Attia shook her head. “He has no right to do this to you.”
Lucretia turned to Sabina. “Is she really this na?ve?” Then to Attia, she said, “Haven’t you learned yet? He is our master. He has every right. This is my fate, and it is fixed.”
“Your fate is what you make it. My father taught me that.”
“I’m guessing that was before the Romans speared him through.” Lucretia pulled down the neck of her gown to expose the horrific bruises forming just above her breasts. “Look closely, Thracian. Look long and hard and learn. This is my lot until death, and if you’re not careful, it will be yours, too.”
Oh, and Attia looked. She saw what Timeus had done to Lucretia—the cuts and bruises and scars that maimed her skin. She couldn’t look away.
Lucretia got up from the chair, slowly, and walked to stand in front of the fire. The flames deepened the shadows and lines of her lovely face.
Attia didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know how to give comfort. She felt so terribly helpless.
“Come, Lucretia,” Sabina said softly. “Let me see to your injuries; then you can rest.”
“Yes. Rest,” Lucretia murmured, still staring into the fire. “So I can do it all over again.”
*
After Attia left, Xanthus leaned his head against the door, shut his eyes, and slammed his fist into the wood so hard that it splintered.
She should have run—she should have escaped without him, damn the consequences. She could be free at that very moment. But she stayed because he stayed.
They both knew that Timeus would hunt them down. The man would tear through every province in the Republic, burn every forest, cross every sea. He was that tenacious and that possessive. But Xanthus had another reason for staying—one that he couldn’t yet bring himself to tell Attia. One that involved the arena at the Festival of Lupa and a vendetta that was more than ten years old.
His blood turned cold at the thought of Decimus. Old screams rang in his ears.
In his memory—the worst of his memories—Xanthus saw flames.
He’d been called Gareth then, nine years old and at the end of his last summer in his mother’s village. No man was allowed to live in the holy community of priestesses, so at the celebration of Samhain, he was to be given over to his father’s clan in the highlands of Alba, just as his beloved half-brother Hector had been given to his own father in one of the southern villages five years earlier.
He’d been running along the crest of the hill they called the Tor, looking over his home spread out below—the misty glass surface of the lake, the rocky crags of the surrounding hillsides, the broad green swath of dense forest, and … smoke. Shielding his eyes, he squinted and saw the fires just starting to burn on the far shore. Then he heard a piercing scream.
He did not know it yet, but the Romans had come.
He raced back down the hill as the fires burned away the thatch-and-wood huts. A small group of children ran toward him, and he herded them into the forest, into the hands of the Little People and the goddess. Running back to the village, he watched in horror as a Roman soldier thrust a sword into the old high priestess. Her blue robes turned black with her blood.
The other priestesses wailed and pulled their hair, calling down curses upon the foreign soldiers. But Xanthus heard his mother’s keening more than any other. Two soldiers grabbed her, dragging her away from the other women. She struggled mightily and spat in their faces as they forced her down onto the stone altar in the center of the village.
The boy found a half-burnt bow in the tall grass. His fingers closed around the wooden shaft of a single arrow as the sound of ripping fabric echoed across the lake. Twenty yards away, his mother was tied down, spread-eagled on the stone altar. The boy raised his bow, aiming his arrow at the soldier who approached her with such obvious lust in his eyes.
Before he could let loose his arrow, he glanced away from the soldier and straight into his mother’s brilliant green eyes. The corners of her mouth lifted up slightly, as if she wasn’t about to be torn apart in front of her people. Her mouth formed a word that struck Xanthus to the core.
“Run.”
The soldier began to part the leather straps of his armor.
That moment had felt like an eternity, one that looped back on itself until the past and present and future became a tangled web of space and time. There was no yesterday, no tomorrow. There was only a young boy watching, furious and terrified, as a nameless army destroyed everything he held dear. The boy saw his mother’s face, traced the tears that tracked down her cheeks.
And then the moment was over. With heartbreaking resolve, he inhaled, aimed, and released. Three black raven’s feathers guided the arrow to its target—straight to his mother’s beating heart. She looked up at the sky as she breathed her final breath.
In the semidarkness of the damp stone room in Ardea, Xanthus choked back a sob. He’d saved her; he knew that. There were fates worse than death. But his mother was still dead, and at the hands of her own son. How could the gods not curse a man who had committed so many unforgivable sins?
He wasn’t a boy anymore. He wasn’t even Gareth. He was Xanthus, the Champion of Rome. In the long decade since he’d been stolen, he’d been made into something ugly, something monstrous. But he remembered—he remembered everything he’d lost when a legionary named Decimus led Crassus and his Romans into Britannia.
Xanthus knew that fighting Decimus at the Festival of Lupa couldn’t change the past. But it would satisfy his hate, and that, he decided, was enough.
Someday, he would tell Attia the truth. But after. When it was done.
Until then, there were rituals he could not abandon and a vigil he would always keep.
Facing east, he dropped to his knees and raised his hands in supplication. “Goddess, guide Attia’s steps. Hold my family in your hands. And for all I have done, and for all that I have yet to do—forgive me.”
*
His brothers came at midday, deep in silence as they entered Xanthus’s room.
“By the gods…” Gallus muttered.
Xanthus looked down at the dried blood that still covered nearly every inch of his arms, legs, chest, and face. He knew the bruises would fade. Water and soap would wash away the blood and dirt. He was barely wounded. At least on the outside.
Lebuin’s large hands clenched into fists like hammers. He gritted his teeth so hard that the muscles of his jaw twitched. Gallus’s broad, usually smiling face was gloomy and drawn. Iduma was deathly pale, and his breath hitched in his throat. Castor’s face was contorted in a painful grimace.
Albinus stepped forward. “Is any of it yours?”
“Maybe a scratch or two.”
“Bloody bastard,” Albinus replied. He gripped Xanthus’s arm and pulled his brother into a tight embrace.
“Literally,” Iduma commented. His voice shook with relief.