It’s her!”

“It’s the saint!”

“Bless me, my lady! Bless me!”

“Saint Quitterie, bless my child. Please, bless my child.” A woman thrust her baby toward me. I forced a smile and touched the babe upon its forehead. “Thank you, my lady. Thank you!”

“They will insist on saying it wrong,” Sid complained beside me.

We and the rest of my retinue were walking toward the pier in Tolosa, where several galleys waited to take us back downstream to Burdigala. Sygarius was already installed in one of them. Belowdecks. In chains. It had been two weeks since my confrontation with him.

“It’s ‘Saint Kitharede,’ ” Sid said, “not ‘Saint Quitterie.’ ”

“I will never forgive you for this.”

“Tsch. You should be thanking me for your life.”

I cocked a brow at him.

“Alaric’s priests would have loved to hang you as a witch. But now, as a Christian saint? You are untouchable. For a hundred miles, they’re already spreading my tale of the Christian woman who wouldn’t submit to the evil lusts of the pagan lord. He struck off her head—”

“I’m not Christian. And he did not strike it all the way off.”

“Facts have nothing to do with a good story.”

“Apparently.”

“As I was saying. He struck off her head in his anger, but instead of dying, where her head hit the ground, a spring burst forth. Saint Kitharede picked up her head and, with her wounds doused in the healing waters of God, put it back on her shoulders.”

“You didn’t make up this story to save my life. Did you do it to increase your fame as a poet?”

He smiled beatifically. “No. Although I do not mind the attention.”

“Then why?”

He sighed and tucked my hand into the crook of his arm. “Nimia, you still have much to learn of the affairs of men. Your naïveté charms me, but I fear it will bring you harm unless you shed it.”

“I’m trying.”

He patted my hand. “Forgive me. I forget sometimes how long it took me to shed my own ignorance. I forget, as well, how very young you are. I wrote the poem of Saint Kitharede because I could not have word spreading of a pagan miracle. I am a Christian bishop in a Christian kingdom, my dear. To have such a miracle—witnessed by far too many, who would never keep their mouths shut—happen at a Temple of Mars, would shake the faith of simple minds. I had to shift the story to serve the Church. You can’t hate me for it too much; it got you what you came for: Sygarius in chains. Alaric can hardly claim the ‘evil pagan lord’ who beheaded a saint as an ally.”

“Tell me, Sidonius Apollinaris: how do you explain to your own mind what happened?”

He was quiet for several steps, then shrugged. “I trust that God had his reasons. But it doesn’t matter, what really happened,” he said. “It matters what people believe. And they want to believe in Saint Kitharede. It gives them hope.”

“It’s a lie.”

“Hope is never a lie. It may remain unfulfilled, but the hope itself is pure. Remember that, Nimia. There are times in all of our lives when hope is all that gets us through.”

Alaric was waiting at the end of the pier. A king, waiting on me. But on this day I outranked him: kings came and went, but a saint was forever.

A saint was also no woman meant to be taken as a wife. I had discovered to my great sorrow that there was nothing like sainthood to make a man unwilling to give me the fucking I so dearly desired.

Alaric wouldn’t even let me hold his mentula.

Sainthood could tongue my arse. No one else here was going to.

I stood before Alaric and looked up into his large dark eyes. There was still warmth there for me, but it was restrained. And depressingly tinged with religious awe.

Everything that mattered had been said—or not said, since I had more sense than to explain to him what had really happened at the Temple of Mars, from Sygarius licking my cunny, to my calling forth the spring waters, to a chalice from which I had once drunk blood and, apparently, gained the ability to heal myself of mortal wounds. So this was simply the final farewell of a parting that had happened a fortnight past. I wasn’t as heartbroken as I had thought I would be, which made me feel obscurely guilty.

I put out my hands, and Alaric took them. “My lady,” he said.

“My lord.”

He chuckled, and shook his head. “I don’t know what to say. How does a man bid farewell to the woman he thought to wed, who then brought forth a miracle before his eyes and became a saint?”

“Not officially a saint,” I said. “I think there are people in Rome who must declare it. So for the moment I am still Nimia.”

“We Visigoths do not follow Rome, and we know what you are.”

I suppressed a sigh. “Then since I am a saint, will you swear a promise to me?”

“Anything.”

I pulled one hand free and gestured for him to lean down so I could whisper in his ear. “When you marry again, treat your wife as Eve in the garden, and teach her to love your body as I did. Will you do that?”

He nodded.

I put my hand on the back of his neck. “Now let me kiss you farewell.” I pressed my lips to his and darted my tongue out to paint the seam where his lips joined. I kissed him until he couldn’t help but respond, his mouth opening, his tongue rubbing against mine.

I pulled back. “God thinks lust is beautiful. You can tell your future wife that Saint Quitterie told you so.”

I left him with a hard cock, and myself regretting that I wouldn’t have the chance to enjoy it.

After boarding the galley I made my way to the back, where Terix was sitting under an awning, sheltered from the view of the people on the pier. I plopped down beside him, and after a moment he put his arm around me.

“I’m tired,” I said. “I want to go home.”

“But we’ve been having such a good time.”

I snorted, and then laughed.

“It’s not every day a girl gets her head cut off,” he chided. “You have to take time to savor these special moments.”

“It wasn’t all the way off.”

“Near enough, from what I saw.”

He’d told me afterward that he had come to talk to me in the palace at Aire, and been unable to find me. Sid had gone to talk to Sygarius, and been unable to find him. When it became clear we both were missing, the alarm had been raised. Fenwig had nearly eviscerated the two soldiers who had been watching my door, so furious and frantic was he. Terix had put Bone on my trail, and in short order everyone was hurtling up the hill to the Temple of Mars.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when Sygarius swung that sword and cut you down,” Terix had told me. “No one could believe it. No one wanted to believe it.”

Bone had gotten to Sygarius first, knocking him down. Fenwig and the soldiers followed, securing him. Alaric and Terix went to me, stopping short of my body. “Your throat was gaping open, all the way across,” Terix had told me. “Blood, everywhere. Your eyes seemed to be staring at the frozen nymphs and the sky beyond, but they’d turned strange. I’ve seen them go fiery copper before, but this time your pupils were only tiny dots, and the copper seemed to have bled out into your whites, in streaks.” He’d shuddered at the memory. “Fenwig came and saw you, and almost fainted. I think he took one look at your neck, and saw his own head on Clovis’s pike. He had his sword in his hand, and I think he was considering sticking it in his own chest when there came a dreadful gurgling beneath our feet.”

Then Terix had told me how the gurgling rose up into the fountain, where first a trickle of water dribbled out of one nereid’s mouth—“like a girl who doesn’t want to swallow after she gets her first mouthful of come”—and then out of all the spouts, increasing to a steady stream and then, with no warning, bursting forth in geysers, one of which knocked Terix from his feet.

By the time he could get up, he saw me rolling in the river of water from the fountain’s overflowing basin. And then he saw me lift myself up, sputtering.

He didn’t believe it at first; he thought it was the water moving me, giving the illusion of life. But then I’d spoken, and Alaric had fallen to his knees, and everyone who’d seen me lying with my throat gashed open to my spine had cried out in fear. “There were some soiled breeches at the Temple of Mars,” Terix had said. “None so soiled as Sygarius’s, though.”

During the shock and chaos of those early moments after my resurrection, I had pushed myself to my feet and stumbled toward Sygarius, who was bound and held by soldiers. He had stared at me in blank incomprehension, as if being visited by a revenant in broad daylight.

Which I suppose he was.

I could see as I approached him in my slow, dragging steps that everything he’d ever believed about me was being shattered. His grip on reality itself seemed to be loosening. I must have looked a fright, with my black hair sopping and my gown covered in blood, and the gods only knew what my eyes looked like by then. The closer I came, the more terrified he became, until he was trembling in the grip of the soldiers, who themselves seemed paralyzed with shock.

When I reached Sygarius, I grabbed his chin in my cold, wet hand and forced him to meet my gaze, and said, “I was never yours.”

I think he believed me.

“What do you think Clovis will do with Sygarius?” Terix asked me now.

“Kill him. Unless there’s a use to having him alive.”

“What use could there be?”

I shrugged. “I’m sure Sid could think of several reasons. He told me that Julius Caesar kept the last king of the Celts, Vercingetorix, as a prisoner for five years before parading him through Rome and executing him.”

“Why prolong it like that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”

He hugged me. “Neither do I.”

I wrapped my arms around his waist and turned my face into his chest. “Thank you, Terix,” I whispered.

“For what?”

“For still being here.”

He kissed the top of my head. “I thought I’d lost you—again. You’ve got to stop dying, Nimia. It’s hard on a man.”

“I’ll do my best.” I closed my eyes and clung to him until I felt the galley push off, and we were under way.

Homeward bound, at last.