Heart of Teutonburg - 25. Chapter 25

They rode out from camp two mornings after the horse lines, before most of the fires had been stirred back to life, and for the first hour neither of them spoke.

It was not the silence of nothing to say. Marcus had come to know that kind well enough, in Rome, in council rooms, in the careful spaces between people who wanted the conversation over. This was the other kind, the kind that came from having already said the parts that mattered, in low voices, over several nights, in fragments neither of them had ever spoken aloud all at once. Marcus did not let himself dwell on any of it too directly, even now, even alone on an empty road with no one to overhear. Some things held their shape better for not being turned over too often in the light.

The land opened by degrees as the morning wore on, forest giving way to scattered clearings, clearings to the first low rise of hills Marcus half remembered from the crossing months before, though he could not have said, riding it now, which direction that memory pointed. Ingomar rode a length ahead where the path narrowed, easy in the saddle in the way Marcus had stopped noticing as remarkable and started simply loving, and twice, without turning around, Ingomar reached back to steady a low branch out of Marcus's way before it could catch him.

They said little through the middle of the day. What talk there was stayed small and easy, the horses, the weather holding fair, a hawk that circled once over a field and was gone. Marcus was grateful for it. He did not think he had the strength yet for anything larger, not with the garrison waiting somewhere ahead of them like a fact he had not yet made himself look at directly.

It was well into the afternoon when the trees began to close in around the path in a way Marcus's body recognized before his mind did, the light going green and filtered, the ordinary forest noise falling away into something more contained, more attentive. He knew where they were before Ingomar said anything at all.

"You didn't tell me we'd come this way," Marcus said.

"I didn't decide it until this morning." Ingomar slowed his horse, glancing back, something careful and unguarded both in his face at once. "I thought you might want the choice, rather than have it made for you. If you'd rather ride straight through, we can. It costs us half a day, no more."

Marcus looked past him, at the dark mouth of the path he already knew led toward the grove's heart, and felt something in his chest answer before he'd finished deciding anything with his mind at all.

"I want to stop," he said.

The grove had not changed. Marcus had half expected it to, the way a remembered room always seems smaller or stranger on returning, but the great oak stood exactly as he'd left it, its lightning-scarred bark, its canopy holding the afternoon light in green fragments across the ground below. The quiet met them at the same invisible line it always had, the ordinary noise of the wider forest falling away the moment they passed beneath the first low branches, as though the grove itself had been waiting, patient, for them to come back to it.

"You said it would still be ours," Marcus said, dismounting, "whenever we came back to it."

"I remember saying it." Ingomar's mouth curved, not quite a smile, something gentler and more private than that. "I didn't know, saying it, how soon I'd want it to be true again."

They saw to the horses first, unhurried, and it was Ingomar who nodded toward the pool once the animals were settled, road dust still on both of them, the day's ride sitting heavy in Marcus's shoulders.

"Wash first," he said. "Whatever else this evening is, let it not start with two days of the road still on us."

The water took Marcus's breath the same way it had the first time, cold enough to startle a laugh out of him even now, even weighted with everything the evening held ahead of it. They washed without hurry, without much speaking, the ordinary business of it, and Marcus felt the road's tightness easing out of him with every small, unremarkable motion, until what was left underneath it was only the two of them and the water and the grove's held quiet wrapped close around both.

He was aware, more than he let himself say, of how differently they moved around each other now than they had the first time in this same pool, no restraint held carefully banked behind Ingomar's eyes this time, no hand rising and stopping short. When Ingomar crossed the last of the distance between them, unhurried, sure, it did not feel like the closing of a gap so much as the simple continuation of something that had already, in every way that mattered, been decided.

They did not linger long in the water once the washing was done.

Before the light went, Ingomar led him by the hand to the Irmin-Beam's roots, where the ground lay thick with fallen acorns, more than either of them could have gathered in an hour of trying.

"A small thing," Ingomar said, crouching, gathering a double handful, "but an honest one." He held them out, and Marcus took half without needing to be told what for. "Not a favor asked. Only thanks given, for what's already been granted us here, twice now."

They set the acorns together at the base of the trunk, a small uneven pile cupped where two thick roots met the earth, and Ingomar spoke something low in his own tongue over them, brief, unhurried, the words meaning nothing to Marcus and everything at once. The canopy stirred once above them, though Marcus felt no wind against his skin, and he did not ask whether Ingomar had noticed it too. Some things, in this place, seemed better left unquestioned.

"For what it's worth to you," Marcus said quietly, once the moment had passed, "for us. Whatever comes."

Ingomar looked at him a long moment, something unguarded and full in his face, and did not answer in words at all.

They built the fire back up as the light failed fully, though neither of them tended it for long once the flames had caught. Marcus sat close against Ingomar's side, watching the fire, and did not try to name the feeling sitting low in his chest, equal parts wanting and grief, the awareness that tomorrow's road led somewhere he could not yet let himself think about clearly. He only knew that here, tonight, inside the one ground in all this country where nothing could follow them in, he did not have to hold any of it at arm's length. He could simply be here, entirely, with the one thing he was certain of in all the uncertainty ahead of him.

He turned, and Ingomar was already watching him, and neither of them reached first so much as they arrived together, the space between them closing the way water closes over a stone dropped into it, natural and complete.

There was nothing held back in it this time, none of the careful restraint of the swim or the fire the night before this one, and Marcus met it with the same wholeness Ingomar offered him, unafraid now of wanting as plainly as he wanted, unafraid of being wanted just as plainly in return. Clothing fell away between them without either of them marking the moment it happened, skin against skin for the first time, warm despite the evening's growing chill, and Marcus gave himself over to it entirely, to Ingomar's hands and mouth and the low, unsteady sound of his own name in Ingomar's voice, to the particular, overwhelming certainty of being known completely and wanted anyway.

Later, in the dark, with the fire burned low and Ingomar's heartbeat steady under his ear, Marcus said the only thing he had words for.

"I just want to be with you."

He felt Ingomar go still, briefly, the way a held breath goes still, and then felt him settle again, his arms tightening, unhurried and sure.

"There is no part of my life I would keep, if keeping it meant losing you," Ingomar said, some while later, quiet, into the dark above Marcus's head, as though the words had needed their own separate courage to arrive.

Neither of them said anything more than that. Neither of them spoke of tomorrow, or of the garrison, or of anything the words might have promised beyond the plain, unadorned truth of themselves. It did not need saying. Marcus understood, lying there with the whole of the man he loved wrapped around him and the grove's old quiet holding them both, that some things were truer for being given rather than spoken, and that this, whatever else the coming days asked of them, was his, entirely and without condition.

He slept better than he had in weeks.

They woke before full light and said little while they broke camp, moving around each other with the easy coordination of two people who had learned each other's rhythms without needing to discuss them. Marcus felt the grove's quiet start to loosen its hold on him the moment they led the horses back toward the path, the world beyond the canopy already beginning to reassert itself, birdsong, wind, the ordinary business of morning.

The road ran alongside the river for a stretch not long after, close enough that Marcus could see the water through gaps in the trees, grey-green and moving fast with the last of the season's rain. Ingomar slowed as they came level with a break in the brush, a narrow trail cutting away from the main road along the river's eastern bank, half overgrown, easy to miss if a man weren't already looking for it.

"That trail runs the river's eastern side most of the way south," Ingomar said, nodding toward it, unhurried, the way a man mentions any ordinary feature of country he knows well. "Rougher going than the road, but shorter, if a man doesn't mind rough going. It comes out eventually near enough to Roman ground to matter, for anyone who ever had reason to use it."

"Good to know," Marcus said, and meant nothing more by it than the words themselves, and they rode on.

The garrison came into view by midafternoon, timber walls pale against the tree line, a Roman standard hanging still in the windless air above the gate. Marcus felt his stomach draw tight at the sight of it, the first plain evidence in weeks that Rome itself still existed as an actual place and not simply an idea he carried inside him.

They stopped a little short of the gate, in the last stand of trees before open ground, and Marcus understood without being told that this was as far as the road would let them go together.

"I don't know what to say to you," Marcus admitted, "that doesn't sound smaller than what I mean."

"Then don't say it smaller. Don't say it at all, if it doesn't fit in words." Ingomar reached out and settled a hand briefly against the side of Marcus's face, unhurried even now, even here, in full sight of whoever might be watching from the walls ahead. "The gods always lead us to our destination. I believe that. I believed it the first time I said it to you, and I believe it more now."

Marcus felt the words settle into him somewhere deeper than comfort usually reached, though he could not, in the moment, have said exactly why.

A small party rode out to meet them before either of them could say anything further, two officers and a handful of men, and Marcus felt Ingomar straighten beside him, some visible shift settling over him, not fear exactly but a readiness, a man preparing to spend something and knowing the price in advance.

"This is Marcus Valerius Pulcher," Ingomar said, in Latin too clean and careful to be anything but deliberate, before either officer could speak first. "I give you my word he comes to you unharmed, and that the terms agreed with your people have been honored fully on ours. I ask the same courtesy of you, in return, for whatever it's worth from a man you have no cause yet to trust."

The senior of the two officers studied him a long moment, taking his measure the way soldiers take the measure of anything they haven't yet decided whether to call a threat, before answering.

"The payment was received and confirmed three days past," he said, plainly, the words carrying no warmth but no doubt either. "Your side has held to its word. So has ours." He glanced once at Marcus, a shorter, more clinical assessment, and seemed satisfied by what he found. "It's worth something, what you've done here today. We'll see that it's remembered."

It was not much, as courtesies went, a few words from a man with no particular reason to offer them. Marcus understood, watching it happen, that the respect itself was still more than Ingomar had any guarantee of receiving, walking a Roman up to armed strangers and asking to be believed on his word alone, and that he had asked for it anyway, plainly, in front of witnesses, because the asking itself was its own kind of payment.

The parting itself was quick, quicker than Marcus had braced himself for, a last look exchanged over the widening space between them as the Roman party closed around him and began to turn back toward the gate. Ingomar did not call out, and did not linger visibly, only sat his horse at the tree line a while longer, watching, until the trees finally took him from sight.

Marcus rode the rest of the way toward the garrison with his throat too tight for speech, the ache of the parting sitting alongside something steadier underneath it, something that had not been there the last time Rome took him away from everything he loved. He did not know yet what the road ahead would ask of him, or how long it would be before he found his way to answering it. He knew only that he had not left the grove the same man who had entered it, and that whatever came next, he no longer intended to face it as though he had no say in the shape of his own life.