The jar thudded against the desktop as Felix set it down.
Jovan sighed. “I know this first one was hard for you. It’ll get easier, I promise.”
His gaze jerked to his uncle’s. “Easier?”
“This happens all the time, Felix.” His uncle’s words were gentle, though his meaning was not. “You must remember, they are only slaves.Investments. We gave the Gaul a good life. He wouldn’t want to suffer. No one does.”
As if that was all the justification needed to murder an injured man simply for needing a long recovery.
He cleared his dry throat, forcing himself to speak the words he’d rehearsed on the walk over here, and not the ones that sprang to his mind now. “I sent for the body cart already. It will be here soon.”
Jovan nodded. “Very good. We will honor him tonight.” He picked up his pen and turned back to his ledger, continuing with his work as if Felix had not just placed the heart of a murdered man on his desk. Felix turned to leave, the shaking in his legs intensifying with relief as he shut the door behind him. He gulped a breath of air and attempted to steady his equally shaky breath. The easy part was over.
His gaze traveled to the niched walls of the entrance hall and the gate at the far end. It was a gate only free men went through. A gate that required a stiff price. Felix felt the cost of it every time he went through, and tonight it would feel particularly heavy. But perhaps tonight it would be worth it.
XVII
THE TRAINING GROUNDS FLICKEREDin the light of a dozen torches ringing the courtyard. Dressed in her best tunic, such as it was, Adel slid along the edge of the cluster of fighters standing shoulder to shoulder, facing the entrance to the hall of heroes. The gladiatrices usually hugged whichever side placed them in the clearest view of Jovan and the trainers, for no other reason than to keep the hands of the male fighters in check. The gladiators were only punished if caught, and the rush of risk only made it more of a game. She rolled to her tiptoes, scanning for Brunhilda’s flaming hair. Instead, real flames danced in clay lamps set into the wall niches, light shattering across glazed jars of opaque glass and painted pottery. Each bore the name and heart of a famed and fallen gladiator.
Asos, “The Mighty.”
Dominicus, “Flame of the north.”
Marcus of Sarmatia.
Livia, “The Lightning.”
Ulrik, “Bear of the Balkans.”
Few in Rome remembered their names anymore. The death of a favorite celebrity was mourned for a moment and quickly forgotten in the shine of a new sword entering the ring. Here at least, their names and memories lived on, if their bodies did not.
Adel caught a glimpse of a red braid in the space between a granite column and a thick body, and she darted forward. Just as she stepped into the gap, the gladiator shifted, slamming her against the column.
“My apologies.” The voice registered as Wulfula’s before his hands raked her chest and backside in a clumsy disguise of help.
Adel rammed an elbow into his gut and shoved away. “Unless you want to lose your filthy hands, keep them off me.”
He only laughed and let her go, not daring to detain her further and risk drawing Jovan’s eye and ire.
What she wouldn’t give to be able to put him in his place. But there were different fighting classes for a reason. No matter what Telemachus had tried to tell her about the equality of men and women in God’s eyes, there was no equality in the ludi. Not physically anyway. Not without a dagger of her own. Or poison.
God forgive her for the thought.
God forgive her for not being truly sorry for the thought.
Adel pushed past him and stopped beside Dreda and Tilla, who turned and gave brief nods.
“It is hard to believe the Gaul is gone,” Dreda said in a whisper.
Jovan, Blandus Albus, and the magistri exited Jovan’s office and walked to the hall of heroes—little more than a hallway with a domed roof that opened into the training courtyard. The shadowed end framed the single entrance to the ludus, an impenetrable, oak-planked door, braced with studded bars of iron.
“He was honorable. In his way,” one of the Hildas murmured. “I will miss him.”
“I doubt Wulfula will,” Tilla spat, casting a venomous glance at the man behind them. The Gaul had kept him in check, as he had the other gladiators, not allowing the arena rivalries to come between them in the ludus. Without him... Adel didn’t spare Wulfula a glance. Did not need to. She could already picture him at the head of the group, oiled hair gleaming on shoulders wide as mountain ranges. Did he think because of his size, because of his fighting record, the stories sold to spectators of his heroics in battle, he would inspire the rest of them as the Gaul had done? She would be the first to disappoint him.
Jovan stepped to the front, clutching the same red-glazed jar from earlier when he’d stopped their training and announced that the Gaul was dead. Hearts in jars. Such an odd and risky thing to do, given the Roman superstitions and fear of ghosts and hauntings that plagued the populace. She’d lived among Romans long enough to know that mutilation of the dead was strictly forbidden and yet—it was not so in the ludi. Throats cut after death, bodies dumped into sewers rather than covered with the minimum three handfuls of earth to avoid the wandering of vengeful souls—but did no one fear the vengeful souls of enslaved people trained to kill others? Or perhaps it was so because Rome believed they had no souls to fear?
She didn’t need to try hard to imagine Telemachus’s response to that.
