or locked warehouses, the latter didn’t seem a viable option. Not that the front gate did either.
But even if there was a way to free the Visigoth captives, how could he do so, when he’d risk his life, his job, his family in the process? Wasn’t his first responsibility to them? He’d argued the same to Telemachus, who’d only shrugged.You may save them for a day, but Alaric will sack the city, and who will save them then?A chill not from the tunnel crept up his spine.
Emerging from the underground passageway, Felix crossed the courtyard toward the clinic. The school was eerily silent and should be for a while.Let it be so.
A glance at the ludus gate confirmed his decision.
He couldn’t help.
