The Valiant

  I glanced around at the faces of the other girls, pale moons in the darkness, and said, “This is our chance.”

  Not one of them moved. The Varini girl said nothing, but I saw the muscles of her jaw clench. When I locked eyes with her, she gave me a curt nod. So be it. Together we stepped carefully, away from the twisted mess of bars and planks. I hesitated briefly when the dark-haired girl—the one who had shouted for us to stop fighting—put a hand on my arm.

  “This isn’t a chance. This is madness,” she said in a low, frantic voice. “Listen to me—I was born into my lot. I’ve been a slave my whole life, with never the chance to be anything but. And I’ll still gladly take that fate over running wild through this countryside, waiting to be caught and killed by lawless men. Killed if you’re lucky. You heard what Charon said.”

  I looked over her shoulder, out at the deep, dark, utterly still forest.

  “I heard him,” I said. “I don’t believe him. These hills are deserted. There is nothing here but the spirits of the Arverni murdered by Caesar’s legions.” I said it in a voice loud enough to almost make myself believe it. “Stay here if that’s what you want.” I lifted her hand from my shoulder. “But I’ll take my chances with dead men, lawless or not.”

  “Wait.” She bent down and yanked off her worn leather slippers and held them out. When I hesitated, she thrust them at me. “Take them,” she urged, nodding at my own bare feet. “Take the shoes and my prayers to the goddess for you. You’ll need them both.”

  The girl’s gaze was strangely compassionate. She knew just by looking at me that I wasn’t like her. I wasn’t a slave—I never had been. I’d only ever been a princess and a warrior. The irony, I realized, was that she was stronger than me because of it. This was a girl who would choose to stay chained if it meant that her odds of survival were even so much as a hairsbreadth better. And there was strength in that choice—the sheer, bloody-minded will to survive no matter how dreadful the circumstance. Maybe honor wasn’t always something won by a blade, I thought. And maybe it couldn’t be so easily stripped away, even in servitude.

  I ducked my head and snatched the shoes from the girl’s fingers, shame heating my cheeks. “Thank you,” I murmured as I stuffed my feet into them.

  The soles of the leather slippers were almost worn through in places, but they fit snugly. As I straightened up from tying the lacings, my Varini shackle-mate reached down and grasped a fistful of the iron links that tethered us together.

  “If you slow me down,” she growled, “I’ll hack your foot off with a sharp stone.”

  “I won’t slow you down,” I said. “So long as you keep your big, flat feet out of my way.”

  Pale blue eyes blinked at me for a moment. Then the Varini grinned—an expression utterly devoid of mirth—and said, “Run.”

  VII

  IT WAS AWKWARD AT FIRST—the Varini girl’s legs were longer than mine—but once we settled into a rhythm, we made surprisingly good speed through the forest, navigating an increasingly steep incline by moonlight.

  But then my foot hit something hard and angular, and I stumbled and fell forward onto my hands and knees. The tall blonde stumbled to a stop, cursing in her own tongue before spinning on her heel to tower over me, one fist clenched.

  “Clumsy idiot!” she snarled, her voice a raw scrape of sound in the darkness. “I told you if you slowed me down I’d—”

  “Hack my foot off,” I snapped. “I remember.”

  I looked down at the thing that had tripped me and tugged on it. With one good heave, I stood to face the Varini, lifting a short, broad-bladed sword streaked with dirt. I smiled as she froze, staring at the weapon in my hand.

  “Perhaps I should just remove yours instead,” I suggested sweetly, “and save us both the burden of each other’s continued company.”

  In the silver wash of a moonbeam, I could see the dints and burrs of battle damage along the edge of the sword’s blade. Beneath a generous layer of rust, it didn’t even so much as glimmer in the pale light. But it was still a weapon. A useful one.

  One of a pair, it seemed.

  My moment of superiority vanished as the Varini’s eyes suddenly narrowed and she lunged for the pile of leaves at my feet. When she stood, her fist was wrapped around the hilt of her own found weapon—another sword, almost identical to the one I held. We had stumbled upon a weapons cache left over from the great battle of Alesia.

  I knew the stories. I’d heard them told around the fire of my father’s great hall. Four year earlier, word had reached our tribe that, across the sea, the king named Arviragus—the mighty Arverni chieftain, the brave rebel the Romans had come to know by his war title, Vercingetorix—had been defeated by Julius Caesar in his wars against a confederation of Gallic tribes. And not just defeated. Shamed. Shackled and dragged off to Rome in chains like an animal. I shuddered at the thought. I couldn’t imagine a worse fate for such a man.

  Alesia had been the battle that had ended the war. Caesar had surrounded the fortified town with not one but two rings of earthworks and hunkered down for a devastating siege. The defenders had eventually sent their women and children out into the no-man’s-land between the fortifications, hoping that Caesar would allow them to go free. He hadn’t. Instead, he’d let them starve.

  Desperate, the Gauls had eventually been forced out of the town and into pitched battle with the legions, to no avail. And Arviragus had ultimately surrendered—but not before tens of thousands of Gaulish Celts had died. Tens of thousands more had been taken as slaves. And the once-bustling town of Alesia—what remained of it—had been left to rot, surrounded by crumbling fortifications and ditches filled with bones and brackish water. And, it appeared, ancient rusting weapons.

  The Varini girl and I stared at each other for a long, tense moment. Then I let out my breath and lowered my battered blade.

  “Come on,” I said. “I’m in no mood to kill you, and if Charon and his slavers come after us, rusty swords aren’t going to be much help if we’re still tethered together like a pair of oxen.”

  She thought about it for a moment, then shoved her own rusted weapon through the rope belt tied around her waist and gestured me forward. When we finally reached the ruins of the hilltop town, the night’s cloud cover had grown heavier. By the little moonlight that managed to break through, we could barely make out the ragged breaches in the high stone wall. We clambered through one of the gaps, the chain between us hissing over the tumbled stones like a warning whisper.

  Once inside, I could see the peak of a large thatch-roofed building rising up out of the center of the town, higher than all the rest. It reminded me with a sharp pang of homesickness of my father’s great hall, only much larger, and the outline of the roof was irregular, as if half of it had fallen in. Most of the buildings were nothing more than skeletal remains. Here and there, darkened windows set in the shells of mud and wicker walls stared vacantly at us like the eye sockets of empty skulls. In places, torn door curtains and scraps of leather awnings flapped listlessly in the chill breeze.

  The place was utterly deserted.

  “There.” The Varini pointed with her blade. “There’s a well.”

  Dragging the slave chain between us, we stumbled toward the low, round wall that surrounded the well. But as we approached, the small hairs on the back of my neck rose. I saw the remains of a smashed water bucket that lay next to a frayed coil of rope. When we were close enough to peer over the low wall, the Varini girl gasped and covered her mouth.

  The well was filled more than halfway to the top with pale, tangled bones. Skulls and long bones, cages made of ribs, the smaller bones of arms and legs. Bodies once, thrown into the well until they stacked up, one on top of the other, now bleached and arid where they piled higher than the water level. A lingering waft of decay hung in the air over the well.

  That’s your imagination, I chided myself, even as I
felt the bile rising in my throat. Those people have been dead for years.

  “They fouled the well,” the Varini girl said, her voice gone guttural, as if she was also on the verge of retching. “Stuffed it full of corpses to make the water undrinkable.”

  “The Romans must have done it.” I shook my head in disgust, unable to keep my feet from carrying me backward. “After they broke the siege. So the Arverni wouldn’t come back here.”

  “Or the Arverni did it,” my companion said. “So the Romans couldn’t use the town for themselves after they won.”

  “That’s horrible,” I said. “They wouldn’t do that to their own dead. It’s a dishonor.”

  “It’s smart,” she countered. “It’s war. Don’t leave anything behind for your enemy to use. Scorch the earth, kill the cattle, foul the water.”

  I looked at her. “And what do you know of war?”

  She shrugged. “My people have been at war with each other since Askr and Almr first grew out of the ground as trees,” she said, “and the gods uprooted them and made of them the first man and woman. Real war. Not your island cattle raids, but war. The kind of war where you can stand on a hillside and look down on a valley and not see the grass for all the men fighting.”

  I tried to imagine just what that would look like.

  “Then?” the Varini girl continued. “There is no thing called dishonor. No thing called honor. There is only winning. Only losing. And if you lose, you don’t leave a freshly made bed behind for your enemy to sleep in.”

  “Your people sound particularly unforgiving.”

  “Ja. Only we call it practical. Where I come from, when one tribe wants to move—to live somewhere else, somewhere better—they burn their houses before they leave.”

  “What?” I frowned at her. “That’s not practical. It’s ridiculous. Why would they do that?”

  “So they can’t change their minds.” She pointed straight out into the darkness ahead of her with her sword. “There is only forward. Only tomorrow. No yesterday, no going back. And nothing of value is left behind, so nothing is truly lost.”

  I thought about the idea of feeding the past to the flames.

  Wasn’t that what I had done? And had I left anything behind of value?

  Father . . .

  . . . who was willing to give me to a husband I didn’t want and couldn’t love.

  Maelgwyn . . .

  I blinked back the tears that suddenly rimmed my eyes and saw, in my mind, the flames of my own hearth. The fire that I’d fed with my torc and my dagger. I might as well have burned my house down. I’d certainly set fire to my yesterdays. And I’d left, intending never to return.

  “What happens when you come upon another tribe that doesn’t feel like moving on?” I asked.

  She grinned wolfishly. “Then . . . you fight.”

  “Is that what happened to you?”

  “Ja. I was born in a place that should have been called Hel, because that is what it was. The land was harsh, the winds bitter, the herds scarce, and the food scarcer. Why anyone would live there in the first place is, to me, a”—she struggled for the Latin word—“a mystery.” Her expression grew rueful. “Our thane must have grown more brains than his fathers before him, though, because he decided that we would go to other lands. Warmer, more plentiful, but already taken by another tribe. Still, we went. And then, when we got there . . . the Suevi had more swords and better food. So, stronger fighters.”

  “What happened?”

  “The Varini—my people—sold as many of us as they could to the Suevi, so there would be fewer mouths to feed, and then they moved on. To a place where the Suevi weren’t.”

  Something about the way she told the bald truth of her tale made me look at her twice. Her face was impassive, but I thought I saw a shadow flit behind her gaze.

  “Who sold you?” I asked.

  “My mother.”

  “What?”

  “She got a good price,” she said flatly, then turned her head and spat. “May she rot in filth in Hel’s icy wasteland until the end of days.”

  I was staring at her, openmouthed, I knew. And as I stared, I saw her mask slip just enough for me to recognize it. Pain. “I’m sorry.”

  She laughed harshly. “I don’t need pity from the likes of you, little island fox. Pity is for the weak.”

  Silence spun out into the darkness all around us. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t like her. At all. And I suppose I could have felt a kind of grim satisfaction about the hardships this rude, brutish, irritating girl had endured. But I didn’t. I couldn’t imagine how that had felt—to have your own kin treat you like a possession. A cow or a cloak or a sword to be sold or bartered away. But then again, wasn’t that what my own father had been willing to do to me? Give me away like some kind of prize to Aeddan? Maybe the Varini girl and I weren’t all that different.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her finally.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t pity you,” I lied. “But I would like to mourn you if the time comes when I have to kill you. And I can’t do that if I don’t know your name.”

  The blonde girl’s winter-cold eyes narrowed slightly. Then she uttered a sharp laugh and slapped me—hard—on the back. “I am Elka,” she said.

  “That’s it?” I coughed, catching my breath after the blow. “Just Elka?”

  “You don’t like my name?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “No, it’s a good name.” I stood up taller and dipped my head in what I hoped she would interpret as a gesture of respect. “I am Fallon. I mean, I was Fallon ferch Virico, daughter of a king. Before all this. But I guess I’m just Fallon now.”

  Elka considered that for a moment and then nodded. “Ja,” she said. “It’s better that way. We belong to no one, you and me.” She looked down at the chain that stretched between us. “Only to each other, until we can find a hammer or a good heavy axe.”

  The remnants of the town’s shattered edges had begun to smudge and fade with a mist that rose as Elka and I searched from ruined house to ruined house to find some kind of useful implement with which to free ourselves from our shackles. I wondered silently what would happen when we did. Would my reluctant companion leave me to my fate and disappear into the forest as fast as those long legs could take her? Would I do the same to her?

  “Tell me something,” Elka said, poking at a drift of leaves and refuse with her rusted sword. “What did you do to gain his favor? The slave master.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the water.” She tilted her head. “And how you always got porridge in your bowl before any of us. And the way Charon talked to you almost as if you were a person.”

  I straightened up from searching. “I don’t know.”

  “Really.”

  “I don’t!” Although I knew, of course, what she was thinking. “I wouldn’t. All I know is that Charon told his men they weren’t allowed to touch me.”

  Elka raised an eyebrow at me.

  “On the ship, Hafgan—the ugly one with the mismatched eyes,” I muttered, feeling my face grow red, “he . . . he tried to . . .”

  Elka’s expression darkened as she realized what had happened, what I couldn’t put into words. I tried to shake off the surge of revulsion and fear from those moments in the slave ship’s hold. “Nothing came of it,” I said in a rush. “Charon found us and stopped him before he could do much more than tear the hem of my tunic. He told Hafgan in plain terms that he’d cut the hand off the next man who so much as laid a finger on me.”

  Elka’s angry frown turned contemplative. “But he never told you why?”

  I shook my head.

  “Maybe he wanted you for himself.”

  “Pfft.” I rolled my eyes. “That must be why he never laid a finger on me either.”

  “
You’re lucky.”

  “Did they . . .” I didn’t know how to ask the question. Or even if I should.

  “No.” She shook her head. “One of them tried. The brute with the long orange beard. You know the one?”

  I nodded.

  “I bit off half his ear and kicked him in the balls so hard he still limps. You might have noticed.”

  I had noticed, actually. He not only limped, he scowled. A lot.

  Elka grinned fiercely. “If we hadn’t run away, Charon would’ve had to pay that bastard blood money, taken out of whatever price I fetched once we got to Rome,” she said. “But I also heard him say that whoever bought me would wind up paying far more than the price of bruised balls and half an ear. He seemed pretty sure of it, so I guess he decided I was worth keeping alive. Anyway, none of the other slavers felt much like trying their luck after that.”

  We’d both been lucky, it seemed. I whispered a prayer to the Morrigan that our luck would hold just a little longer.

  “Do you think he’ll come after us?” I asked. “Charon?”

  Elka opened her mouth to answer, but suddenly the hairs on the back of my neck rose, and I grabbed her wrist, pulling her down behind rubble that used to be a wall. I hissed at her to be quiet. Shadows at the edge of the weedy town square stirred and grew long, and I feared that my very words had conjured Charon and his men out of the night. Beside me, Elka held her breath.

  But I was wrong. It wasn’t the slavers.

  It was worse.

  VIII

  A PAIR OF MEN stepped out from between two burned-out houses and moved silently through drifts of gathered mist on the worn soles of their leather boots. They were long-haired with thick beards and dirt-smudged tunics. For a brief instant, I thought that they might be ghosts—shades of the Arverni dead—but they stepped into the clearing, and the moonlight didn’t shine through them. And the mist moved where they walked.

  Elka shifted closer to me so that we were crouching shoulder to shoulder.