She flinched at his touch, her lips tightening as she shut her eyes once more.
Felix set the rag aside and waited for the salve to take effect before continuing his stitching.
Ignacio circled the table to peer at the wound. Felix elbowed him away. “Go plan your training regime for the morning—and tell the cook she needs to eat more.”
The trainer ran his hands over his face and moved toward the door. “First I have to figure out how to tell Jovan his Amazon is down.”
“Best of luck to you.”
The door clattered shut behind Ignacio. Felix let out a long breath and touched her arm. “Can you feel this?”
“Could you feel a dagger if I rammed it between your ribs?”
“Again, a simple yes would suffice.”
The ankle shackles clinked as she shifted on the table and looked away, gooseflesh prickling her skin.
“I’ll offer you a blanket if you’ll return my scalpels.”
She shrugged. “Already done.” Her chin jerked toward the tool stand. “You did not think I would let Ignacio catch me armed when I was not supposed to be.”
He checked the stand—scalpels in place as promised—and yanked it out of her reach.
“So mistrustful.”
He felt her eyes on him as he crossed to a row of cupboards and drew out a wool blanket, shaking it open as he turned back to her. She watched him approach, tension tightening the muscles in her body, like a cat readying to spring—or scratch his eyes out—if he did anything other than flick the blanket over her body.
Felix snapped it in the air above her and let it fall into place, turning away as she tugged it up to her chin. Her dark lashes had begun to droop lower over her eyes, Sergius’s draught finally beginning to take effect... or perhaps she was only faking again. He dragged a stool closer to the table and angled the lamp for better light.
“Just get it over with.” She sighed. “I do not care about the pain. I want to go back to my room.”
He hesitated a moment longer, then pinched the sides of the cut together with his left hand. “Do you enjoy fighting?” Picking up the needle, he bent over her arm.
She turned her head, watching as the thread slipped through her skin. “Do I enjoy it?” she repeated in a soft voice, her breath tickling his forehead. “Being sought after? Hearing crowds scream my name, and knowingthey talk about me around their fires and tables? Having guards for protection? Men to cook my meals, wash my clothes, stitch my wounds?”
He looked up, meeting her steely gaze, flickering with anger and... something else he could not name.
“I love it.”
Following the guard to her room, Adel chafed at his slow pace, wishing it was Brutus on duty instead. He always left her door unlocked until his final nightly round, allowing her a scrap of freedom the other guards did not. Voices and laughter echoed down the hall from the cells where the male gladiators were kept two to a room. She caught enough to know they were recounting the matches of the day and comparing them to fights that had taken place in the last year and decade. How they could remember each fighter’s statistics with such clarity never ceased to amaze her. Did they have no memories and regrets to think on instead?
At the end of the hall, the gladiatrix cells emanated with less laughter and a near-constant hum of voices. Dreda and Tilla threw the Visigoth language back and forth like flaming arrows, barbs meeting their marks with screeching accuracy. In the cell next door, Brunhilda and Clothilda—the Hildas—squawked and cackled like a pair of old hens. The cell closest to Adel’s sat dark. Little Berit and the newest acquisition, as quiet during the night as they were during the day.
Not Brutusunlocked her door and pulled it open with a silent gesture for her to enter. Her tiny, second-story room overlooked the training courtyard as all the cells did. Their singular view. Their sole focus. She crossed to the window and looked at it again. After spending her life crammed into a bed of furs with two sisters at night, and until recently, sharing a cell with Berit, a room of her own was a lonely honor. But she would not dwell on that.
The door shut with a clang at her back.
Jovan had called it a luxury, a symbol of her status, and so it was. The stone shelf of her bed took up one whole wall and was topped with a lumpy mattress and a blanket the color of forest moss. And it was all her own. Three paces across from the door, a rickety table rested beneath the slit of a window, a cracked cup in the middle cutting a shadow through a silver moonbeam. Adel moved to it, lifting the cup to her nose and inhaling the scent of dirt and life. The tiniest sprout broke through the earth.
“Grow, little one,” she whispered, hearing not her own voice in those words but heraipei’s. Mother’s gentle tone had always seemed to coax herbs and flowers to vibrant, wild life. Did Adel have that power too? Or did her skill only lie in destruction? All evidence suggested the latter.
She replaced the cup in its sliver of moonlight and unfastened the end of her breastband, unwinding it and carefully freeing the seed pods she’d tucked into the folds. Retrieving a small jar from the shadows under the table, she wrestled the cork lid off the top with one hand and dropped the seeds inside. They rustled against others in the bottom of the jar, whispers of a home long gone. She pressed the cork back over the mouth, refusing to listen. The Ludus Gallicus was everything she’d wanted. A place where work was rewarded, and effort earned wealth and status. She was well on her way to becoming one of the magistri. Jovan had nearly promised. And when the promotion came, she would plant the seeds, set down roots in a future of her own making.
Replacing the jar in the shadows, she finished removing the breastband, letting the fabric drop to the floor along with the skirted loincloth.
Her arm burned as she plucked a plain, ludus-issued tunic from a peg on the wall and wrestled it over her head. It fell to her knees in shapeless folds, and she ran her hands over it, feeling the thinness of the cloth. It would never do at a meeting of the magistri. If she wanted to be a part of the trainers’ circle, she’d best look the part. But it would not be this month at least.
Adel crawled onto her bed, pulling the blanket to her chin, arm and heart throbbing.
