Well, if he wants me here, if he wants me as his own, he had better step up to the plate…because I’m seriously afraid I’ve just struck out for the third time.
We paused at the top of the canyon, and I could see half the men heading toward us, the others waiting on the opposite side. At the sight of me in their captain’s arms, they cheered, their call coming down the arroyo like the blast from a trumpet.
Captain Blondie laughed. I felt the rumble in his chest, behind me.
“Take your ease, m’lady. Your flight is over. You’ve done your best to preserve your will, your honor. And now you must bend to the forces of the gods. For they’ve surely thrown in their shoulders against you.”
I considered that for a while. The scattered remains of the Roman gods, a decimated faith, against Father Tomas’s God, who’d lasted a couple thousand years, the God I thought I was coming to know. Which was right? Who had more power? Or was it all a matter of our own imaginations, a yearning for something bigger, greater than we, especially when we felt weak?
We moved forward.
“Be at ease,” the knight said again in my ear. “You cannot travel the miles we have ahead of us in such a manner.”
“I shall have your name,” I said regally.
“I beg your pardon, m’lady,” he said, the same smile in his tone. “’Tis Captain Albertus Ruisi.”
“You look like men I knew in Normandy,” I said, after a while, baiting him.
“Many say I resemble my father, who was from Germania.”
As I had guessed. Keep him talking. I relaxed a bit, but not totally. I wanted him to think I was giving in, giving up. I felt his arm tighten around my waist as I eased back, against him. “Did he come to Roma as a mercenary?”
“Nay,” he said, like a secret in my ear. “He came as a priest.”
I fought the urge to turn and stare at him.
We rounded a bend, and I saw Father Tomas, still bent over, maybe even unconscious, while still on his mount. “They are as fallible as any other man,” he said.
The others rode to meet us, leaving Father Tomas behind. His horse stirred and took a few steps after them, pulling the reins from the priest’s hands. But then he stopped.
“Please,” I said. “Captain Ruisi, allow me to go to him.”
He apparently followed my gaze, looking over my shoulder. “The priest? He is of no concern to us.”
“Mayhap not to you. But he is God’s concern.”
I could feel his stomach muscles tense at the base of his chest plate, right behind me. A long moment ticked by.
“You can see to him when we make camp this night. Should he live that long.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Did you not just say that he was God’s concern? If that proves true, he will live until we make camp this night. If not, we shall leave him for the wild to reclaim.”
Awesome, I thought. This dude has serious daddy issues.
Can You make this a tad easier, Lord? I prayed. Uhh, hello? If You’re there? My doubts about God’s presence—about Him being little more than a figment of our imaginations—came crashing in. But I quickly decided I’d rather believe in Him than not. I needed Him. Needed Him bad, especially right now. Be with Tomas. Help him…make it, Father, I finished awkwardly.
Captain Ruisi gestured for a couple of men to bring the semiconscious priest along, and we moved south, toward Roma. Twenty-three knights. A half-dead priest. And one filthy, dirty girl.
We camped that night along the edges of the huge, sprawling Lago di Bracciano, perilously close to Rome. Captain Ruisi offered me the opportunity to bathe, promising me protection and privacy. But yeah, I wasn’t feeling super trusting, so I did my best to wash my face and arms, conscious that I was dripping dirty water down the front of my Roman toga bridal gown. Not that I cared. But the boys in town were going to find it ridiculously amusing if I didn’t cut loose before I got there. The guys here with me already thought it highly entertaining.
They glanced at me and laughed, some spitting out their pent-up guffaws behind their hands and others not bothering to hide their amusement at all. I approached them as regally as I could, well aware that my hair was coming down around my shoulders and that I had spots of dirt all over me. It was all I could do not to dive into the lake, frigid cold as it was. Every bit of dirt chafed at me, making me itch. I didn’t need my enemies’ laughter to tell me I looked like a train wreck.
When I returned from the water’s edge, I saw that they’d finally taken Father Tomas down from his horse. “Is he—?” I began, terrified that I was too late.
“Nay,” Captain Ruisi said. “But not long for this world.”
“Please,” I asked yet again. “May I…?”
He studied me a moment and then waved me on, as if whether or not this man lived was the last thing he cared about. As if the battle was over and his death would put a firm stamp of victory on it.
I hurried over to the priest, so terribly still, alone. The others kept far away, as if death might be catching. “Father Tomas,” I whispered, shaking him a little by the shoulder.
There was no answer. How much blood had he lost through the day? In the late afternoon he’d grown too weak to even hold on, so knights had strapped him to his steed. The light of the bonfire nearby lit up half his face, leaving the other half in utter darkness. Listening to his breathing, I knew that was where he was—hovering between light and dark, life and death.
But he was breathing. Alive.
“I need a knife,” I said. I lifted my head and looked to Captain Ruisi, conscious that one by one, the men looked to him too, all thinking, There’s No Way….
He returned my stubborn gaze.
“Water. Bandages. And another blade, set in the center of that fire,” I added.
A tiny smirk lifted the edges of his thin lips. “You think you can save him?”
“I can try.”
He stared back at me for a breath, then two, before he nodded once, lifted his hand and flicked two fingers, setting several men into motion.
One of the hulking knights came over to me, paused a moment, and then handed me my own dagger from his belt. He stood there, at the ready, watching me as I bent, cut away the shoulder of the priest’s robe—as well as the shaft of the arrow. Then he reached for the dagger again, and I gave it up without comment.
The other men arrived with my requests—water and bandages. Another man was stirring the fire, moving aside a half-burned log, placing a sword in the center of the white-hot coals.
I moved to place my knee between the arrow and Father Tomas’s neck, wanting him still for what was to come next. I held the end of the arrow that had the head. The shaft was narrow, about the width of a pencil, really. I’d broken a few pencils in my lifetime. Could this be any more difficult?
I didn’t wait any longer. If Father Tomas was to have half a chance, I had to free him of the arrow, and quickly. I twisted to get a better angle, grabbed hold of the arrow shaft with both hands, and snapped the head off as cleanly and quickly as I could.
Father Tomas moaned, frowned, beneath me, but he did not move. I was thankful for his unconsciousness. But I had to move very, very quickly.
I rolled him to his side, sitting in the dirt behind him. Then, grabbing hold of the other end of the arrow, its feathers tickling my wrist, I put a filthy, sandaled foot against his back, tried to get the straightest angle, and yanked.
It emerged far more easily than I had thought it would. But immediately, bright blood began running down the wide, white expanse of his shoulder. “Bandages!” I barked. “Water, and the blade!”
A man handed me a wad of cloth, and I stretched it over his shoulder, trying to staunch the blood on both sides at once. It was like pressing in on either side of a pierced water mattress. “The sword!” I cried. “I need the sword, wrapped in a cloth!”
They brought it to me, dropping it twice en route, it was so hot.
I studied it and wonder
ed if I had it in me—what was next.
I knew the fastest, surest method to stop a wound from bleeding was searing it. And Father Tomas had lost so much blood already…But I was anxious, anxious that his heart could not withstand the pain yet to come. It reminded me of the night they’d pulled the stitches from my belly. The night they’d had to cauterize it…I still had the puckered scar to show for it. It made me shaky, remembering it.
Captain Ruisi was there, then. “Must I do it, She-Wolf?” he taunted. “Are you not all that the storytellers have said? Or be you only a woman?”
I glared at him, even if there was the glint of teasing in his eye. Perhaps he was not as eager to see a priest die on his duty as he pretended. He handed me a thick cloth with which to grab the glowing sword at my knees. It literally was red-hot, fading to black, and then slightly less red a moment later, as if the heat lived within it.
I took the cloth, folded it twice, then in half again. I reached for the sword and in a second could feel the heat radiating through. I had to move fast.
I eyed Father Tomas’s wound at his back, kneeled against his side, wiped away the blood to better see the hole, pinched the skin together, then with my other hand, held the flat of the blade against it.
He moaned, shifted, but I was ready for it, moving with him as the disgusting scent of burning flesh wafted to my nostrils. I lifted the sword, when I could not tolerate it a second longer, and rolled him to his back, atop a portion of cloth. One side down, one more to go…
With a swipe of the bloody cloth in my hand, I eyed the hole at the front of his shoulder, about the size of a dime, pinched the skin together again, and seared it shut, this time using the tip of the blade. I closed my eyes, wincing at the sound of the flesh sizzling again, forcing myself to count, a thousand one, a thousand two, trying to get five seconds before I released him.
There. It was done. I turned and flung the sword away as if it were a poisonous snake. But the fire snake had done its duty. The wound at Father Tomas’s shoulder smoldered, as if I’d just stamped out a tiny fire.
I stared at it, watched a tiny tendril of smoke rise from his charred flesh like a signal fire. I followed the curving line up, looking up toward the stars, bright even though they were accompanied by a rising, waxing moon.
Oh, God, I said to Him silently. What have I become? Who am I?
I searched within, trying to find something I remembered, something familiar, something beyond this young woman who was running running running, who was fighting off her enemies, who was performing triage medicine in the wilds of Italia in medieval times.
I had returned through the time tunnel, to this place, this time, sure that this was where I was meant to be.
But at that moment I wasn’t sure at all. I choked back the tears, willing myself not to cry, but knew I was losing the battle. I rose and took a few steps away into the darkness, aware that Captain Ruisi and another were right behind me, giving me a moment and yet not giving me half a chance to slip away into the dark.
Turned away from them, face to the pitch black of the Roman hills, I let the tears fall, trying to keep my breathing from betraying my weeping as the tears poured down my face.
“M’lady?” asked Captain Ruisi.
I raised one arm, not turning, and he was silent. He knew. But I didn’t care. Couldn’t care. I was so far from home, so far from family, so far from Marcello…so far from me, that at that moment, I thought the very stars might envelop me, enfold me, take over…make me disappear.
I was having a panic attack.
I knew the symptoms…increased heart rate, wild thoughts, a sense of being totally overwhelmed. I laughed then, and lifted a hand to my brow. A panic attack? I could handle that. It was just something else to manage, get through. Tomorrow would be another day; I would find another morning, another sunrise to give me hope, to help me remember. I laughed again, the sound hollow to my own ears. But even the action of it, the contraction of the muscles in my belly, the force of air from my throat, reminded me that I was very much here, very much alive.
Even if I felt like I was slowly disappearing.
Chapter Seventeen
If I thought the first approach to the eternal city was difficult, it wasn’t half as tough as this one. I glanced back, beyond my captor, to Father Tomas, who was staring back at me, clearly as agonized for me as he was in agony. Captain Ruisi’s arms tightened around me, as if I was about to leap from our mount. “Relax, Blondie,” I muttered in English. “Where am I gonna go?” I let out a humorless, desperate laugh.
I straightened again, and Captain Ruisi’s arms loosened, holding the reins.
Apparently word had spread about my escape, and so, as Vivaro’s knights paraded me back to his sprawling palazzo, people gathered to point and applaud and whisper behind their hands. Some women stared at me without smiling or averted their eyes, as if they felt a little of my pain. Others laughed, reminding me of kids at school who enjoyed the after-school brawl or abusing the underclassman—dumping-the-puny-freshman-into-the-garbage-can kind of thing. Mean kids. Now mean grown-ups. The kids ran alongside us like we were bringing a carnival to town, arms raised, laughing, shouting.
I had to speak to Rodolfo. Plead with him to find a way out for us. It was my only hope, since these people were never going to leave me alone. There would not be another opportunity to escape. People dropped what they were doing to follow us to the palazzo, eager to see how my arrival would play out. The last blocks leading up to Lord Vivaro’s were agonizing. I felt like time was slowing, as if I were slogging through wet sand, waist deep.
A woman screeched and came at me, waving her fingers and speaking in a nonsensical language. Was she crazy?
Captain Ruisi kicked at her. “Off with you!” he barked.
I watched her run to the nearest building, clinging to it as if it might save her, looking back at us if we were chasing her. And there was a part of me that understood her.
Okay, I’m losing it. I’m really losing it.
We turned the corner and entered the final street, Lord Vivaro’s street.
As we passed Lord Zinicola’s, I saw that he and Carsius were out front, watching as we passed, saying nothing, though their sad eyes really said it all. I couldn’t bear to look at them for long. They’d sacrificed so much, tried so hard to help me. And what had I done with their gifts? Blown it, big time. Gone and gotten myself captured and hauled back.
A fine legend I turned out to be.
When we finally reached Palazzo Vivaro, with its wide travertine steps cascading down to the street, I saw Rodolfo first, looking somberly in my direction. And then I saw Lord Barbato’s chin, raised in triumph as I approached. But it was Lord Vivaro that I heard first, crying out in shock at the sight of me. “Oh, by the blood of Mars!” he cried, skittering down the stairs with his hands clasped together and shaking his head in horror. “What have you done to my beautiful bride?”
“We did nothing to her, m’lord,” Captain Ruisi said, dismounting. “We merely pursued the She-Wolf until she could run no farther. And that was farther than we expected.” He reached up for me and, when I hesitated, grabbed hold of my arm and roughly hauled me down.
A woman gasped.
“Is that really necessary?” Rodolfo asked sternly, now just a few steps above us.
“’Tis, m’lord,” the captain said, turning toward him. “She cannot be trusted. At every moment you must guard your bride from fleeing. Even unto her death.”
Lord Vivaro clasped one fist to his mouth and raised both of his eyebrows in exaggerated fashion, clearly loving every minute of the drama.
“Unto her death?” Rodolfo asked the captain.
Captain Ruisi cocked his blond head and met his gaze. “If you’d seen what I’d seen, you wouldn’t question me.”
Rodolfo stepped forward and took hold of my arm. “I understand.”
“Rodolfo, I must speak to you alone—” I begged.
“The time for speaking is
long over,” he said angrily, staring down at me.
“Indeed,” said Barbato, looking over Rodolfo’s shoulder like an evil little messenger. Delight lit up his eyes. “The only words required of you this night shall be your vows.” He dragged his eyes from me to the crowd, scanning it as if looking for enemies. “Quickly, let us get her inside.”
He turned and walked up the steps, and Rodolfo followed him, hauling me along too.
“Nay, you shall not take her to the cathedral in that!” Lord Vivaro cried, trailing us like a fat cat following a tray of fish. “At least let me put her in a clean gown!”
“’Tis most appropriate, don’t you think?” Rodolfo asked his host over his shoulder. “She-wolves are wild, untamed. Could a bride look more untamed than this?” he asked, giving me a wry up-and-down. Was he joking? Playing the part? Or was that a serious tinge of fury in his eyes?
“You have a point, m’lord. But I have a certain role to play in Roma.”
“And Lady Betarrini robbed you of that role, Lord Vivaro,” Rodolfo returned. He paused and faced the panting, fat man. “I am most sorry for your disappointment. But I sincerely hope that the private nature of the wedding ceremony shall ease your pain. The only Romans in attendance shall be the fifteen you have arranged to join us. That is enough! All of Roma shall clamor for your story, wanting every detail.”
Lord Vivaro paused, studied me and then Rodolfo. “As you wish, m’lord.”
So Rodolfo had something on him. I’d never seen Vivaro shut up before, and there it was. Barbato had taken Captain Ruisi a few paces away to speak to him. Their backs were to us.
“M’lord, may I have but a cup of water to drink?” I asked Rodolfo.
He studied me, then ushered me over to a carved marble fountain at the end of the hall. There, a cherub spit an unending stream of water. I cupped my hands beneath it and shakily took a sip. My back was to the rest of the room. “Surely you do not intend to see this ceremony through,” I whispered.
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