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‘The House of Mars is burning,’ she said.
At this, Mercury finally turned to face her, his face seizing with horror. She gazed deep into his soulful, dark eyes, like two portals to the underworld.
‘The war of the gods has already begun.’
21. RETURN OF THE EMPEROR
Claudia returned to the world in stages.
Her hearing came first, as muted voices bled through the infinite dark. She heard her name, faded and faraway, but she couldn’t talk back. She could hear someone crying – a raw, ragged sobbing. She tried to move her mouth, her tongue, to cry out for help, but her body and her mind were not fully connected yet.
She felt warm hands on her cold skin as someone picked her up and carried her. She was placed on a cold, flat, stony surface. Cold water splashed her face, followed by the warm comfort of some kind of blanket or shroud wrapped around her.
Someone was rubbing her arms, trying to wake her up. She wanted to wake most desperately but she was heavy and sluggish, making slurring noises as she continued in her quest to say something, anything.
‘She’s coming round,’ came an unknown voice.
‘Claudia?’ came a known one. ‘Claudia? Can you hear me?’
She could smell some kind of rousing, spicy incense now, mixing with blood and dirt and sweat – all the carnal smells of people in a state of panic.
She could taste the bitter tang of the substance that was forced down her throat, causing her to cough, splutter and choke, vomiting down herself and staining her clothes.
That was the first thing she saw when her vision returned: a splatter of puke on robes.
Claudia looked up, blinking as her eyes cleared.
‘She’s awake.’
‘Thank the goddesses.’
‘The empress lives!’
Her vision was last to return, breaking through in spots of colour that grew outwards, connecting like puddles until she could see her room in the palace, and a crowd of blurry bodies huddled around her.
‘She’s regaining consciousness,’ someone said.
Claudia looked out at a group of soldiers in armour. Thinking them Aquinas’s men, she writhed in panic, trying to get away.
‘It’s us, it’s us. Don’t be scared.’
One of them pulled off their helmet, as the others copied.
It was Dom. One of the soldiers was Dominic.
She didn’t recognize the other soldiers right away, but then she looked to her left and saw Cassius, and, next to him, Celadus the Handsome. She looked to her right and saw…
‘Gia?’ she said.
Claudia blinked again, doing a second-take, because Gia’s hair was almost as short as her brother’s now.
The other ‘soldiers’ were Dido and Livia, who had also cut her long dark hair short. Claudia couldn’t understand why. Everything was so strange and slow and foggy.
Panicked, confused, she struggled to get up.
‘I was poisoned… by Aquinas,’ she recalled.
‘Henbane, in the wine you drank,’ said the physician.
