Three days.
I lived for three days in the ruins of Villa Drusus like an animal in a cave. The stone walls still stood — limestone does not burn — but everything within them was gone. The roof had collapsed in sections, leaving jagged frames of charred timber against the sky. The great hall was a bowl of ash. My father's study was a black cavity. The kitchen, where my mother had been singing, was rubble.
I found water. The old well in the rear courtyard was stone-lined and deep, and the fire had not reached it. I hauled up buckets of cold, sweet water and drank and washed the blood from my face and hands and then sat staring at my reflection in the bucket — a hollow-eyed stranger with a bruise spanning one side of his face and a crusty gash along his scalp from the pommel strike.
I caught fish. The villa's private beach was a small crescent of sand below the cliffs, accessible by a cut-stone stairway that the fire had not touched. I found a hand-line in the boathouse — the boathouse itself had survived, being stone and below the cliff-line — and caught two small bream on the first morning. I ate them raw because I could not bring myself to make a fire. The irony of this was not lost on me even then.
On the second day, I buried my father.
His body lay where it had fallen, on the white stone of the courtyard. Three days in the coastal heat had done what three days do. I will not describe it. I wrapped him in a sailcloth from the boathouse and carried him to the cliff-top garden where my mother had grown her herbs — where, on summer evenings, my parents had sat together watching the sun go down over the Mare Internum. I dug with a spade from the garden shed. The soil was thin and rocky and full of rosemary roots, and it took me most of the day.
I did not speak words over the grave. There are formal rites for the burial of a knight — prayers to the Sacerdotium's divine hierarchy, hymns of passage, the breaking of the sword — but I could not bring myself to invoke the names of gods who had watched a good man murdered on his own doorstep and done nothing. I stood over the mound of rocky earth and said only: "I'm sorry, Father." And then, after a while: "I'll find them."
I meant House Corvinus. I meant Domitian Corvinus specifically, the crown prince whose seal had been on the writ. I meant every soldier who had ridden through our gate, every senator who had signed the false charges, every hand in the chain of conspiracy that had reached down from the golden towers of Aurum Caput to our small, quiet villa and crushed it.
I would find them. I would kill them. I would burn their houses the way they had burned mine.
It was a simple vow, and I believed it completely, and in believing it I made myself into something my father would not have recognized.
On the third day I searched the ruins.
The great hall was treacherous — fallen timbers and hot stone, pockets of ember still glowing beneath the ash. I moved carefully, turning debris with the spade, looking for anything that had survived. Most had not. My mother's clay pots were shards. The mosaic floor was cracked from the heat into a web of blackened lines. My practice swords, the weapon rack, my squire's armour — all melted or warped beyond recognition.
But beneath the collapsed hearth, where the floor was thickest and the stone had held, I found the iron chest.
It was large — perhaps two feet on a side, heavy as a filled water barrel — and locked with a mechanism I did not recognize. The iron was warm but unbreached. The fire had not penetrated it. I tried to shift it and could not; it was too heavy to move alone, wedged in the rubble of the collapsed chimney.
I noted its location. I would return for it.
And in the rubble of the armoury, half-buried under a fallen beam, I found my father's sword.
Gladius Paternum — that is what I call it now, the Father's Blade, though it had no formal name. It was a plain weapon: single-edged, thirty inches of good imperial steel, a leather-wrapped grip worn to the shape of my father's hand. The scabbard was charred but the blade was intact, the edge still keen. It was not a beautiful sword. It was not a legendary weapon. It was a working blade, meant for use, and it had been used well for thirty years.
I drew it and held it in the morning light. The weight was familiar — I had trained with this sword a hundred times, when my father handed it to me in the practice yard and said "again" and "again" and "watch the left guard, boy."
I strapped it on.
Then I turned my back on the ruins of Villa Drusus and began walking south, toward the city of Aurum Caput, toward the golden towers where the people who had destroyed my life made their homes.
I did not look back. I think if I had, I might not have been able to leave.