She Walks in Shadows(53)

“I’m a doctor, my lady,” said Engatius. “General Antonius sent for me.”

“Have you told them?”

The General huffed out a breath. “That you talk nonsense? No, of course not. The doctor will give you something for the road. We leave by first light.”

Astride a horse? I thought. Again? Fatigue slumped my shoulders, but I knew better than to protest. We had ridden far to tend a woman who seemed in fair health — if slightly cross with her husband.

I had been wrong to trust old prophecy. The spirits in these woods did not take kindly to tainted blood.

My master sighed and nodded. “Can you tell me what ails you, sweet lady?”

“My name,” said the general’s wife, “is Iunia Gratiana.” She pushed herself upright, folding pale legs beneath the hem of a sheer-white shift. “And I do not wish to leave this place.”

“Iuno Sospita!” The General strode forward, his jaw clenched. “Whatever daemon you hold inside you, the doctor will pry out.”

With limp, sweat-soaked black hair sticking out at odd angles and bags drooping beneath her eyes, Gratiana thrust out her chin as defiant as a queen. “And if he cannot?”

“Then I will do it myself!”

I flinched, all-too-familiar with the Roman appetite for threats.

The unyielding tension between husband and wife was quelled by the sudden blare of a horn.

Engatius looked up from where he was rifling for some miracle cure. “What’s that?”

“Barbarians,” spat the General. “Have her ready for the road!” Fury twisted at his mouth as he whirled around and left us.

“My husband speaks to you as a friend,” Gratiana observed.

“We, ah, had the good fortune to study under the same tutor in Calleva.” Engatius shot a wary glance to the door. He’d never been in a battle, let alone so far from Hadrian’s Wall. Naked fear shone on his wrinkled face.

Gratiana slid back to the sleeping couch with a huff of laughter. “Fortune! This place has not known any in a year.”

“You’ve suffered many attacks?”

“The tribes harass us. They steal cattle and horses.”

Engatius bid me upend a vial of tonic into a cup of wine. “I see the people have fled. No one is left but for you and the garrison —”

“Yes, five souls and my indomitable husband.”

Gratiana turned her head on the cushion. I had the uncanny feeling that she was following me with her gaze, a yellow flicker in her eyes.

When I chanced a look, I discovered her peering at the ceiling.

“My husband led a skirmish into the oak wood, you see. Two hundred perished, but he returned. I saved him … and this is how he repays me.” She rose up onto her elbows. “He turned my son away when he was born. Such a small, fragile parcel of life. I laid him at his feet and he said, The eyes aren’t mine. Now our son sleeps with the spirits of the forest and my husband wages war, and I do not wish to leave!”

I shivered, though the elaborate brazier in the room tinged the air with a warm glow.

Engatius blew into a clump of burnt rosemary to dim the embers. The pungent scent filled the room like incense. “For purification,” he explained.

He wasn’t truly listening to the General’s wife, but I was. Curiosity got the better of me.

“How did you save him?”

Gratiana met my gaze. “A pact with the wood. My husband’s life for our eternal gratitude … as though that might slake its hunger!” She laughed hoarsely. “You believe in daemons, don’t you?”

“She is a simple girl,” scoffed my master. “She is seduced by simple superstition.”

“Is it superstition if I say you may not see morning, Doctore?”

Marcus nearly dropped the rosemary. “Surely, the barbarians cannot penetrate these walls ….” This villa was Rome and Rome was eternal.

“It is not barbarians you should fear,” Gratiana informed us. With a careless hand, she snatched the goblet from my grasp and downed its contents in a single swig.

Crimson dregs spilled onto her shift as she collapsed, as though even this small effort had exhausted her. The bed gave a small, disconsolate groan.

I hunted for my customary scorn and found none. The blare of the horn had given way to the sounds of battle, which ricocheted from the walls of the villa like stray arrows.

“That was no tonic,” I murmured, wounded.

Engatius gave a careless wave. “A soporific to clear her mind. She will be restored when next she wakes.” He had roused the General’s wife from her strange torpor only to medicate her into another unnatural sleep.

Gratiana had struck me as perfectly lucid, but the Doctor’s judgment was the only one that mattered. I left him to his task, creeping out of the bedchamber on cat-quiet feet.

Rain spattered the ground, but the rattle of the downpour was not enough to disguise the beastlike howl of warriors. My heart swelled.

I remembered their cries. The music of their battle. I was home.

Fishhooks snagged in my flesh with the sudden urge to find the nearest door and run, to join them and disappear into the oak wood with the daemons. I took my first step to the baths.

Something tumbled from the roof of the villa. A soldier, my addled mind supplied. His skull shattered upon impact with the tile walkway at my feet, helmet rolling into the azaleas.