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She licked her lips. "I don't mind." Then, hopefully: "Could I have water? Please?"
He nodded. "Just let me finish this and I will get Sextus." He bent to pick up the bucket.
"Wait—"
He paused.
"I'd... rather not be drugged again. And I don't like Sextus. Couldn't you bring it?"
Rufus' face went utterly still, an alien mask that left her chilled despite the close heat of the room. Deep furrows at the edges of his eyes aged him beyond his years.
"I am sorry," he said stiffly. "But it is not permitted. I should not be here, alone with you, while you are awake."
She tried to sit up and was faintly surprised when she managed it, although nausea in the pit of her stomach rumbled warningly. She rested bound hands awkwardly in her lap. "Why not?"
A film of sudden sweat shone on his battered face. His glance slid away from hers. "Because I am not a eunuch."
A eunuch?
"And I do not want to become one," he added with a low growl.
He left her sitting in darkness and took the bucket and crutch with him. Rufus shut the door with a solid thud. A bar outside dropped into place with a bang that made her jump.
A eunuch? Sextus had been castrated? Dear God...
Where am I?
Aelia closed her fists—but her name, ill-fitting and wrong, galled some i
She drew a ragged, foul breath—and felt a metal band at her throat rise and fall. She explored tentatively. The thing circled her throat completely. The back of it was fastened with a crude-seeming but effective lock. The breath she drew this time shuddered all the way down to the diaphragm.
"I want to go home!" But she didn't have a clue as to what, or where, home might be.
Sextus arrived with a deep wooden cup and an unglazed ceramic jug. She eyed him warily.
"I won't drink any more of that drug," she said with more conviction than the circumstances probably warranted.
Sextus eyed her sidelong while he poured. "If you keep down this water," he murmured in his light voice, "and if you behave yourself, you won't need any more of it."
She wanted to ask what constituted "behaving one's self " and discovered a sudden, sweating fear of the answer. Sextus set the jug beside her on the bench—except it wasn't really a bench, it was more a wooden daybed, without a mattress. Sextus turned toward her with a smile on his lips, but not in his eyes. He held the cup to her mouth. The water was warm and tasted metallic. Drinking while someone else held the cup was awkward. She was thankful when the liquid seemed content to stay in her stomach. Sextus released her wrists, but not her ankles. Then he called for Rufus.
Aelia winced at Rufus' halting, slow-footed approach.
"Yes?"
The light where Rufus stood in an open corridor of some sort had strengthened to a clear, pale gold. Aelia heard the splash of water somewhere nearby. A fountain, she realized, somewhere inside this building. Farther away she could make out the muted sounds of civilization: voices, the rattle and clatter of workshops, barking dogs.
"Watch her while I prepare her breakfast."
Rufus held Sextus' gaze. "I am not supposed to stay with her."
The immensely overweight Sextus gri
Rufus flushed dark red, all the way to the base of his throat. Scarred hands closed slowly into fists. Only his lips, drawn into a tight line, remained pale.
"You do remember how I came here? Don't you, Sextus?"
Aelia shivered at the gently delivered threat.
Laughter drained from Sextus' eyes. "Just guard her!"
Rufus limped aside to give him room to pass. Then he returned to the doorway without offering to enter her cell. During the time he'd been gone, he'd removed his sweat-soaked tunic. Except for a dirty, ragged loincloth and a thick metal collar around his throat, he was naked. Glistening moisture along his chest and in his hair suggested Sextus had interrupted his bath.
Rufus was scarred across most of his visible body: arms, legs, chest, and that hideous burn scar on the side of his neck. It pulsed lightly with the rhythm of his heart. The scar was shaped like the letter F. Something deep in her mind stirred again, but she couldn't grasp it solidly enough. It slipped away.
Despite the exhaustion she had heard in his voice, his body was neither starvation thin nor bowed. He rippled with muscle, every part of him she could see. Whatever had happened to his leg, he hadn't allowed himself to go soft. Given the little she'd gathered about the crazy world into which she'd awakened, he probably hadn't been given much choice.
He stood glaring down the corridor, in the direction Sextus had gone. Tension had tightened Rufus' body into hard knots of muscle. Pale eyes glinted in the early daylight. Aelia decided abruptly she would not want Rufus Mancus for an enemy, no matter how desperately he'd been injured. He turned abruptly toward her. She jumped, then bit her lip.
"I did not mean to frighten you," he said heavily. "And my anger does not lie with you. Dominus Xanthus is a fool to keep that slave. He's worse than I am, in his deceitful way. Cheats Master blind and—"
"Slave?" she echoed, Slow disbelief seeped out from beneath the blackness that held her mind captive.
He met her gaze. Bitterness stiffened the set of his mouth. "Did you not guess? Sextus and I are hardly dressed as freedmen." He gestured with one hand to his near-nakedness and the metal band around his throat. "Perhaps you do not welcome another slave's company?"
The implications—and the band at her own throat—left her suspended between broken thoughts, astonished at some basic level that couldn't quite comprehend slavery as a concept, never mind as a reality for herself.
When he turned his back on her, she forgot everything else. Rufus' back was a mass of criss-crossing scars and welts, some of them so recent they were still bloody. Old bruises discolored his ribs and shoulderblades.
"My God!" she choked out. "Who did that to you?"
He glanced over one shoulder. "Don't be stupid, girl."
The accusation stung, even as it deepened the sense of dislocation behind her eyes. "I'm not stupid!" When his glance begged to disagree, she felt compelled to add, "I'm sick and confused and... Why do you hate me?"
"Hate you?" That brought him around again to face her. Wary surprise colored amber-green eyes. "I do not hate you, child."
"I'm not a child," she said levelly.
At least, she didn't feel like a child. Her body, under the shapeless linen, was certainly more developed than childhood.
He frowned. "How old are you?"
She opened her lips—
And pain struck her down. She cried out and clutched her head. She heard a distant clatter; then he was beside her, catching and cradling her, rubbing her temples and whispering to her. His Irish-whiskey voice was gentle again, soothing. The pain gradually faded, leaving her limp and drained, with a wet face.
"I'm sorry," they said simultaneously.
She looked into his eyes and discovered a slow, cautious smile. That smile was almost beautiful. It lit his eyes until their color lightened into a clear amber with just a wash of green remaining. A moment later, the smile and the clear amber hue vanished without a trace, replaced by the darkness she'd seen there before. That darkness watched the world warily and didn't expect to find anything good in it.
She found herself wanting to trust those watchful eyes and the personality behind them. Now there's an irrelevant thought, she chided herself. Or was it? She needed help, information. And he'd been kind to her.