A/N: Apparently I lied in the last chapter. Oops. There will be one more chapter after this, before the epilogue.
Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to give me such kind and thoughtful reviews in these past few chapters. This story has occupied a kind of obsessive part of my brain since I started it, so I'm really glad that other people are digging it so much.
Without daylight, time passes without measure.
You find that you doze off often and with little warning, sleeping for lengths of time that Pete tells you are irregular.
Waking brings forgetfulness of your dreams, but Pete tells you that you startle often in your sleep, mumbling names. Charles. Wolcott. Myka. Christina.
Periodically, the door opens and someone tosses you a plate of food and some water. The deposit happens so quickly that your eyes never have time to adjust to the light from the corridor, so you never know who delivers it. You're pretty sure it's not Leena. She would stop, talk to you.
When you're awake, you pass the time with Pete by sharing stories. You both tell them, but you tell them more often than he; you were much-beloved as a storyteller in your home village and had practice recalling many of those tales when you had Christina as an audience.
Pete tells you war stories, an amalgam of his own with the stories he's heard from others used to fill in the gaps where his memory fails. "I hate that there's so much I can't remember," he says, "but then I think of what I do remember… the battles, the blood, the dead innocents… and I wonder if maybe I'm the lucky one to have forgotten so much." He shakes his head. "It's a sad statement that you have to become a slave in this empire to learn to see that outsiders are, you know. People."
Your own stories are more fantastical. You tell him a story of a person who finds ways to visit different eras in time, much beloved by Charles and Wolcott when you first spun it over a campfire a decade earlier.
You spin a tale of a man who makes himself invisible to the human eye and then travels around avenging the people who have wronged him.
"Myka would love your stories," Pete says. "She always loved a good yarn."
Each of you has a bucket within reach of your bindings. You can't see through the dark, not really, but you develop the habit of turning away when the other needs to use theirs, creating an illusion of privacy.
These small decisions help you to remember that you haven't died; you aren't in the afterworld just yet.
/
You think it must be night when you hear a key worked into the lock on your cell door. There hasn't been any movement in the corridor from some time.
The door opens and you and Pete both raise your arms against the torchlight flooding through.
"You need to be quick about this, dear." Artie's voice. "We're not supposed to be in here."
"My goodness, the smell," says a female voice you haven't heard in a long time. It's the healer, Vanessa.
"Not our fault," Pete says tightly from behind his raised arms. "We don't like it either."
"Nobody has come to empty these buckets," you say.
"Well, that's the first thing, then. Artie, can you take these and dump them out?" Vanessa asks. Your eyes are beginning to adjust to the light, and you make out the shape of the tall, striking woman standing between you and Pete. She carries her medical bag in one hand. Behind her, the shorter, grouchier form of her husband throws his hands up haphazardly.
"Really? Really? I run this ludus, and you want me to dump out prisoners' waste-buckets?"
Vanessa throws a stern look over her shoulder at him, and then steps to kneel near Pete, alongside his injured shoulder. Artie groans again, but he picks up your bucket and Pete's and sets off down the corridor.
"Let's check your shoulder, shall we, Pete?" she asks, carefully untying the knot in the bandage and unwrapping it. Pete hisses a little when the cloth tugs at his injured skin. "It's healing well," she says. "Let me clean it up a little, and I've got something here I can put on it for the pain."
You watch in silence, still squinting a little against the light of her torch, propped in a wall sconce. Vanessa treats Pete's wound quietly, and then comes to you.
"We meet again," she says to you, with a slight twinkle in your eye. You shrug a little, but say nothing.
She has you lay down on the cell floor and she runs her hands over your abdomen and the broad, dark bruise left by MacPherson's foot. She presses gently, asks you to breathe in different ways. Then she has you sit up a little and watches how your eyes respond to light.
"You must have taken a good hit to the head," she says, finally. "There's not much I can do about that. The good news is that if you're doing okay now, then you're healing. You'll get better, not worse. Same thing for your stomach."
Something like anger fizzles up in you, and dies. Is she taunting you, promising that you'll heal when she surely knows you won't live long enough for that to happen?
You swallow. "Why are you doing this?" you ask, as she finishes coating your bruised back with a pain-relieving ointment that warms against your skin.
She begins to gather her tools back into her bag. "When I was a young woman, training to be a healer in Gaul," Vanessa says, "my teacher told me that my job was to care for the injured, the sick, and the elderly. My job was not to determine who was and was not worthy of care—my job was to care for all." She smiles and stands. "I heard you two needed care."
On her last words, Artie walks back into the cell, empty buckets in hand. He sets one next to you and the other next to Pete.
"How's it going, old man?" Pete asks, with a small smile. You've learned his tone well enough to recognize the sadness it tries to conceal.
"I'm doing all right, Pete," Artie responds, and you're surprised to here sadness there, too.
/
Time swims slowly by, treading toward your doom.
Eventually, you and Pete stop sharing stories.
Eventually, you stop talking at all.
/
You develop a loose sense of the days passing based on the traffic in the corridor outside your door.
You don't bother to count the days as they pass, though. There's no point. You don't know how long you were unconscious, or even how long you were imprisoned before you tuned your ears to the aural patterns. And without daylight and with your head injury, your sleep pattern follows its own rhythm.
It's been quiet for several hours, however, when you hear the lock rattle on your door.
Pete is snoring lightly on his side of the cell. The rattling of the lock continues.
It shouldn't take this long to open a simple padlock.
Seconds pass, and the rattling continues. Finally, you lean forward.
"Pete," you whisper. He doesn't stir.
"Pete," you try again, a little louder. Still no response. You trail your finger through the seam between the wall and the floor, gathering a pinch of eroded pebbles there. You flick them at his shin, just out of your reach.
His fighting instincts kick in and he jolts awake. "What?" he says.
"Listen."
Still, the lock is rattling. Pete shifts, sits up straighter.
"It's been making noise for a few minutes. I don't know—" you cut yourself off upon the sound of a soft "click." The lock is unlatched.
The door opens, and there, framed by the light like Apollo, is Leena.
You blink fiercely, willing your eyes to adjust to the glare. She has a bag slung over one shoulder and something you can't make out—something small—clutched in one hand.
"All right, kids," Leena says, "I hope you've packed your bags, because we're going on a trip."
You blink at her, then look over at Pete. You hold his surprised gaze for a minute, then look back at Leena, who has dropped to her knees by your feet, her bag in the center of the floor.
She takes the small padlock on one of your ankles into her hand and eyes it carefully.
"You have the key?" you ask, breathlessly.
Leena shakes her head. "I didn't have the key to your cell, either, but I have a few tricks that Claudia taught me, and I have this." She opens her hand to reveal, in her palm, an ornate hairpin.
You remember wondering how Claudia made it to the wrong side of the locked gate to the gladiators' area in the ludus.
You tip your head forward into your hands, elbows resting on your bent knees, as Leena works the hairpin into the opening of the padlock, twisting and jiggling the pieces gently.
"Do you have a place for us to go?" you ask. "Some kind of safehouse?"
She shakes her head, eyes still on the padlock of your left ankle. "Not exactly."
You sigh, keeping your eyes downcast. "You shouldn't put yourself at risk like this, then."
Leena pauses at her work to look at you, one hand coming to grip your shoulder. "For years, I've been waiting patiently for the right time," she says. "This is the right time."
"We won't last a day without a destination," you protest.
"She's right," Pete says, breaking the silence from his corner of the cell. "And, I mean, I'd really like to leave, but we're just prolonging the inevitable if we don't have a place to go."
"I said I didn't have a safehouse for us. I didn't say we didn't have a place to go," Leena says, returning to your padlock. With a click, it snaps open. She works the hairpin free and immediately goes to work on your other ankle. "This has been in the works for awhile," she says. "You two are one day away from being transferred over to the Colosseum, and probably two days from being fed to the lions. Steve got a message from Claudia a few days ago. It's time."
"How in the name of the gods did Steve get a message from Claudia?" you ask. "Isn't she with Myka—"
"—in Cosa?" Pete finishes for you, as he sits up straighter.
Leena nods. "They're in Cosa. But Claudia sent the message to Steve through the slaves' networks." She glances up at Pete. "I've never had enough above-ground access to be able to get into those networks. Helena either," she glances apologetically at you, "but you must have heard of them, Pete? This way of passing a message from slave to slave, sometimes even across cities, until it finds its intended recipient?"
Pete cocks his head. "Okay," he says, "yeah, I've heard of it. One person sends a message to another—something cryptic, something only those two will understand, so that the slaves passing the message along don't know what it means. Right?"
"Exactly," Leena says. "Except Steve doesn't know what the message means. I doubt Claudia did, either." Leena glances at you pointedly before looking back down at her work. "The message is originally from Domina Myka, and we think the intended recipient is you, Helena." With a final twist of her wrist, the lock on your second ankle springs open, and Leena looks up at you, smiling.
Something terrifying burns in the pit of your stomach. It's hot, and sharp, and spreading.
It feels an awful lot like hope.
"May I have that?" you ask, gesturing to the hairpin. Leena hands it to you and you crawl across the floor to kneel beside Pete. Your mind has always wrapped easily around mechanics, and you are suddenly invested in opening his cuffs as quickly as possible.
"What is the message?" you ask.
In your peripheral vision, Leena's eyes shift up and to the side, recalling her words carefully:
"Beloved, I linger upon the memory of a marriage proposal, long ago. All that you need is here, and my father will know I approved it. When the time is right, come and find me. By moonlight and with good wisdom, you will remember the path."
You furrow your brow even as the lock on Pete's left leg clicks open and you shift your attention to his right.
You ask Leena to repeat the message, which she does, word for word. Your eyes slide out of focus, carding through your memories of Myka as your hands work furiously at the padlock. Beloved—that is you, right? Surely it is. But you have never proposed marriage to her, of course, and what is the gibberish about using wisdom to find a path—
You look up, first at Pete, then at Leena. The second padlock clicks open in your hand and you grin, broadly, at both of them.
"I have the plan," you say.
/
Once you have taken a moment to wipe the worst of the metal-stains from your ankles using a rag and spit, once you have pulled your fingers through your hair and tied it again into an innocuous braid, once you have brushed the dust from your clothes, you think maybe, maybe, you might be able to walk through the market street without being pegged for a person who has spent the last ten days sitting in a cell.
In her bag, Leena has brought an item of nobleman's clothing.
"Steve pinched this from the Dominus," she says, as she holds it up in front of Pete. "Put it on."
The tunic is too big around the waist for Pete, but Leena manages to pin the extra fabric behind his back using the hairpin, and then together you drape the toga overtop, careful to fully obscure the bandaging on his shoulder. Leena uses her fingers to comb his hair into a fashionable sweep across his forehead.
"There," she says. "Do you think you can play the nobleman for us, Roman?"
Pete smiles lopsidedly and puts on an affected upper-class accent. "I do think that can be arranged, my good lady."
Leena shakes her head, grinning. "Not like that. Definitely not like that."
"Is my face still bruised?" you ask.
Leena touches your chin, tilts your face one way, then the next. "A little," she says, eventually, "but it's not bad." She shrugs. "The sight of a slave with a bruised face isn't exactly noteworthy."
You don't know why this makes you think of your daughter. You wonder where she is—if she's still in Roma. If she's been traded to Capua, or further. She could be in the far edges of Gaul by now. You wonder if anyone has dared bruise her perfect face. You wonder if she's even still alive.
You swallow hard. "Let's go," you say.
Pete shakes his head. "We need to get supplies, first. Can you get us into the store-room and the armory, Leena?"
"Yes," she says, but you raise your hands in front of you.
"All that you need is here, the message said. I think we should just go."
"Go where, exactly, Helena?" Pete asks, a hint of exasperation in his tone.
You take a sharp breath. "There's a campsite a few leagues north of the city. Sam built it when he was a boy. Myka took me there once. That's where she's meeting us."
"A campsite," Pete says, and exhales. "Okay. We definitely need supplies."
"But the message said—"
"These messages sometimes get a little muddled and are easy to misunderstand, Helena," Leena says, resting a hand on your shoulder. "I agree with Pete on this."
You sigh and fight the urge to roll your eyes in frustration. Myka is somewhere waiting for you, and you want to leave as soon as possible. But they are united on this. "All right," you say.
The corridors of the ludus are deserted. Your heart pounds furiously as you creep past the cells of sleeping servants until you reach the supply room, which Leena unlocks with a key. Pete keeps watch in the doorway while you and Leena take three blankets and, in the center of each place a fur, an empty waterskin, and a small collection of staple foods. You push through the nervous shaking in your fingers as you knot the edges of the blankets in the center and each sling a bundle over your shoulders.
You slink carefully, quietly, to the armory. The corridor to the yard is touched with grey light. Coming up on sunrise, then.
By silent, mutual agreement, you bypass the racks of swords and spears—you can't carry those in the city without drawing attention—and gather around the small box of daggers. You pick one up and tie it, nervously, to your thigh. Pete does the same. Leena takes two.
"Take a bow and arrows, Pete," you whisper.
He shakes his head. "I'm no good with them."
"But I am, and if we're serious about supplies, then we need hunting tools and—"
"What in Ares' name is going on here!"
All three of you wheel around. You refrain from diving for the dagger at your thigh.
It's Artie, standing in the doorway.
"Artie," Pete says, stepping forward, slowly. "You can't—this isn't…" His hands open and close at his sides. "Nobody wants anyone to get hurt."
"If nobody's going to get hurt, then why, exactly, are you standing in a room full of weapons when you're supposed to be in a cell? Why the hell is she holding that knife like she wants to throw it at me?" He points an accusatory finger at Leena.
You glance over at her. Sure enough, she's gripping one of her daggers, blade pinched between thumb and forefinger, tensed and poised to throw.
"She's not going to throw that," Pete says. He turns his head toward her slightly, his hands outstretched, palms down, like he can contain the tension in the room beneath them. "Right, Leena? You're not going to throw that."
Leena glances at you and you bite your lip. The indecision burning through you is unfamiliar. You have nothing to lose, at this point, by hurting Artie—but you don't want to. You think of the sadness in his voice when he visited your cell and spoke to Pete.
Slowly, Leena relaxes, standing a little straighter and letting her knife hand fall to her side. You breathe deeply and turn your gaze back to the two men, standing opposite each other.
"We just want to leave," Pete's saying. "Start over somewhere else. I don't want to die for a crime I didn't commit."
Artie brings his hands to his face and rubs his eyes tiredly. "You understand that if you leave here, it's going to come down on me, right? I'll wind up in that cell you just left."
"You won't," you say, suddenly. My father will know I approved it, the message said.
"I will. That's the way things work here."
You shake your head. "Domina Myka has written to the Dominus. He will know the fault lies with her, and not with you."
Artie's eyes narrow. "How do you know that?"
"She told me," you say, stepping forward.
"With all due respect, I don't have reason to put any faith in your word."
"I understand that." You step forward again. "I do. But surely you have no reason to mistrust Leena or Pete?" You're at Pete's shoulder now. In the edge of your vision he glances at you, then looks at Artie again, and nods.
"Just go back down toward the yard," Pete says quietly. "You never saw us here. Myka won't—she won't let you be hurt for this, just like she's trying to protect us."
Artie stands for a long time, eyes moving warily between you.
You have one more angle to try. "Your wife must have told you about me," you say.
"Told me what?" he asks angrily.
"My history. She helped to care for me when I first came here."
Artie's eyes harden and he crosses his arms over his chest. "You aren't the first slave to feel the whip, and you won't be the last."
"Did she tell you I had a child?" you press on. "She examined me; I'm sure she could tell. After I was captured—they forced me into prostitution, they gave me a daughter, they took her away. I got angry and lashed out and—the whipping I received was not a common whipping of a slave. Your wife knows that."
You run your hands nervously over your head, over the smooth rolls of your braid. "I have always tried to protect the people I love and I continue to be punished for it. And I am asking you to let us—let me—have this one, final opportunity to feel basic human dignity."
Artie's face remains resolutely impassive, but you see his hands squeeze tighter around his biceps.
You step closer to him. "Myka will not let you suffer for a crime you won't commit."
"She won't," Pete affirms. "You know that."
Artie drops his arms, then raises one hand to pinch the bridge of his nose.
"Go," he says. "Go now. Before I change my mind."
You gather your bundles and your small collection of weapons and flee the room as quickly as silence permits.
/
Your pulse pounds in your ears as your group files up the steps and out of the ludus. You find Steve waiting by the roadside. Day is just breaking, and the strangers you see are mostly slaves, preparing storefronts and stalls for what will undoubtedly be a busy day of tourists flocking in for the games. Few Romans are out at this early hour.
Your breath trembles, your hands tremble with it. With every passing second you expect to be tapped on the shoulder, tackled, bound and beaten and escorted back to your prison. You find yourself startling like a frightened cat at every unexpected sound.
You glance at Pete. He maintains his composure better than you, but you've come to know him well enough that you can recognize the slight flare of fear in his eyes.
Leena, who has never seen battle and never been hardened, somehow maintains composure better than any of you. She wraps an arm around you, squeezes your shoulder. "You're doing this," she says. "We're doing it. It's going to be okay."
You take a deep breath. "We need to go to the stables, and we need to somehow get them to give us Myka's two favorite horses," you say.
Leena, Pete, and Steve all look at you oddly.
"One is a bay named Athena," you say, "and the other is a dapple grey named Artemis."
Steve smiles broadly at you and snaps his fingers, recognition flaring in his eyes. "Wisdom and moonlight!" he says happily.
Leena rolls her eyes and nods, smiling, understanding. Pete just looks confused, but he doesn't say anything.
"I think I can get us the horses," Steve says. "Let's go."
Steve is well-acquainted with the location of the stables where you have only been once. He leads your band along the side of the building, then across the road and around the corner to the left. You and Leena fall into step behind Pete, one off of each of his shoulders, posing as his maidservants. Pete's carriage and stride is normally imposing, molded by his gladiatorial training and the need to intimidate his opponents, but he slouches a little as he walks, now, shrinking himself, effectively making himself a less-memorable figure. It's smart, you think.
Leena, Pete and you wait outside the stable while Steve wanders inside to find a stablehand. A few short moments later he emerges, striding purposefully up to Pete and greeting him with a short bow.
"The horses you requested are being prepared, Dominus," he says, eyes sparkling.
Out of the corner of your eye, you see Pete bite the inside of his cheek to stifle a laugh. "Very good, servus," he says, and then coughs for an unnecessarily long time into his fist.
(Later, you will ask Steve what he told the stablehands. He will explain that he had introduced Pete as a suitor for Myka, travelling to Cosa to escort her back to Roma for the games, and bringing her horses along at her father's request. Because the stablehand knew Steve as the Dominus' manservant, he never questioned his motivation.)
Steve boosts Pete onto Athena's back, and you and Leena tie your various bundles to Artemis's tack.
"The north gate," you say, and your patchwork band sets off, slowly, through the gradually lightening and filling streets of the city. Slaves rarely ride, so you lead Artemis by the head while Leena and Steve walk alongside Pete, servile.
Your breath, your heart, your soul freeze up as you approach the gate. It's daylight now, and traffic at the gate is crowded and busy with the ins and outs of tourists coming for the games and merchants seeking to profit from them.
You brace yourself for the cries from the sentries: Stop! You, band of miscreants! You do not have the freedom to leave the city!"
But as you cross the threshold, eyes downcast and body demure, the cry never comes.
You follow the road to the north, weaving between travelers, and still nobody stops you.
And then you're out of sight of the city, and you start to think maybe—maybe—maybe this is going to work.
A half a league beyond the city gates, you pause by the side of the road to redistribute the horses' loads so that all four of you can ride. You settle behind Pete on Athena's broad back; Leena and Steve ride Artemis. You're moving faster, now—not as fast as the time you travelled with Myka, but the horses are carrying far more weight and you're all invested in not over-exerting them so early on. So long as you are not captured, you will need horses tomorrow, and the next day.
The hours of travel pass in slightly-strained silence. Every shift in the grass, every change in the wind feels like a threat. You imagine the Dominus behind every tree. You imagine MacPherson behind every bend in the road and wish, somewhat morbidly, that you had seen him dead; that you could make yourself understand, and truly believe, that he can never again hurt someone you love.
When the sun is high in the sky, you come upon a familiar-seeming leftward bend in the road, and you tell Pete to keep the horse to the right.
You look up, along the lower edges of the canopy, looking for the trunk with the scar from the fallen branch.
"Let her have her head," you say to Pete. Without question he lets the reins slide through his fingers and Athena stretches her neck down toward the ground.
"There!" you say, when you spot the tree; the horse confirms it by stepping intuitively off the road and onto the barely-worn, barely-visible path.
"Here?" Pete says, incredulous.
"Are you sure?" Steve says, from Artemis' back, behind you.
"I'm sure," you say. "Leave your reins loose, Pete. The horse knows this path far better than I do."
Long minutes tick by as you duck low on the horse's back to avoid branches. Athena picks her way carefully along, stepping over roots and rocks. You begin to wonder if you've made a mistake—this part of the trip was long, last time, but was it this long? Your eyes skip along the tree trunks and you begin to wonder if you're going in circles—yes, surely you've seen that tree before, surely you're lost in the endless woods—
And then light gasps through the trees ahead of you. Your eyes reach for it in manic desperation over Pete's shoulder.
Finally, finally, you emerge into the clearing.
"Ha!" you hear Pete laugh, a loud, relieved, amused sound. "Look at this!"
You slide from Athena's back while she's still moving and you run the short distance to Sam's shelter. Beside it, someone has pitched two small canvas army tents.
"Myka!" you call out as you sprint. "Myka!"
You duck your head into the shelter, and each tent in sequence. They are filled with supplies: you see sleeping furs, firestarters, another tent folded up, some bags of what looks like flour, water-skins, clothing, knives, thin rope for snares—everything you could need to survive in the wild for many weeks.
Myka, however, is nowhere to be found.
In the last tent you find a note, carefully written on parchment and laid on top of the pile of supplies. You recognize the Latin script, but you do not know how to read it. In fact, you despise writing, in general. Your own language has never used it. In Rome, your experience with the written word has been limited to records of slave sales, of brothel transactions, of gladiatorial fights. If these transactions happened in conversation, you think, it would be harder for the masters to pretend that slaves were less than human.
Nothing good has ever come to you in writing.
You crawl out of the tent, clutching the parchment, and you stumble to the center of the clearing, turning in desperate circles. You gaze into the woods in all directions, one hand shielding your eyes from the sun's glare.
She's setting snares somewhere, you think. Or she's bathing in the creek. Or she's hunting.
Please, you whisper into the ether. Please, please, please.
"Helena." You don't hear it, the first time.
"Helena," Leena says again, bringing her hands to your shoulders to stop your desperate searching. "Breathe, Helena. What have you got there? What have you found?"
Her hands are on your jaw and you center yourself on her kind eyes.
"Can you read Latin?" you ask. The parchment makes a crackling noise, like burning, when you hold it out to her with a trembling hand.
She takes the note from you and looks at it, brow furrowed. "I… only a little. Not enough for this."
Her eyes come back up to yours, and she offers you a hand. "Come on," she says, "Pete will read it."
You slip your hand into hers and she smiles at you, carefully, before leading you back to the tents, where Pete and Steve are unloading the horses.
