The Defiant

  The last thing I saw was Tanis. Her face, moon-pale, eyes wide and dark and blankly terrified. Staring after me as if I’d viciously betrayed her in that moment. Which, I suppose, I had. I told myself I didn’t have a choice. That it couldn’t be helped. That I’d go back for her . . .

  In the last sliver of space between the gate doors, I saw one of Aquila’s men stalk toward her, and Tanis saw him too. The corpse hook fell from her hand and she dropped to her knees in the mud, lifting her hands above her head in surrender.

  Lightning cracked the sky, and the rain began to fall in torrents.

  VIII

  I BURIED MY face in my pony’s mane. Hanging on blindly, I let her run for all she was worth as those of us who’d managed to escape galloped south down the Via Clodia. Lightning lashed the bellies of lowering clouds, and mud splashed up in great thick spatters. We traveled hard and fast in the darkness and the unrelenting rain, pausing only briefly to let the horses catch their wind at the side of the road.

  The farther we got from the ludus, the better I should have felt. But I didn’t. Instead, Tanis’s cries for help rang in my ears. And dread thoughts of Nyx at our heels, or Aquila waiting for us in Rome, wrapped around me in a suffocating embrace. Cai tried to calm me, to make me rest for a moment, but I couldn’t. I needed to keep moving or I would crumple. Fold in on myself and wilt into fevered oblivion. The bandage beneath the tunic covering my wound was damp, sticky, and hot to the touch. Only the darkness and my cloak concealed the fact that blood was running down my flank, collecting in my boot. The breath rasped in my lungs, and my vision blurred and sparkled with flickering red fire at the edges.

  “How many?” I asked Elka during a rest, dizzy and nauseous, unable to make myself do a proper head count. Or maybe it was just that I didn’t want to know who’d been left behind. “How many of us are there?”

  “Twelve,” she answered. “Thirteen if you count that ridiculous kitchen boy. Plus the soldiers, and your gloomy friend from Aquila’s own ludus.”

  “That’s all?”

  She bit her lip. “The others didn’t make it out.”

  “Help me, Fallon!” Tanis’s voice cried out in my head.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and wiped the rain from my face. Then I turned and called for everyone to mount up. Before our escape, Elka had asked me where we were going to go, and I hadn’t been able to give her an answer. Rome was, we decided, out of the question entirely. Pontius Aquila had a home there, the vast, sprawling Domus Corvinus. He had servants. Friends. The Sons of Dis. Eyes and ears everywhere . . . and even in the twisting streets and tangled districts of Rome, there was nowhere any of us could think of to hide. The townhouse where the Ludus Achillea lodged our gladiatrices when in Rome was the first place Aquila would look for us. Caesar’s estate across the river might have been an option if Caesar was there, but of course, Caesar and his Populares were halfway across the wide world fighting wars with the Optimates, wars that had angered his fellow Romans—one of the reasons we were now fugitives. Charon the slave trader, my patron in the arena, had a house in Rome, but I had no idea where or how to find it. Neither did Cai.

  Together, we’d come to the conclusion that our best bet was to try to skirt the eastern edge of the city heading south. If we could just outrun the news of our so-called “gladiatrix rebellion” long enough to make it to Neapolis, or even as far as the province of Sicilia, we might stand a chance. It was decided. But all that changed as we approached the walls of the city.

  The rain had begun to ease and a haze of mist seeped up out of the ground. In the distance, I could just make out the contours of the Seven Hills of Rome, dotted with villas and temples, crisscrossed with roads and meandering open markets and gathering places. A teeming hive of humanity that, the closer we rode, looked like an empty cursed place, the windows shuttered against the hour and the weather and not a soul on the streets.

  Not a soul except for one . . .

  Riding in a chieftain’s war chariot a hundred paces ahead of me.

  A voice called to me on the wind with the sound of a whetstone on rust.

  “Fallon . . .”

  I lifted a shaking hand to wipe the rainwater from my eyes.

  It was him. Arviragus.

  I peered into the fading darkness and could only just make out his forest-green cloak and auburn hair, spread wide on a ghostly wind generated by the passage of his ghostly chariot. He didn’t so much as glance over his shoulder at me, but I knew why he was there.

  To lead us to a safe haven . . .

  The Morrigan had sent his shade back from the Lands of the Blessed Dead to lead me and my friends. And I would follow. Head swimming, vision blurring, I wound my hands tightly in my horse’s mane to keep from falling off, and urged her from a canter to a gallop as the chariot began to pull away just outside the city gates.

  Behind me, I heard Cai frantically shouting my name as my horse broke away from the rest, asking me where in Hades did I think I was going. I started to laugh. Because if that was where Arviragus in his war chariot was about to lead me . . . if Hades was where we were bound . . . then by the gods—his, mine, and Rome’s—I would follow him all the way down.

  • • •

  As it turned out, I didn’t have to go quite that far. I had to follow my ghost king only through the gates of Rome and down a tangle of deserted streets to a narrow twisting lane in a questionable part of town not far from the Circus Maximus. But when I turned the corner, Arviragus had vanished and the street dead-ended in front of a plain stone wall featuring only a single, heavy door set with a small grated window.

  I dismounted—which is to say, fell off my horse—and lurched through the ankle-deep mud toward the door to pound on the oak planks with the butt of my sword. The war chariot was nowhere in sight. But I shouted Arviragus’s name in a voice gone hoarse with fever.

  “Fallon!” Elka shouted, grabbing me by the shoulders and dragging me away from the door. I think she must have been calling me for a long time. “Are you mad, leading us into the city? What are we doing here? Someone’s going to call the watch and have us arrested! You don’t even know who lives there.”

  I turned to her, my mind awash in confusion.

  Live there? No one lived there. Arviragus was dead, and this had been his prison. Now it was nothing but a cold empty—

  “What in the name of Jupiter do you want?” asked a gruff, angry voice.

  From the other side of the door.

  I whirled around—nearly losing my balance and pitching face-first in the mud—to see a pair of narrowed eyes peering out through the grate at us. They widened when their gaze fell upon my face. I tried to say something—anything—but the face disappeared and the grate slid shut with a bang.

  I felt a helpless sob hitching its way up my throat.

  Then I heard the sound of bar-locks sliding and the heavy door opening.

  “Miss Fallon . . . ? Is that you?” A man dressed in a worn cloak over a legion soldier’s gear reached out and grabbed me by the shoulder, pulling me inside with my weary pony in tow.

  Unable to speak coherently, I put a desperate hand against his chest and beckoned behind me. One by one, Elka and the rest of the Achillea fugitives poured into the barren little courtyard, which could barely contain our numbers. Cai was the last one through, and he barked a terse command to Quint to shut the portal door. Horses and bodies milled around with me at the center, dizzy and swaying. The stone walls spun around me as I struggled to keep standing. This was the place where Arviragus had been imprisoned. The place where he’d died.

  The place where he stood framed by the inner door to the prison . . .

  His eyes went wide as his mouth formed the shape of my name.

  After that, nothing. Only blackness and silence.

  • • •

  “Fallon . . .”

  Something smelled
strange. Not unpleasant, just . . . bracing. Pungent. Like juniper boughs fresh-cut and stacked for a bonfire at Samhain.

  That must be it, I thought. Mael is trying to wake me so I can dress for the festival . . . Or, more likely, a round of sparring in the Forgotten Vale before the feast. A fight would be good right now, I thought. There’s something I ought to be fighting. Someone . . .

  “I’ll be there in a moment,” I heard myself murmur. “I just need to find my sword first . . .”

  I could feel my hand opening and closing on the bed beside me, searching for the hilt of a weapon. But what I found instead was another’s hand. Warm and strong and calloused, fingers gently wrapping around mine, keeping me still.

  “It’s all right, Fallon,” that same voice said. Familiar, comforting. “You don’t need a sword. You don’t need to fight right now. You won.”

  I opened my eyes to see Cai gazing down on me, the worried frown that creased his brow smoothing as I blinked up at him. “I did?”

  He nodded. “You did.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “Who was I fighting?”

  “Yourself.”

  I shook my head, fuzzy with confusion, but that just made me dizzy.

  “You’ve been feverish and delirious for two days now,” he explained. “Almost three. But thanks to Neferet and Ajani, your fever has broken.”

  Ah, I thought. That explains the scent.

  Neferet had Heron’s training, and Ajani was skilled at mixing salves and unguents. Together, the two of them must have treated the stab wound Nyx had given me. Now that I was aware of it, I could actually feel a cooling sensation all along my flank, under a linen bandage. And the tightness of stitches. Heron’s medical bag had already been put to use. I was only sorry I was the one who’d necessitated it.

  “They tell me you’re going to be all right,” Cai continued, his expression turning stern. “No thanks to your own damned stubbornness, I should say. You should have told me you were hurt.”

  I struggled to sit up, feeling as if I was waking from a long sleep fraught with strange dreams. My limbs felt soft, but my head was beginning to clear. And I was very thirsty. I grabbed with both hands for the cup of watered wine that Cai lifted from the table beside the cot I lay upon. I gulped at it like it was the finest vintage, not the thin, sour mixture that it was. I finished it and handed the cup back, looking around the dimly lit room.

  “Where am I?” I blurted.

  “You’re a guest in my humble abode,” rumbled a voice from the shadows beyond the foot of the bed.

  My mouth fell open as Arviragus stepped into the circle of lamplight.

  “And believe me when I say that I’m just as surprised as you.”

  No shade, but the man himself. Real as life and just as impossible.

  Not a ghost. Not my imagination. Alive . . .

  I felt the prick of tears as Cai made way for him to sit on the edge of the cot. I hugged Arviragus with all the strength I had—not very much at all—and he wrapped his great long arms around me, smoothing my hair as I wept into his shoulder.

  “I thought you were dead,” I sobbed.

  “I was, dear girl,” he murmured. “I was.”

  I looked up into his face. “What happened?” I asked. “After Caesar’s Triumphs . . . I thought . . .”

  “Yes, well.” He snorted. “It seems the fearsome old general had a change of heart. Couldn’t bear to rid himself of his best enemy after all.”

  “I can hardly believe that of Caesar.”

  “I can.” Arviragus shrugged. “In fact, I think it’s very much in character for him. So long as the world thinks I’m dead, it harms Caesar not at all to let me live and, indeed, assuages that small, deep corner of his soul that rebelled against the massacre of so many of my people. A tyrant has to find ways to live with himself. Leaving me alive was one of Caesar’s, even if that life wasn’t much of a step above death. That is, until you and your gaggle of gladiatrices arrived.”

  I swallowed the tightness in my throat. Arviragus alive was a comfort I hadn’t expected. Not after everything that had happened. “Did Cai tell you of . . . ?”

  “Sorcha?” The sorrow in his gaze was a deep as his compassion. He nodded. “I have made sacrifice to the goddess for her safe journey.”

  He held my hand quietly until the storm of my grief passed over me again and I was able to look him in the eyes once more.

  “What madness led you here, Fallon, of all places?” he asked.

  “You did. You were my madness.”

  I explained how his apparition had goaded me from my cell and, later, led me through the streets of Rome, and Arviragus shook his head in wonderment. “The Morrigan’s will is a very strange thing sometimes,” he said.

  “Strange, perhaps,” Cai said. “But in this case, fortuitous.”

  I looked up at him.

  “I doubt we would have made it past the city at all if we’d kept to our original plan,” he explained. “The vigiles were already looking for us within hours of us coming to this place. They would have most likely caught up to us on the road south to Neapolis if we’d stayed that course.”

  Vigiles, I thought. Rome’s watch guard. “News travels that fast?” I asked.

  He nodded. “We must have missed a saddle or a chariot. Or one of the guards rode bareback to send word. But word has definitely reached the local constabulary. They’re said to be on the lookout for a band of escaped renegade gladiatrices from the Ludus Achillea, led by none other than Caesar’s darling Victrix herself. And as we all know—”

  “The Roman mob has not forgotten Spartacus,” I said with a sigh.

  “You’ve been branded a rebel and the leader of rebels.” Cai shook his head in disgust. “That makes you a political liability for Caesar. It’ll take a while for word to reach him of that, but when it does . . .”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I have a friend, remember? One who is privy to the secrets of the city. And its men of power.” Cai poured another cup of watered wine and handed it to me. “I sent word to Kass about what had happened and asked her if she had any insights into our situation.”

  Kassandra, I remembered. She had been kind to me—rescued me, really—on more than one occasion. A brothel slave, she was also a secret informant for Julius Caesar. A dangerous profession—in both respects—but she somehow managed to navigate that world with grace.

  “What did she have to say?” I asked.

  “She gave me the political lay of the land, and we’re in more trouble than I thought.” Cai sighed bleakly and I waited for him to continue. “There is a deep unrest brewing in the Republic, Fallon. The Optimates—the men Caesar is fighting right now—and the Populares, the ones who support him in this war . . . they are the public face of the conflict. The two major factions in the power struggle that everyone sees and knows. But, according to Kass, it is the Sons of Dis and those like them who are the monstrous visage lurking beneath.”

  “The blade cuts both ways,” Arviragus mused. “The political climate is the very reason why men like Aquila suddenly feel they have the kind of agency to promote things like the Sons of Dis and get away with it. Public perception is everything to the Roman mind.”

  Cai nodded. “And people like you and Sorcha, Fallon—the champions of Caesar, his stars of the arena, and favorites of the plebs—you’re only pawns in a much greater game here. A distraction and a bargaining chip, both.”

  “And in Aquila’s twisted mind, a source of arcane power,” I said, looking down at my arm, where the cuts he’d made were healing, slowly becoming the thin white scars I would carry so long as I lived. “Let’s not forget that.”

  Cai shifted uncomfortably at the thought, but nodded. “Yes,” he said. “In his mind. And the minds of his followers.”

  “And now Sorcha’s dead because of it,
” I said, crushing the renewed swell of agony that saying those words caused me. “Forget Aquila’s sick agenda. Even if he were to vanish from the earth right now—and what a pleasant thought that is—the way things stand, we’re going to have to find a way to clear our names. All of us. Or we’ll all live as fugitives for the remainder of our days. Numbered as they are.”

  “We’ll find a way,” Cai said. “Don’t worry about that now.”

  “Aye. You will.” Arviragus reached out to squeeze my hand, his expression one of commiseration. But I saw in his eyes just how likely he considered that possibility. “In the meantime, you’ll need your strength back. I’ll go scare up a bite for you to eat.” He nodded at Cai and left us alone.

  We sat silently for a while, just sitting and staring at each other, and then Cai reached over, taking my hand in his.

  “You gave me quite a scare, Fallon,” he said.

  “I gave myself one.” I smiled at him wanly. “Several, in fact. I thought I was going to die in that cell.”

  “But instead you found a way out.”

  I shook my head. “No. I didn’t. Aeddan found me and led me out.”

  I could see a wealth of things in Cai’s face that he wanted to ask me about that, but he confined himself to just one question. “Do you trust him?”

  I thought about that for a long moment. Cai knew about Aeddan—and Mael—and he must have been wondering how I could even stand to look at the man who’d murdered my first love.

  “Trust him?” I hesitated, but I already knew the answer. “Yes. I do.”

  Cai waited.

  “But that’s a world away from forgiving him, believe me.” I sighed. “Several worlds.”

  “Good.” He nodded. “Then it should be no problem for us to thank him for the rescue and turn him out into the city to fend for himself.”