by Rachel Ford
Trygve had met him in Cassia’s study and confided in hushed tones a truncated version of what had happened. “Curse that damned priestess,” Aelius sighed. “I knew she was looking for trouble. Well, I think we’re going to have to make some changes. No more visitors. And I’ll remain onsite. At least until she’s on her feet.”
Cassia heard these plans with an indifference that bordered on disinterest. “Alright,” she said, and “That will work.”
If Aelius was concerned, he didn’t show it. “The empress has had a difficult morning,” he told Trygve after his examination wrapped up. “I’m going to give her a sedative. Right now, sleep is the best thing for her.”
But here, Cassia perked up. “First, I must speak to Trygve.”
Aelius glanced at her, then the Northman. A flicker of understanding crossed his face. “I understand. Excuse me. I will wait outside until you are done.”
Trygve colored at the other man’s expressions and sudden discretion. He felt sure that whatever understanding he’d arrived at was – sadly – mistaken. He remarked none of this to the empress, though; she had enough to worry about at the moment, without adding to it. “What is it, Cass?” he asked when Aelius had gone.
“I’ve been thinking, Trygve. I’ve never seen Faustus so angry.”
He clenched his jaw and said nothing. He didn’t trust himself to speak sensibly on that subject.
“I’m afraid of what he might do.”
Now, he did speak. “I won’t let him near you. Not again. Not after that.”
She reached out and took his hand. “It can’t be like that, though. I can’t be at war with my husband. And…” Here, her face grew grave. “I can’t have him at war with you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He’s mad, about our baby. He’s hurt. And – I said some things I should not have said.”
“Cass, he was going to hit you!”
“I know.” Her tone was pained. “I’m not excusing that, Tryg. I’m just saying…I think he needs time.”
“Oh Cass.” He shook his head. “Time? He needs to be flogged within an inch of his life for thinking of touching you.”
She squeezed his hand. “You’re a good friend, you know.”
Friend. The word hurt more than it should have.
“But,” she continued, “he does need time. Time to cool down. I’m going to be bedbound for the next week. Doctor’s orders.” She let go of his hand and straightened up. “I think you should take those days off, Trygve.”
His heart seemed to drop in his chest, and he blinked. “What?”
“Visit your friends in the country.”
“Cass…are you firing me?”
“No. Minerva, no.” There was an urgency, an authenticity in her tone that set his mind at ease on that score at least. “On the contrary, Tryg – I don’t want you around while he’s angry because I…I don’t want him to blame you.”
“For not letting you die, you mean?” he asked bitterly.
“Yes.”
“Oh Cass…” He felt like crying. How could she not see what she was asking? How could she not see how absurd it was to try to placate a man who would hate her for living? How could she still care what that man thought?
“Please, Trygve. For my sake?”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Trygve did go. He brought two bottles of mead from the North with him, as an apology for the short notice. He’d found them in a stall in the city’s markets and paid more than they were worth for a taste of home. The excitement of the last journey was markedly absent, though, as the carriage rolled out of the city.
So, too, was the enthusiasm in his reception. He didn’t notice it; not at first. He was too lost in his own melancholy thoughts to observe the change in Tullius. But as the day wore on, and they went through the motions of conversation, lapsing more often into silence than anything, he started to feel something was amiss. It wasn’t like Tullius to go quiet for long stretches of time. It wasn’t a hostile kind of silence. But now and again, the gladiator’s expression would grow pensive, as if his thoughts were far away.
Trygve supposed he’d been doing the same. He knew his own thoughts had been far enough away, back in the city; back in the palace; back with Cassia.
Even when he’d told an abbreviated version of recent events and mentioned, casually, that he was thinking of moving on, of leaving his job at the palace, Tullius hadn’t seemed particularly interested. “Oh? Well, everything changes, I suppose,” he’d said. And they’d left it there.
When at last dinnertime came and Lucretius was not present, Trygve stopped and really scrutinized his friend. The distant look had returned, and like himself, Tullius seemed more intent on drinking than eating. They’d opened the first bottle of mead, and though the gladiator had wrinkled his nose at the taste, he was still imbibing.
“Hey,” the Northman said, “where’s Luke? Isn’t he going to be here tonight?”
His host glanced up at the name, and then shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh.” Trygve frowned. “Is everything…alright with him?”
“Yes. We just…” Tullius shook his head. “Haven’t been agreeing much lately.”
“Oh.” Then, a thought occurred to Trygve, and his frown deepened. “It’s not politics, is it? The visit to the city?”
Tullius returned his gaze now. “Kind of. It’s not your fault, if that’s what you’re asking, Tryg.”
It was, and the Northman was relieved to hear it. “Well, I’m sorry things are rough.”
For a moment, silence returned. But then the southerner spoke. “The thing is, Tryg…I think I’m going to break it off. With Luke, I mean.”
Trygve stared at Tullius. “Why?”
“He won’t run for Gallus’ seat. Not if we’re still together. He’s too afraid they’ll find out. He’s afraid of what Gallus’ people will say.” His gaze fell to his mug, and his tone grew pensive. “He’s worried about what it will do – to me. To my career.”
A sardonic smile crossed his face. “I never thought I’d say this, but the fact is, running for that seat? It’s the right thing for him. It’s what he was meant to do.” He shook his head. “He wasn’t meant to take care of a farm. He wasn’t meant to waste his life on a battered old fool like me. Politics is where his heart is – where it’s always been. And this…this is his chance.”
His tone took on a sharper edge, now, which pushed the sentiment aside. “So there’s nothing for it. I’ve got to let him go.”
“But shouldn’t that be his choice?” Trygve asked. “He loves you, Tullius.”
Tullius’ gaze was still fixed on his tankard. “I know. Which is why he won’t make it. He loves me too much to hurt me.” He smiled now, and it was a gesture so filled with sadness that for a moment his own troubles were forgotten, and Trygve felt his heart ache for his friend. “So I have to love him enough to make it for him.”
“You can’t make someone else’s choice for them,” he said, and there was more bitterness to his tone than he meant there to be. “No matter how much you love them.”
Tullius glanced up at his words, and the Northman flushed. “So that’s how it is, is it? I’m sorry.”
Trygve protested that he didn’t know what he was talking about, but Tullius ignored his protestations.
“It’s the empress, I assume? So that’s why you’re thinking of leaving.”
“It’s the way he treats her,” Trygve said hotly. “In the North, a wife would cut her husband’s hand off if he touched her like that. And if she couldn’t, her brothers or father would do it for her.”
“Cassia has no brothers, and her father is dead,” the gladiator reminded him.
But the Northman was not in a mood to let details distract him. “The men of the village would do, if she had no family,” he said, brushing the objection aside. “But the point remains. He lifted his hand to hit her, you know.”
Tullius’ expression darkened. �
�I didn’t know.”
Trygve nodded. “I wanted to kill him.”
Tullius seemed troubled by the words. “Trygve,” he said, “you know you can’t talk like that. If someone heard you…”
“I don’t care.” The Northman was sullen, and in the moment, he meant it.
“You will, if they hear you. Have you ever seen a man nailed to a board and left in the sun to die? It takes days, sometimes. He begs for mercy, for water, and finally for death before his voice gives out. Still he lingers. People come and point and laugh.”
The Southerner’s tone as much as his words got through to him at last. “I’ll be careful.”
“Saying it at all isn’t careful,” Tullius said. “I’ve seen men crucified, Trygve. And for less than threatening an emperor’s life.”
His mind, though, was back on Cassia. “I don’t understand why she doesn’t leave.”
It seemed no mystery to his friend, though. He shrugged. “Love.”
“She can’t love him. Not after this.”
Tullius barked out a hollow laugh. “If only it was that easy.”
Trygve toyed absently with his mug, turning the matter in his mind. “He left. When the doctors feared she wouldn’t make it through the night. He left her.”
“You told me.”
“I wanted –”
“I know.” Tullius sighed, reminding, “You told me that too.”
Trygve frowned at his friend. For a man who made his fortune spilling blood, his passivity was something of an incongruity. “I’ve never seen her so scared.” Then, his tone and expression changed. “And all the while, she kept talking about him. Asking for him. Worrying about him.” The Northman’s jaw set in anger at the memory. “He couldn’t even stay to comfort her, he would have begrudged her her very life…and yet…”
“Love,” his friend repeated, and his tone was quiet. “As I say. It makes fools of all of us, Trygve.”
For a while, he contemplated this in silence. “I don’t know how much more of it I can take.”
“You’ll leave her, then? Alone, with him?”
If Tullius had called him a coward, or worse, it would not have hit him as hard as those words, and the imagery they conjured in his mind. He saw the scene of a day ago playing out again, only now she was alone, weak and in her sick bed. Trygve glared at the table between them, as if, in the moment, he could transfer all his hatred of Faustus to that surface. “You don’t know what it’s like. How can I stay?”
The other man shook his head. “Only you can answer that, Tryg.”
They drank more than they talked after that. Dinner was forgotten, and before long the second bottle of mead had gone the way of the first. Tullius went to procure replacements from his own cellar and returned with a bottle in each hand. “Here,” he said, handing one to the Northman. “Real drink. Not that swill you like.”
It was a sweet red wine, and Trygve wrinkled its nose as it chased away the flavors of mead from his tongue. Still, it was liquor, and that was the salient point.
The night was growing long when Tullius asked, “Will you go home?”
Trygve laughed at that, a laugh that conveyed more bitterness than amusement. “What home?”
“The North.”
“No. I can’t ever go home. You know, sometimes I think this – all of this – is the gods’ way of punishing me. Punishing me for everything I did. The more I want to go home, the more I have to regret it all.”
Tullius mulled this for a minute, nodding a little drunkenly as he did so. “You never told me why.”
“No,” the Northman agreed. “I didn’t.”
It was the Southerner’s turn to laugh, although with more humor. “That bad, eh?”
“I tried to kill someone. Two someone’s,” Trygve admitted. He wasn’t sure why he said it. His friend seemed intent on picking at the scabs on his heart, and he was too inebriated to exercise good sense. “My father, and my sister’s father-in-law.”
“Oh.” The other man’s eyes had lost some of their merriment. “That’s…ambitious.”
Trygve didn’t laugh. “Not for entirely selfish reasons. But…well, there were enough of them, too.”
“I’m sorry. I had thought…well, it must have involved a woman.”
Trygve snorted. “You underestimate my capacity to be a fool on all fronts, Tullius. No, it had nothing to do with a woman. Not like you’re thinking, anyway.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
“Me too.”
“But if it was not entirely unmerited, why can you not return?”
The Northman drank a long draught. “That,” he said sardonically, “is the best part, of course. One of them was a king. And the other a tsar.”
Tullius considered this for a moment, then nodded. “Your father is a king? And you tried to kill him?”
“You see?” Trygve asked. “I am capable of greater stupidity than you give me credit for.”
“But…why?”
“I hated him.” He shrugged. “For what he did to me. For what he was going to do to my sister.”
“What was that?”
“Sell her off, to be married to an imbecile. A fool of a prince, who would have made her life hell.”
He considered for a long time. “Some might call that justice.”
The Northman laughed. “But you know, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t have something to do with my own interests too, Southman. It didn’t start that way. When it started, my motives, they were so noble. I was going to save Ingie. I was going to save them all.
“But somewhere along the way…I guess I lost sight of that. I started thinking more about what it would mean for me, and less about them.”
“Do we do anything without considering our own interests? You say you acted as if you were selfish. But I tell you, Northman, if anyone tried to take my sister against her will, if I had one, I’d splay his guts out for all to see. King, or prince, or whatever.”
Trygve nodded. “And you’d be dead, or banished, too. Under the law, a parent can arrange marriages as they see fit. So you see, even forgetting my other motives, I am still in the wrong.”
“It happens too often, I’ll admit. But that at least is not legal here. I know you think your Northern law superior to ours,” Tullius said. Trygve tried to protest, but he was brushed aside. “Do not dissemble, Northman: you know you do. Anyway, for all that, I think there is something to be said for our way of life too.”
Trygve considered this. “Not for the way you treat your women,” he said at last.
Tullius nodded. “That I will grant. We like to make the lives of women – and homosexuals too – as miserable as we can.” He grinned at Trygve. “Whereas you prefer your people to be equally miserable.”
The Northman laughed. “I’m not too drunk to kick your ass, you know, Southman.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
It was the second morning after Trygve’s arrival that Tullius left, just after sunrise, to talk to Lucretius. The Northman heard him return, but he went directly to his own quarters and stayed there for the rest of the day. When he emerged at dinner time, he looked grim and weary.
They didn’t speak of it. They didn’t speak of Cassia again either. Each carried on in his own quiet, miserable fashion. Trygve would shake his head for his friend and think what a terrible business it was; and now and again he’d see Tullius watch him with a similar pity. But it proved easier – or simpler, at least – to keep their pain private.
The days passed slowly. Tullius worked around the estate and was often absent. Trygve and Gunnar roamed the countryside, and some days they’d be gone from sunup to sundown. As the week began to expire, though, the Northman grew nervous. He’d had no word from Cassia.
For all his thoughts of leaving, for as many times as he’d determined to do it, the fact was that he had no intention of going. Whatever pain there was in staying, even this temporary separation was proving harder than he supposed. He couldn’t imagin
e being away from her forever.
Except, the longer he waited without word, the more he began to fear that such would be his fate. He remembered her words, the earnestness of her expression, as she’d assured him that she didn’t mean to let him go. But that was then. Who could say what might have happened in the meantime? Who could say if Faustus – ‘poor Faustus’ – had put his foot down, and demanded he not be allowed back?
A week came and went. Trygve was a bundle of nerves on the eighth day and couldn’t sleep that night. By time day ten dawned, without a peep, he waited not for a summons back, but a letter dismissing him from service. Gunnar began to sleep beside the Northman, and to watch him with worried green eyes.
He tried to focus his energy on writing the letter he still hadn’t been able to finish.
My dearest sister,
I pray that you are well. Do not worry for me. I have had many adventures, and am in perfect health. So is Gunnar.
He misses the others fiercely. He’s grown fat and lazy in his exile. I think maybe I did him wrong in taking him from the North.
But the more he wrote, the more he wondered if he was talking about the big cat at all. And this missive went the same way as all the others.
His letter writing, it seemed, was going no better than his letter receiving.
In time, even Tullius broached the subject. “No letter yet?”
“Nothing.”
“I’m sorry, Tryg.”
“I’m sure it’ll come,” he said.
He didn’t mean it any more than Tullius’s expression showed he meant it when he said, “Of course.”
On the twelfth day, a carriage rolled up to the villa. Trygve’s heart dropped as he saw the occupant. It was Senator Felix. She’s sent him to tell me it’s over.
“Trygve,” the senator greeted. “How are you?”
“Well. And you?”
“Very well. All the better at seeing Cassia looking so healthy.”
“Is she healing, then?” Despite the circumstance, this for a moment took precedence in his mind.