The Defiant

  “How do you know he was?”

  “I don’t. You’re right. And I don’t want to find myself in a situation where I can be certain. All I’m saying is . . . you’d better be careful. Keep hold of your wits—and your heart.”

  “What could possibly have made you say such a thing?” I asked, growing angry again. How dare he even pretend to have a care for my heart. After everything he’d done . . . “Is this some sort of twisted jealousy, Aeddan? Because I know—I know—Cai would never betray me. Not for anything—”

  “Not even for his father, Fallon?” Aeddan shook his head. “Lugh’s teeth! And you want to take us into the man’s very house. It’s folly. Dangerous folly.”

  “Even if I believed you—which I don’t—what, exactly, is it that you think Senator Varro can do to us from the other side of the Ionian Sea, Aeddan?”

  “He doesn’t need to be there to exert a powerful influence on his son, Fallon. Think about it—once we’re there, Cai will be surrounded by all the things that will remind him of the man who raised him, provided for him—”

  “You’re wrong—”

  “I know the way the Romans think!” he snapped. “Their parents are more like gods to them than family. They worship their ancestors! And if—if—it comes down to it . . . who do you think your handsome decurion will choose, Fallon?”

  I was silent for a moment. Then I said, “Me.”

  “Over blood?”

  He stared at me, and I thought I saw a flicker of compassion in his eyes. It made me even angrier. How dare he pity me? “Stop it, Aeddan. I already know you tried to convice Cai to send me home—”

  “For your own good—”

  “And I know what he told you—”

  “It’s blood, Fallon!”

  “Like the blood you shared with Maelgwyn?” I scoffed. “That didn’t stop you from thrusting a knife through his heart!”

  The minute the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. Aeddan’s face looked like I had just slapped him with an armored fist. I wished desperately that he would just go. Take what freedom he had and, once the ship docked, leave. Leave me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you expect from me, Aeddan—”

  “Expect from you, Fallon?” His head snapped toward me, and his gaze burned where it fell on me. “I expect nothing. You’ve already taken everything from me that I could have ever hoped to offer. I have nothing. I am nothing. I have no tribe, no torc, no house . . . I have no brother—as you’ve so very graciously reminded me. No family. No honor. Thanks to you, Fallon ferch Virico, I’ve lost my very soul.”

  “Then why do you stay? Why subject yourself to me like this?” I spat. “There’s a whole wide world out there. Leave, Aeddan.”

  “That’s the irony of it.” He laughed bitterly. “I can’t. I’ve lost everything, and now, all I can do is make sure I don’t lose you. The one thing I could never have had in the first place. You can curse me, spit on me, ignore my warnings, and pretend I don’t even exist, but I will not leave you. I will do whatever I have to, to keep you safe. Because your safety, your life . . . your . . . you—the sum of all my nothings—is the only thing I have left.”

  I stared at him, speechless and stunned.

  “I expect nothing,” he murmured again, his gaze drifting from my face, unfocued. “But I’m not leaving.”

  Silence descended between us, broken only by the snapping of the new sail overhead as it caught the wind and billowed full, and I realized in that moment that something I’d always accepted as truth was, in fact, a lie. Aeddan looked nothing like his brother. Nothing at all. I’d grown up thinking he and Mael were like two tapestries woven from the same threads. There were variations in the patterns, to be sure, but the similarities were far more striking than the differences. At least, that’s what I’d always thought. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Aeddan was nothing like his brother.

  And, for some reason, that suddenly made it harder to keep on hating him for Mael’s death. An accident? No, it hadn’t exactly been that. The two of them had fought with every heated intention of ending the other. I knew the feeling—the red rage that descends in the middle of a fight, the blind driving need to kill, to win, at whatever the cost. For Aeddan, the cost had been his own blood.

  Like he’d said of Cai and his father. Blood. Betrayal. I knew he was wrong about Varro. And I knew, in my heart, that even if he was right . . . Cai—brave, honest, honorable to a fault Cai—would do the right thing.

  Whatever the “right thing” was.

  XV

  “SO YOU’RE NOT only a slave trader, you’re a smuggler as well.”

  “A successful businessman knows how to diversify.”

  Quint nodded in open appreciation of Charon’s honesty. Or possibly his methods. Predictably, the slave master had been right when he’d said that the Amazons weren’t going to like his plan for getting them through the city. Kallista and the others did not take particularly kindly to the means by which he would smuggle not only their weapons but the girls themselves north up the Via Clodia, straight to the gates of the Ludus Achillea.

  The weapons were easy enough. Upon docking on the west bank of the Tiber, inside the walls of Rome, Charon’s men had procured a cage cart, like the one in which Elka and I had been transported through Gaul as slaves. Only this one had a false floor with shallow compartments beneath—just roomy enough to hide a wealth of unsuspected hardware—camouflaged beneath a layer of straw.

  The girls, on the other hand, were to travel hidden in plain sight. Riding in the cage cart, iron slave collars around their throats, shackles and chains at their wrists and ankles. It had taken a great deal of convincing on my part to reassure them that they weren’t, in fact, being taken to a slave auction for sale. Kallista had extracted blood oaths and promises, and at one point, I think she even cast a looming curse-in-waiting on my head should circumstances ultimately prove I’d been lying.

  Growing up in an Amazon tribe must have been rough, I decided.

  But when Charon and I had first devised the scheme to infiltrate the Ludus Achillea by way of our new warriors, we’d given them all an even rougher history, in order to account for their delivery to the academy.

  “I’ll tell Nyx that my suppliers sent word they’d picked up this pack of lovelies from a pirate brothel in Tunisia that burned down a few months back,” Charon proposed. “I’ll say I offered them for sale to the Lady Achillea and that they’re already bought and paid for. I’ll even have the bill of sale with Sorcha’s seal on it as proof”—he gestured to Sorcha—“of the bargain.”

  She almost smiled as she cocked an eyebrow at him and reached down the front of her tunic for the seal that hung perpetually from a chain around her neck. I wondered why they hadn’t taken it from her when she’d been a captive, but then—according to Pontius Aquila’s lie, and so the world—Sorcha was dead. And the seal was of no use to anyone.

  “Nyx is hardly going to refuse delivery,” Charon continued. “Especially not of a whole new feisty crop of potential munera fodder for her master. In fact, knowing how she operates, she’ll probably take credit for the whole deal.”

  I eyed the Amazons over my shoulder, none of whom remotely resembled the only girl I’d ever known who actually was a brothel worker. Every single one of them looked far more likely to cut a man’s throat in a bedchamber than anything else.

  “Do you really think Nyx will believe all that?” I asked.

  Charon shrugged. “I suppose that will depend on whether she’s ever been to a Tunisian pirate brothel.”

  “Fair enough.”

  It was a risk, but then again . . . so was the whole damned plan.

  Sorcha would stay at Charon’s house in the city and help him coordinate our two disparate objectives. It was easy enough for her to move through the city in relative anony
mity—the fame she’d earned as the vaunted Lady Achillea in her arena days had faded in the eyes, if not the minds, of her many ardent fans. And the elegant patrician figure she cut now bore almost no resemblance to the fierce mythic creature she’d been back in those days.

  The same could not be said of her little sister and her companions. We had to adopt a different strategy altogether. Which was why, in the port of Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber where it emptied into the sea, we’d docked briefly for a single purpose: to bring onboard a shipment of empty wine barrels. I wasn’t about to risk sneaking myself and the Achillea girls off the ship in twos and threes. I would not risk a repeat of the scenario that had led to the loss of Meriel. But there was only one way I could think of to avoid it, and after mulling over the outlandish idea with Cai and Charon and the others, we’d agreed that it was the best—probably the only—hope of success we had.

  I’d teased out my idea from a story Antonia had once told after the evening meal at the ludus, about the hero from her land named Odysseus, and how he and his war band had infiltrated a city hidden inside a wooden horse. Not having one of those handy, we’d had to make do.

  “Whatever was in here previously was a cheap vintage,” Ajani muttered, crinkling her nose as she lifted one long leg over and climbed gingerly into the empty barrel. “And musty.”

  “Don’t be a wine snob.” Gratia rolled her eyes, stifling a grunt as she attempted to fold her muscled bulk into a small enough ball. “At least you’ve got room to breathe.”

  “That’s not necessarily a plus,” Neferet gasped. “I’ll be giddy on fumes by the time we get to where we’re going!”

  The ship deck was awash with grumbling gladiatrices:

  “A slave cage is starting to look like a pleasant way to travel . . .”

  “Lucky Amazons . . .”

  “There’s a rat in my barrel, and I think it’s drunk . . .”

  “Oh, don’t be such a pack of princesses!” Antonia rolled her eyes as she hopped nimbly into her barrel. “I think it’s a brilliant ploy.”

  “You only think that because Fallon got the idea from your ridiculous Trojan horse story,” Vorya said, crouching reluctantly.

  “Ja,” Elka concurred. “And the horse probably smelled better.” She waved at Antonia’s prosthetic weapon. “At least you can carve your own air holes once you’re in there.”

  Antonia just grinned in response, waving the crescent blade in a little circle.

  “It’s not a far journey,” I said, ignoring the rough wooden splinters digging into my flesh as I climbed into my own barrel.

  “Better not be,” Elka grumbled as Quint lifted the lid of her barrel.

  “It isn’t. I promise.”

  It wasn’t. Well . . . not that far. Only up a twisting road and through the gates of the sprawling Varro estate, perched high on the Caelian Hill. It really was a desperate gamble, but we’d all agreed that it was the only way we were going to get off Charon’s ship without being immediately arrested. Even with Rome’s vigiles on the lookout for us, no one would think to stop a shipment of libations being transported through the city at the behest of one of its wealthiest and most powerful senators. That was the hope, at any rate.

  I settled myself as comfortably as I could inside the oaken cask as Charon’s men hammered the lid on, breathing as slowly and shallowly as I could, trying to ignore the dizzying scent of the long-gone wine and the faint stirrings of panic the cramped confines provoked. It felt as though I had been entombed, like in the stories Neferet had told us about how they buried dead Aegyptian kings, trapped forever in darkness, sealed up in a sarcophagus for all eternity. When finally they carried the barrels up onto the deck, then tipped them over to roll down the gangplank, it took every ounce of self-control I had not to scream or vomit.

  Assuming none of the others did either, I thought, and we managed to get through the city without discovery, I was going to owe a whole cellarful of wine-stained gladiatrices an unpayable debt.

  The trip through the winding streets of the capital was nerve-wracking. Every time the cart slowed or stopped, I feared it was because we’d been discovered. Every voice I heard calling out was surely the vigiles ordering us to halt for inspection. When, finally, I felt my barrel being lifted down off the cart, I felt a surge of fear strangle my throat. I had no idea if we’d actually reached our final destination. For all I knew, we’d been diverted to the Forum to be arrested and hauled away.

  I held my breath as the lid above my head was pried off and the rosy light of the setting sun poured into my wine-soaked casket. It blinded me for a moment, and then Cai’s head and shoulders blocked the twilight gleam as he reached down and lifted me out of the barrel and set me down on wobbly legs.

  He tried to keep a straight face, I could tell, but it was no use. The bare whiff of me up close was enough to bring tears to his eyes. He took a step back and mustered a watery, breath-holding smile of welcome.

  “Welcome, daughter of Bacchus, to Domus Varro,” he said as he tucked a straggling, sticky lock of hair back behind my ear.

  I rolled an eye at him. Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, was probably gazing down on us from his purple-stained couch, high on Mount Olympus, and laughing himself silly.

  Quint was nowhere near so diplomatic as Cai.

  “Whoo!” he exclaimed, waving a hand in front of his face as he helped Gratia and Elka step from their barrels. “You lot smell like a legionnaire mess tent after a right good pillage of a Gaulish vineyard!”

  It was entirely true. But it had also worked. We were safe. I looked around at the vaulting stone arches of Cai’s father’s wine cellar, and at my companions, and couldn’t help the grin spreading across my face. For the first time since our desperate escape from the ludus, I dared to hope that we had not seen the last of our home as our home.

  • • •

  Home . . .

  As places to grow up went, Domus Varro must have been an extraordinary one. The kind of home that I’d never imagined existed in all the years I’d spent scampering through the forests around Durovernum like a wild deer, leaping over moss-covered logs and diving into secret springs, climbing into bed at night to nestle under heaped furs while the fresh-cut straw crinkled in the mattress beneath me and owls hooted outside my window, perched on the eaves of my cozy little roundhouse.

  A world—worlds—away from the airy, elegant, marble- and mosaic-clad halls and courtyards of Rome. I still missed Durovernum. Sometimes with an ache so deep it felt like broken bones. And yet, as I sank chin-deep into the warm, lavender-scented waters of the bathhouse’s tepidarium pool, I distantly marveled at how easy it had been for me to become accustomed to this kind of life. I wondered: If I were ever to return home again, back to Durovernum, how would I get along with only the cramped copper tub in the corner of my hut for bathing? Would I miss the spaciousness of Roman homes, the echo of voices down their colonnaded corridors? The wide skies of Italia open to the stars at night, not hemmed in by the lush spreading branches of ancient, mighty oaks? How different would I have been growing up here, I mused, as I floated half-dreaming beneath the fantastical murals that arched overhead.

  The other girls had retired after washing off the day’s winey residue, but I’d stayed behind, reveling in the peace and stillness after the ordeal of the last few days. When I heard the barest ripple and splash from the corner of the pool, I opened my eyes to see the torches had burned low in their sconces, and the swirling steam rising from the surface of the water veiled the room in a sparkling, misty haze.

  But even in the dim light, I could still see Cai—head and shoulders of him, anyway—where he rested against the blue-tiled edge of the other side of the pool, staring at me. The flickering torchlight glinted off the water droplets on his shoulders and chest, and sparked fire in the depths of his hazel eyes. I felt a fluttering, like birds startled to flight, in my chest and co
uld hear my pulse surge in my ears as he pushed himself away from the edge and floated toward the center of the pool.

  That rare, secret smile played about the corners of his lips, but there was a flicker of uncertainty in his eyes as Cai swam near. I felt it too. My mind flashed back to the day when Cai had told me he loved me—the same day Caesar had declared me his Spirit of Victory. But how well did we really know each other, I wondered in that moment. He’d been gone on campaign for most of the time since. And before that . . . when we’d first met, my life had seemed like being caught in the middle of a whirlwind. I’d been stripped of my self and my soul—a princess-turned-slave, taken from my world and thrust into another—and nothing about that time had seemed safe or certain. Nothing except Cai.

  Nothing except the soldier who’d worn the armor of my enemy.

  “I remember the first time I ever laid eyes on you,” I said as Cai drifted close, wreathed in the steam rising from the rippling bath water.

  “On the wharf. In Massilia.” He nodded ruefully. “I seem to recall . . .”

  “All that metal and leather. I could barely see the person beneath.”

  “There’s none of that now,” he said, grinning. “You may feast your eyes.”

  I laughed. But I didn’t look away.

  “I remember how you looked at me that day,” he said. “I can still feel the flames on my face.”

  “Ha.” I splashed a handful of water at him. “And I remember how you looked at me that day.”

  “To be fair,” he said, “there wasn’t very much of you that I could see, either. You were more caked-on road dirt and rags than girl.”

  “True.” I had to agree with him there. “Although I remember Charon telling you we’d all clean up well enough. You didn’t believe him.”

  “I should have.”

  “I didn’t believe him either!” I reached for a bathing sponge in a basket on the side of the pool and handed it to him, turning around and lifting my hair away from my shoulders. “I didn’t know at the time that you Romans had such baths. At home, I had a river. And a cramped copper tub for special occasions . . .”