For a Roman's Heart (18 page)

“Adrenia, come in here.” Her mother’s harsh voice grated on her senses.

She didn’t want to obey, but she did. There was no escape from her dubious position. Since the encounter with Sulla, Adrenia felt on edge. Something horrid would happen soon, but she couldn’t pinpoint what or when it would happen. While she’d worked weaving clothing today, she’d daydreamed, thinking on Terentius’s last dazzling kiss.

Marry me.

“Adrenia!” Her mother’s voice escalated into shrillness.

Adrenia hurried to the main room. “Yes, Mother?”

Ulpia stood at the hearth, her thin face lined and tired, yet heavy with distaste. “Your father has grave concerns about you.”

Adrenia settled down on a rickety wood chair near the fire. Her bones ached with the chill. Her mother pulled her
tunica
closer, as if she felt the growing cold as much as Adrenia.

“Why is he concerned?”

Her mother’s gaze darted from side to side as she pushed one hand through the loose curls around her neck. She hadn’t tried to style it today, and she looked bedraggled. “He says you were intimate with the centurion yesterday at the forum.”

Adrenia’s fingers tightened in the folds of her
tunica
. “Intimate? When father found us, we were standing in a small courtyard near the forum between buildings. The centurion had just saved my life.”

A slow, smooth smile returned to her mother’s lips. She stepped away, her pace as regal as if she were an empress. “Then you won’t object to what your father has decided is best for you.”

Adrenia’s stomach tossed with nerves, her body stiff with suspense and growing dread.

“We have found a husband for you,” her mother said.

Adrenia’s fear rose to new heights. “I don’t want to marry. It gives me more pleasure to stay here and help you and Father.”

Her mother’s thin lips pursed in sour disagreement. “It’s far passed time you married. Your sisters married at the right time, but your father and I saw that you’re essentially unsuitable for marriage. Most men find you ugly and undesirable. Too thin.”

The degradation shouldn’t have penetrated Adrenia more than the other insults she suffered over the years, but it did. It sliced like the knife used to cut her hair. “Yet somehow I am fitting now?”

“Do not interrupt me!”

Adrenia clasped her hands in her lap and waited with sharp resentment.

“You’re
not
a beauty and everyone knows it. You’re too rebellious for most men to handle. There is, though, a man who doesn’t care about those admittedly heavy faults.”

A cold lump settled within Adrenia’s middle, like the ice that would soon coat the roads come morning. “Who?”

“Sulla.”

Revulsion stirred inside Adrenia until she crawled with the unmistakable desire to run. “No.”

Her mother’s expression showed disgust. “Of course you’d say that. But Sulla is an excellent choice for you. He is powerful, handsome, has some money, and he knows how to handle women who don’t obey. And let us be honest. He doesn’t care how ugly you are.”

Adrenia stood slowly, numb to the insults, her body rigid with building denial.

“I can’t marry Sulla. He’s a cruel man.”

A murderer.
She had no evidence, but she knew it in her bones.

The wintry expression her mother’s eyes showed no mercy. “No more cruel than most men. Do you think this centurion wouldn’t beat you once he marries you when it’s within his right?”

“Something is gravely wrong with Sulla. When he bought that slave for you some time back, he never brought her to the farmstead. Why? What did he do with her?”

“The girl ran away. He repaid us our lost investment.”

“A small, frail girl like that escaped a man as strong and brutal as Sulla? Not likely.”

Closing her eyes, her mother sighed and said with disgust, “Anything is possible.”

If there was anything free left within Adrenia, anything that still belonged to her alone, she must fight this marriage. She drew in a stabilizing breath.

“Sulla killed that girl just as he tried to kill Pella.” Determined, Adrenia hurried with her accusations. “Pella recognized him and the centurion has been charged as
beneficiarius
at the fort, to hunt him down.”

Her mother took a step forward, her lip curling in disdain. She leaned in until her hot breath hit Adrenia’s face. “These are stupid, unfounded statements. You’re making this up to avoid your duty to marry when you are told.” She pointed in Adrenia’s face, fury in her eyes. “So this is why you have secretly been meeting with the centurion. To participate in lies and further the centurion’s ambitions for himself.”

Adrenia refused to back down despite the frantic fear worming a deep path into her gut. “You’ll believe what you want, mother. You’ve always done just what father wanted, no matter how immoral.” Sick of the hiding, the games, the lies, she charged forward with her accusations. “There are rumors in the village about our family. I used to think they were false, but I’ve realized that some of it must be true. People say my siblings disappeared because you sold them into slavery. Can you honestly tell me
that
is untrue, mother?” Her voice shook. “Can you stand there in righteousness and swear to the gods your conscious is clean? Can you?”

For one hopeful moment Adrenia saw humanity spark in her mother’s eyes. Like a newborn snuggles into a mother’s loving embrace, Adrenia hung on to the hope. She wished with everything inside that her mother could produce proof of her innocence.

“What are you accusing us of, Adrenia? What vile notions did that soldier put into your head?”

Hope faded like a dream. “Maybe you don’t understand what horrible things Sulla did before he came to Durovigutum. First, he is a deserter from Legion Twenty in Deva and that alone is cause for death. But if he has hurt women...” Adrenia calmed her voice. “Would you wish your daughter to marry such a man?”

Her mother made a scoffing sound and almost hissed her next words. “You are a simple girl, but I curse the day the gods gave you to me. Do you know how often I prayed to them while I was pregnant?” She stalked around the room, her hands waving as she emphasized her words. “I asked them to abort you. But no. No matter what potions I drank, you wouldn’t die. I did not want any more children, and yet you came anyway. Now I can see the guidance I tried to instill in you was worthless. Your father kept saying maybe I should just beat you more. But I’ve been far kinder than I should have been. You have
not
learned that when you are told to marry you will
not
question it.”

Adrenia let this hurtful new knowledge spread inside her and grow. Her own rage built and yet she retrained her ire with deep breaths. She’d fight back the only way she knew how. With strength. With whatever it took to survive. “I’ve always known you hate me, Mother. This is not surprising news.” Tears trembled in her voice, but she refused to allow her mother the satisfaction of seeing real tears.

Shaking with anger, Adrenia feared her own desire for revenge, for the violence within her own heart. She walked away and leaned against the large wooden table near the hearth.

Adrenia made a decision. She couldn’t pretend any longer and couldn’t hide any more. “I’ll no longer be a part of this.”

“Very well.” Her mother slipped her hand into the pouch she sometimes carried tied to her waist. “Sulla will come and take you away. And if that means he takes you by force, so be it.”

Wondering if her mother had lost her mind once and for all, Adrenia waited.

When her mother stood but a foot a way, she whipped her hand out and flung a substance into Adrenia’s face. Adrenia gasped, coughed and choked as the sand like substance flooded her face and sucked into her lungs. Immediately she couldn’t breathe, and panic attacked her. She clasped her throat as disbelief wrestled with outright terror.

Weakness assaulted Adrenia’s knees. She tried to reach out, to implore. Her mother’s features twisted into an ugly theater mask until it resembled a hideous monster. Adrenia collapsed on her right side onto the hard packed earth and stone floor. Pain registered as thin protest in her foggy mind.

Her mother leaned over and said in her face, “Now when Sulla comes you won’t be such a problem, will you?”

Adrenia knew her liberation had arrived. For madness had found her as it had her mother, her father, Sulla, and the whole world.

Terentius’s warmest smile and his gentle kiss were Adrenia’s last thoughts before darkness found her.

“Venus, help me.”

The scream sent Adrenia bolt upright on her pallet, her breath halted as she stared into the semi-darkness of her room. She trembled, her heart beating a rough tattoo as she sucked in a deep breath and tried to reassemble her scattered thoughts. She threw back her coverlet and stood on shaky legs. Confusion muddled her brain, but she remembered one thing without a doubt. Her mother had thrown a potent powder in her face and blackness had engulfed her.

Light from her one small window danced along the walls like women undulating to appease a god or goddess at a worship altar. She stood silent and still. Her breath rasped in her ears as she looked around her tiny room.

For a few seconds Adrenia thought she’d dreamt the horrible dust her mother threw in her face. The argument about Sulla and Terentius. Yes, maybe it was all an abhorrent dream brought on by the god’s cruelty.

“No!” Her mother’s voice wailed to the gods. “Venus, please!”

A thousand pinpoints of light patterned the walls and sent shadows bouncing. She heard more voices. Men and women shouted accusations and then someone bellowed a sentence that sent blade sharp fear careening through her.

“Burn them! Behead them!”

Another female scream shattered the night. Although her heart slammed with beats so hard she thought it would burst from her chest, Adrenia left her pallet and stepped toward the front door. The door hung loose from the hinges. Her head throbbed, her breaths coming with some difficulty. Her body shook from the inside out, her mind awhirl with horrific notions.

An entire mob stood outside, torches blazing as they brandished various clubs and swords.

Someone shouted out. “Grab her!”

“It’s the bitch daughter.”

Two men ran toward her, faces contorted with clear aggression.

She backed up. “Wait! Please wait!”

They grabbed her arms and yanked her forward. She slipped and went down hard on one knee and pain sliced the joint. She cried out as they roughly pulled her upwards. Murmurs and rumbles from the crowd and echoed in her ears.

“Cut her head off, too.”

Too?

“What?” Adrenia looked around for her parents.

Someone tossed a flaming torch onto the roof of the long house and fire licked like a hungry serpent’s tongue. She heard another shriek, and she twisted in the men’s hold. Her mother knelt beside a supine body. A familiar figure minus the head.

“Father?” She asked the question to no one in particular.

A sword lashed out and the slice sent her mother’s head sailing. A loud cheer went up from the mob.

Disbelief and terror escaped Adrenia’s throat in a hoarse croak. Her body quivered with fine tremors. Would this be her fate? She tried to find strength to face death with dignity. Somehow she would banish the screaming fear inside her. Sounds melted together. Crackling fire roared, the heat building, smoke thick. Stench of death hovered near.

Two people grabbed her parent’s heads and walked toward the open door to the burning long house. They tossed the heads inside. Bile stung Adrenia’s throat, and she swallowed convulsively.

The hulking figure with the sword that had taken her parent’s heads walked through the crowd toward her. “If one of you will speak to this woman’s good nature, we’ll spare her life.”

She didn’t recognize the man who spoke, but another male voice called out, “Botar, I say spare her.”

A wrinkled old woman stepped out of the crowd, her garments little more than rags, stained with dirt and sweat and the stench of foul living. “Wipe her evil seed away and offer it to Isis. Offer her blood to Mars and save us all. No more girls will die when all Brigomallas are destroyed.
Stone her, behead her, and burn her
.”

“Fortunia,” Adrenia said with a plea, her voice shaking. “You know me. I’m not evil. I heal others, not harm. I’ve never hurt anyone.”

The old woman’s face remained passive.

Adrenia didn’t think she could feel any more terror. Perhaps, if she could just die now, just slip away, suffering would disappear for her and everyone else. A strange calm settled over her, easing the cramps in her legs and arms as the men held her with biting fingers.

So be it.

“Burn her!” came another call from the back, and soon the chant accelerated. Two, three, four voices mingled until half the crowd shouted. “Burn her!”

The men dragged her toward the fire. All the bravery she’d mustered evaporated in sharp, harsh bursts.

“No!” She dug her feet in and struggled in earnest. “No!”