The Centurion's Woman

Chapter 5

IT TOOK ONLY a minute of arguing before Verus relented and Alex climbed down. Ixillius stepped back over to his slave – his wife – and held his cloak around her as a bit of privacy while she dressed, grinning at the irony. He pinned his cloak back at her throat.

        "Are you warm enough?" he asked quietly, noting the pinching at her eyes when she smiled up at him that belied her fronting strength before the men.

        "I am," her voice was tired.

        "Is the pain much?" he nearly whispered.

        "One, two days, I am the same to before the mud. The mud is bad."

        "You should not have come, Alex," he stated, frowning down at her with only worry in his tone. "Verus rides well. He could have easily come alone."

        Alex initially replied to his concern with just a shrug, smiling past him at Max. Ixillius glanced over his shoulder to see the large stallion eyeing him up due to his close proximity to Alex.

        "Max says Max owns Alex," she stated, the smile slipping away quickly. "Max is good for Alex to ride, but he will kill Verus if Verus is to ride alone. Bad Naevius wants to own me, so I ride Max, and he runs fast with Verus for me." Her dark eyes turned back to him, filled with anxiety. "You are sad." Her fingers inched between the armor fastenings at his sides and he realized he was already holding her, his arms drawing her close.

        "Right now, I am happy," he lied. She relaxed against him. He closed his eyes and just breathed in the smell of her, resting his cheek on the top of her head.

        "Sir?" Marcus broke the spell much too soon. "The century is ready to march on your order."

        "What says the First File?" Ixillius asked, not yet moving.

        "He will march with us for now, and then return to the 1st and 1st with the stallion and the Lady, on your permission, once we've cleared the mud. He is currently occupying the... Inquisitor."

        Ixillius grinned at the corrected naming after his Guard Commander's quick glance at Alex. He re-shouldered his responsibilities with a sigh and pulled reluctantly back from his wife.

        "You have to go back to Verus," he told her quietly.

        Alex held on for a moment longer, her eyes searching his face, and then her fingers released him. Before he could step away, she stretched up to her toes and kissed his cheek. When she stepped around him and went to see to Max, his stomach twisted worse than when Brasus had carried her from him.

                                                                ***

        Alex hated this. The memory of when she'd been ten and having problems with a bully at the school she was attending kept coming up in her thoughts as she checked over Max's legs and hooves. The fights hadn't been the problem, Alex could already hold her own just fine, the problem had been the language barrier; Alex didn't speak well, and the bully got after her for that. Her gigno had put her in school to learn, expecting that she needed schooling and wanting to keep up what her momma had started. He'd stepped in for the trouble with the bully, calmly speaking in his heavy accent and drilling into the teachers his point with very simple words and her bully troubles ended. He was great at just talking. She felt like an idiot. Granted, that 'dumb twit' feeling was forcing her to accelerate how fast she was picking up Latin. But seriously, damn it.

        She wished her gigno could just pop up here and deal with all this crap so that the soap opera would be done with. Maybe Ixillius could even run through that Naevius jerk and save the rest of the world some usable oxygen. If the jeers and taunts as he ran away from Verus were any indication, few would be sad to see that guy disappear, and with her gigno's blessing maybe she could make killing Naevius into an honorable thing. From how people talked, her gigno sounded like a big deal around the Roman times, at least in the boogey-man rumors she kept hearing, even if he'd never made the history books.