I endured Sygarius’s visits for six days.
On the seventh and eighth days, he didn’t come, and the guards were on edge. The servants showed whites around their eyes, and scuttled about their work with only half their attention, leaving floor rags forgotten in puddles on the mosaics, and my soiled dishes attracting flies in the summer heat. No one would tell me what was happening, although I suspected.
Attack.
The night of the eighth day, I was jolted from my uneasy sleep by a servant’s hand on my shoulder. “Wake up, wake up! You must dress, quickly—he’s here.”
“Clovis!” I said, my mind still sleep-befuddled.
“He is sacking the city. It is terrible; what will become of us?! We must flee. Thank the gods that Master has come.”
My heart fell. I threw on the white gown and a pair of sandals, and jogged after the servant to the atrium at the front of the house. Sygarius was there, wearing armor, his skin filthy with sweat and dirt. He grabbed my wrist without so much as a greeting, and dragged me out the door into the dark street.
The servant’s hopes of rescue by her lord were for naught. Sygarius spared not a look for those he left behind; I would that he had done the same for me. I felt a growing sense of panic, and that I was losing my best chance for freedom. I struggled against his hold, and he rewarded me with a punch to the gut that knocked the wind from me and left me dangling, stunned, from his grip. Tears stung my eyes. He’d hit me.
A small mounted guard of two soldiers waited for us. Sygarius hoisted me onto a horse and mounted behind me, his arm coming hard around my frozen, breathless waist. I cringed at his touch. If I’d had a dagger, I would have stabbed it into his arm, even if it meant stabbing my own gut at the same time.
Sygarius put his heels to the horse’s flanks, and we were away. I could hear the shouts and crashes of an army let loose in a frenzy of looting and destruction, and smoke was heavy in the air. Orange glowed above several rooftops, signaling fires below.
My breath came back in gulps. “What happened?” I asked.
Sygarius let loose a stream of invective. “He won this battle; but a battle is not the war. No it is not. I would have had him, if Gararic’s Franks hadn’t joined him at the last moment; they’d sworn to help me. Two-faced barbarians, all of them. I knew better than to trust them.” We careened around a corner, and I sank my fingers into the horse’s mane. Sygarius leaned forward, forcing me to do the same as he kicked the horse into a full gallop down a straight and empty street.
“Where are we going?” I gasped, suddenly more terrified of our speed and the danger of falling, than of the infuriated man behind me. I’d never ridden a horse like this, recklessly, hooves pounding, and so fast it felt like flying.
“Retreat,” he growled in my ear.
And then I heard, above all other sounds, a howl. Baying, deep, and somehow triumphant.
Bone?
Up ahead, standing at the intersection of another street, was the shadow-shape of what could only be an enormous hound. He tilted back his head and gave another baying call of triumph, and then he began to run.
Straight at us.
“What in Hades?” Sygarius said.
This was not a dog for herding sheep. This was not a dog for hunting birds. This was a dog whose ancestors had been bred to go to war for the Greeks, taking on lions and elephants.
What was a horse to such a dog?
The two soldiers flanking us drew their swords.
“Bone!” I screamed, thinking I don’t know what; that I could warn him away. Instead, my cry only spurred him on, his head lowering for the attack.
I heard shouting, and saw three mounted figures come out into the intersection ahead.
Bone threw himself at our horse, jaws locking on to its neck. Our mount stumbled, recovered, spun; I clung with all my strength to my fistful of mane, while around me Sygarius tried to control the reins. The soldiers wheeled their own mounts, and slashed at Bone, their blades flashing in the moonlight. Our horse tried to rear against the weight of the dog on its neck, forelegs pawing, and I heard the sickening sound of hoof connecting with flesh, and Bone dropped away with a piercing yelp. Our mount, thrown off balance yet again, dropped onto its haunches.
I acted before I could think: I released the mane and twisted under Sygarius’s arm, sliding off onto the ground. Deadly hooves danced in chaos around me as Sygarius shouted my name and the horse regained its feet. “Nimia! Get back here! Nimia!” And to the soldiers, “Get her!”
They circled round me, the three of them, arms reaching, and then the other riders were upon us, blowing apart the circle like wind against a dandelion head. Metal engaged with metal, clanging, hammering. I heard the grunts of effort, shouts of battle rage, and then from beyond the mêlée Terix’s voice, “Nimia, this way!”
I dodged through the horses and the fighting, feeling a sword pass within a breath of my shoulder. I glanced back and saw Clovis, his face deadly with focus, engaged in battle with Sygarius. Sygarius’s left arm hung limp at his side: he was wounded.
Clovis was winning.
I hesitated too long. A Roman arm swept me up, and the soldier turned his mount and began to flee the scene. “Clovis!” I screamed.
Both he and Sygarius looked. For a moment they became, under the moonlight, a marble frieze of warriors at arms, carved in stone.
Sygarius acted first, taking advantage of Clovis’s distraction to turn his mount and ride—in the opposite direction from me.
Clovis’s head jerked, catching the movement, seeing that his most hated enemy was escaping. He turned his horse to follow.
“Kill her!” Sygarius shouted over his shoulder to the soldier who held me.
I twisted in the soldier’s grip, to see a bloodied blade being raised above me, point downward, aiming for the space between collarbone and neck. A whimpering cry was all the protest I could offer.
And then the man’s sword arm was gone.
Gone. Lopped off. Blood spurted from the severed arteries.
His grip on me slackened and I began to fall . . . only to be caught, and pulled onto Clovis’s mount. I clung to him, stunned, as the soldier crumpled and fell, and his horse ran off into the city.
And then it was over. Both Roman guards and one Frank lay dead, and Sygarius was gone.
“You let Sygarius go!” I cried. “You have to catch him. Go. Track him down. Kill him.” I hooked my fingers around the top of Clovis’s breastplate, and shook. “Kill him! Kill him!”
“Nimia, shhh, my love. Shh.” He held me to his hard armor and stroked my head. “He won’t get far.”
“You have to kill him. Or let me.”
He planted kisses on my cheeks, my forehead. “Nimia, Nimia, what did he do to you?”
“You let him get me. You left me with him.”
“His capture of you . . . I failed you there. I didn’t know there was a catacomb under the church. But I didn’t leave you with him. I brought three armies to conquer the city, to get you back.”
“You would have done that anyway.”
“Eventually. But not so soon; not with so little preparation. It was a close thing; Sygarius had more men. And Gararic—” He stopped himself, and put his hands to both sides of my face, forcing me to look at him. “Never mind all that. I went mad when he took you, Nimia. Anyone can tell you. I felt like someone had ripped out my guts.”
I sucked in a breath. They were the first words of real caring I’d ever had from him.
“Ragnachar had to hold me back from charging into the city alone, to find you. I wanted to rip out Sygarius’s heart with my bare hands.”
“You let him go . . .”
“Because your survival mattered more than his death.”
And then he was kissing me, and I was crying and opening my mouth to him, and he took me with him off the back of the horse and we stumbled to the wall of a house. The stones against my back were still warm from the heat of the day.
“Erase his touch from me,” I begged between breaths. “Make me forget.”
He hoisted one of my legs around his waist, and then he was in me. He gave a quick few thrusts, then slowed, diverting his attention to his hands on my buttocks, his tongue in my mouth. I wrapped my fingers in his hair and let myself go, losing myself in him, feeling safe in his arms. And cared for.
He cared for me.
He’d gone to war for me.
He’d let his greatest enemy escape, for me.
Joy flowed through my veins. As he slowly thrust inside me, his hands massaging my buttocks, the hum of the golden swarm surrounded me. Filled me. And a vision came:
Myself. Alone. Standing on a slight rise in the middle of a vast, grassy plain. Gray skies, and wind blowing chill against my skin. And a feeling of such loss and emptiness as I had never known.
My heart broke, and I grieved for I knew not what; but in the waking world, my body found its release, and a moment later Clovis groaned out my name and found his own.
The wrenching vision faded away, leaving behind a strange hollowness that I fought to fill, placing my hand gently on Clovis’s cheek. He grasped my hand and pulled my palm to his lips, kissing it, and then held my hand to his chest.
A lovely gesture, which would have been more lovely without the metal breastplate in the way. I quirked a smile at him. He kissed me quickly on the corner of my mouth, and carefully withdrew his rod from my cunny. I straightened my skirts, in a pointless display of modesty; I hoped Terix had had no interest in watching.
Stupid thought, that. Of course he had watched.
We walked back to Terix and Bone. “Thank Wotan for those two,” Clovis said, breaking the tender silence between us. “Terix knew Bone would find you, given the chance.”
Bone, brave creature, held one hind leg off the ground, and Terix was using his own tunic to bandage a wound on his side.
“We’ll get him sewn up, and the leg splinted,” Clovis said. He hugged me to his side, and kissed me on top of my head. “Don’t worry.”
I wrapped my arms around his waist. For this night, at least, I wouldn’t.
