The Centurion's Woman

Chapter 28

        Alex twitched and jerked in her sleep. He squeezed her tightly and kissed the top of her head.

        "I have you," he'd reassured her and she quieted immediately, her hands creeping up and gripping onto his forearm. "Are you safe, Alexandria?" he asked, wondering if she'd speak to him in her sleep.

        "For the moment," she replied smoothly. "But we need to go home."

        "Where is home?" he asked, grateful that this opportunity had occurred now, that he got a chance to ask her some of his questions, maybe understand some of the things she'd tried to tell him in her mother's language.

        "With the 1st right now," she answered, her accent gone. Something in her tone left him with a horrible feeling settling in his gut.

        "Right now?" he asked before he could stop himself.

        "We will grow old in Illyria. That will be our home once the war ends," she stated and then fell quiet, her snores resuming. The world seemed to tip beneath him; her tone was so plain, as if what she'd just said was all written in fact for her. The questions that he'd wanted to ask, the clarifications he'd wanted for her past, slipped away like water in his fist at her strange words about their future.

        "You believe we will grow old?" he whispered, hoping she was fully asleep again.

        "Our tombs are carved that we do," she nuzzled his arm and sighed.

        His body broke out in goosebumps and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He wished he hadn't asked. One of her statements from today rose back up in his thoughts, and he suddenly wished he could forget everything she had said, but the words repeated over and over in his mind.

        My work is to teach people who pay to learn to live outside. No house, no market. There are fourteen of us who teach. The man we work for, he sent us for three days to a camp to have us to be together. Together as friends. I was sad. I missed Gigno. I went to sleep then, and woke up now. The hunters from Hiltraud's village attacked me. Hiltraud's village was not good...

        ... I went to sleep then, and woke up now...

        ... Our tombs are carved that we do...

        Verus had said, before leaving Bonna, that Alex looked like she was trying to fit into her skin while they were trying to force her to wake from the medicine. Ixillius had wondered then what her typical shape might be. A few minutes ago he had been marveling that her form fit him so perfectly, as if she'd grown for that exact purpose. He'd often thought she'd lied to him when they were in Bonna, that she was a Nymph and not a man's daughter at all.

        Her body twitched again, her hands gripping tighter and one of her legs jumping as if working up to a kick.

        "Hush, my wife. I have you," he said and she quieted again, her sigh content. "Do you love me?"

        "I do," she stated immediately. "Sometimes my chest hurts because I love you so much."

        "Are you born of the gods, Alexandria?" He hated himself for asking.

        "Gigno is just a man, Ixor," she replied

        Ixillius swallowed hard and kissed the top of her head. Avilius was a man gone for seventeen years, without a trace, his footsteps just ending in the mud in the middle of a path he had been walking on alone to go take a piss. According to Quintus and a couple of other, older veterans Ixillius had spoken to, Avilius had returned healthier and stronger than he'd left. Since his return, Quintus said he often spoke with reverence of a dead wife and lost daughter, and hadn't touched another woman.

        Alex had stated that her father was just a man, more than once, but never really spoke of her mother outside of a name, that she was a scholar. Ixillius now wondered who – or rather what – was Alisa Moldovan?

        Ixillius curled tightly around Alex – his Alexandria – and silently cursed against whatever gods had given her to him; that had planted curiosity in his mind as a child that led him as a man to see what was kept in the pit with a stone holding down the planks. He cursed them for making her fearless of him, and that her lack of fear had left him defenseless against her attentions. He cursed them for her father's name making her so unobtainable when he loved her so much.

        Then he cursed the curse the gods placed upon him, that left him weak the instant her body – this body she was wearing – nestled against him and begged him for a child. The curse that even now, at the thought of a child with her, left him craving for her sex.

        He had no doubt that Alex believed they would grow old, had maybe even dreamed that – she must have dreamed that – they shared a tomb. But he knew that when her father killed him on their arrival in Illyria, the death would be a sweet blessing to be released from the love of this woman. He thought of a future where he lived, and saw only a blackness of days and nights where he would see her at a distance. In that future, she would eventually belong to another man who actually had the bloodlines to be with her, and Ixillius would fight every day for survival so that he could continue to see her from that distance, with that other man, because then he saw her.

        He closed his eyes and breathed in the smell of her. Brasus had called him her fool that night on the Training Ground, and chided softly as such many times since. Ixillius cursed himself that his friend was so completely and utterly right.