Read Persona Non Grata for Free Online Page A

Surely he could not have misread it? Tilla’s views were of no help since Tilla could barely read her own name. But Valens had interpreted it as ‘come home’ too. “It was in your writing.”
    Lucius shook his head. “The only things I’ve written to you about lately are Cass’s brother being drowned, and Marcia’s wretched dowry.”
    “That’s not the letter I got.”
    “No, you’d probably already left by the time it arrived. Are you sure this ‘come home’ was addressed to you?”
    “Of course I am! And it looked exactly like your writing. You don’t think I’d travel a thousand miles on crutches because of a letter to somebody else, do you?”
    “I suppose not.” The tone was reluctant rather than conciliatory.
    Ruso sat on the trunk, propped his stick against the wall, and scowled as it slid sideways out of reach and clattered onto the floor. “This is ridiculous.”
    “Did you bring this letter with you?”
“I burned it. So if you didn’t send it, who did?”
“I’ve no idea. I wish they hadn’t.”
Ruso shrugged. “Well, I’m here now.”
    “Yes.” Lucius cleared his throat. “I suppose we’ll have to make the best of it. You’re looking well, anyway. How was Britannia?”
    “Messy. Is it true someone’s trying to bankrupt us?”
    Lucius leaned back in their father’s chair and folded his arms. “If I were to say no,” he said, “and ask you to go straight back to Deva for the good of the family, would you do it?”
    “I can’t,” Ruso pointed out. “I had to wangle months of leave to get here.”
    “So you can’t go back to the Legion.” Lucius managed to look even more depressed.
    “Arria says somebody’s applied for a seizure order.”
    Lucius let out a long breath. “There’s a law somewhere,” he said, “that says you can’t take out a seizure order against someone who’s away from home on public ser vice.”
    Ruso began to grasp the nature of the problem. “Does that apply to an ordinary man in the army?”
    “The last thing I would have done, brother, was to ask you to come home.”
“So it’s true then? We have a legal problem?”
“We do now,” said Lucius.

9
    F INALLY, TILLA WAS alone with her headache. The Medicus’s nephews and nieces had been rounded up by their mother. The older girls had grown bored with her and gone about their own business, and the cook, eager to get this stranger out of his kitchen, had handed her a cup of water and suggested that she go and sit in the garden.
    She glanced both ways down the long stone porch that shaded the front of the house. There was no sign of the man whom she called the Medicus, everyone else called Ruso, and now his family— confusingly— seemed to know as Gaius. She supposed he was somewhere talking to the brother, finding out at last why they were here.
    She crossed the porch and went down the steps into a garden where roses and lavender grew in beds corralled by little clipped hedges, as if they might otherwise make a dash for freedom.
    The path led under the dappled shade of a long wooden frame that she thought might be called a pergola. The word was one of the many new things she would have to learn here. She already had the word for the insects hiding up among the leaves. Cicadas. The Medicus had promised her she would grow to love the song, but so far the terrible grating screech made her feel as though she was having her back teeth sawn off.
    Tilla sank onto a stone bench that looked out over a cracked concrete pond. The water had evaporated long ago, leaving a black flaking coat that might once have been algae. She gazed at a plinth where a rusted bracket reached for a statue that wasn’t there, and tried not to think how far she was from home. Everything was as the Medicus had described it: the sunshine, the olive grove outside the gates, the tall vines, the winery . . . but her mind had taken his words and painted its own pictures. In those pictures nothing was quite as big, or as hot,