Ocyrhoe exhaled, letting the words run out of her in a tumbling rush to be done. She knew she was babbling, but she didn’t care. “I don’t even remember what happened next. I don’t know what I ate, or where I slept, or if it was too hot or cold. The days were a blur. The Bear—” she stopped, flustered at her use of the nickname. How would this woman know who she meant? “The Senator,” she corrected. “Senator Matteo Orsini. His men had a list, I knew it as plainly as I knew I was the last one, and I couldn’t go anywhere I had been before. All I could do was practice my lessons. Learn the faces. Listen to the city. Stay out of sight. Stay alive.
“I would visit the statue of Minerva, because I remembered that Varinia had said that she watched over us. I didn’t know what else to do; maybe if I prayed...” She shrugged, summarizing her frustration and helplessness in that simple motion. “But why did I do that?” she continued. “I don’t really know. One day there was a pigeon with a message that said, Where are my eyes in Rome? Had one of my other sisters made it to Palermo? I didn’t know. And so I kept watch. I kept waiting until—”
Until the priest and Ferenc had arrived, and in the few days since—how many days? One? Two?—everything had changed.
“Enough,” Léna said. “I have asked too much of you already, I can tell. Let me send in some food, and then I shall inquire about someone who speaks your friend’s language. I have questions for him.”
When Léna left, Ocyrhoe sat with Ferenc on the cool and dry ground. They leaned against one another, their fingers tapping on the other’s skin. She told him as much as she could: the woman was a friend, another like her, and they had been talking about what had happened to others like them; she had gone to fetch them food and someone who spoke his tongue; afterward, they would return to Rome, probably with armed soldiers, to rescue Father Rodrigo from the Septizodium. Ferenc was remarkably patient throughout the lengthy process of Ocyrhoe telling him all this. If he were a tracker or a hunter, she assumed he should have been more intent on knowing what the goal was, but he appeared quite placid. He only showed some urgency when the food arrived; he ate quickly, as if he feared the hovering page boys might try to snatch the plates away before he was finished. He kept a protective eye on her too; otherwise he may as well have been one of the camp stools, so quiet and still he was.
She realized her affection for him went deeper than the simple love one had for an attentive pet.
When they finished eating, the page boys took away all the dishes, and they were left alone with a guard standing outside the tent. Dimly Ocyrhoe could hear the joyless sounds of camp life going on around them, and the light outside the open tent flap finally softened to an amber tint. A page boy came in and lit the lantern, and a hint of cool air began to circulate through the tent.
“Léna?” Ferenc asked and Ocyrhoe almost jumped; he had been silent so long.
“She wanted to find a Magyar speaker,” she said, and then signed on his arm. “She wants to talk to you.”
“About my mother,” Ferenc signed back, and gave her a questioning look. When she nodded, he signed, “My mother is dead.”
Ocyrhoe grimaced and patted the back of his hand. “Mine too,” she sighed.
“She was killed by the invaders,” Ferenc added.
Ocyrhoe snapped out of her maudlin remembrance of Auntie coaching her on how to use the needle and thread. “The invaders,” she signed. “The invaders who also made your priest body-sick and mind-sick.”
Ferenc nodded.
Her life, her focus, had always been about the city of Rome. She knew there were lands beyond; Auntie had taken her to another woman’s house on occasion to look at maps, and Auntie had wanted her to memorize them, but she had always found it so hard to make sense of the jagged lines. She knew that Binders were sent to other places, like the ones named on these maps, but she was a child of Rome, and there was always so much happening there. Her attention had never had occasion to wander far, and recent events seemed so enormously significant: the death of the Pope, the incarceration of the Cardinals, the destruction of the Binder network, the Emperor’s blockade of the city. What could possibly be more significant? Even the worried murmurs in the marketplaces about vicious, keen-eyed invaders from the East seemed so distant and so... unimportant. The threat of these Mongols was only something that strangers visiting from far-off places concerned themselves with.
But the Mongols had destroyed Ferenc’s life, and Ferenc was not a stranger.
Ferenc touched her cheek, and she started. “You are staring at me,” he signed, a self-conscious, slightly lopsided smile tugging at his mouth.
“Sorry,” she signed hurriedly. “I am sad for you.”