She Walks in Shadows (25 page)

“Stop right there,” a stern voice reprimanded.

The brutal slam of a wide palm to my ribcage halted me in my tracks. Its owner glared with brown eyes set in a scarred, indubitably Roman face.

“Let her through, General,” Engatius urged. “She has my potions. Your wife needs smelling salts. Has she been ill long?”

“Every night since ….” The Roman caught himself. “Yes, a while. The trance takes her at midnight.”

At once forgotten, I skirted around the General to bring my master his medicaments.

The bedchamber was a small room with a wide entrance and a vaulted ceiling. A bedroll in the entryway told me a slave had been assigned to the General’s wife. There was no trace of her now. The mistress of the house lay on the bed, her eyes moving rapidly behind closed lids.

“Spirit of Hartshorn,” the Doctor told me sharply.

I rummaged through the bags, my fingers combing through powdered lemon plant, rose petals soaked in wine, dried laurel, poppy seeds, aniseed to treat the bite of a scorpion — and yes, finally, the blue vial of liquid Hartshorn.

Marcus snatched it from my hand and uncorked the concoction. He was comparatively tender with the General’s wife, holding her head up so she might inhale.

Her nostrils flared.

The General cleared his throat. “They tell me sometimes, she wakes in a cold sweat. Sometimes, not at all.”

“‘They?’” I repeated, before I could quell the impulse.

The furrow between the General’s brows deepened. “The slaves.”

“Have they abandoned you?”

He crossed his arms across a barrel chest. “Is this relevant?”

“I think she’s coming around,” announced Engatius, in a tremulous voice.

Indeed, the General’s wife blinked her eyes open with some effort. Her sinister kohl-black gaze found mine first, then her husband’s.

“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.

I stumbled, yearning curdling in my gut. Before I made it more than a pace, my shoulder was seized.

“How dare you disrespect me so before the General? I should whip you ….” The Doctor’s gaze ticked down, past me, to the body in the garden. “Gods above ….”

“Above is Rome,” intoned a fearsome voice. The General’s shoulders stooped as he stepped into the light, a bull bracing for a fight.

Were it not for the breathless heave of his plated chest, I might not have guessed he’d been in a battle at all.

“And that man was a coward.”

“He fell,” I protested.

“He
jumped
. The North acquaints men with their fear.”

Marcus shook himself. “But — what of the battle?”

“Won.”

“So soon?”

The smile on General Antonius’ mouth was cruel. “Vermin dare not approach this house. Hallowed ground, my wife calls it. Speaking of whom ….”

“Sh-she will be well enough to travel by morning. The potion I administered will help.” When he spoke, the Doctor’s voice shook badly. He had yet to look away from the corpse.

Noticing this, the General gestured to two of his men to tend to their fallen brother.

“Good. Then you will take the adjoining bedchamber and rest. We leave at first light.”

I waited for my master to ask how many of my own people had died, how many lay wounded in the fields outside the settlement, but he did not.

He seemed so eager to leave that I wondered if we should have come at all.

That night, Engatius snored blissfully on the sleeping couch, impervious to our eerie surroundings.

The steady rise and fall of his chest filled me with aggravation. While the Doctor drifted off into the arms of Morpheus, I was charged with keeping watch. There was no telling my master that I was ill-suited to the task, or that I jumped at every shadow.

Once, a crow alighted on the lip of the ornate fountain at the heart of the
peristylium
and I slammed my head against the wall in fright.

I rubbed the tender spot, keeping the pain alive, and strained my ears.

Gratiana’s words rang in my skull like the echo of a howl in a cave. Did I believe her? Yellow-eyed daemons suited the legends of my childhood and I could not shake the feeling that more than foul weather and barbarian skirmishes were at play here.

A rustle of movement pricked my ears. I dug my knuckles into the bedroll and shifted my weight. I was uneasy around soldiers, but with only a handful left, I doubted they’d venture far from their post to seek me out.

The shadow of a man drew itself sharp onto the tiled floors, putting paid to my hopes.

I flattened my back to the wall, blood pulsing in my temples, and fumbled for my short dagger, the only weapon Engatius permitted me when we were away from home.

An hour or an instant passed as I waited to be attacked or ravished, Roman impunity sure to prevail on my innocence. It took what little courage I had left to chance another glance into the courtyard.

My gaze found the figure at once. It was shambling away, gliding more than walking, a sword held aloft.

The guardsman in the atrium must have sensed the same frisson I had. He squinted into the shadows between the colonnades, features smoothing into a mask of recognition when he made out the source of the disturbance.

“Oh, it’s you —”

The shade drew back its
gladius
and swung it in a clean, decisive arc.

I buried a shriek into my palm.

Swords killed. That much I knew from the day my village was attacked. But it had been years since I’d witnessed their prowess. I could not look away. Blood spurted from the soldier’s throat, spattering painted tile and staining his uniform. He was beyond caring, a nearly headless amalgamation of raw meat and split skin, bone protruding glaringly from his jaw.

The figure stood over him a moment, naked hunger in its gaze. Though my vision was unimpeded, I could hardly make out its features. It was not human. It could not be. Yet, as I watched, it crouched down with a creak of human knees and reached a long-fingered hand into the soldier’s face.

My gut churned.

The jelly-white of human eyes gleamed in the moonlight, lustrous like marbles. Gratiana’s opium-addled blather slammed into me with startling clarity.

He said the eyes aren’t mine.

As I looked on, the swordsman brought first one eye and then the other to his mouth, and bit down as though into a grape. Then, satisfied, he rose and turned his steps to the front of the house.

I was paralyzed with fright, but knew I had to move — now and quickly, before the creature returned. I stood on shaking knees, half-stumbling and half-bolting the short distance to the Doctor’s bed.

“Master.
Master
, wake up ….”

He mumbled something indistinct and batted at my shaking hands.

I knew I would regret my impudence tomorrow, but in that moment it seemed desperately more important to rouse him. With trembling fingers, I pinched his nostrils together, the way my mother would do to my siblings and I when we were small.

His eyes fluttered open. “What ….”

“We must go,” I gritted out. “Now. The General —”

Before another word could pass my lips, the villa erupted with a shrill and sudden bellow. It was a cry of anguish.
Another guard dead,
I thought, reaching for the Doctor’s arm.

He shook me off. “What — are we under attack?”

“No, no … it’s the daemon.” I hadn’t allowed myself to think it before, but deep in my heart, I knew.

The creature that fed on the soldier’s eyes was not of this world. Gratiana had tried to warn us. I spared a thought for the General’s wife as I grabbed for the Doctor’s satchels, loading myself with his surgical equipment and herbal potions. Once we escaped, we would not be returning to the villa, for Gratiana or anyone else.

I knew the stories too well.

“That’s not — there are no such things as daemons,” Engatius insisted.

A second cry rippled through the villa. I flung a desperate, searching glance at my master. How could a man of such learning be so obtuse?

“I saw it with my own eyes!”

“Then we must find the General.” He was up in a heartbeat, moving with swiftness that belied his age.

“There is no time!”

“He’s a friend,” the Doctor shot back. He shook off my grip when I seized hold of his sleeve, rounding on me with a snarl and a raised hand.

The slap snapped my head to the side. Heat spread down my neck and collarbone, sunk its claws deep into the cage of my ribs.

“He’s a dead man!” I gritted out.

But it was too late. The Doctor turned for the door that led into Gratiana’s
cubiculum
, the beaded curtain that separated our bedchamber from the
procoeton
jangling like a wind chime.

My master and I had little in common beyond a mutual hatred, but without his Roman protection, I would be another runaway Pictish slave and Rome’s reach could be long in these parts.