I do not remember descending the stairs.
I know I did, because one moment I was gripping the gallery railing with both hands and the next I was in the courtyard with a training sword in my fist — a wooden practice blade I'd seized from the rack by the hall entrance. I don't remember choosing it. I don't remember running. I remember the sound of my own breathing, ragged and animal, and the feeling of cold stone under my bare feet — I'd kicked off my sandals somewhere — and then the first Corvinus soldier was turning toward me and I was swinging.
The training sword caught him across the jaw. Wood on bone. He went down sideways, helm flying free, and I was already moving to the next one, all the sparring drills of my entire life collapsing into a single funnelled purpose. The second man was faster — he got his arm up and the practice sword cracked across his vambrace hard enough to split the wood. I reversed, drove the broken end into his throat below the helm-line, and felt him crumple.
Two down. Forty-eight remaining.
Someone hit me from behind. A gauntleted fist to the back of the skull — white light, the ground rising, the taste of blood. I tried to rise. A boot caught me in the ribs and I heard something crack in my chest and the air went out of me in a rush. Hands seized my arms. I was dragged across the courtyard — across the white stone, across the dark smear of my father's blood — and forced to my knees.
They made me kneel over him.
His eyes were open. They were already changing — that terrible shift from presence to absence that happens faster than you think it will. His mouth was slightly open. One hand was still extended toward where the writ had fallen, fingers curled, as though reaching for something.
The Corvinus captain stood over us both and read the death warrant. I heard the words — treason, conspiracy, sentence of death duly carried out — but they arrived at my ears as sounds without meaning, like hearing a foreign language through water. The captain's voice was businesslike. He was completing a task.
Behind me, in the villa, I heard my mother scream.
I turned — tried to turn — and the soldiers holding my arms wrenched me back. Through the colonnade I could see more Corvinus men inside the house. They were dragging Aelia Drusus from the kitchen passage. She fought them — my small, practical mother, who managed tenant farmers and kitchen accounts, fought two armoured soldiers with her bare hands, kicking and clawing and screaming my name.
"Caelius! Caelius!"
I tried to stand. A sword pommel came down on my shoulder and I heard something else crack and fell forward over my father's body, my face inches from his, my blood mixing with his on the white stone.
They put her in a prison wagon. I heard the iron door clang shut. I heard the bolt slide home. I heard the wheels begin to creak as the wagon moved toward the gate, and I heard her screaming my name until the sound faded into the sound of hooves and the sound of the sea.
Then the burning started.
They were methodical. They went room to room with torches, starting at the rear of the villa and working forward. I watched from where I lay — they had released me, whether from mercy or from the deliberate cruelty of making a boy witness the complete destruction of his life, I have never determined. I watched the fire climb the old timber ceiling of the great hall. I watched the mosaic dolphins disappear under a tide of flame. I watched my mother's rosemary pots crack in the heat and the herbs blacken and curl. I watched my father's study — his books, his letters, his interminable Stoic philosophy — become a column of orange light against the dark sky.
The Corvinus riders mounted and departed. The captain did not look at me. None of them looked at me.
I was alone in the courtyard, on my knees, over my father's body, with the villa burning behind me and the sea dark and uncaring before me, and I screamed.
I screamed until my voice broke. I screamed until there was no sound left, only the shape of screaming — mouth open, chest heaving, tendons standing in my neck. I screamed at the fire and the sea and the sky and the retreating hooves and the dark spreading pool on the white stone.
It was not grief. Not yet. Grief is a thing that arrives later, soft and heavy, and sits on your chest for years. This was something rawer, something older — a sound from the part of the brain that has no language, only rage, only the animal knowledge that something irreplaceable has been destroyed and there is no recourse, no appeal, no reversal.
I was nineteen years old, and I knelt in blood and ash, and I made a sound that I hope to never make again.
The fire burned until there was nothing left to burn.