“Very good, dear boy.” Gallus hardly looked up from his accounting as Arius came back to the barracks doctor for his usual examination. “Go get drunk if you like. Try to be back before dawn, will you?”

There was the usual riot of games fans at the tavern, the usual smash of wine jugs and windows. They knew to keep their distance—it was July, the streets boiling under a blazing brass sun, and everyone knew the Barbarian’s temper was black and short in the heat of summer. A girl approached him with a nervous giggle. “I’m Fulvia,” she said breathlessly as he drank straight from an ale cask. “You’re the Barbarian, aren’t you?”

He looked at her. Blue eyes. Fair hair. She’d do.

“I saw you today in the arena. You’re a wonderful fighter—”

Arius jerked a thumb toward the stairs where the innkeeper let him use a room. She giggled and raced for the bed. An undemanding girl. She didn’t mind when he turned his face to the wall afterward and fell silent. None of them did, those dozens of girls who had shared his bed these past years. They seemed disappointed if he talked, as if talking took the mystery away. They wanted the Barbarian brooding and silent and intact.

That was all right with him. He didn’t want to talk to girls anymore. Not ever.

He used to see Thea everywhere. Every dark braid of hair had been hers, every narrow hip balancing a basket. His hopes had leaped and crashed a dozen times a day. Agony, but he missed it. Agony was better than forgetting.

Her face slipped his mind now, the exact arrangement of eyes and nose and mouth escaping him. He sometimes sat with his eyes squeezed shut, trying to remember until his head ached. If he forgot her face, he’d forget everything: the way she’d touched his scars, the way she’d coaxed him to talk, the way she’d convinced him that things like demons and blood and nightmares weren’t real.

She was probably dead by now.

He left the blond girl soon after, padding silently through the stinking back alleys to Mars Street. Gallus’s thugs let him in without a word: the star gladiator had no curfew. Gallus even gave him a small allowance. It had all become very civilized, except for the killing part.

His dog yipped as he came into the room. She lay curled on his pillow, gnawing a hole in a leather gauntlet. “That’s the third set of gauntlets this year,” he growled.

The gray bitch wagged her tail and hopped nimbly down to the end of the bed. She’d lost a leg to that pack of street dogs, but managed quite well on the other three. He lowered himself into bed with a groan, abused bones protesting, and the bitch curled herself neatly behind his knees. “You’ve got a nose for the soft spot, haven’t you? Worthless dog.” He tweaked her silky ear, and her dark gaze reminded him helplessly of Thea.