Look me dead in the eye. I need you to understand something before we keep going.
Look at my hands. See these faded, white scars crisscrossing my wrists and my knuckles? If you ever want to find out what you’re truly made of, wait until the middle of a freezing night, look at the wall of a prison you’ve inhabited for six long years, and just start walking into the dark. No map. No shoes. No weapons. Just a voice in your head screaming that if you stay, you die?
Everyone thinks that the second you step onto a getaway boat, the music swells, the credits roll, and you're magically safe. It’s a beautiful, soft illusion. But let me tell you the absolute truth about the night I finally left Ireland: when the chains drop, you don’t instantly feel free. You just feel completely hollow.
I sat right there on the salted oak planks of that deck, watching the jagged green cliffs of my prison slowly shrink into a blur of gray mist, completely numb. I had run two hundred miles. I had outwitted a pagan captain on the sand. I had won my ticket home. But as the sails groaned above us and the ship crested the deep, unforgiving swells of the open sea, the first mate shattered my peace with a heavy wooden club directly to my shoulder.
"Get your filthy carcass up, shepherd!" he roared, spitting a spray of stale ale into my face. "The cargo is ripping itself to pieces down below. Fix it, or you're going over the side!"
"They're just dogs," I muttered, my voice cracking as I dragged myself up by the rigging, the salt spray stinging the fresh cuts on my hands. "They're terrified of the sea."
"They aren't just dogs, you idiot!" the captain barked, leaning his entire weight over the steering oar as the waves tossed us like a leaf. "Those are forty premium Irish wolfhounds. If they kill each other in the hold, my investors in Rome will have my head on a spike. You said you could handle beasts. Now get down the hatch!"
Below deck, it was a suffocating cavern of absolute terror. The ship plunged down the face of a massive wave, pitching violently, and the darkness echoed with a horrific chorus of snarling, howling, and the frantic scratching of claws against timber. Barrels of salted fish had broken loose, smashing into the wooden crates. The dogs were thrown into a blood-soaked, biting heap in the dark.
A massive, scarred hound lunged from the shadows, its jaws snapping inches from my throat.
"Back!" a sailor screamed from the top of the ladder, poking an iron-tipped pike down into the opening. "Stick 'em! Kill the alpha before they tear us apart!"
"Drop the pike!" I yelled back, my voice echoing off the shaking timber. "You're making them wilder! Get out of the hatch and close the grate!"
"You're dead down there, boy!" he yelled, slamming the heavy wooden grate shut, plunging me into pitch blackness.
Mm, think about that for a second. Locked in the dark, in the belly of a tossing ship, with forty prime killers who want to eat your face. What would you do? Would you scream? Would you pray in fancy Latin?
I didn't do either. I dropped right down into the filthy, cold bilge water, completely ignoring the sharp pain of a tooth scraping across my forearm. I didn't hit them. I didn't threaten them.
Instead, I let out that low, vibrating click with my tongue the deep, resonant hum from the center of my chest that I used to quiet panicked ewes during midnight wolf raids back on Mount Slemish.
“Peace,” I whispered into the dark, using the rolling, musical Gaelic tongue they had heard since birth. “Down. Stand down, brothers.”
I reached out blindly, pressing my bare, calloused palms flat against the ribs of the two largest hounds, breathing with them. I let them smell the mountain on my skin. I let them smell the grease, the mud, and the utter lack of fear in my blood.
Slowly, the frantic scratching stopped. The savage snarling dissolved into low, shuddering whines. The alpha hound the massive beast from the beach pushed his heavy, wet snout directly into the hollow of my neck, his hot breath anchoring the rest of the pack. One by one, forty of the most vicious killers in the ancient world lowered their heads and huddled around my body, forming a living blanket of fur and muscle against the freezing pitch of the storm.
For three days, the storm raged. For three days, I didn't eat, I didn't sleep, and I didn't move. I just sat in the dark, tasting the salt, smelling the animal rot, and listening to the steady, rhythmic heartbeat of the wild against my own chest.
When the hatch cover was finally yanked open, letting the blinding morning sunlight stream into the hold, the captain looked down the ladder and went completely pale. He didn't see a dirty runaway slave anymore. He saw a man who could command the storm.
"We've hit land, Roman," the captain whispered, his voice trembling with a strange new respect. "We're on the coast of Britain. You're home."
I climbed up the ladder and stepped out onto the deck, the bright sun burning my eyes. Ahead of me lay the green, orderly, rolling hills of my homeland. My father's world. Civilization.
But as I stared at the Roman roads in the distance, a cold, terrifying realization settled deep into my gut. I had spent six years dreaming of this exact second. But the soft, spoiled boy who had been stolen from this island was entirely dead. And the man returning... was a complete stranger.
Chapter 5