The Defiant

  “We’re posting a sentry guard for the night,” Cai said, breaking the silence. “Me and Quint.”

  I frowned. “Areto’s shown us hospitality in good faith,” I said. “I don’t want to do anything that might offend her.”

  “It’s not Areto I’m worried about,” Cai said.

  I couldn’t argue that point. Thalestris was out there somewhere. And Areto might trust that her pride or their code or the goddess Cybele herself would keep her from returning that night, but Cai was far too much an officer of the legions to place his trust in that alone. I didn’t blame him.

  “We don’t need to dig a bank and ditch and set a perimeter guard,” he said. “I’ll settle for a single sentry up there.” He pointed to a place where the stone outcropping provided a natural vantage point. “See? Nice and discreet, and no offense offered to our gracious hostess. I’m taking first watch. Quint’ll take second.”

  “I’ll take one,” I offered.

  “You,” Cai said, raising an eyebrow at me, “will take your ease and get a good night’s sleep.”

  “But—”

  He put a finger to my lips. “You deserve it after that masterful bit of oration, Fallon,” he said. “Believe me. Caesar prides himself on his public speaking skills, and even he would have crowned you with laurels for that bit of brilliance . . .”

  He seemed to notice then that he was still touching my lips. His gaze flicked from his finger to my eyes and back, and he ran his tongue over the edge of his teeth. I lifted a hand to his and turned his palm over so that I could rest my cheek against it. Cai made a sound, deep in his chest, and drew me into an embrace.

  “Give yourself permission to rest, for once, Fallon,” he murmured into my hair. “And give others permission to be strong in your stead. I promise, they won’t disappoint you. I won’t.”

  “I know,” I said.

  I leaned against him, for as long as he would let me. Until he pushed me gently to arm’s length and bent his head to kiss me.

  “First watch,” he said. “Remember?”

  I looked up at him, telling myself that he wasn’t taking first watch to avoid finishing our conversation from the beach. “You can always come get me for a turn,” I said. “If you can’t pry Quint away from Elka.”

  I nodded over to where, rather to my surprise, Elka had gone to sit by the little fire Quint had built.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Cai said and, after kissing me one more time, stood and went to take his watch.

  After he’d gone, I turned and saw the young fishergirl Amazon sitting alone, sharpening the blade of a dagger with a stone. She had not gone to join her sisters. I walked over to her and sank down and stretched out my hands toward the warmth of the fire. We sat in silence for a while until she finished sharpening her blade and tucked it back in the sheath at her hip.

  “You fought well today,” I said, nodding at the weapon.

  “Well, maybe.” She lifted a shoulder, staring into the flames. “But on the wrong side.”

  “You didn’t know.”

  “I should have.” She shook her head. “I listened to Thalestris with deaf ears. Followed her with blind eyes.”

  “In many ways, I understand the place where Thalestris is coming from,” I said. “I lived there myself for a long time. I used to think that honor was more important than anything. That righteous vengeance was the only way forward. I was foolish.”

  “But what you said today was wise—and right.” She turned to me, her eyes gleaming in the firelight. “Those men who brought our mothers here against their wills are dead and gone, and yet we live on in isolation, scraping out a threadbare existence on fish and sand and our own pale whispers of a someday retribution. For what? From whom? When Thalestris brought your sister here—a mighty warrior who’d spilled the blood of our own—and bound her to the altar, I believed what she told us. I thought a sacrifice would make everything all right again. I see now that it wouldn’t have. I think the goddess would have turned from us forever.”

  “I learned the hard way—I’m still learning—that every time I thought my goddess had abandoned me, it was in truth I who had turned away from her.” I put a hand on her arm. “You want a sacrifice? Make a sacrifice. Take a chance. Step outside the boundaries that have been placed around you, and make your lives your own.”

  She fell silent then, and I could feel the weight of my words pressing heavily on her. I didn’t want to leave her with nothing but that burden. “What’s your name?” I asked.

  She was silent for so long, I didn’t think she would tell me. But when I started to get up to leave, she said, “Kallista. My name’s Kallista.”

  I sat back down and watched her for a moment as she went back to sharpening her blade. “Where did you learn to speak Latin, Kallista?” I asked, striving for a lighter tone. “I thought your tribe hated Rome—and all things Roman.”

  “We do.” She shrugged, smiling a little now, but still staring into the heart of the fire. “I mean, they do . . . I’ve never been as sure. I was taught to hate them, but it’s hard to hate all Romans when some Romans are . . . kind.”

  She reminded me so much of myself in that moment. I’d grown up hating Rome and Romans and one particular Roman most of all. And then that had all changed. Well—not all of it, maybe. I still didn’t understand the Roman mind and didn’t approve of a great deal of Roman culture, but I’d also met Romans like Cai and his father. Soldiers like Junius. I’d even found much to admire. Even—the Morrigan help me—in Julius Caesar himself.

  The great bloody tyrant, who’d been kind to me.

  “Who was kind to you?” I asked Kallista.

  She turned her face to look at me and said, “My father.”

  Of course. She must have been the progeny of one of the stolen boys from the other side of the island, and it wasn’t beyond believing that he might have been kind toward a daughter. Loving, even. I wondered . . .

  “What’s his name?” I asked.

  “Secundus. His name is Secundus. Was.”

  Secundus. The second son. The second out of five.

  “What happened to him?” I asked, a sudden knot constricting my throat.

  “Marsh fever,” Kallista said. “Four summers ago it was very bad. It took my mother first. Then him. We were even going to take him over the mountains, back down to the Roman town to see if they could help him, but he was too weak.”

  Quint’s brother had been alive only four years earlier, I thought.

  The cages we’d seen hadn’t been used in far longer than that. Maybe Secundus had lived a freer life here among the Amazons than Quint had thought. Maybe even one touched by love. With a daughter he cared for . . . Looking at Kallista then, I could see the close resemblance to Quint and wondered why it hadn’t struck me before that moment. Maybe it was because I just hadn’t been looking for it, but she had the same tawny coloring, the freckles and gray-blue eyes. Maybe, under different circumstances, she would have even had something of his sense of humor.

  I stood abruptly and held out my hand to the girl.

  She looked up at me, frowning.

  “Come with me,” I said. “There’s someone you should be properly introduced to.”

  Quint was, unsurprisingly, still sitting beside Elka. Because, perhaps a bit more surprising, she was still sitting beside him. The fire he’d built was bright enough to illuminate Quint’s face clearly through the shimmering heat and bursts of sparks climbing upward into the night. I opened my mouth to make the proper introduction, but I didn’t get the words out of my mouth before I heard a soft gasp. I turned to see Kallista staring at her uncle.

  She looked at him—really looked at him, without his helmet on his head or a sword at her throat, without the veil of fear that would have fogged her eyes on the path when she’d ambushed us with arrows and fish—and she knew. I heard her
murmur the word “Father . . .” under her breath, and the knot that had closed up my throat got tighter.

  Quint looked back and forth from me to the girl, a frown of confusion on his face. Inasmuch as he’d come here to assuage his own feelings for never having tried to save his brother, it seemed not to have dawned on Quint that he might find—if not his brother—someone else who shared his blood.

  “Quintus, this is Kallista,” I said.

  “Uh, the fish girl, yeah?” he said.

  “Her father was the one who taught her to speak Latin, Quint.”

  He blinked at me for a moment. “That’s nice . . .”

  “Your brother, Quintus.”

  “My . . .”

  It still took him another long moment. As if what I was telling him was something he quite simply couldn’t wrap his mind around. And then, finally, his jaw drifted slowly open, and his gaze shifted to the girl standing at my side.

  “You’re . . . My brother Secundus is your . . . father?”

  “Was.” Kallista nodded, her eyes filling with tears. “He always told me you were the idiot brother . . .”

  Quint choked on a sudden, strangled laugh. “He always told me that too.”

  She bit her lip—to keep it from trembling, I suspected. “He missed you so much,” she said, her voice breaking. “He . . .”

  Then Quint was up and hugging her, and Kallista collapsed into that embrace. I looked over to see that Elka was blinking rapidly at the exchange, the gleam of unshed tears rimming her eyes, and my heart clenched in my chest. We’d both caught the look on Quint’s face when he’d seen the empty cages in the cave at the head of the path. His hopes—whatever they’d been—had been dashed in that moment. Finding Kallista might just have redeemed the journey for him.

  And then some.

  Elka and I moved a discreet distance away, back to the other fire, to give uncle and newfound niece a chance to get better acquainted. Elka was silent for a while, poking at the charred wood with a stick, lost in thought.

  “Family,” she murmured eventually. “It’s . . . something, ja? An important thing, I mean. Sometimes.”

  “All times,” I said.

  “For you, I guess.” She nodded her chin at Quint. “For him . . .”

  “For you too.”

  She raised a pale eyebrow at me over the flames.

  “What do you think they are?” I gestured at the clusters of Achillea girls hunkered down in front of the fires on the other side of the clearing. “What do you think I am, you great thickheaded brute?”

  “Besides a constant thorn in my shoe?” She grunted a laugh and then subsided back into silence, frowning. When she spoke again, it was with a shrug that I suspect was supposed to be casual but came off as more of a shudder. “I suppose you’re right.” She sighed. “Well . . . I guess it was nice while it lasted. Belonging to something and all that.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You have your sister back, Fallon,” she said. “That’s what we came here to do. It’s over—the quest, the adventure . . . Now? We all go our separate ways.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “What else is there for us to do? It was bad enough when we were just infamia. Now we’re outright rebel fugitives.”

  “We are not.”

  “We are.” She snorted in frustration at my stubbornness. “You can tell yourself another story if you like, little fox, but I’m the pragmatic one, remember?”

  I snorted right back at her. “And were your pragmatic ears not listening back in Heron’s infirmary when I told you that, once we rescued Sorcha, we’d go back and retake the ludus?”

  “Oh no, I was listening,” she said. “I just assumed you’d lost your mad little fox mind again.”

  I shook my head and she tilted hers, regarding me warily.

  “You were serious,” she said.

  “Deadly.”

  “Retake the ludus.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “With what army?”

  I opened my mouth, but found I had no immediate answer. Elka was right. I looked back over at our gladiatrix sisters. While we’d fared far better than our adversaries, we’d still collected an impressive degree of injuries. None of us had escaped without cuts and bruises of varying degrees. Neferet suspected Hestia might have a fractured bone in her wrist, and Anat had suffered an ugly shoulder burn when her shield had shattered during our fiery rush. Then there was Gratia, who kept telling everyone she was perfectly fine—even though it had taken more than a dozen stitches to close a deep gash on her thigh. I suspected the ample mead the Amazons had supplied before Neferet had begun stitching had gone a long way to influencing Gratia’s opinions of her own hurts.

  Even before the fight, we’d been too few to win in a pitched battle against Nyx and Aquila’s contingent of gladiatrices and Dis warriors. The only thing going back to the ludus in our present state would achieve would be to land us in chains. And then, inevitably, in one of Pontius Aquila’s evil munera fights. I frowned and looked away from Elka, searching the darkness for the answer. My gaze drifted back over to where Kallista still sat with Quint, heads together, and then on past them to where the lights of the Amazon fires flickered through the trees just beyond the oppidum’s tumbled walls.

  “We don’t need an army,” I said, responding, at last, to Elka’s question. “We need a war band.”

  “I fail to see the distinction.”

  I felt myself smiling as a hazy, half-formed plan began to coalesce in my mind. “When I was a little girl,” I said, “all I ever wanted was to follow in my sister’s footsteps and join my father’s royal war band. Warriors, Elka. Not soldiers. Not mercenaries. Not Aquila’s killers. Not even gladiatrices, fighting alone. No. What we need to be to make this happen is warriors. Few, fearsome, and fighting as a family.”

  She shook her head. “We’re not enough.”

  “No.” My gaze drifted back toward Kallista. “But we will be.”

  XIII

  THE SUN BROKE over the horizon as we were finishing a breakfast of fish and crabmeat wrapped in grape leaves on a bed of soft, roasted grains, washed down with cups of cold spring water. The repast had been left for us, laid out on flat stones at the edge of our encampment, some time before dawn broke. Even if it was grudging, one couldn’t fault the Amazons for their hospitality. Which was only surpassed by their enthusiasm to get us started on our way, I thought, as Areto and a small council of the older members of the tribe came to bid us farewell.

  Unfortunately for them, I suspected—hoped, rather—that there would be a slight delay before we left them to their rugged solitude.

  As we made our final preparations to depart, I kept glancing off into the distance, where Cai and Quint had gone, waiting anxiously for them to return. Sorcha noticed my fretfulness and asked me what the matter was.

  “Nothing,” I murmured. “Nothing . . .”

  Then I saw movement beneath the trees, and I turned to grin at her.

  “Just . . . here comes my clever plan.”

  Sorcha turned to look as Kallista and more than a dozen of her sister warriors appeared—girls who, as Kallista had told me the night before, had voiced their own doubts about the rightness of the Amazon way. Together, the group of young women climbed up the steep path from the clusters of huts beneath the pines. They all wore traveling cloaks over their ragged tunics and had packs slung across shoulders and torsos. All of them carried their weapons, and a few had even painted their cheeks and foreheads with symbols, not unlike the war paint my sisters and I had arrived wearing. They strode toward us, walking as tall as they could, as brave and as fearless, in the face of what they were about to do.

  I waited.

  Kallista stepped up and cleared her throat.

  None of the Amazon matrons turned their attention toward her.
At first.

  “I will go with this gladiatrix on her journey,” she said, just a little too loud.

  That got their attention.

  I wondered if it was the journey itself or the act of announcing her intentions to the Amazon matrons that had put the hint of a quaver in Kallista’s voice. Whatever the case, I silently cheered her bravery.

  “What’s this, young one?” Areto said over her shoulder—but only after a sufficiently intimidating pause.

  “I will go and I will help her win back her home,” Kallista continued, thrusting her chin forward. “We all will.”

  Areto regarded her with a stone-hard gaze. “Will you now.”

  She nodded gravely.

  “This is not our war to fight.”

  “But it is ours.” Kallista took another step forward. “Because we choose to make it so.”

  “Kallista—”

  “I’m tired of hiding on this island, Areto!” She flung her arm out to the girls with her. “We all are! I’m so tired of telling myself every night I am descended from greatness, only to wake every morning to practice my spear throwing at nothing but the fish in the lagoon. The fish are tired of it!”

  One of the Amazon matrons—the one with the long, puckered scar that ran from her hairline, down the side of her face, and past the collar of her tunic—crossed her arms and pegged Kallista with a pointed stare. “What if we don’t wish to let you leave, young ones?”

  The other girls standing shoulder to shoulder behind Kallista bristled with silent rebellion, defiance in their eyes, but not one of them opened her mouth in protest. That seemed to settle it for the warrior matron. She sniffed and turned away.

  “No,” she said. “Return to your houses.”

  “We don’t have houses!” Kallista’s voice cracked with protest. “We have huts. Leaky ones. With dirt floors and hard beds.”

  “You crave leisure?” Areto asked. Her tone was harsh, but for a flashing instant, I thought I saw something in her gaze that might have been approval. Or veiled pride.

  “I crave something beyond the stones and trees of this island and talking to myself just to hear something other than birdsong and wind,” Kallista pleaded with a desperation I could feel in my soul.