“I couldn’t lose you.” Pain hollowed out Cadan’s voice, as if something vital had been carved free of his soul. “I’d lost too many. Was unable to protect too many.”
It dawned on her then. His family. When the Romans had taken his village, they’d killed many of the Trinovantes and expelled the rest from their homes. She’d known the loss of his sisters and mother in the initial attack had affected him, but she’d had no idea how much. He’d carried that burden with him, blamed himself, though he’d barely been out of childhood when they’d attacked. As Boudica, she’d been too filled with her own pain to ask about his, to even wonder. Had that wound been festering all this time?
“You couldn’t have protected them, Cadan. You were a boy. The Romans were an army with the support of the greatest empire on earth. You were lucky to survive when they burned your village.”
“It was my fault. It was my responsibility to protect them.”
“Not yours alone, and their deaths aren’t on your shoulders.”
“Yours is.” His voice was bleak, his eyes dark with pain.
“No!” She wanted to stamp her foot. How could he not get this? “It’s not. That’s what you don’t understand. It wasn’t your job to protect me above all else. We were to look out for each other in battle, yes, as soldiers do.”
“You were my woman. The woman I loved. The only person left alive who meant anything to me. When our homes were burned, our people killed, you were all that was left.”
Oh God. What was she supposed to do? Her anger was just, his sins unjustifiable. But what could she do in the face of such pain? Continue to kick a man who’d committed his sin out of love? Because she had escaped his trap and fought in the final battle, his actions hadn’t had long-ranging consequences other than killing Boudica’s trust in him.
“And then you left me.” His voice had the jagged edges of pain. “Without a word, without a good-bye, you plunged that dagger into your heart.”
The sight of him standing tall and strong across from her made her feel like a piece of glass had just carved its way into her heart, not unlike the blade from so long ago.
“I missed,” she said, recalling the pain of dying slowly, with the blade piercing her lung instead of her heart.
“Aye. If you hadn’t, I’d never have come upon you while you were still alive. I’d lost so many. You, and vengeance, were what I’d lived for. And you, the woman I loved and the only good thing remaining on earth, left without a word. Would have snuck off into death.”
“What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t trust you to let me do the right thing—you’d have taken that choice from me as you’d done the previous night. Tied me up, thrown me over your horse, and taken me away to hide.”
His jaw tightened; she could see in his eyes that it was true.
“I was not just the woman you loved. I was a warrior, the leader of a lost people. We’d been crushed in that last battle—the Romans even slaughtered the women who made up the last line of defense. They’d have come for me, taken me to Rome to be slowly executed as an example of our so-called barbarism, or worse, ransomed back to the Iceni.”
Her tribe would have paid a price they could ill afford, and they’d already suffered so much. She hadn’t wanted to fight anymore. “I couldn’t be either of those things. You’d have done the same if you had been in my position. Why shouldn’t I have had that right?”
“We could have fled. Gone north.”
She could admit that now, as Diana, she might have run with him. Run with the man she loved when the battle was lost, and hidden for the rest of their lives. But not Boudica.
“That’s what you don’t understand, Cadan. Boudica would never have done that. After the death of her daughters and the theft of her land, she saw no future for herself. Not even with you.”
“What?” He took a step back.
“She—no, I mean, I cared for you.” It was becoming harder to speak as Boudica once she realized that their choices might have been different. “But she didn’t have her whole heart to give and what she had wasn’t enough to change her path. Paulinus took that when he took her daughters, when he took her home. When she picked up her sword in vengeance, she never planned to lay it down. There would be no life for her if she failed to expel the Romans from her land. She knew that she stood for her people, was a symbol for her cause. And her warriors were dead.” She could remember them, as she knew he could, too, their bodies scattered across the fields in all directions.