Page 19 of Trial of Bronze and Blood
“Absolutely not,” she says between bites.
His hands still and his lower lip juts out. “You would deprive me of expressing my gods-given talent in such uncertain times?”
“In my presence, yes.”
He places his lute on the sand, crossing his arms over his chest and slumping. “Anyone ever call you a dream killer?”
Biting into another sweet slice of the orange, she can’t help smiling. “Not to my face.”
“It has a certain ring to it,” Marcus comments after swallowing a morsel of focaccia. “Drusilla, the Dream Killer.”
When she looks over at him, he’s grinning slightly, light-blue eyes bright. It’s been so long that she forgot about the deep flecks of gold in them, near the center. His attention warms her, dredging up long-forgotten sensations.
Her sorrow over Ovi manages to smother them just as quickly, reminding her why she’s here with him in the first place.
What you feel for him is nothing more than dormant yearning. Let it pass.
She doesn’t return the grin. “With a name like that, I’ll be feared throughout the entire Imperium.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she watches the bard glance between them and raise a brow before spreading some ricotta on his focaccia with his finger and devouring it. Dru goes back to her own meal, trying not to grimace at the idea of the bard’s dirty finger inside the jar.
Dru’s never been one to feel lonely, but even in the company of these two, she can’t help being consumed by it. Thinking back on what happened at the brothel—on Marcus and Ovi, on King Cato and the Imperium—she realizes no creature left on this earth cares about her. The bard doesn’t know her from any other Phaedran woman, and Marcus… she can’t decide if Marcus merely recalls her existence or if heremembersher. And honestly, she’s not sure which is worse.
Everything is fucked. Not as if everything hasn’t been fucked before, but now Ovi’s not here to help her through it. Or at least make light of it, reassure her it can’t be as bad as she thinks even when it usually is.
Grief is a strange thing. Once you lose someone, that loss neverleaves you; it merely lies in wait until something—anything—calls it forth again. It is the deep ache that drowns her now, tearing apart her insides and silencing her cries of pain.
The slight popping of a cork brings her attention to Marcus again as he takes a swig from the wine skin.
He hands it to her, and she does the same, then reluctantly passes it to the bard. He takes the longest pull out of any of them, a few dark drops leaking down his chin and plopping onto the sand.
“Water would’ve been more prudent than wine,” she notes, getting to her feet.
Marcus caps the skin and stands too, handing the bard the mostly empty bag. “I don’t think brothels keep anything but wine stocked.”
She pauses. “I don’t want to know how you know that.”
He smirks, stepping onto the same boulder she took refuge on to mount his horse, waiting for the bard to follow. Looking down at her, some of his dark hair falls in front of his face. He doesn’t tuck it back though, instead meeting her gaze with an intensity she’s not expecting.
“The things you don’t know about me could drown the sea.”
She swallows her response. Though the image is absurd, he’s right: she has no idea what she does and doesn’t know about Marcus Scaevola, praetor to the king of Anziano.
Hours pass on their journey until the tide comes back in and they can no longer travel by shore. Instead, Marcus leads them up a steep, uneven path into the low, dry brush of a wide ledge carved out of the cliffside. The strong afternoon breeze whips at her hair, extricating strand after strand from her braid and drying out her eyes. Her chapped lips scrape together like sandpaper, and her dry throat aches.
She flexes her grip on the reins, the sleepless night taking its toll on her. “How much farther to the palace?”
Marcus turns his head without looking at her, his posture rigid. “We’re nearly there.”
“Oh, so it’s fine whensheasks it,” the bard mutters, the same exhaustion she feels weighing down his shoulders.
Marcus wasn’t lying, at least: it’s not long before they climb a particularly difficult section of the cliffs, where Dru nearly slides backward off her horse. At the top, they find themselves on an enormous plateau inhabited by mature olive trees, their shade a welcome reprieve.
The worn path at their feet leads them through the old olive grove. Tall golden grass sways in the breeze like waves on the sea, the horses’ hooves silent among it.
In the distance and precariously close to the edge of the plateau stands what she assumes to be the famed Vecchio palace—a dazzling white, oblong structure, marked by tall columns—whose edges drop off sharply into the sea below.
The path takes them out of the olive grove and slightly to the left, where the cliffs have been carved out by the ocean and left bare centuries ago.
