“The legate’s son?” The blacksmith glowered, but no flash of recognition crossed his face. “What is it then? Blades? Javelins?”
The shop stood empty. Eric forced his mouth open. “May I marry your daughter?”
The blacksmith raised his eyebrows high, not in anger, but in shock. Then his eyes went dark with fury. “You were the criminal that – ” The blacksmith stopped, turned, and bellowed toward the back room. “Cara!”
Eric swallowed hard.
The door creaked open. Cara’s disheveled brown hair fell loose down her back. Her eyes red, tears streaked her cheeks.
“Is this patrician the villainous lout?” Her father rested his hammer on the red-hot anvil.
Cringing, Cara moved her brown chin down in the smallest of nods. Head down, she pulled a palla further over her face. The cloth obscured the delicate curves of her cheekbones and her long eyelashes.
Her brown dress wrinkled over her hunched shoulders, the fabric falling flat across her stomach, no hint of the baby within. Even drawn back, palla clasped around her, she couldn’t hide the way her slender arm clutched around her bosom and the palla didn’t cover her gloriously silky tresses, which tumbled down to her waist.
Unlike the nights she’d played tabula and the days she’d lingered at the training field, Cara didn’t meet his gaze.
The blacksmith shifted toward Eric. Not good.
“You want to marry my daughter?” The blacksmith released his hammer.
Eric nodded quickly. Want wasn’t the right word, more like couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t. Well, that was a type of wanting.
“And your father, he has agreed to this betrothal?” The blacksmith rested his big hands on his smithy apron.
“Oh, yes.”
“When will you marry her?”
“Uh.” Eric gulped and looked at Cara. The girl standing before him would be his wife for the rest of his days? His gut constricted, forcing bile up his throat. Of course he wanted a wife someday, years in the future. He’d thought to select one of his own choosing, not have a girl shout his name in the crowded street of a Fortuna festival, and his fate be sealed by the words, I’m having your child. Do something about it.
A sigh escaped his lungs, his breath turning to mist in the cold autumn air. At least, as Father had mentioned, he hadn’t done this with some betrothed or almost-betrothed girl who would hate him for ruining her plans.
Quite the opposite. Cara had always made abundant excuses to spend time in his company. Focusing on Cara, he forced his mouth up in, if not a smile, at least not a scowl. “When do you want to marry me?”
The tears that ran down Cara’s cheeks stilled, her eyes growing less red, and though her hand clenching the palla trembled, she met his gaze. “Whenever you want.”
Was she granting him a reprieve? A fortnight, a month, two, more? Cara’s pink lips, which framed the words, had never looked so beautiful.
The blacksmith boomed from behind them. “This First Day, after service.”
The day of the pentathlon. Eric’s heart dropped, but he nodded because this was all his fault.
Chapter 14
The morning sun lit the triclinium when Eric entered. A breakfast tray sat on a low table. Wryn gawked at him from the dining-couch.
Gut churning, Eric stared back. Silence bounced off the stucco ceilings, ricocheting against marble window frames and rebounding back against Eric’s lungs with the impact of a discus.
The curtain behind them whooshed open. Gwen swooped in and grabbed an apple from the tray. Moments from sinking her teeth into the fruit, she glanced at Eric. “I’m trying to imagine you holding a babe.”
Wryn tensed. “Shh, that’s inappropriate.”
“It’s not my fault Eric ground a village girl. I see no reason why his acts should decrease my pleasure in my little niece.” Gwen focused her black eyes on Eric. “Do tell Cara to make it a girl. There are too many boys in this familia already.”
Eric jerked back and now he couldn’t breathe.
With the crunch of dirty sandals against tile, the curtain parted again. Paulus dragged his dog by a makeshift rope. “Are you really having a bairn, Eric?”
Wryn swiveled his disapproving gaze to the boy. “Where did you hear that?”
“The whole house shook when Father spoke. How ignorant do you think Marcus and I are?” Paulus embraced the mongrel. “Are you, Eric? Are you? Are you?”
In addition to his familia’s interrogation, the blacksmith had sent a note requesting tomorrow’s ceremony occur at the church, in front of hundreds of such stares and questions. Eric fled the room.
Lifting the javelin, Eric threw it hard. A hundred paces, his best throw yet. Not that it mattered.
The pentathlon would happen tomorrow, but instead of competing, he’d swear lifelong pledges to some girl he barely knew. He might have won, too. He hadn’t beaten Victor in the run yet, but the other four events were his.
A cold autumn wind blew over the deserted field. He’d planned to break ground for his training school this week.
Training school? Eric kicked the dirt. Father would never trust him with the financial capital now, and one can’t start a training school without first proving one’s mettle by winning the pentathlon games.
“Eric,” a hard voice barked his name like an order.
He whipped around.
“I want to speak to you,” Father said as self-righteously as last afternoon when he’d assumed his son wouldn’t want to marry the girl he got with child. Did Father think he had no integrity?
“I sure as Hades don’t want to speak to you.” Eric seized another javelin and pulled it high.
Father grabbed his arm, the metal of his chest plate scraping across bare skin.
Eric wrenched away.
“Listen to me.” Father’s legate cloak blew in the wind as he employed the same voice he used on legionaries.
He hadn’t joined the Army yet, and Father could save that tone for the men whose life he owned.
“I don’t even know where to begin.”
“What about with ‘you hate me, and you wish I was a sycophant like Wryn?’” Eric threw the javelin. He’d even had the plot of land selected. He could have had the training school completed before the winter snows.
“You call obeying the dictates ordained to differentiate men from beasts sycophantic? Have you no regard for what you did?”
As if he’d have ever done this sober. No, the one time he accidentally became drunk, behold, a girl and a baby. If Wryn ever became drunk, he’d probably unwittingly catch a dozen smugglers.
“Do you know anything about this woman?”
She loved when he told her the stories of Greek myths, and she wanted to explore the world. Also, she touched him a lot. He grabbed for a javelin.
“This Cara, whose life you ruined, was almost betrothed to a carpenter.”
Eric froze. Cara, almost betrothed?
“The carpenter is an upstanding shopkeeper, diligent enough to rebuild his entire shop after it burned to the ground last month, and a deacon in the Camulodunum church. She had a whole life you just destroyed.”
When had Cara agreed to marry this carpenter? After she played side-by-side with him at tabula? After she begged him to retell the tales of Homer and Ovid? After she pressed her lips to his behind the training grounds with kisses that shot fiery arrows through him? Kisses best ignored. Best ignored, that is, until she’d done it again at the tabula game.
After all that surely? Or had it been before?
Almost betrothed? Cara must have drunk more than he that night. Why had he assumed she looked on him with favor and sought each of those kisses he’d given her? Arrogance? She’d called him Hercules, by Jove.
Maybe she said that to all her friends. Did she hate him for his drunken actions that parted her from her carpenter?
Eric seized up the javelin. Nothing he could do to fix that now. The almost betrothed had rejected her, or Cara wouldn
’t have screamed “Eric” in the midst of that crowded street only yesterday.
“And for what? For an imbecilic party with reprobates.” Father whipped his voice over dead and dying grass.
Next Father would order him to take a tribune post, no matter how ill-suited to those duties he was. He’d have to accept the position too, since he’d acquire a wife and a baby on the morrow.
“You ought to have been at the inn, learning about Dacia, preparing to take your place as a Paterculi statesman, but instead – ”
“Lecture over yet?”
“No,” Father bellowed. “You will stand there, and you will listen. If you expect any help from me for the rest of your life, you will change your shiftless ways.”
Shiftless? He had a plan, a good plan. A training school might not alter the lay of empires or the path of senators, but it would have created a dependable income. Just because he wasn’t Wryn, didn’t make him incompetent. Eric dug the javelin shaft into the ground. “I’m neither shiftless nor incapable.”
“Truly?” Only Stoics could produce a tone that biting. “You think your irresponsible eighteen-year-old habits could take you through one month of this life without the Paterculi name and fortune?”
Actually, nineteen, next week, and a month? He was no bairn, and plenty of plebeian-born men in this town supported wife and child a lifetime without Paterculi backing.
“You need my help, and you will obey my rules.”
Need? Eric tensed. Wished for, perhaps, so he could build his training school, but he did not need Father’s support to survive the responsibilities he’d freely take upon himself on the morrow, anymore than he needed Father’s urging to choose to take them on. Despite how Father had made it sound.
He’d tried to follow Father’s rules his entire life, although he received no credit for it. “You act as if I’d die without your benevolence. I’m fully capable of supporting myself.”
“Wager accepted. Find other lodgings after you wed tomorrow, but when you fail miserably, I expect an abject apology.” Father narrowed his eyelids.
A chill passed through Eric’s limbs as he stared. He’d thought he’d chosen his words poorly in rhetoric class, but not to compare to the cliff he’d just launched himself over. He should have kept his mouth shut.
Father stood, stance spread, the sun glinting off his cuirass, the sword at his belt just as stiff as his rigid back. When Father made a demand like that, he never backed down.
Eric swallowed. If he didn’t give that abject apology this instant, on the morrow he’d acquire a wife and a baby, with no house, no food, no clothes except those on his back, and lethal Britannia snows swiftly closing in. He touched his tongue to his teeth.
Whipping away, he grabbed a discus. So be it. He was done with Father’s rules. “Don’t hold your breath.”
Outside the window, the sun rose high. First Day service would have ended. Cara tugged at the brown wool that covered her body. She’d had no time to weave the white dress of a bride. How many people would crowd into this shop for the wedding? The betrothal papers only required the presence of two witnesses. Two witnesses and Eric.
Like Alexandros, Eric had done it. Only hours after she’d told him, he’d astounded her by walking into Father’s shop and asking for her. He hadn’t looked happy, but unlike any other patrician male alive, he’d done it. Now she’d have to face him, knowing she’d just destroyed his dreams, for surely his dreams didn’t include her and a squalling baby.
Was Eric as furious as Alexandros to be saddled with a wife and baby he didn’t want? She certainly hoped not, for from today on she’d live with him as his wife.
“Here, carissime.” A tear rolled down Father’s cheek. “It was your mother’s.” He pressed a flame-colored veil into her hands.
The fabric twisted around her fingers like actual flames. She touched her unbound hair. Edna had said she’d come braid it up in the traditional six plaits of a bride, but she hadn’t arrived.
“Almost ready to go to the church, carissime?”
“What?” She went rigid. “The ceremony’s here.”
Father glared at the cold hearth fire. “Those patricians, they wriggle out of marriages, legal paperwork or no. I want witnesses and lots of them.”
Her chest constricted, choking her.
Thanks to Conan, everyone knew. Everyone.
Walk in front of hundreds of people to take Eric’s hands and repeat the marriage vow? The patricians always sat up front. What must Eric’s familia think of her?
Still no sign of Edna, so Cara made the braids herself, fumbled affairs twisted between trembling hands. She slipped the veil over her hair.
Father locked the shop behind them, each move deliberate.
“Shouldn’t we hurry?”
“Don’t care if that wretched patrician does have to wait.”
Wretched? Eric could have had any girl he wanted, girls to put Venus’ beauty and Minerva’s wisdom to shame. Instead, he’d get her. If anything was wretched, that was.
Decked in the screaming red of a bride, Cara started the cold walk to the church. The cobblestones felt clammy. She shifted her gaze, looking for the stares, but locks secured every shop door, vendors nowhere in sight. Did the temple have a festival?
Two streets away from the church, she had her answer. People ringed the brick building, spilling out from every entrance, and filling the streets beyond the door.
Heads turned, people staring and pointing as their mouths moved.
“Can you believe it?
“A patrician marrying a common village girl, and her not even a maiden anymore.”
“I’d lie with a patrician too, if I thought he’d marry me.”
She sucked in a breath, but she didn’t look down. Eric was marrying her, and that meant the only one she’d have to give an account to for her deeds was him. Terrifying thought.
The sea of sweaty bodies parted. Reaching out, Cara squeezed Father’s hand. “They’ll all bring their business to your shop now.”
Father spat on the ground. “This stranger had better treat you right.”
“He will.” She hoped. “I’ve loved him since the kalends of Maius.” That didn’t mean Eric loved her, or felt pleased with her, though.
Inside, people jammed from wall to wall. Seeing her, they pressed back against each other, making a narrow shaft down the aisle. She moved her gaze down that shaft to Eric. The white linen of his tunic covered his chest, clean this time. A toga hung over it, the clumsy cloth wrapping up, around, and over. He met her gaze and he looked ready to retch.
She dropped her gaze to the plain tile beneath her feet. This was all her fault. If she hadn’t pressed matters forward, Eric wouldn’t have done it. Wait, Victor had said Eric did this before with a different girl, so maybe not entirely her fault.
She and Father squeezed down the narrow aisle toward Eric.
The elder pointed Father to the foremost row and gestured her to move to the front of the room.
She dragged her feet as she walked toward her bridegroom. For one instant, Eric caught hers gaze then he looked away. Did he hate her? She’d experienced his friendship. What would his hate look like? Conan’s righteous rage had proved dreadfully unpleasant.
The church elder held up a scroll, a dangerous move now that Rome outlawed the Christian texts. From now on, she’d follow that text’s rules.
Eyes bore into her and Eric from every angle. She strained her ears to hear the murmur of whispers. She knew all too well what people chattered about.
Swallowing through a dry mouth, Cara moved her gaze to the elder. What text had he picked?
Pruella’s mother would select something from the Prophet Hosea. Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms.
The gray-haired man turned his head toward the left. She struggled to follow his gaze through the fog her pounding head created.
The commander of the military forces of the province, Legate Paterculi, sat to her
left on the foremost bench. Even if Eric did hate her, no one would dare label the bride of the legate’s son a harlot. Behind her, the scroll crinkled and the elder started reading a passage from the Jewish scriptures, something a prophet had said long ago.
“And as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee,” the elder said.
Rejoiceth? She snuck a glance at Eric. His face grew deathly pale, his gaze on the crowd who stared at them. Dread spread across his features. Dread to marry her?
The betrothal papers sat on a table to Eric’s right. The fathers would sign them now along with the wedding ceremony rather than months before as for virtuous girls. As hundreds of people stared at them, the elder passed the parchment to Father. He signed. The elder crossed the aisle and handed it to the legate.
The legate scratched the writing instrument across the parchment so hard it tore.
“The ring.” The elder looked to Eric.
Digging into the pouch at his belt, Eric produced an iron band. He handed it to her. He didn’t slide it on her finger, just placed it in her palm.
Gaze on her scuffed boots, Cara slipped the ring on her left-hand finger.
“Join hands and repeat after me,” the elder said.
Eric reached out to her. His fingers felt cold. For one instant they seemed to tremble, then he closed them over hers.
“Ubi tu Gaia ego Gaius – where you are mistress, there am I master,” Eric said the phrase as quickly as possible.
The elder looked at her. Voice numb, she repeated. “Ubi tu Gaius ego Gaia – where you are master, there am I mistress.”
Words complete, Eric dropped her hands.
Still the congregation stared. Hundreds and hundreds of faces, all focused on them. At least the first dozen rows held the white linen and fine silk of patricians, most of whom had never crossed this threshold before.
A girl in pink silk pouted. A man wearing the purple-bordered toga of a magistrate frowned disapprovingly. Behind the patricians, sat row upon row of villagers, squeezed so tight not a breath of air blew through the building.
When Gambling (Love and Warfare Series Book 2) Page 17