“I doubt that.”
She made to sweep past him.
He blocked her path to the stables. “You can see your family any time you want, but you’re not taking a step out of this town without guards.”
“I don’t need your permission to see my family.”
“That’s what I just said.” A scowl pressed his mouth together as he spoke the words through gritted teeth.
Her eyes were set. “I’m not taking guards.”
“I’m your husband. I’m not letting you, or our children, wander the Britannia countryside unprotected.”
“The children you tried to sell,” she muttered.
Just what he needed to make this lousy week even worse, another fight with her over something so ridiculously straightforward he didn’t even know why he had to explain it. Stepping closer, he swiped the saddlebag. “I’ll get you a horse and guards.”
“Quidquid,” she said as he crossed back to the garrison, the saddlebag swung across his sword arm.
Chapter 24
The wind blew colored leaves into Ness’ face as she urged the brown mare faster. She’d dumped the guards that Aquilus made her bring a quarter mile back. Rationally, she should appreciate that he’d wanted her to have the protection of guards. Then again, after a man agreed to sell his sons, did one have to acknowledge his merits ever again? The cold iron of his wedding band scraped her finger. She choked back tears.
The horse crested the hill and her heart leaped. Finally, after almost a year and a half! She touched Eric and Wryn, who nestled in the woven baskets in front of her, and pointed to the brown fields and rising smoke of hearth fires. “Look, home.”
She flicked the mare’s halter and Aquilus’ ring almost flew off a too small finger. Cedric’s fields spread out to the left, brown stubble ground into the darker dirt. Hoofprints marked a trail from the fields to the house where a trace of gray smoke rose. He must be cooking the midmorning meal.
Jamming Aquilus’ ring on tighter, she tugged the horse’s head to the right. Less than four months until she had a divorce in hand. His face rose to her wits, that same pensive expression furrowing his brow as this morning when he looked at her. She forced away the image.
The horse stumbled on a pothole and her swelling midsection hit the steed’s mane. She winced. Cedric would notice that.
On that night over a year ago, Cedric had suggested running away to the North beyond Roman rule. Perhaps she should have said yes. He said he’d wait years for her. Though she hadn’t been near as faithful to him this last year as he had been to her, she did intend to return to him.
Moments later, the splintered archway of her family’s door rose in front of her. Ness dropped the mare’s reins and jumped to the dirt below. Only Eric and Wryn’s red noses and big eyes showed underneath the layers of bundling they squirmed in. Eric wriggled a hand free. Ness kissed his disgruntled face.
Brilliant autumn leaves decorated the ground. The house door creaked open.
“Ness?” Isobel froze in the doorway. She looked as if she’d just seen an apparition. Her copper hair twisted back in one braid and something in her face looked older.
Ness rushed forward. “Look at you. Almost a woman now.”
“I am a woman,” Isobel said and loosened her death grip on a rosemary sprig.
Laughing, Ness tugged a whimpering Wryn and angry Eric out of the saddle basket and entered the house.
Inside, Mother looked up from a boiling pot. “Ness!” She ran across the dirt floor and clutched her. “Your father heard the tribune was in Camulodunum and we hoped you might be there too.”
Ness frowned at Aquilus’ name, but at least Mother hadn’t mentioned her all too obviously swollen stomach.
Mother knelt to the twins’ level and started unwrapping their layers.
Eric and Wryn tugged back from Mother. With a smile, Ness pushed them forward. “Your grandmother’s nice, I promise.”
With a little clatter, Enni swept through the back entrance. “Ness!” Enni cried.
“Here.” Ness thrust a sack of gold at her. “I brought you coin to repay you for the letter that you never should have sent.” If Enni hadn’t sent that letter, she would have spent the year in her village rather than enduring the last year of tears and anger.
Enni stiffened. Then, turning, she squatted down by the twins.
Best friends and now they didn’t even talk? Another problem that Aquilus bore the blame for. Ness grimaced and leaned back amidst low-hanging herbs. “How are all of you and the village and everyone?”
“Fiona’s well. Had a second child,” Mother said. “Mailmura’s been trying to press Enni into being her new herbs apprentice.”
“I think I want to,” Enni said. “Isobel might need help soon.”
“Not now,” Mother said with a frown. She looked stronger than before.
Ness wrinkled her brow. “What about Legate Vocula? Any more trouble with Rome?”
Mother shook her head. “No, not a word since you left, thank heaven.”
“Good.” Ness glanced at Isobel, who hung back in the doorway. Smiling, Ness examined the difference the months had made in her little sister.
With a gasp, Ness blinked and looked again. She ran her gaze very carefully up and down the midsection of Isobel’s tunic dress where a fold of cloth hid the babe-to-be. “Am I seeing things, Isobel?”
Isobel followed Ness’ gaze and spread her feet apart, hands on her hips. “I married, and yes, I’m carrying a child.” The bump jutted out even further with her new posture.
Ness’ expression changed from aghast to more aghast. “You did what! How old are you anyway?”
“Sixteen,” Isobel said, head high.
“Sixteen.” First her brother and her best friend. Now her little sister. She wasn’t sure she could handle much more marital bliss at home. Tears formed in Ness’ eyes.
Isobel’s cream-colored face changed from defiant to shy as she pointed to the telltale signs on Ness’ body. “Our bairns will be born at the same time.”
“You’re my baby sister. You’re not supposed to be with child at all. Let alone at the same time as me.” Ness stared at the dirt floor. Unlike her, Isobel had likely told her husband the moment she discovered she was with child. Rather than running away to Germania, Isobel’s husband had likely rejoiced. Would she ever experience that perfect moment she’d once dreamed of telling a man that she carried his child as they both rejoiced?
Isobel blushed, but her eyes sharpened in anger.
“How long have you been married anyway?”
“Seven months.”
Ness glanced again at the fabric tight across Isobel’s midsection. Within a six-month of her leaving Isobel had found her love, married him, and now lived happily with him. Three years and three children later she still hadn’t accomplished that.
A sigh slid from her lungs. She shouldn’t despair like this or take out her dejection on Isobel. Though at present she felt as if she’d never rise out of misery, she would marry Cedric and in time she’d experience happiness again.
Just then, she realized that absolute quiet filled the room. She glanced to Mother, then to Enni. Nothing.
Ness swallowed. She had been rude to Isobel. “I’m sorry for my ill-humor. I suppose Marki didn’t string the man up after all?”
Isobel shook her head as possessiveness tinged her tone. “Marki couldn’t. He’s stronger than Marki.”
“I doubt that.” Then the silence returned. Ness squirmed. She’d insulted Isobel again. “So, who did you marry?”
Isobel blushed scarlet.
A smile played on Ness’ lips. “That Gavin boy? Or maybe the bony one with the stringy hair that you used to gawk at on first-day?”
Isobel moved her white chin in a negative.
“Gael of the pointed nose? Ronan whose breath smells like rotting fish?” She started naming all the Celtic boys that had just earned their first spear last time she’d lived here.
F
rom her seat on the floor, Enni drew Wryn into her lap. “She married Cedric.”
Ness jerked her gaze to Isobel. “Cedric who? Someone new from town? I can’t think of another Cedric in the village.”
Isobel’s copper braid hung as straight as her taut back. She parted her lips slowly, just barely enunciating the words. “Your Cedric.”
Ness laughed. “A fine jest.”
No one spoke.
Ness turned from Mother to Enni to Isobel, waiting for someone to laugh with her, or perhaps to say that she’d misheard.
Absolute silence.
“But he loves me, and you’re too young, and….”
“It’s true.” Mother chafed already clean hands on her dress front.
Ness cried out, but her voice made no sound.
Mother stepped between Isobel and Ness. “They were in love and she wanted to. We let you marry a foreigner when you wanted to.”
“Great boon that was.” Ness looked at Isobel, at her childish frame that, all the same, carried a child. “Of all the men, in all the villages, of all this wretched country, how could you?”
“Shh, quiet, Ness.” Mother moved her gaze from Isobel to Ness. “You have your own marriage. Let her have hers.”
“My own marriage?” A marriage with a man who would sell his own sons. Ness’ head pounded.
Mother clenched her hands. “Things must have improved,” she said, voice hopeful rather than confident. “You carry his child.”
“Oh yes, throughout the ages, a child’s birth has always signified the existence of the most perfect of marriages.” Tears pooled in Ness’ eyes.
“You left with the tribune. I thought… Cedric thought….” Isobel ran her tongue over her lips.
Mother laid a weathered hand on Ness’ shoulder.
Ness threw it off. The tears came thicker and faster. With one backward glance to ensure that the twins played happily with Enni, she turned and fled.
The haze filling Ness’ eyes obscured her vision as she ran. Hardly knowing where she went, she stumbled into her field, the one she’d plowed and planted with Cedric, the one Aquilus had made her leave before harvest. Only the stubble of wheat chaff remained from this year’s harvest. Ness collapsed on half-frozen dirt by a tree trunk.
Sobs racked her uncloaked body more than the cold as she choked on her own phlegm. Then the images of Cedric started. She envisioned Cedric at fifteen, already one of the best hunters, and how the sun caught his torque the day he speared fifty-seven pike and did that idiotic victory dance. Then her mind flashed to more recent years with the memory of him tossing her sons in the air and blowing dandelion tufts into their faces.
She wanted to be sick, but couldn’t. One’s little sister’s husband should be—well, not one’s former betrothed.
“Ness,” a man’s voice called from behind her.
Turning, Ness saw Cedric. As he looked at her, knees drawn up to her chest, tears frozen on her dirt-stained cheeks, and visibly with child, she lost her last shred of self-respect.
“How are Eric and Wryn?” Cedric asked, hands looped in front.
“Tell me you stumbled across this tree and weren’t purposefully planning to talk to me!” Ness screamed.
Cedric stood there, gaze on the dirt clods at his feet, but his face showed that someone had told him she’d returned.
“You better stand there and look ashamed. Honestly, you married my baby sister. What could you possibly have been thinking?”
A concerned expression on his face, Cedric extended one big hand. “Ness, you have to listen to my side.”
The same words Aquilus had spoken when he’d thought to excuse why he’d wanted to give away his own blood. She was beyond done listening to men’s justifications. And let it be written that Aquilus had spoken the infuriating words with a thousand times more charm. “No! You listen to me. I worked over a year to get a divorce. Now I almost have it, and what do you do?”
“You were gone, Ness. He said that you would be married again.”
“He?” Ness screamed. “I promised you that I’d come back. You promised me you’d wait.”
Cedric opened his mouth, no doubt to dodge blame as all men tried to do.
“If you meant to break your promise, why not someone your own age, or at least rob a different family’s cradle? Fiona’s little sister? Bretta’s? Why insult everything that happened between us by marrying my baby sister, who is hardly old enough to dance at the festivals let alone marry and have your child?”
Cedric glanced at the chaff spread across the ground. “She reminded me of Elena.”
“Wait,” Ness said, too angry to even scream. “You betray me, marry my baby sister all because of Elena?”
Cedric shuffled his feet, rustling dead foliage, but he didn’t leave. “Ness?”
“What?” Ness scrubbed at the tears streaking her cheeks. Maybe she should have brought the Roman guards if only to have them order Cedric to leave this field.
“I do wish you well. Is that bloody Roman any less despicable than he was a year ago?” Cedric looked into her eyes.
“You have no right to ask me that question.” She held her chin high, imperious as a real domina.
Cedric rubbed his chapped thumb against his fingers. The chill wind blew across Cedric’s cheeks, blistering them red.
“Leave,” she ordered, shoulders stiff.
For one moment, he looked at her, then he turned and departed into the gusty wind.
As Cedric shrank into the distance, piercing cold ran up her bare fingers and into loose sleeves, penetrating every layer. Even bone iced against bone and the imperious air that had sustained her froze in the chill. “If you kill her in childbirth, I’m going to kill you!” Ness screamed after Cedric.
The rigid bark pressed against Ness’ back as she fell into the tree behind her—alone.
The moon had appeared and Ness couldn’t feel her fingers anymore when she forced herself to rise. Her babes were at the house and they needed her.
When Ness entered the lonely lean-to, both boys lay snuggled in wool on her bed with a roaring fire behind them. Sacks of grain and metal farm tools made shadows across the strings of drying produce that hung from the rafters. No sign remained that this place had been her haven—Enni, Isobel, and her room.
Ness squatted on her old bed and pulled the red coverlet up around her cold shoulders. Her fingers slipped through gaps in worn fibers. Over a year ago, in this very room, she’d waited for morning to come so she could marry Cedric, and soldiers had arrived instead. Then, just when she’d thought she might at least attempt to find happiness with Aquilus, he’d agreed to sell their sons. She rubbed her fists into her burning eyes.
“Ness.”
She turned toward a gust of wind. Enni peered in from the darkness. Her black hair fell in tendrils, iced by sleet. “You were always my best friend, bar Marki. Please don’t shut me out.”
“You were my best friend bar no man.”
Sliding onto the wood shelf bed next to her, Enni laid the sack of gold in her lap. “You didn’t have to give me the money. The tribune sent a legionary with coin after you left that night.”
After sending an army to kidnap her and the sons he intended to sell off, Aquilus had remembered to fulfill her request to repay Enni? Ness flung herself back against the wattle and daub wall. “Can we not talk about Aquilus? I’m leaving at first light tomorrow. How have you been?”
Enni drew back. “Already?”
“I can’t handle staying.” She’d intended to come back to her village after she divorced Aquilus. Now Cedric had destroyed her haven by marrying into her very own family. He’d sit at this hearth fire on feast days as one of the family. That was her spot by the fire and he’d stolen it.
Enni pulled her shawl tighter around small shoulders. “Are you still angry with me, though?”
“You could have told me first. Asked if I wanted to be kidnapped by an army.” Ness drew her knees up to her chest. The damp fabric of
her dress clung to her. Even her tears couldn’t warm her enough to ward off the uncontrollable shivers.
Enni rounded her solemn eyes. “What if he had come after you married Cedric and there had been violence?”
“Aquilus wouldn’t have done that.” Ness clapped her hand over her mouth. Why was she defending the man? He’d been prepared to dispose of his own son. Though, this morning when she left, Wryn had babbled about ‘Dada’ the entire first hour of the journey. A sick feeling churned her guts. The feeling was a symptom of the babe within, not grief that he’d never see this new child after its birth. Aquilus didn’t deserve to see any of his children after what he’d done. Also, he still favored Wryn over Eric.
So why did a hot guilty feeling warm the back of her wet dress?
Enni squeezed her thin arms around Ness. “My birthday is next month. Will you come then and see me if the tribune tarries in Britain that long?”
If the tribune tarried, Ness kicked her heel against the shelf bed at the words. For three years Aquilus had commanded where she lived. This was why she was divorcing him. If Aquilus took as much delight in Wryn as Wryn seemed to in him, Aquilus could take a post in Britain. She’d not deny him seeing his sons even after she divorced him.
“Will you, Ness?”
Ness shook her head. “Every time I’ve come to this village, I’ve ridden the waves of disaster, distressed Mother and Father, and earned all’s pity. I’m not returning until I can come back with my head held high, having made something of my life with these two hands.” She stretched them out. No calluses lined her palms now. Someday, she’d purchase her own fields and happily change that.
“I’d meet you in the fields. You could stay the one night with Marki and I. No one need know.” Enni reached out to her, and as much as she wished to, she couldn’t say “no.”
“I’ll come. I promise.”
“Until then.” Enni stood and walked out into the wind and snow.
Twisting the coverlet around her wet dress, Ness threw herself back on the bed, prepared for a sleepless night.
For Life or Until (Love and Warfare Series Book 1) Page 31
