Byzantium's Crown by Susan Shwartz Page A

to life. Now his task was simple: heal and wait. Marric took comfort from his remembered vision of the pair. They had all but told him he had something worth waiting for.
    Carefully Marric settled back on his belly. If Taran had defended this shed, he was safe enough. A druid's prophecy had brought him here. Magic had kept him alive and consoled him. It was not the druid's fault—or Nico's, or Stephana's—that he himself was not fit to be trusted with it. Marric sighed and rested his cheek on his arm where blue marks still showed where he had bitten his own flesh to keep from crying.
    Whatever salves Taran and Stephana had used on his lacerated back seemed to work. He hurt, but was no longer devoured by agony.
    Had they fed the Gepid to the crocodiles, after all? Marric wondered, and shuddered. And Sutekh himself: had Strymon punished him, or would the overseer still swagger about brandishing that whip of his? There would come a day of reckoning, Marric promised himself that.
    The warped door creaked open as a boy edged in with a tray. Nicephorus followed. Before kneeling beside Marric, he closed his eyes, gestured at something, and muttered. Closing the wards?
    "How does my back look?" Marric asked.
    "Like raw meat, if you must know. But it will heal cleanly. Stephana says you are to eat all of this. No, don't move!" The boy brought the tray nearer, and Nicephorus raised Marric's head.
     
    All that day Marric drifted in and out of sleep. Around dusk the door opened, startling him. A flash of white skirt told him that his new visitor was Stephana. Marric smiled up at her.
    "Mor? Wake and drink."
    Though he was still half-asleep, he drank. When he had finished, she washed his face. Her touch was cool and deft. The broth had smelled better than it had tasted, but he had forced himself to drink all of it, lest Stephana call him a coward for refusing the food that would help him heal.
    Now she opened the phials she had brought. The clean fragrances of nard and valerian filled the room. "I must work these into your back," she warned him. "You know you must not struggle, or the wounds will reopen."
    Marric braced himself. As she anointed his back, Stephana talked to distract him.
    "Nicephorus has been busy today," she said. "This morning he took your story to Lady Heptephras. While she was still weeping, he asked if I might tend you." Stephana laughed, telling him that she would have nursed him in any case. "The Gepid has been sold. Strymon was all for selling Sutekh too, but . . . then he considered how efficient he is. It is a shame." Her voice quavered for so brief an instant that Marric thought he had imagined it. "When you recover, you will not return to that barracks. You are to work inside—light work until your strength fully returns. Perhaps, as a door guard—"
    Marric chuckled. So he was to be promoted, was he? Stephana hushed him with a touch, then continued. "Mor, you must avoid Sutekh. As long as you stay within the house, he cannot harm you. But if you go outside . . . "
    Marric yawned. I wish that Sutekh were crocodiles' meat, he thought contentedly, and slept.
     
    As Marric's fever abated and his strength returned, he began to wonder when his inexorable nurses would ever let him stand and move around. They were being overly indulgent. If this were Cherson's frontier, he would have had to fight in this condition. His allies the Kutrigur Huns rode with worse wounds and counted them of little importance.
    Marric lay listening to the shaduf laboring to pump water into the fields from the canals. This year the floods had come late and not risen as they should have.
    Running feet approached. The door slammed open. Marric leapt into a defensive crouch, the blanket that was his only covering falling down along his hips. The gouges on his back and sides ached, but no trickle of warm blood told him that the scabs had broken open.
    Stephana stood with her back to the door. She was breathing hard, and her face was