Free Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 by M. C. Scott Page A

thought lost.’
    ‘Perhaps?’
    ‘If I find him. If he lives through what is coming. If he chooses to come back with me. It must be his choice, freely made.’ Ajax rose smoothly, with the grace of his professions. ‘But first, we must win a race, and for that we must sleep. Even you, I think? The team would be sorely pressed without its healer.’
    ‘You go.’ Hannah did not stand. ‘I’ll come later when the fire’s less.’
    He swept her a salute she didn’t recognize and was gone, treading soundless across the grass.
    Hannah stared at the space where he had been and thought of choices freely made, of oracles and dreams and the duties they imposed, of family and friends, of past, present and future and knew herself only at a crossroads, with no idea at all of which route to take.

C HAPTER S IX
    B etween one breath and the next, Sebastos Abdes Pantera woke to the grey stirrings of race day at the Striding Heron tavern.
    He lay still with his eyes shut, waiting, as he did every morning and, as every morning, in that finite space between sleeping and waking, Aerthen came to him, alive in the black echoes of his mind, bright-haired, green-eyed and laughing as she raced him on her mouse dun gelding in their first meeting, touched him with her eyes across the fire on a smoky winter’s evening not long later, made love to him soon after that, holding him in her long, long legs, in her warrior’s arms, against the cushion of her breasts, breathing his name into his ear and that she loved him.
    She came to him naked first, and then dressed for war in a stolen legionary shirt with armoured leather wraps on her forearms taken from the tall, bronze-bearded Rhinelander who was the first man she had ever killed in battle.
    She stood before him, weapon-ready, as tall as her spear, so that the shine of her eyes and the shine of its blade were as one before the rising sun, and then again, before the setting sun, when blade and face and body were rusted with others’ blood, and her smile was savage, lit with the hope of victory.
    In the thick of battle she came to him, fighting to be at his side, to keep him safe, trusting him to keep her safe, and they fought together until that moment in the evening of the battle’s second day, when it was lost and all were dead, or soon to be so.
    Then, she came to him still smiling her love and her courage, holding Gunovar, their golden-haired, ocean-eyed daughter, who was named for a hero of the Dumnonii who had fought in the Boudica’s rebel army against the legions. Aerthen’s loathing of Rome was legendary and so her child must feel it too, when she grew; how could she not with two such brave, proud parents? She slept in her mother’s arms, her peace perfect in all the din and chaos of battle.
    Except not asleep, because now, in this last part of the visiting, there is bright, wet blood scarfing Aerthen’s stolen shirt, gathering in pools at her feet, and the smile on the child’s face is matched by the broader, red-lipped smile in her throat, where her mother’s blade has sliced it, so fast and so sharp that the child has never woken from the tea-drugged sleep.
    And as he feels her spirit leave her to make the last walk to the gods, the man known as Hywell, the hunter, feels his wife reach for his hand, and press the blade into the sweaty wetness of his palm.
    She has more courage than he. She caresses each part of him with her turbulent gaze and she smiles and tells him she loves him and asks this last gift of him and he gives it, he who has killed before in pity, in anger, in detachment, in scorn, but has never yet killed in love.
    He kills in love now, holding her head in his one hand, finding the place with his fingers, in the ninth rib space, a little to the left of the breast bone, trying not to think of how often he has kissed here, how precious the skin, how strong, how fragile.
    He finds the space and steadies it and she says his name, ‘Hywell,’ as a prayer and