CHAPTER 24

VIX

“… Vix?”

“What?” I bashed the stopper off a new jug of wine, sloshed a cup brim-full, and drank it off without water. It burned all the way down.

“You’ve hardly said a word since you came back.” Mirah eyed me cautiously, Chaya balanced on her hip and Dinah clinging to her skirts. “Aren’t you going to tell me what happened?”

I grunted, refilling my cup. Two days since the ship had brought my men and me back from Cyprus. Mirah and the children had run to the door to greet me, beaming, but I’d brushed right past my wife in her new red dress and the girls in their rose smocks, straight to the wine, and started drinking. Two days later, and I still wasn’t nearly as drunk as I wanted to be.

“Vix.” Mirah was starting to sound exasperated now. “Won’t you talk to me?”

“No,” I said, and drank off another cup. Little Dinah retreated behind her mother, hearing the harshness in my voice, and Antinous gave me a long troubled look from the corner where he sat practicing his letters. He hadn’t been with me in Cyprus, thank God, but he’d tagged along on enough campaigns by now to know the look on my face after a bad fight. He’d taken one glance at me when I returned from Cyprus, and retreated to the very back of the house.

“How long are you going to sit there getting soused and staring at the wall?” Mirah’s voice rose. “You go back to the legion in two more days, Vix, and you’re not in any condition to ride.”

I held a swallow of wine in my mouth until my teeth burned. Didn’t help. I swallowed.

“What happened in Cyprus?” I heard the rustle of my wife’s skirts as she came closer. “You were gone more than a month; I thought it was only going to be—”

“Takes time, digging graves.”

Little Dinah peeked out from behind Mirah’s skirts, staring at me through a fringe of dark hair that had escaped its ribbon. I’d buried a little girl just her age. Her hair had been stiff with dried blood. No need for a ribbon.

Mirah looked at me another long moment, then took Dinah by the hand and disappeared into the bedroom, Antinous trotting behind like a young deer. I looked around our lodgings: the usual scrubbed and cheerful domesticity that Mirah managed to impart to all our varied homes. A little frieze of leaves and vines about the door; a pot in the courtyard just outside the door where she grew a few herbs to flavor the soup; a clutter of the children’s toys on the floor. So ordinary. So wholesome. The whole scene was blurred from all the wine I’d drunk. Or maybe from tears.