They lapsed into a silence, thick with their own prayers and contemplations. How could the most obvious component of the plan feel like a last resort, when it should have been their first action?
It was Adel who broke the silence. “I do not know if anyone can survive what is coming,” she whispered. “But you have given us hope, Felix. And that is a better gift than any I have ever received.” She swallowed, the next words coming slowly. “Thank you.”
He reached through the bars, clasping her other hand in his unblistered left one. “It will work, Adel.” His voice dropped somewhere toward a whisper.
Warm light played across her features from the lantern dangling from the ceiling outside their cells. Her expression was one of pity for him over his belief in something good at the end of all this. Her fingers shifted and tightened around his, painful and sincere.
“How do you know? How do you know the others will do what you expect?”
“It is my pater’s plan.”
“And do you trust him?”
Did he? Did he trust that his father would come through on his promise of rescue, even when Felix could not see the outcome, could not see all that he was doing outside of these close walls? For so long, Felix had carried the weight of mistrust, the weight of all that needed doing on his shoulders. And he’d done it. Worked and schemed and compromised, and still he’d ended up here. And he could not do thisalone. Not now. He was forced to trust. To trust Telemachus and his pater and God. And did he? Could he?
He met her gaze and held it. “I do.”
She blinked, swallowed. “I do not trust easily.”
“I know.”
“I can always find a reason not to. Everyone has always let me down. But you have not given me reason to doubt your character.”
Her words might have filled him with a swell of pride a week ago but now left him wanting to weep at her heartbreak. At the walls she’d built to avoid further damage.
“And I have been waiting for you to betray me. To let me down. To prove that you are no different than everyone else.”
He knew that too.
“And then Jovan... and you...” Her eyes flashed back to his, glimmering in the lantern light, confusion and admiration tangling in their depths. “No one has ever fought for me before.”
Something in his chest snapped and broke at her admission. “Everyone else is a fool.” A statement he knew she would agree with.
A tear slipped past the dam of her lower lashes, tracking a streak of golden light down her cheek. She tried to turn her face away, to hide it, but he reached up and cupped her face in his hands swiping the tear with his thumb. Her eyelids flickered at his touch but she didn’t pull away, not even when he gently turned her face toward his.
“You, Adelgard, are a woman worth fighting for.”
She chewed her lip and he could see that she still didn’t believe it. Determination rose up, swift and strong and he knew if it took his whole life, he wouldn’t stop telling her until she believed it too.
Finally, she lifted brimming blue eyes up to his. “They do not mean for you to survive.”
He leaned forward, drawing her close enough that their foreheads touched between the bars. “Then it’s a good thing you’re worth dying for.”
XXXV
31 DECEMBER, AD 403
Adel shivered and pressed the skirt of her gown to her thighs as the breeze tried to tug it away. Her sandal slapped impatiently against the paving stones, the sharp snap echoing back off the columns and roof of the colonnade as she hurried toward the entrance hall. She’d attended dinner parties as the evening’s entertainment, had fought in inter-school matches, but never had she fought in official games. Nor had she ever attended the game master’s feast. Part guest, part spectacle, Adel had been outfitted in the green of the Ludus Gallicus, the front and back panels of fabric pinned at her shoulders and belted at her waist, brushing the tops of her feet. Though the gown left the sides open, she’d been grateful for the hint of modesty she’d been allowed. But now outside in the wind, her skirt panels flying sideways, she cursed it.
Her gladiatrices clustered around her in a phalanx: Dreda, Berit, and the red-headed Hilda had chosen to accompany her.
She looked over her shoulder, the walkway still empty behind them. “What is taking the men so long?”
“They’d better come out in elaborate costumes for how long they’re making us wait,” Dreda grumbled. “I’m freezing.” She pressed a hand to her head, her hair tied into a high tail streaming down her back. Wisps had already escaped the wax sculpting the rest to her head.
The Hilda huffed. “You’d think they’d be just as eager to get there before the food gets cold.”
The women hurried into the entrance hall, slightly more sheltered from the wind, and moved nearer to the firepot where two guards stood warming their hands. Adel paused a safe distance away and flexed her foot, the brass-studded sandal straps oddly constricting. She blew out a shaking breath, willing her stomach to settle.
