The Rest of the Story: The whole of
Fire can be found on my
Writings page in PDF format, while the portion of the story that's been published on this blog so far is on
this page.
Wondering what happened to Lucia? Well, you're about to find out.
Chapter 14
Runaway
She pushed the ragged blanket lower, trying to cover her overlong legs. That feeble effort only left her exposed elsewhere, and her tossing and turning only made her awkward body more miserable. The steady pattering of the rain nearby reminded her to be grateful for what she did have, a little shelter at the entrance to some Patrician’s townhouse. She considered the damp stone beneath a small enough price for a roof overhead. The household slaves would have chased her off by now if the rain had not made their vigil lax. It drove away other people, too, men with dark thoughts on their minds. She had chosen her shelter with more care since she had awoken to find that hairy man stroking her arm. His gap-toothed smile had vanished when he saw that she was awake, and he had fled as if from a demon. She hoped he was still running.
More than anything, she wanted to go home, but it was the one place she could not go. She did not think she could explain what had happened in a way that would convince anyone. Marjori would never believe such nonsense. Marcus Principius neither tolerated lies from his slaves nor trusted them to tell the truth. As for Avla... if the guards had spoken truly, then Avla wanted Jaelin returned, and as long as the slave girl could still talk, the guards would not be out-of-line if they made her a little more pliable. She thought she must have done something
magical in order to escape, as the guards had strangely lost interest in her. They had not noticed when she fled.
Lucia remembered seeing Jaelin die, but somehow she was Jaelin now. When she tried to remember what had happened, she could recall nothing more than her momentary envy of Jaelin’s lost life. Lucia had wanted her anonymity, her life removed from concerns of politics and magic and Domini, her maturity and worldly knowledge, even her exotic beauty. Then, Lucia had changed. Her body had become Jaelin’s, stretching and shifting to be older, stronger, inconveniently taller. She had Jaelin’s features, her freckled face and red hair. Even her voice had changed, though it still didn’t sound like Jaelin’s to her ear. Inside, she was still Lucia.
Unless she really was Jaelin, and her belief that she had once been Lucia was mere fantasy. She shied away from the fearful thought of madness.
The envy seemed silly now. Jaelin was a slave; how could Lucia have forgotten what that meant? Slaves had no rights, and Lucia’s apparent death would fall on her slave girl’s head. Now they were searching for Jaelin, and since Lucia had no idea how to become Lucia again, that meant they were searching for her.
Her stomach growled, reminding her that she had not eaten anything since the apple she had stolen this morning. Even that had been a feast compared to the discarded scraps on which she had survived for the three days previous. She did her best to ignore the hollow pain in her belly, the cold and damp of this evening, and the aches that came from sleeping on hard ground for the last ten nights. She lacked even the single coin to pay for entry to the public baths, and her body itched with the resulting dirt. Drawing herself into a tight ball, she blinked the tears from her eyes and wished for sleep so she could forget these things for a few hours. Her fear of the dreams kept her aware for a long while, however.
Struggling to wake from a dream where she watched her own body, her real body, writhe as fire consumed it, Lucia opened her eyes. For a moment, only dim grey light filled her vision, and heaviness suffused her whole body so she couldn’t move. She opened her mouth to cry out, but only a small whimper came. Fighting, struggling, she managed to get her finger to move, then her hand, then her arm. She pushed herself to a sitting position, her heart racing and her breath coming in short gasps. Real, physical terror had replaced the dream terror of a moment ago. She searched for the source of her distress, and finding none, she realized that her body was behaving normally now. It ached, itched, felt cold and sore, but none of that differed from when she had fallen asleep. The groggy head and blurry vision completed her morning routine. Did what had just happened have something to do with magic? The thought that someone had placed a spell on her frightened her less than the idea that she had done it to herself by wearing someone else’s body. Maybe, no, surely, it had only come from being only half-awake.
Though the rain had stopped, dampness darkened every surface in the dim light of dawn. Lucia shivered in the chill of a morning even colder than the night. The rain had washed out the normal city smells of garbage and food and smoke, of men and animals and their waste, scents she would hardly have noticed had they not been diminished. She saw no one in the narrow street except for a slave boy on some early errand. Although he glanced at her as he jumped over a large puddle, he did not slow, in too much of a hurry to be bothered with the problems of some strange girl.
The unnerving experience of a few moments ago renewed her determination to find her quarry today. It could not be that difficult. Even though she still hesitated to approach him in some public place, Lucia had no intention of losing him again for fear of being caught. She draped the dirty blanket around her shoulders like a shawl as she got unsteadily to her bare feet. They hurt with cuts and bruises which marked her bare feet and legs all the way up to the knees her tunic failed to cover. It might have once fit Lucia perfectly, but it did not fit Jaelin well at all, who was not only taller but also older and more developed. She wished she could have found a tunic that fit better. The blanket shawl at least hid some of the places where it had ripped. For once, she did not want a mirror; she had a good enough idea of what she must look like. Once moving, Jaelin’s long legs carried her faster than Lucia’s would have. It suited her to walk quickly, since her legs didn’t feel as awkward when she hurried, but it exacerbated the pain in her feet and made it even more difficult to avoid the filth and shards which littered the road. Her cut and dirty feet demonstrated how not even the raised stepping stones made the streets of Novaro safe to travel barefoot. She felt exposed, even all alone in the early morning city. Especially when alone. She walked even more rapidly, certain that faster had to be safer.
She did not know where her quarry lived now, since the fire had scattered the entire household. Lucia knew that he had not joined her parents in the Imperial palace, and that he had an apartment somewhere which he had tried to keep secret from her parents. Whether he was now staying there all the time or not, he probably still went there on occasion. Lucia just had to find it. She had followed him the other day, almost to where she thought his apartment must be hidden. Lucia might have approached him publicly if the others hadn’t been following him too. The intentness which had radiated from them had told her that they were not just walking behind him. Though she didn’t know them, they might have recognized Jaelin, so she had kept her distance. Lucia had hoped that she could approach her quarry after his tail had grown tired of the chase, but when he had lost them, he had lost her as well.
Lucia reached the point where he had disappeared last time, then stopped since she had nothing else to go on. No people shared this narrow street with her this morning. She looked around, half-hoping he would appear, and when that failed, she searched for places into which he might have vanished. The whole area had an air of disrepute. Several ungainly tenement buildings supported one another, while a few warehouses clustered near a larger street at the end of the block. None of the buildings were short, and the protruding upper stories threatened to cave in. A fountain splashing tepid water into its basin was the sole public structure around here. Why would he choose this place in which to hide? He had a paranoid need for secrecy, but what could he be doing that would require a place on this street?
Lucia noticed the alley on her third pass across the same stretch of road. What she had taken for a recess between two adjoining tenements was a twisting alleyway, just wide enough for a person to walk through. She stepped inside, feeling like a rabbit going into a ferret’s hole. The alleyway made two sharp turns in quick succession before opening up into a wider stretch flanked by several doors. Lucia sighed in relief when she felt his presence, guiding her unerringly to the third door on her left, which looked no different from any of the others. Raising her hand to knock, she hesitated. He wouldn’t recognize her, likely wouldn’t believe her. What made her think he could help her when no one else could? She was on the verge of turning away when the door opened.
Lucia’s brother looked worse for the wear. Aulus had not bothered to straighten his twisted tunic, and his tousled dark hair and the bags under his eyes did nothing to help his already sickly appearance. Lucia wondered whether he might really be sick. At the sight of her, however, his eyes lit up and unabashed relief filled him. “Finally!” he said. He took hold of her arm and pulled her roughly into the apartment. After a brief look outside to make sure no one lurked in the alley, he shut the door.
Aulus had kept his bedroom at home spotless, everything in its proper place. The clutter of this apartment, while not excessive, did not fit him at all. Scattered papers shared a low-lying table with a single lamp, the only light in this windowless room. A toga draped over the couch, and a lone sandal lay on the open floor. The small stove must provide heat, and perhaps a place to cook. Lucia didn’t see a bed, but the curtained doorway indicated another room. Unless it was much larger than this sparsely-furnished room, the entire apartment could have fit in the atrium of the destroyed townhouse. Aulus didn’t give her much chance to explore. “Where have you been? I expected you days ago.” Rather than continue, he took her firmly in his arms and kissed her.
Alarmed and repulsed, she pushed him away. As his confused eyes met hers, she found herself looking straight into his brown irises rather than up at them as she once had. With the realization of what Aulus saw, Lucia began to understand.
“What’s wrong?” Aulus asked. Her brother and Jaelin? She had thought they didn’t even like one another. How had they managed to keep it from her?
“I’m not Jaelin,” she said.
Aulus just looked at her in confusion.
“I’m not Jaelin,” she repeated. “I’m Lucia.”
“What are you talking about?” Hurt and disbelief coursed through Aulus, barely noticeable beside the rising panic.
“The Dominus came for me. He killed Jaelin, and I... killed him. Then, somehow, I became Jaelin. I don’t know how, or how to change back. I couldn’t go home. Who’d believe me? And Mother is hunting for Jaelin, and the Domini are searching for Lucia, and you’re the only one I--”
“Hush,” Aulus said, hugging her gently. Lucia could sense real compassion in the midst of all the grief and fear, but it all gave way to the hard edge of his skepticism.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” she said into his ear.
Aulus pushed her back, his hands on her shoulders. His face had turned hard and unreadable; his mind had vanished entirely. Unlike the Dominus’s blank wall, which she could feel even when she could not read what it hid, this seemed more like Aulus wasn’t there at all, even though she could still see and hear and touch him. “How can I believe you? You look like Jaelin, you feel like her.” He pinched her arm, though not hard. “You even sound like her. But you’re not acting like Jaelin.” He frowned. “You could be lying, but I think you believe what you’re saying. That doesn’t make it true, though.”
“You think I’m Jaelin and I’ve gone mad.”
“Whoever you are, you’ve been through a terrifying experience, and you’re coping with it as well as you can.” He looked her up and down. “That’s the most reasonable explanation I can think of. As for what you believe happened--I don’t even know whether or not it’s possible. I can’t rule it out entirely.”
“You’re hoping I am Jaelin, aren’t you? You’d rather have her than me.”
For a moment, she could sense him again, grief and fear, hope and desire, and underneath it all a bitter amusement that was distinctly Aulus. All of it vanished in a moment. “I hope? What is there to hope? Either I lose a sister or a... friend. I had reconciled myself to losing Lucia, but Jaelin had vanished too and I was afraid I had lost her--you--as well. Now you’re telling me I had it backwards. Do you expect me to be happy? Madness or magic, which should I prefer?”
Lucia had not allowed herself to dwell on Jaelin’s death. She had avoided any thought of those awful moments of magic, fire, and death, though they came to haunt her dreams anyway. For the first time, the raw truths of what had happened caught up to her. Jaelin was gone. Her constant companion for most of her life had died because of her. Shuddering, heaving cries seized her. Aulus placed his arm around her awkwardly and led her to the couch, where he sat her down. He took a position on the disorderly table across from her and waited for her noisy sobs to subside. It took a long time, as memories of Jaelin flitted through her mind: The red-haired girl comforting her as she cried over some trifle. Jaelin’s panic when she had touched the fire. The two of them with their heads together, foreheads almost touching, conspiring to slip out of the house before Marjori could find them. Jaelin had often counseled caution, but when Lucia had insisted on doing something reckless, she had always come up with the how. Lucia would have to figure out the how for herself now. When she looked up, sniffling and wiping tears from her eyes, she found Aulus watching her. She thought she had seen him wipe his eyes earlier, but now he just watched her with a quizzical expression. “You don’t cry like Jaelin,” he said. “She rarely cries, and when she does, she fights the tears every moment.”
“You still don’t believe me, though.”
“No, I don’t,” Aulus said. “Although...” He shook his head. “We need to talk about what we should do.”
“What about it?”
“First, you should put on some decent clothes. There are some in the bedroom. You could use a bath, too, but that’ll have to wait. Why don’t you get changed?” The thought of changing out of the rags she wore now had never seemed more appealing. She hurried to the bedroom while Aulus stoked the stove.
The bedroom had the same dishevelled appearance as the rest of the apartment and Aulus himself. Bed coverings lay in a heap on the floor, leaving the scandalous bed, large enough for two people, bare. A few of Aulus’s clothes lay scattered about as well. A shuttered window probably looked out on a courtyard. She didn’t open the shutters, instead going to the cabinet against the wall. Inside, a partition divided it into two sides, one occupied by Aulus’s clothes and the other by a woman’s clothing. Stripping off her torn and dirty tunic, she put on the best of what lay in the cabinet. She had forgotten what clean, comfortable clothing felt like. The perfect fit seemed odd after wearing the undersized tunic for days. She could tell that these clothes must belong to her slave girl, and any doubts she still had about the relationship between Jaelin and Aulus vanished. Lucia shuddered to think what her father would think of it.
She fingered the fabric of the dress she had put on. Something seemed odd about it. While not as fine as what she had worn as an Imperial princess, she didn’t think it’s low quality was what bothered her. Without a mirror, she couldn’t see what she looked like, so she tried to picture herself in it. No, to picture
Jaelin wearing this dress. Lucia realized the she had never seen her slave girl wear anything like this. Jaelin had more often than not worn a simple grey tunic, shorter than her mistress’s. Aside from being full length, this dress had a light blue color. No slave wore dyed clothing. What had Jaelin and Aulus been up to? Lucia longed to hear Jaelin’s explanation. Wiping her suddenly blurry eyes, she wondered whether she could ask Aulus. Would he give her an honest answer? Could she tell if he didn’t?
Lucia returned to the other room, more comfortable in body if less so in mind. Aside from straightening up some, Aulus had also heated water and laid out some food. He gave Lucia a warm, damp cloth. She accepted it gratefully and tried to wipe her hands and face clean, watching in alarm as the cloth went from white to gray. “At least now it’s dirtier than you are,” Aulus said, giving his usual smile at another’s embarrassment. Discarding the cloth, she tentatively began to eat the food in front of her. Bread, cheese, and fruit made up a typical Novar lunch, along with a cup of almost cool water. She sat down on the couch and began to eat, focusing on the fruit since she had found that bread and cheese upset her stomach if she had not eaten in a while.
“What now?” she mumbled to Aulus around an apple.
Aulus stood above her, watching her eat. She still could not sense him. “I had intended to take you with me. You—Jaelin—and I discussed this,” he said. “At length.” He had apparently convinced himself that she was Jaelin.
“With you? Where?” Jaelin had intended to leave? Why hadn’t she told her mistress? The hurt Lucia felt engendered guilt. How could she take offense at something her dead friend had done?
“If you can’t remember, I probably shouldn’t tell you. You might say something to someone you shouldn’t. After what’s happened, I can’t bring you with me anyway.” He paused, waiting for her to say something. Lucia was afraid to ask why she couldn’t go with him. She didn’t want to go with Aulus, not when he still believed that she was Jaelin. Would his doubt stop him from...? She pushed the thought from her mind while Aulus answered the unasked question. “The people who would have helped me to hide you before won’t now that Mother is hunting for you. They’d just hand you over to her. I think I can get you out of Novaro, but you can’t come with me.”
Lucia took a drink of water so she could speak. “Well, what about Grandad? I thought maybe I could stay with him. It’s a long way from Novaro, but that’s a good thing. It’s out of the way, so I don’t think the Domini or anyone else who’d be looking for me go there very often. And if anyone can face down a Dominus, it’s him.”
She still couldn’t sense Aulus, but she knew she had said something right when he smiled and said, “That’s brilliant! Mother would never think to look for you there.”
“Mom...” She had a sinking feeling. How could she forget that her grandfather would mistake her for Jaelin just like everyone else? “Grandad would tell her he had me, wouldn’t he?”
“No, no, no. He dotes on you, remember?” At Lucia’s confused look, he slowed down to explain. “Your parents belonged to him before they died in the Agnatius Rebellion. He raised you himself. We stayed with you and Grandfather for a year when you were six and I was seven. Lucia must have been two or three. You two took an instant liking to one another... You really don’t remember this?”
Of course she didn’t remember what had happened to her at that age. As far as Lucia could remember, Jaelin had always been there. Now that she thought about it, her grandfather had always welcomed Jaelin as warmly as Lucia when they visited. The two also spent considerable time alone together. They hadn’t visited him often, but Lucia should have paid more attention to Jaelin’s relationship to him. Only, why would anyone want to know about a slave’s life?
“Why did Jaelin leave?” Lucia asked.
Aulus looked at her for a moment, before saying, “You and Lucia both begged him not to separate you. He let you go with her, but he still owns you. You’ve told me before that he intends to free you when you’re twenty.” Aulus frowned. “I never understood why he let you leave, or why you wanted to go. You were both happier before. It always struck me as one of Lucia’s whims, when everyone went along for no sensible reason...” Aulus trailed off at her expression. “Sorry, I forgot.”
The words gave Lucia something to think about. She didn’t want to admit that Aulus was right, but Lucia realized now that she had almost always gotten her way. She had believed that her abilities were new, but maybe instead she had just become aware of what she had always done. With that realization came a depressing thought. When people were kind and accommodating to her, did they do it because they liked her or because she made them? Did people really like her at all, or had she somehow coerced them into acting as if they did? Even Aulus would hesitate to manipulate people the way she did without thinking.
Her brother didn’t seem to notice the sudden attack of self-doubt. “Would you like to visit the baths? I’d hate to say that you need one, but...” He gave another of his mocking smiles. “We can go to the small one close-by. While the regulars might remember us, none of them know who we really are.”
“Yeah,” Lucia said, her mind on more disturbing things. “That would be nice.”
The public bath turned out to be the more disturbing thing after all. Aulus hadn’t told her about the mixed bathing.
Over the next few days, Lucia actually missed living on the streets. The food, clean clothing, and warm bed did not make life with Aulus tolerable. He did not approach her, or even talk about his and Jaelin’s previous relationship, but when she could sense him she knew that what he felt for her was not brotherly affection. He had convinced himself that she was Jaelin, and nothing that Lucia said could change his mind. Only his knowledge of her “madness” stopped him from pressing her. Fortunately, Aulus spent much of the day elsewhere, working and, she believed, plotting. She pretended to sleep when he came home late.
Just hiding in the apartment from the Domini, the guards, and anyone else who might be looking for her quickly lost its appeal. It would have helped if Lucia had anywhere to go. She did not want to wander around in this sort of neighborhood, even to visit the small forum a few streets over. Without any money, she couldn’t do a great deal of shopping anyway. Aside from that small marketplace, only tenements and warehouses stood nearby. And the bath.
That place both appalled and fascinated her. She imagined what her mother would say about Lucia bathing with both men and women. Avla had a most unNovar dislike of public baths in general; she herself only bathed in the private bath which Lucia’s father had commissioned for her. At first, Lucia too had been mortified at the idea of mixed bathing. Gradually, the casualness of the nudity had caused her to relax. It was not the orgy some of the rumors made it out to be. Mostly, the customers came from the poorer citizenry, and they had larger concerns than shared bathing facilities. The stern proprietess forbade any physical contact between the sexes, and bouncers stood ready to enforce that rule. Lucia found it curious that the men felt more self-conscious than the women, though they hid it behind forced nonchalance. The baths offered scant refuge, however. Even though she started to recognize some of the regulars, she couldn’t carry on more than the most trivial conversation. Between her own embarrassment and her awareness of their self-consciousness, Lucia couldn’t manage to talk to the men at all. She took to going to the baths early in the day, when mostly women filled the various pools.
With no one to talk to and nothing to do, she spent much of her time alone with her thoughts. Lucia would have much preferred either to distract herself from these difficult ruminations or to talk with someone about them, but she had neither option available. She may not have had anyone with whom she could speak when she lived out in the streets, but at least she had something to do, namely surviving. Now she could only think. Jaelin’s death, the Domini, her abilities and her unconscious use of them, the relationship between her brother and her slave, Aulus’s conviction that she really was Jaelin, her mother’s hunt for the young slave girl, her grandfather’s connection to Jaelin--all these things haunted her thoughts. She spent many hours letting them chase each other around in her head until it ached. Then, exhausted, she’d lie down and sleep, only to awake in the night, the thoughts still there. Lucia spent a great deal of time sleeping, hoping to escape them, but usually they came back in her dreams.
Dreams of fire came the most often, the flames always hungry for someone. The Dominus, her father, her mother, Aulus--they all cried out in agony from within. When she saw a tall, red-haired girl in them, she didn’t know whether it was Jaelin or herself. Sometimes the blaze consumed Victor. His suffering was worse than all the others combined. He didn’t cry out, instead looking at her with pity and hurt. Lucia woke from that dream more quickly than any of the others, only to find that the memory of it faded more slowly.
When Aulus announced that he had come up with a way for her to slip out of the city, she couldn’t leave soon enough. She didn’t have to wait long, since his arrangements required her to flee that night. After a flurry of packing, she found herself wandering through dark and empty streets with Aulus drawing her almost at a run. Like Aulus, Lucia wore a dark cloak with the hood drawn up, sure to draw suspicion had anyone seen them, but her brother proved adept at avoiding notice. They hid in the doorway to a large townhouse as two watchmen passed within a few feet without spotting them. Then they were off again, through narrow streets and even narrower alleyways, following a winding route that covered twice the distance as a straight line. It took nearly an hour to reach a point near the city walls.
The sky had begun to lighten to the dull grey of false dawn. A sputtering street lamp provided enough real light for a fat merchant to hitch his wagon to two reluctant donkeys. He must have lit it himself, as no other lamps showed signs of life. The merchant smacked one donkey on the nose when it tried to bite him, muttering either to it or to himself.
“Raxtus!” Aulus hissed from the alleyway by which they had approached. He tossed his hood back to let the dim light fall on his face. The man spun around, his hand clamped around a short sword he had at his waist. Lucia couldn’t imagine a man that large being able to use one effectively. What sort of merchant wore a sword, anyway? His eyes looked much too small in that wide face, although his large nose fit it well.
“Oh, it’s you,” he grunted. He didn’t sound happy to see Aulus.
Aulus replied, “Be glad it’s me and not the guards. Besides, did you think you’d be able to leave without my help?”
“I thought I might give it a try,” he said, drawing closer. His worn traveling cloak draped over a stained tunic.
“You wouldn’t make it.” A slight smile touched Aulus’s lips. “You’re kind of hard to miss, you know.”
“Not all the guards can have a description of me, no matter how remarkable I look.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of remarkably large, but...” Her brother radiated confidence, enough that he could risk insulting the man like this. “All the captains have your description, and no junior guard would let you leave this early without waking his captain.” Lucia realized Aulus was enjoying manipulating this fat merchant, certain that he had full control of the situation. Fortunately, Aulus judged correctly. For all his bluster, the man reeked of resignation. Lucia wished that were all he reeked of. Sweat and sour wine made a poor perfume.
“If getting out is so hard, how do you intend to get me past the guard?”
“I’ll go with you to the Septimian Gate. I know the officer on duty there tonight, and he’ll let you through.”
“And they’ll stop hunting for me? You promised me that.”
“Tomorrow, the paperwork to renew your case will get lost. When descriptions get circulated next month, yours won’t be among them. I would wait another few months before coming into Novaro again, but after that...”
The man grinned, showing more holes than teeth. Lucia wondered whether he could even eat solid food. “Well, if you’re offering me that, I suppose it’s worth the price, boy.” He looked at Lucia for the first time, trying to see into her hood. “I suppose this is the cargo.”
“This is your passenger. Her name is Marcia, and that’s all you need to know.”
“What story should I tell? My young wife?”
“Say she’s your daughter. I expect you to treat her that way--if she doesn’t get word to me that she’s safely reached her destination within two and a half months, I’ll track you down again.”
“Can’t you trust me not to harm the young woman? You know I’m no highway bandit. Besides, you’re not giving me much time to get her there so she can send a message back.” As odd as it seemed, Lucia sensed the sincerity of his words.
“No, not a bandit, just a smuggler. Take good care of her.”
Raxtus retuned to the donkeys, who seemed none too happy for the attention. For a moment, Lucia thought she could sense what the animals felt, but she had other things on her mind. “You’re sending me with him?” she whispered to Aulus.
“Raxtus is harmless,” he assured her. “A small time smuggler who ran afoul of one of the Agnatii. Since he’s so concerned with someone spotting him, he’ll do his best to keep both of you away from places where you might run into trouble.”
“Or he might sacrifice me to save himself!” Lucia said. She didn’t really believe it, though. Smuggler caught in a tight place he might be, but she couldn’t read any betrayal or deceit in him.
“Sacrificing you will only bring something worse, and he knows it. I would make his life a waking nightmare,” Aulus said as if such words were comforting. How could he be so skeptical of everyone else, yet so confident in his own wild plans? Before she could stop him, he leaned close to give her a kiss on the cheek. “Let’s go,” he said, pulling her to the wagon. Lucia’s free hand twitched. If he had tried to kiss her lips, she would have slapped him.
The first part of Aulus’s plan worked without a hitch, and by dawn she and Raxtus had travelled a mile past the Septimian gate. The smuggler watched her out of the corner of his eye but remained silent. While she could feel his matter-of-fact lust, at least he thought her off limits. Lucia just hoped that her life was improving since the day she found Aulus. She feared that it was getting worse.
This chapter is a 5,559 word excerpt of a 90,110 word novel.
One thing that surprised me was Jaelin's and Aulus's relationship. It hadn't occured to me they might be lovers until after I killed her off. Once I found that out, I began to wish she was still around so I could develop that further. Alas, that was not to be, and I had to live with the consequences of my actions.
