The Defiant

  Eventually, though, the unease gave way to mere queasy boredom.

  “What’s the matter with them?” Cai asked me once we’d finished breakfast and the sun had climbed high into the sky. He too had sensed the growing restlessness among my fellow gladiatrices.

  “I think they need something to keep them occupied,” I said.

  Cai pondered that for a moment, then said, “I have an idea.”

  He gestured me over to the side of the ship and reached over the rail to hoist up two of the round shields that decorated the sides. I laughed and shook my head. “Do you remember what happened the last time you and I fought and there was a shield involved?” I asked.

  “You cracked my rib.” He grinned back at me. “How could I possibly forget?”

  “And you want to risk that again?”

  “I do not.” He shot me a look from under a raised eyebrow. “Between you and that bear, I’ve recently found myself inclined to watch others hurt themselves instead.”

  “Oh, I like the sound of this,” Quintus said, wandering up.

  I’d noticed Quint had no trouble with his sea legs. Likely the result of having come from a Corsican fishing village, where he’d probably learned to ride the bobbing waves astride a skiff before he could walk on land.

  “You like the sound of what?” Elka asked, pushing herself up from where she’d been dozing fitfully on a deck bench.

  “Fighting,” Cai said. “Us against you. Well, Quint against you.”

  Elka snorted and knotted her arms across her chest, eyeing Quint up and down. “Your kind doesn’t fight, soldier boy,” she said. “You just hide behind your shields and wait until the real warriors tire themselves out.”

  “That’s not true!” Quint protested. “Also? It’s called strategy. And it’s not as easy as you’d think.”

  One by one, the other girls wandered up to join us, drawn by battle talk.

  “You fight like insects,” Vorya sneered. “It’s mindless. Boring.”

  “I didn’t know war was supposed to be entertaining,” Quint countered.

  “Then you’ve never seen us fight,” Kore said, and earned a shoulder punch from Thalassa. “Or you wouldn’t say such a thing. We’d get your blood pumping, that’s for sure!”

  Elka and I exchanged a glance, and I hid a grin behind my hand. The two of us had been fighting as gladiatrices for less than the span of a full year, but the younger girls on that boat were a whole new generation of firebrands, eager to prove themselves out on the sand. Nephele was nodding in vigorous agreement, and I was pretty certain she’d taken her oath only two months back. She hadn’t even seen real exhibition combat yet.

  In the face of Quint’s argument, that didn’t seem to matter. And he remained undaunted in his debate. “That’s the thing, though,” he said, responding to Kore’s assertion. “Isn’t it?”

  “What thing?” Devana asked.

  “His pumping thing?” Anat said with a feigned innocence that turned Quint scarlet with blushing. “What about it?”

  “The thing I’m talking about, you ridiculous creatures, is discipline. Teamwork. It’s all very well and good to get out there and face off in single combat. But what if you’ve got a whole army coming at you?”

  Devana shrugged. “You fight? Same as one-on-one.”

  “But it’s not!” Quint said, gesturing triumphantly, as if she’d just clearly and succinctly made his point for him. The girls just looked at each other, shrugging, and Quint huffed a sigh and tried again. “Look,” he said. “You’ve got attackers coming at you from all sides. There’re arrows and slingshot raining down from above. Men behind you, men in front of you, men to the right, to the left; if you fall, your own army’ll walk right over you. So you’d better not fall.”

  “Sounds horrid,” Hestia said. “Dishonorable.”

  “How does anyone survive?” Devana asked.

  Quint hefted the shield. “Defense.”

  “I prefer offense,” Gratia said, holding out her arm and curling her fingers into a fist with a loud succession of knuckle pops.

  “Then I’ll see you again on the banks of the River Styx,” Quint said, and swept the shield suddenly to the side, knocking Gratia’s fist away as if it were a bothersome horsefly. “But you’ll get there a long while before me. Because I’ll be going home and straight to the taverna for a cool jug of wine after a successful campaign. And another. And another. And you’ll all be bleached bones in a meadow.”

  The girls shifted uncomfortably, and Quint relented.

  “You think it’s mindless, I know,” he said, with a sigh. “A soulless way to fight. It’s not. It’s training. Just like you train. Right, decurion?”

  “My second would not lie to you ladies,” Cai said, gesturing magnanimously. “And he has trained some of the finest soldiers that were under my command. Why not give him a chance?”

  There were glances back and forth, shoulder shrugs, and then Ajani stood and said, “Well, I’ve got nothing better to do until my feet hit dry land . . .”

  “Good!” Quint slapped his palms together. “Everyone, fetch a shield.”

  The girls moved to the ship side rails, where the sea salt–weathered round shields hung from hooks in all their faded glory. I hefted one along with all the others, wincing a bit at the heavy awkwardness of the thing.

  It didn’t go unnoticed. Neferet was on me like a mother duck on a wayward hatchling. “Not you, Fallon,” she said. “You’ll pull your stitches out, and I refuse to put them back in.”

  “Come on,” Cai said, grabbing my hand and leading me off to the side. “We can sit and watch the battle from afar, like the great generals do.”

  Reluctantly, I went with him, placated somewhat by the arm he snaked around my waist as we sat side by side. I’d forgotten how good it felt to just lean into him sometimes, and I relaxed for the first time since I’d woken up that morning.

  Over on the opposite guardrail, I saw Aeddan and Arviragus settle themselves, cross-armed, to watch the exercise. I wondered what Arviragus must be thinking, observing as a group of young warriors trained in the techniques that had decimated his tribe. I wasn’t sure about it myself. But the Cantii had never lost in the way the Arverni had. Not many tribes had, really.

  Quint challenged the girls not to fight but rather to defend. His aim was to see if we could work as a unit the way the legion did, responding to commands as a single entity. And he was right in what he’d said. Legion shield work wasn’t anywhere near as easy as it looked. He started off instructing his gaggle of gladiatrices in the formation of the testudo—the essential legion “tortoise” defense—where soldiers in the front line of a fighting unit held their shields out as a solid defensive wall, while those in the ranks behind held theirs overhead, forming a defensive shell. The round shields offered less coverage than a heavy rectangular legionnaire scutum would have, but the lighter weight was to the girls’ advantage. Still, they had to learn to move as one, like dancers in a chorus, as Quint would blow a series of notes on a whistle he carried to indicate the formation changes.

  “See?” Cai said, as he pointed out the finer points of the defensive maneuver with his sword. “The footwork is key, just like in a duel—Elka! Right foot!—otherwise you get all tangled up. Good, Hestia! Neatly done . . .”

  “Vorya was right—they do look like an insect!” I marveled. “Like one of those segmented things with all the legs.”

  “Exactly.” Cai grinned at me. “And you know how hard those things are to squash!”

  I did. We’d been plagued with them for the better part of a hot month at the ludus, and whacking them repeatedly with a sandal did almost nothing to deter the little monsters. I could see how it would be much the same with the testudo formation, properly executed. I watched Quint running up and down the line of shields, probing for weakness, slamming them intermittently
with the flat of his blade to indicate gaps that needed closing. It was a fascinating lesson in legion discipline, and I felt like I did when I was a girl, watching Sorcha learn some new technique that was exciting and mysterious to me—until I discovered the tricks behind it.

  “That’s it,” I muttered when Quint called a brief break.

  I jumped to my feet and took up a spare shield, no longer able to sit idle when there was a new way of fighting to be learned. Just like when I was a girl, I needed to know the tricks. Neferet looked about to squawk at me again, but I stopped her.

  “If I can’t fight here,” I said, “I’m not going to be able to fight when we find Sorcha and Thalestris, now, am I?” I shrugged the shield straps up my arm and joined the line. “Better to know that sooner than later.”

  She couldn’t really argue with my reasoning and contented herself with the sort of annoyed, professional grumbling that she must have picked up from her time spent with Heron. I grinned, ignoring her, and tested my strength, turning my concentration toward Quint’s instruction. As both a Cantii warrior and an Achillea gladiatrix, the legion way of fighting felt—at the beginning—utterly foreign.

  Not just to me, but to all of us.

  It took some getting used to. To put it mildly.

  For the first hour of Quint’s drills, we fell all over ourselves, bashing each other with the shields and, as Cai had predicted, tripping over each others’ feet. There was a lot of swearing—and a lot of laughing—and then, gradually, we started to move from testudo to hollow square to staggered formation and back again with a degree of precision. By the time we finished the drills, all of us were sore and sweating and congratulating each other on our newfound defensive prowess.

  Cai dubbed us “Legio Achillea,” and Quint stood in our midst with his hands on his hips, looking extravagantly pleased with himself—especially when Elka affectionately punched his shoulder as she went past on her way to stow her shield.

  The distraction had transformed the mood of the ship. Most of us seemed to have even forgotten we were sailing out on the open sea without a stitch of land in sight. It felt more like we were gliding along on a pleasure barge crossing a placid lake. The lightness hadn’t touched all corners of the ship, though. Arviragus had disappeared belowdecks—to nurse his seasickness with a draught, Leander said, but I suspected it had been a bit too painful a reminder of his own defeat by those same maneuvers. Aeddan brooded silently from his perch in the stern of the boat, watching everything through his hawk eyes and scowling. And as the girls dispersed, I glanced over my shoulder to see Charon standing in the bow, arms crossed over his chest and a faraway, pensive look shadowing his handsome face.

  I gave Cai’s arm a squeeze and crossed the deck to talk to the slave master.

  Charon nodded at me in greeting, his dark eyes never leaving the horizon in front of us. I leaned on my elbows beside him and gazed in that direction. At first, I thought it was my imagination, but as I looked, I saw a thin, dark smudge in the farthest distance that began, ever so slightly, to thicken as we sailed toward it.

  “You’re thinking about what we might find when we reach the end of this journey,” I said quietly. “Aren’t you?”

  “Aren’t you?” he countered.

  “You mean, am I wondering whether we’ll find my sister alive or dead?” I looked at him sideways and lifted a shoulder. “I am. Then again, I’ve spent most of my life thinking Sorcha was dead.”

  Charon nodded, staring out over the water. “The thought of having only just found her to lose her again must be unbearable,” he murmured.

  I suspected he was speaking more of himself than of me. I turned back to gaze at the growing shape on the horizon. “I do not think the Morrigan would be so cruel,” I said.

  “Your fearsome war goddess.” He regarded me from under an arched brow. “She who—as I’ve been led to understand—bathes in the blood of her enemies and feasts on their eyes after the battle’s done? She would not be so cruel?”

  I smiled at him. “She led me to Sorcha once; she’ll do so again.”

  “And what if we, weak unworthy humans that we are, are too late when we do finally find her?” he asked.

  “We won’t be,” I said, feeling the smile fade from my lips. “But even if we’re too late for rescue, we’ll still be right on time for revenge.”

  XI

  THE SEA RUSHED to meet the rugged contours of the wild Corsican coast as if it had been too long away from the kiss of land. To the north and west of us, the water was the color of the blue-green faience collars Cleopatra wore around her neck, the waves sparkling and laced with delicate nets of pearly foam. Schools of silver fish darted and danced in the shadows cast by the galley prow as we sailed in the lee of majestic cliffs. In the far distance, I could just make out the profile of another island—Sardinia, I’d been told it was called—that lay to the south of us.

  We sailed between the two islands, following the Corsican shoreline, and eventually rounded a towering promontory that raced away to the east, swooping low to become a gleaming beach circling a deep, sheltered bay surrounded by forest-cloaked hills rising back toward craggy mountains.

  Cai looked at Quintus. “Is this the place?”

  Quint nodded. He looked over his shoulder at where Charon stood up on the captain’s deck and pointed to a spot on the shore. The slave master gave the order, and the sailors steered the ship in that direction.

  “Do you think they’ll have sentries posted?” Elka asked Quint.

  He shook his head. “No. No one comes here.”

  “Because of the Amazons?”

  “Their reputation has been enough to guard this place and keep it safe since before I was born,” he said. “There are those who say it is a cursed place.”

  I saw Charon wince and glance over his shoulder at the ship’s captain, who’d been listening to the conversation. Charon took Quint by the shoulder and turned him away from the man. “I’d counsel you against using that kind of language around the crew, friend. Sailors are a superstitious lot.”

  Charon had already told us that his men would not go ashore with us when we dropped anchor. They were slavers and sailors, not fighters, and no amount of money—even if I’d had any to speak of—would convince them otherwise. But I worried in that moment that they would leave us to our business once we were gone and sail back to the mainland without us. I said as much to Charon.

  He shook his head. “I’ll stay behind. You’ll have a ship standing by to return to, Princess,” he said. “I promise.”

  “And I’ll stay behind to make sure he keeps that promise,” said Aeddan, joining the conversation.

  Charon cocked his head and regarded Aeddan. “You don’t trust me?”

  “You’re a career thief.” Aeddan shrugged. “A scoundrel. The leader of career thieves and scoundrels. I trust you as much as I would any in your trade.”

  I groaned inwardly, but Charon just smiled. He turned to me. “And you, Fallon, do you trust me? Him?”

  “I trust that you’ll be here when I get back,” I said. “Whether Aeddan is or not, well . . . surprise me.”

  “I’ll happily take wagers on whether we come back to find him floating faceup or facedown,” Elka said dryly.

  Aeddan turned a flat stare on her—which she returned in kind—but that was the extent of his response, for which I was thankful. I’d resigned myself to the fact that he seemed determined to make himself “useful” on our quest and there was nothing that would dissuade him, short of one of us throwing him overboard. Maybe Elka had the right idea with her suggested wager. My dream of Aeddan’s duplicity, of him trying to convince Cai to lie . . . to make me leave . . . swam up from the depths of my mind, writhing like a sea serpent, and made me wonder, again, just exactly what Aeddan’s motives were. And whether or not I really could trust him.

  Or Cai . . .

&n
bsp; No. Aeddan was the only one I questioned. Even as I owed him my escape from Tartarus. I bit my tongue, frowning, and went to check my gear.

  At Quint’s direction, Charon’s men anchored the galley in a northern curve of the bay and launched the ship’s single skiff over the side to ferry me and Cai and the others to shore. The little craft could only hold two at a time plus a rower, so it would take a while, and I was a seething ball of impatience. So much so, in fact, that my nerves must have frayed to the breaking point without my really realizing it. Because it was only moments after the skiff turned around and headed back out to where the ship was anchored, leaving me and Cai alone, when I turned to him.

  “I . . .” My mind told me to stop. To let it go.

  “Fallon?” he said. “What is it?”

  “Did you . . . speak to Aeddan last night? On the ship while everyone else was asleep?”

  I half expected him to laugh or deny it. Why would he speak to Aeddan? But he did neither, and the memory of the conversation clouded his clear hazel gaze. I closed my eyes as I felt my heart sink. It hadn’t been a dream. Not at least that part of it. And now there were only two possibilities. Two answers to fill in the terrible, silent space of Cai’s answer.

  “It’s not what you think,” he said.

  I shook my head and turned away.

  “Fallon—”

  “No.” I spun back around, anger burning in my cheeks. “Cai. I heard.”

  “You heard what?”

  “I heard what you said—or what you didn’t say!”

  He gaped at me in confusion. “What—”

  “You hesitated. When Aeddan told you to lie to me—to tell me that you didn’t love me—so that I’d leave. You didn’t tell him no.”

  “That hesitation you heard,” Cai said sharply, “was me trying to figure out how best to explain the kind of girl you are to your tribesman without punching him in the face first. Fallon . . . if all you heard was that hesitation, then you didn’t hear the most important part.”