As soon as the stable door closed behind him, Milo had an unsettling sensation of being back in the arena. Surrounded by walls, with a large beast rearing and baring its teeth while he did his best to stay out of range of its hooves. No one would come through those doors to help him if things turned ugly, and in the Roman amphitheaters they always did. But this time his job was to calm, not to kill. Milo raised his hands as the horse's legs flailed in the air. Swallowing to clear the dryness from his throat, he padded softly across the floor. The stallion was frightened, but not wild. Milo could usually tell within the first ten seconds which horses had been born domestic and which had been broken. He sensed this one trusted people by nature, almost certainly raised from a foal. That made his task much easier. Still, he could not suppress a pang of sympathy for a creature that had never known what it was like to run free.
The stallion whinnied and reared its legs again. Milo backed away, nearly colliding with the door. The horse pawed the earth. It turned and cantered nervously across the stable, but at least now all four legs were on the ground. Carefully, Milo moved closer. He stopped when his outstretched fist was a few inches from the animal's teeth. It was not a threat or command, but an invitation. Turning his head aside out of respect, he waited. After a few seconds he felt the stallion's warm breath against his knuckles. It gently nudged his fist. Letting out a slow breath, Milo stroked the horse's nose and neck until he felt its muscles relax. He let his fingers run through its gray mane. When he was finally convinced it was safe, he sprang up.
The instant his legs fell across its back, he felt a rush of relief. It had been so long since he had been allowed to ride. He had been afraid, at first, that he had forgotten how. Seventeen years out of the saddle had made his legs soft and uncertain. He was half-amazed the stallion had remained still long enough for him to mount at all. But his muscles remembered the old motions. He was a Celt again—not the nameless Celt trained to amuse bloodthirsty crowds, but a true Celt where Celts belonged. Elation rising in his chest, he flicked the reins and let the horse take him in a slow, easy circle around the stable. The horse was no longer spooked, but it was restless. They would have done better to tether the animal outside, Milo thought. It still would have panicked, but it wouldn't have risked injuring itself.
A low creak from the front of the stable jerked him back into the present. Milo wondered which of the men-at-arms he was about to send into an apoplectic rage. Smirking from his elevated position on the stallion, he watched as the girl Cassia slipped inside, the folds of her amber dress narrowly missing getting caught in the door as she shut it. Her solitary entrance threw him for a second. He hadn't expected her to come in alone. But judging by the barely concealed drop of her jaw, she hadn't thrown him nearly as much as he'd thrown her. She quickly closed her lips. Folding her hands in front of her, she regained her marble mask of composure.
"How did you do that?" she asked politely.
Milo shrugged. "I asked him," he told her.
Without losing her demeanor, she reached for the reins and stroked the horse's nose. "You could ride, before you were a gladiator?"
"I could ride before I could walk," he answered. "My people were horsemen." He did not say it to impress her. In all honesty, he didn't care much about impressing Lady Cassia. He had noticed the way her eyes sometimes fixated on him, but hadn't given it much thought. It wasn't the first time a bored Roman girl had fantasized about a barbarian. He had seen dozens like her when their trainers marched them outside the arenas. None of them seemed terribly heartbroken when their favorites died; it was difficult to take seriously a fascination so shallow.
"Were horsemen?" she interjected, her eyebrows furrowed.
"My family were butchered by the Romans," he said coldly, and watched her recoil. Her eyelids dropped.
"I am so sorry," she said.
"Sorry," Milo repeated, unable to suppress a soft snort of contempt. "What would a Roman know of such things?" It was harsh, possibly too harsh. She was the first person to inquire about his past—hell, the first person to ask him a polite question in at least a year. But what did her words amount to, beyond a routine scrap of sympathy?
Her eyes flared. "I am not a Roman. I am a citizen of Pompeii," she said, as though she expected him to see a difference between the two.
Milo leaned forward so his chest almost touched the horse's neck. "Then why do I see Rome's eagle everywhere I turn?" he asked her.
"I am no part of that," she snapped. She snatched the horse's reins again, with more ferocity than before. As she ran her fingers along its neck, the motion seemed to calm her brief outburst. "After a year in Rome, I hoped never to see that eagle again. Yet here it is, thrust into the soil outside my home. And my father believes he can bargain with those animals." Her voice was quiet and steady, although a cold anger lingered beneath her words. Anger, he thought, and a hint of muted desperation. Milo studied her face, momentarily riveted against his will.
"My father," he told her slowly, "would have killed every last one of them." He found himself curious to see her reaction. He had in effect just confirmed her head guard's opinion of the savage Celts; any rational Roman girl would be horrified. She flinched, but the look in her eyes contained more sorrow than horror. To his surprise, she nodded. It would be too much to expect a girl like her to understand his bitterness, or the hollow ache that had festered in his chest for almost two decades…yet somehow she accepted them. Her grey eyes had started to glisten. She tightened her jaw and glanced aside to hide it, but the marble mask had cracked, and suddenly he felt guilty. He needed to get away; he needed to get very far away from her.
A sharp rapping on the door broke the stalemate, and the voice of her man-at-arms made her glance frantically behind her. "Milady?"
Cassia turned back to him. "If they catch you up there, they'll punish you," she said, her voice low and quick. When he didn't move, the agitation in her voice intensified. "Please," she said.
Milo leaned backwards. He had no intention of dismounting or giving her back her horse, not now that he remembered what if felt like to be a man. He had decided what he would do the moment the stallion let him climb onto it. And yet there she stood between him and the door, to all appearances the quintessential Roman aristocrat, her posture tense and rigid. She reminded him of a fierce but small animal caught under the shadow of a bird of prey. If she truly had come to Pompeii to escape the Roman eagle, perhaps she knew what it was like to be hunted and cornered. What on earth would she have to run from? Milo wondered. Then again, he supposed that wasn't his business.
Flicking the reins, he urged the horse forward and stretched out his hand. This time she did not try to hide her shock. Her lips widened; she looked torn and bewildered. Milo eyed her without moving. He would not compel or cajole her. It was simply an offer—the same offer he had made to the stallion, the offer no one had ever made to him. If freedom is what you want, take it, he thought. Choose to fly, or stay and seek shelter in the familiar.
"Milady, is everything all right?" Cassia glanced back at the door once more; then her face hardened with resolve. Drawing a sharp breath, she seized his arm and let him pull her up behind him. He felt her fingertips rest tentatively on his shoulders. She would never stay on that way, not at the pace he intended to go. If this was going to work they needed to ride fast, and there would be no time to gradually build up speed. She seemed to realize that a moment later when she locked her arms around his waist. She inched forward until he felt her chest and stomach pressing into his back.
"Milady, what's happening in—" Milo dug his heels into the horse and let it bolt.
The next few minutes were a chaotic jumble of shouting, galloping and splintered wood. The city streets were narrow, even without the fruit and fish tents that crowded the market during the day. Several times Milo found himself having to dodge wool tunics and sheets hung out on clotheslines to dry. He was dimly aware of orange candlelit windows whirring past them in the dark, Cassia's arms tightening around his rib cage, and her cool breath leaving a strange trail of goose bumps on his neck. It wasn't until they had left the city gates half a mile behind them and found the open road that his head finally began to clear.
The night was glorious, full of mist and silence. The only sounds in his ears were the labored panting of the stallion and the rapid hoof beats pounding against the pavement. He could feel weeks and months of captivity falling from his shoulders as the road ate them up. When the hills rose on their left, he veered off the main road and made for the slopes. The grass muffled the stallion's hooves. This was the terrain Milo was used to riding on, with emerald blades sweeping against their legs and salt-sprinkled air filling his lungs. This was paradise, this was euphoria, this was home.
Abruptly, Cassia's breath against his neck lifted as she sat up straighter. He wondered if she was feeling the same awe he felt under the open sky. He didn't have a clue what he was going to do with her on their mad race to nowhere. Whatever reasons she had for fleeing, he could not picture her wanting to fly with him to the backwaters of Britannia. But he thought he would have liked to turn and see her face in that moment. For years he had only smiled in the heat of a fight, when he found a way to take advantage of an opponent's stupidity. Damned if he'd ever show a real smile to a crowd of Romans. But it would not be so bad, perhaps, to let her see one.
Halfway up the hills, Milo pulled up the reins and looked back at the city. The torch-lined streets of Pompeii glared back at him—distant, but not nearly so distant as he had imagined. There would be a search party. It had already left the gates. If he closed his eyes, he could hear the soft drumming of four dozen hooves against the earth. As the euphoria wore off, he was forced to accept what he had known in a corner of his mind the entire time: One might have escaped on the back of a stolen horse, but not two. A taste of freedom was all they would be permitted.
Cassia unlocked her arms from his waist and let them fall behind his shoulders. "What's wrong?" she asked.
"I have to take you back," he said.