“Better than you.” A rustling from her cell.
“I think I’m going to die.”
“You are not going to die.” Her voice sounded closer, just on the other side of the bars separating them. “That would be too great a mercy for Jovan.”
He grunted in agreement. It did sound like a mercy just now.
“Your hand is full of blisters.”
And it throbbed and burned. How did they expect him to wield a sword in two days? Not well. Perhaps that was the point. Torment now, death later.
Fabric tore on the other side of the bars.
“Give me your hand.”
He rolled his head to face her. Adel knelt at the bars and reached toward him, wiggling her fingers impatiently. A strip from her tunic dangled from her other fist.
“You don’t have to—”
“You spent hours patching me up. It is time I repay the favor.”
Pain speared his muscles as he pushed himself up and tried not to flop toward the edge of his cell.
Her fingers closed around his wrist.
“Touch me and it’ll be the last thing you do.”
She started, blue eyes jolting into his. “What?”
He lifted an eyebrow. Even that hurt. “Isn’t that the customary greeting for something like this?”
Adel stared at him a moment before her lips cracked into a smile of recognition. “Well, as you are about to die from these blisters, and I am the only one who can save you, if you kill me, it will be the last thingyoudo.”
His chuckle was cut short as Adel wrenched his arm from its socket—or perhaps she’d only lifted his arm and worked his hand through the net of bars. Her thumb swept across his palm, brushing away bits of grit, before beginning to wind the fabric around it.
The new guard had been the one to lock them in the punishment cells last night and he’d taken a few whispered minutes to explain the revised plan involving his pater.Lord, be in this plan. Grant us success.
His fingers curled, trapping Adel’s inside. “I will do everything in my power to ensure you live.”
Her eyes slid to his and she gave a sad shake of her head. “You keep saying things like that, Felix, but I am not a good person.”
“None of us are, not really—”
“You said your mater did not approve of you choosing the hard way of things, and my aipei was the same.” Her chin lowered. “She urged me to give the desires of my heart to God and He would fill them in time—but I could not. I wanted a husband, so I slept with Eadric. I wanted to regain my honor and I joined Alaric’s war band. I wanted wealth and fame and security, so I fought and schemed for it in the ludus. Not once did I surrender anything to God. I clutched my dreams in my fists, too afraid of losing them to let Him hold them.” Adel circled a hand in a vague gesture at their cells. “And I cannot help but think that this is what I deserve for trying to get it all on my own terms.”
He swallowed, her words finding a stinging hold in his own heart. Hadn’t he done the very same? Compromised his beliefs to work in the ludus, justified his unforgiveness and lack of church attendance and Scripture study—and hadn’t they led him to this moment too?
“We are not so different, you and I,” he admitted softly. “So I cannot sit here and tell you all the things you should have done, because I have a list of my own failures—and we both know what we should have done, anyway.”
Adel shrugged. “Why does it feel wrong to pray now that I’ve gotten myself into a mess I cannot escape? As if I should make things a little better before I take it to God, so He does not have quite so much to undo...”
A wry laugh escaped. He felt that too.
She continued talking in a voice weighted with memory. “Telemachus loved to tell the story of a son who left his father, went his own way, and ruined everything. And when he finally came home, intending to beg to be a slave in his father’s house, his father ran to meet him instead. Restored him to his place as son. He said God was that Father for us.Waiting and ready for us to turn to Him.” She sighed. “How can turning be so hard and too easy all at once?”
Felix said nothing. He knew that story and knew there was another son too. Self-righteous and unforgiving, believing he’d done everything right and could judge his brother. Was it possible to be both the prodigal and the older son?
God forgive me.
