Gwen glared at Wryn. “If we were Celts in Britain, I’d hold just as high a military post as you and go into every battle.”
“We’re not barbarians in Britannia.” Praise heaven. Wryn rolled his eyes. “Can you just accept there are some things Roman society doesn’t allow a patrician woman to do and stop making all our eardrums ache by screaming about the injustice of it all?”
With a groan, Gwen leaned her head back against the couch. “Aulia said you didn’t make it to her house yesterday.”
“Grr, I forgot.” Fourth time. Not good.
“She’s the perfect woman for you. Follows every one of society’s dictates. Never complains. Worships the ground you tread on.” Gwen rested her chin on her hands.
“Yes, well.” Wryn’s face heated.
Gwen straightened. “The least you could do is visit her.”
“There’s nothing to talk about with her, ever.” Wryn squirmed.
“She listened to all of your political monologs.” Gwen slid back against Marcellus’ shoulder.
“And smiled and nodded.” When he spoke to Libya, she challenged his thoughts at every turn, and the discussion grew as he thought about things he never had. Whenever he spoke to Libya, the moments raced by, turning into hours long before they finished.
“She said you asked her about her weaving and needlework.”
He had. Surely, he should get some credit for that. “And Aulia smiled and nodded.”
Gwen folded her arms. “That’s what you said you wanted. A proper Roman wife who would make you well-respected throughout the city.”
“Yes, well,” he scratched the back of his neck, “I’m sure I’ll like it once I get used to it.”
“She thinks you’re Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great combined with the apostle Peter, and maybe even God. The least you can do is try to make her happy.”
“I’ll visit Aulia tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Gwen quirked an eyebrow.
“I’ll try with Aulia. I promise.” Wryn traced a grout line with his sandal. He needed to try a lot harder with Aulia before he married her in a matter of weeks.
Disapproval in her eyes, Gwen looked at him.
“Trust me. I don’t plan to make my wife miserable. I wouldn’t wish that on any woman.” He certainly wouldn’t wish that on Aulia, a sweet woman of good character about whom Gwen probably spoke the truth when she said he didn’t deserve her.
“I believe you, brother. Sort of.” Gwen stood and moved to the entrance.
Wryn turned to Marcellus. “Tell me if you find new Viri information.”
Gwen and Marcellus passed through the doorway.
A footstep fell outside the curtain. Libya’s dark hand pushed the cloth aside. “News on the Viri?” Her eyelashes rose, revealing those lovely eyes that held the mystery of moonlight in their luster. The hue of her lips spoke tales of the exotic lands her ancestors hailed from.
“Not much. I’ll map out the last shipments I seized thanks to your information.”
With the force of an arrow shot from a bow, Horus hurtled into the room. “Carve my spear now. Please, Wryn. I was ever so patient.”
“Shh.” Libya touched Horus’ shoulder. Afternoon sunlight flickered on her tunica, making shadows and lines across her lithe body as she turned her gaze to Wryn. “The cook ordered me to ask if you were hungry.”
“Of course, he is. I grabbed this bowl of figs and bread for us.” Horus held up a pottery serving dish. “Let’s go eat by my garden. My first seed came up.”
A smile lit Libya’s lovely face, rising over dark cheekbones and shimmering eyes. “I don’t know that tribunes deign to eat on dirty garden beds.”
“Soldiers eat in the field regularly.” He couldn’t help but watch the way the light played along her ebony hair, dancing along each strand as the breeze tugged at it. His kiss had last touched her glistening lips.
“Ah, but they aren’t Paterculis.” Libya swished her tunica around her legs as she stepped to him and caught his hand. She glided her finger over his signet ring, the mark of an eagle locked in combat with a raven.
“You’ve studied the austere Paterculi lineage so extensively, O Record Keeper of Rome?” He held her hand up, his fingers intertwining in hers. Her skin felt soft like starlight as its glow penetrated to his very being. His kiss. Not Jacob’s. He aimed to keep it that way.
No, he didn’t. He planned to free her.
Sliding her hand out of his, she dropped it to her hip and raised one shoulder. “Or you could prove me wrong?” Her gaze touched Horus’ bowl.
No other tribune in his garrison would free a woman like that and allow her to marry a potter.
“Will you?” She arched one eyebrow.
“Yes.” He smiled at her as if these times together could continue.
But if he wished to lay claim to any morals at all, he had to free her.
Chapter 16
The aroma of thyme and mint floated in from the window box, mixing with the scent of hyssop. Libya glanced at the dirt littering the atrium that she swept only yesterday. She had a dozen more rooms to clean before she fetched Horus from school. A little more than a week and she’d sweep her own house as a free woman.
While tolerating Jacob. She scowled. Maybe he’d change his mind and divorce her in a year or two. Not that she’d give him cause to. She’d be a good wife. She owed him that after he agreed to pay to free her.
The scratch of a stylus over wax came from inside the tablinum. Wryn didn’t have garrison duty on this beautiful day.
Dropping the broom, Libya flicked the corner of the tablinum curtain open.
Wryn’s gaze met hers. He smiled.
With an answering smile, she slipped into the room. “What’s all this?” She gestured over parchments and tablets littering the table, which the summer breeze tugged at. So many letters. Horus had taught her some of them.
“Rome’s statutes. Prefect things.” Wryn slapped his hand on a parchment before it sailed off the table into the mess of myrtle blossoms outside the low window.
“Poetry on every shelf and you must read statutes on your day off?” She scooted onto the edge of his table, her feet dangling. “What sorrow.” She’d miss Wryn. Miss him a lot. Not that he’d remember her. In a matter of weeks, he’d have his virginal bride in this villa to consume all his thoughts.
Wryn’s gaze connected with hers. “You bring poetry to any room you enter.”
She laughed and leaned back on her hands over his parchments. “Who’s your favorite poet?”
“Vergil in the Aeneid told of the founding of Rome —”
“Not a war poet.” She kicked her foot against his stool. “A poet who speaks of the stars, and fields, and beautiful things.”
“The Hebrew King Solomon wrote best of those.” Wryn had an interesting voice, one that could bark orders at soldiers or usher in the calm of deep waters.
“Tell me one of his poems.” The wind blew through the open window, flapping at her tunica like a spring lamb frolicking in green pastures. “Your favorite one.”
“You give your orders very freely.” He flicked the linen of her skirt from where she sat above him, on his table, surrounded by the laws of Rome.
She threw her hair back over her shoulder, and it fell on top his parchments. “Are you ordering me to leave, dominus? Because you’ve neglected to thus far.”
He shook his head, his light brown hair just touching his square forehead. “Here’s one of my favorites:
All the rivers run into the sea,
Yet the sea is not full…
All things are full of labor,
Man cannot utter it,
The eye is not satisfied with seeing,
Nor the ear filled with hearing.”
Her laughter bounced through the quiet room. “That’s the most depressing poem I’ve ever heard. You’d think the author a slave, not a king. Is this what you ponder when you lie awake at night?”
“No.” His ga
ze followed hers as if he looked across this space into her soul. Yet, despite her infamia and his patrician honor, he didn’t seem to find her soul lacking.
She tilted her head. “What do you ponder then?”
“What do you?”
Freedom. What if she’d been born free and never forced into infamia? Marriage to Jacob would give her freedom, but it wouldn’t remove the tattoo from her cheek or the scars inside her. Horus’ future. What if he’d been Victor’s legitimate heir and had the opportunity to live a patrician life? Marriage to Jacob would give Horus a trade and some learning, but he’d never get to discover all that knowledge he loved at the Collegium Academy like Victor’s heirs would. Like Wryn’s heirs would. She dropped her gaze. “I long for a world that can never be.”
Wryn grazed his hand across hers, his touch soothing. “So do I.”
“That’s insane.” She flicked his hand with her finger. “What could a patrician male possibly desire that he can’t obtain?”
“You shouldn’t marry Jacob.”
She lurched back. “Are you going to prevent it?” He had every legal right to refuse to allow Jacob to pay for her freedom. If Wryn did that, she’d lose everything.
“No.”
Good. She released her breath.
A knock sounded on the doorframe. The porter poked his head through the curtain. “Your sister’s here. She said not to bother you. She’s just getting things out of the storage buildings.”
Wryn jerked back from Libya. He slapped his hand on a parchment. “I need to work.”
“Of course.” Libya slid to the ground and walked through the curtain. Her broom still stood in the atrium, a dozen rooms awaiting her cleaning touch. She grasped the handle.
“Salve, Libya.” Gwen strode through the wide peristyle carrying a box. “How’s your son enjoying school?”
Libya inclined her head. “He loves it, domina.” No more talk of fire-setting, now Horus jabbered endlessly about his lessons.
“I’m glad. So unfair though how the Collegium Academy won’t take girls.”
How had Wryn and Gwen both come from the same parents? One a statue, the other as unpredictable as Mercury, both kind, though. Would she at least see Wryn in the catacombs sometimes after she married Jacob?
“What do you do to keep the waves of your hair so glossy?” Gwen smiled at her. “My curls always tangle. I wish I could leave my hair down like that.”
Libya’s muscles tightened. Of course, Gwen couldn’t, because she wasn’t a woman of infamia. “Olive oil.”
“I’ll have to try that. What does your star mark mean?” Gwen gestured to her cheek. “I always loved celestial imagery.”
“I don’t know.” Libya shoved at a speck on the tile with her toe.
“You don’t know?”
“I didn’t choose to have it there.” Libya knit her fingers into her skirt.
“Oh. Mea culpa.” Gwen dug her teeth into her lip as she shifted. She glanced at the door. “I guess I’ll be going.”
Gwen’s footsteps sounded out to the gate, yet Libya stood motionless as her fingers tightened around the doorframe behind her.
Ten years had passed since the slavers had marked her cheek with that tattoo. She turned twelve the day the old master, her father, sold her. Growing up, she always had her mother, and though the master’s wife beat her often enough, that had been the greatest unpleasantness.
Every year she grew, though, the master’s wife became more resentful of her mother and her. One day, after an epic fight with his wife, the old master had agreed to sell her mother and her.
Libya dug her fingers into the plaster. Flakes came off under her fingernails.
At the public auction, her mother had sold first. A kind-enough-looking man had bought Mother. Sweat drenched his tunic and sawdust covered his arms. Mother had fallen to her knees, begging her new master to buy Libya too. The man had shaken his head.
She never saw her mother again. A few years back, she heard Mother had died in a fever.
Two whole days of auction passed and no one bought her. Fingers gripping the plaster, Libya tried to swallow. Even now, ten years later, her throat became too sandy for breath at the memory.
As the sun set the second day, a burly slaver had walked up to her. He turned to his comrade. “We sail with the morrow’s tide. I want them all sold before that. I’ll make no profit if I have to feed these slaves all the way to the next port.”
The smaller man nodded.
“Rub some oil on his skin.” The slaver shoved a sickly-looking slave. “Give that woman a plaque saying she’s good with children. Best chance of selling her is as a nurse.”
“What about her?” The smaller man stabbed a dirty finger at Libya.
She shrank into the coarse fabric of her oversized dress. Palla pulled over her bound hair, only her eyes peered out at the man.
“How you goin’ to make some shrivel-faced child sell?”
With a grunt, the burly slaver ripped the palla from her head and tore her hands from her chest. He ran his gaze over her early-bloomed body. “This one ain’t no child. I think she’ll sell very well.”
A shiver ran through Libya.
The smaller slaver’s gaze raked down her and he nodded. “We bought her for three hundred denarii. I hoped to sell her for five-hundred.”
The burly man tapped his finger against his fat lips. “We could get a thousand denarii for her as a woman of infamia.”
“I’m a girl, not a woman,” she screamed. “A good girl, not one of infamia.”
“That’ll change tonight,” the burly slaver said.
They held her down when they marked her cheek with the tattooing ink and unbound her hair. The next day, they displayed her naked on the auction block.
The slavers had spoken truth on one account. Before the tide came in, they got 1,100 denarii for her.
“Libya.” The voice sounded oceans away.
She worked at three different taverns, each one worse than the last, before the old master had bought her and discovered her talent for dancing. Then she had Horus and life had taken on some meaning again.
“Libya.” Wryn stood at her side. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She tried to keep her voice steady as the memories swarmed over her. That first tavern. The first time. Prostitution.
The blood drained from her face as cold chills passed through her. At that first tavern, that first night....
Oh, she didn’t want to remember. She could, though, every sensation, every fear, every violation. So many men that night. Fifty, sixty, she lost count.
“You look pale as death.” Wryn’s voice grated in her consciousness, pulling her back one handbreadth from the precipice.
Her body trembled, every breath she took sweeping the memories back over her.
“Sit down.” He gestured inside the room to a couch.
Her feet stumbled as she moved to do as he said.
Catching her hand, he sat next to her on the couch. “Do you need water? Wine? Something to eat?”
“I….” Her gaze met his. His brown eyes held concern. Sweat clung to his forehead, dripping down the bridge of his nose in the warm day. Another chill ran through her as her chest shook. That first night.
Sweat drenched her tunica as the memories rushed back. Shivers ran through her limbs, her breathing faster than any soldier in battle. She threw herself against Wryn.
He closed his arms around her. He stroked his big hand down her back. Arms around his neck, she clung to him. His body felt warm against her, driving away the chills. She pressed tighter against his chest as her breathing began to slow.
Wryn stroked his hand against her hair. His fingers touched her blood-drained cheek. His heart beat against her as she clung to him. The strength of his body surrounded her, a barricade against all harm.
Her pounding heart slowed, but she didn’t pull back. She could feel the sinews of his shoulders underneath her arms, the muscles of his chest touchi
ng her. If only in a week’s time she could marry Wryn, not Jacob.
No, she shook her head. As much as she’d miss Wryn, marriage to him, besides from being impossible, would be worse. Lying with a man always ruined everything. When she didn’t care about a man, she didn’t mind so much that he only saw her body, not her soul. She pulled back onto her space on the couch. She looked up at Wryn. “Gratias.”
“Of course.” An intenseness shone in his gaze.
She stood.
“Put on your sandals, Horus.” Libya glanced to the already-fading sunshine. At First Day service yesterday, in those ever-winding catacombs, Jacob had invited her to visit him today.
Crossing into the villa, Libya lifted her hand and rapped against the tablinum doorframe.
A slave needed permission to leave the house. Soon she’d be a freedwoman, able to go and come as she pleased. Married to Jacob.
Would she even feel free married to a man, him touching her whenever he pleased? She stiffened her jaw. Freedom for her and Horus was worth any sacrifice.
“Come in,” Wryn called through the curtain.
She stepped through the doorway. He smiled when he saw her. She touched his table. “May I take Horus and go to Jacob’s house this afternoon. I finished all the work the cook asked of me.”
Wryn’s smile vanished. “Be back before dark. Rome’s streets aren’t safe at night.”
With how late the afternoon shadows stretched, that would scarcely give her a half-hour at Jacob’s house. She wished to spend at least one evening in conversation with him before she married the man.
Libya frowned. Legally a slave couldn’t spend the night away from a master’s house, but Wryn let her get away with a thousand things a slave shouldn’t. “I’ll just wait until morning to come back.”
“Absolutely not.” Wryn raised his voice, anger in it.
She stiffened her shoulders. “Why? I’d come back at dawn’s light, finish the cook’s work just the same.”
His jaw granite, his eyes looked as hard as any other man who ever ordered her. “I said ‘no.’ Do I need to repeat myself?”
Without Love: Love and Warfare series book 4 Page 17