The Defiant

  Cai was silent, scrubbing the sponge in slow, gentle circles across my shoulders and back, squeezing the water out over my neck.

  “Sometimes I wonder if you—if all the Romans I’ve met—still think of me as a barbarian,” I mused. “If you, even with what you said to Aeddan, don’t still sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t be happier sleeping under furs beneath the thatched roof of my hut . . .”

  His hand on my back went still, the water from the sponge trickling down my spine. “Would you?”

  I let my hair fall and spun in a slow circle in the water until I faced him again. “Would you be there, under those furs, beneath that roof, beside me?”

  “Under thatch . . . under marble and glass . . . under stars in the middle of a desert, Fallon,” he said, his voice catching in his throat. “I would lie beside you in a cave on a mountaintop if you wanted me to. And if I ever thought of you as anything other than my equal—and more—then that is to my deep shame.”

  “As much as it’s to mine that you were right—what you said on the beach at Corsica. That I haven’t let myself fully trust you. I haven’t treated you as an equal.”

  He shook his head. “It’s all right. I understand—”

  “No.” I huffed a little. “It’s not all right, and you really need to stop being so understanding, Cai. I don’t always do the right thing, and as much as, yes, I need you to trust me, I also need you to question me. Challenge me. Keep me from trying to prove myself too strong to need anyone else. Because I do need you.”

  Desperately . . .

  He reached up and cupped my face in his hands. There were water droplets on his lips and on his eyelashes. “You have me,” he said, holding my gaze with the strength of his.

  “Is it madness?” I asked. “Going up against Aquila and his monsters . . . My friends could die if we go through with this, Cai. My sister. Me . . . You.”

  “You’re doing it because you think it’s the right thing to do.”

  “But is it?”

  He gazed at me then, with those far-sighted eyes that always seemed to look right through me to see my secrets and sorrows and strange, nebulous fears.

  “All right.” He sighed. “I’d be lying if I said there weren’t times I’ve seriously thought about talking you out of it. Spiriting you away to Cyprus or Bithynia. Or back to your thatched-roof hut in Durovernum.” His brow creased in a frown. “But I also listened to what you said to those girls back on Corsica—what you’ve been saying all along to your sisters at the ludus—and you’re right. Together, you are stronger than any legion of men, and you deserve—they deserve—a place where you’re allowed to flourish in that strength. When I was a boy, my father nearly lost his mind when my mother died. She was the true strength in their union. It took a lot for him to build himself back up, and I think there is still a part of him that is weak. Wounded.”

  “My father was the same,” I said.

  “We men think we rule the world.” Cai laughed a little. “We’re wrong. You deserve the Ludus Achillea, Fallon. You and the rest of those mad, marvelous—occasionally quite terrifying—girls. And I’ll do anything I can to help you get it back. Even if I am one of those wretched males of the species.”

  I reached out and brushed the water droplets from his lips, one by one.

  “You are anything but wretched, Caius Antonius Varro,” I said.

  His smile bloomed deeper beneath my fingertips. I put my arms around his neck and he cradled me in his, swimming out to the middle of the pool where the water was deep enough that my toes couldn’t touch the pool bottom. And then he kissed me, and I lost myself to the sensation of his skin sliding against mine as he stopped swimming and, together, we sank beneath the surface of the water, breathing only each other’s air.

  XVI

  IN THE DAYS since we’d arrived at Domus Varro, I’d slept less than half of each night, waking each morning well before sunrise with my heart pounding from half-remembered dreams and the near-constant fear that there was some aspect of our grand plan I hadn’t yet taken into account. Something I’d failed to consider that would trip us up and shatter to pieces our painstakingly constructed scheme.

  The crux of which amounted to this: Pontius Aquila wanted us to fight? Then we’d fight. We would issue a challenge to the Tribune of the Plebs, false master of the Ludus Achillea, and the leader of the Sons of Dis. We would call him out from behind the walls of our—our—academy, and we would engage his warriors in the biggest battle since Caesar’s Quadruple Triumphs.

  Right there in the field beyond the ludus walls.

  When I’d initially presented my spark of an idea, Charon was the first to embrace it. Indeed, most of the details that went into how it would come to pass had come from him. Without his multitude of connections to the Roman merchants’ and builders’ guilds, I don’t know that it would have been even remotely feasible.

  I was on my way to the scriptorium, a central room in the house we’d commandeered as a kind of hub of operations, where Cai was waiting for me. I’d just rid myself of the scrolls announcing the tournament challenge, an advertisement that would appear in the public spaces all around the city, and the purse full of denarii to pay for them. Cai had written out the details on sheets of vellum as I watched, still mostly baffled by the meaning of the lines and shapes he scribbled across the pages in neat rows, but trusting he knew what he was doing. After, I’d gone in search of Quint, so he could carry the scrolls to the guild head of the city notice-painters and the Forum crier.

  I was thinking about Charon’s blessedly useful connections—and about what Aeddan had said, warning me not to trust my fate to the kind of man who’d been responsible for my slavery in the first place—as I rounded the corner of a corridor leading through the domus atrium. I wasn’t expecting anyone else to be there.

  Let alone the master of the house.

  I froze.

  But Senator Varro had heard my footsteps approaching across the marble floor and turned. He wasn’t supposed to be there, I thought frantically. Not for another month at least . . . But he was there. Then. And when his dark eyes locked on me, I felt like a deer in a clearing that lifts its head to find itself surrounded by hounds.

  “Fallon?”

  The breath stifled in my lungs at the sound of his voice.

  I couldn’t move, couldn’t turn and run . . .

  I heard Aeddan’s voice in my head: “He will betray you . . .”

  Suddenly, all I could do was remember his admonition about my blind trust in the boy I loved. And his father. I wondered if one of the faces behind those hideous masks on that horrid night at the Domus Corvinus had been Cai’s father’s—

  “Fallon!”

  The senator strode across the light-filled room, eyes flashing, hands outstretched to grasp me by the shoulders . . .

  “My dear girl!” he exclaimed and wrapped me in a fierce, unexpected hug. “You’re safe! Thank Jupiter, I was so worried.”

  I remained stiff and teetering, shocked immobile for a moment, before I could return the embrace. But when I did, all my remaining fears and foreboding washed away like rain running from leaves to disappear into the earth. This was Caius Antonius Varro’s father. And I had nothing to fear.

  When, finally, the senator pushed me to arm’s length and peered intently into my face, I could see the genuine concern in his gaze. “I heard rumors, Fallon,” he said. “Terrible stories of things that happened at the Ludus Achillea . . .”

  Everyone had, it seemed.

  “Stories of rebellion,” he continued, “and bloodshed. I heard the Lanista had been murdered by her charges and that legion soldiers had encouraged and even aided in the uprising. I heard one of them was Cai.”

  “It’s not—”

  “But if you’re here, then that means that the rumors were wrong. Of course they were wrong! Where is Caius?” His gaze swe
pt the room. “Is my son all right?”

  “He’s fine, sir. He’s in the scriptorium—”

  Before I could get another word out—about what had really happened, about my still very much alive sister, or about Pontius Aquila—Senator Varro had turned and was hurrying down the marble hall toward his scriptorium. If the swathes of material that made up his toga would have allowed it, I think he would have broken into a run. I followed close on his heels.

  “Caius!” he called out, bursting through the carved oak double doors. “Caius!”

  “Father!”

  Cai spun around where he stood beside the desk that still held an ink jar and stack of vellum. His gaze flicked back and forth between me and his father, confused and surprised. And—I wondered if I was imagining it—alarmed. Kassandra’s warning must have still lingered in his mind.

  “I . . . I thought you were on your way to Greece,” he stammered. “What . . . what are you doing back here?”

  “I wasn’t yet at Brundisium when word reached me of what was happening at the Ludus Achillea,” the senator explained. “A revolt in the same vein as Spartacus, I was told! With my own son a traitor in the service of it.”

  “I wasn’t. And there was no revolt—”

  “Of course not.”

  “How did you even hear such—”

  “I have informants, Caius.” Senator Varro brushed aside his son’s confusion, deeming it more important to convince himself of Cai’s actual well-being. “You can tell me what actually happened later. In the meantime, I want you to see my personal physician.”

  “Why? I’m fine.”

  “Aside from all this ludus nonsense, do you forget you were discharged of your legion duties due to injury?” Varro frowned sternly at his wayward son. “You’ve subsequently endured long travel, confinement, escape, and the gods know what else, all under—I’m assuming—violent circumstances. You are too thin, and there are shadows under your eyes. You’ll see my physician.”

  “When I have time, perhaps. At the moment, I’m a bit busy—”

  “Now, Caius.” Varro glared balefully at Cai. “I’ll send a slave to fetch the man. And you will submit yourself to an examination.” He turned to me. “Both of you, I should say. You, dear girl, look to be in almost worse shape than he does. And that will never do.”

  “I’m fine. I just haven’t been sleeping too well—”

  “Then I’ll have my physician prepare you a draught before bed.” He put a hand up. “No arguments.”

  All that being said, the senator turned and strode across the room, the matter clearly decided. As he pulled the oak doors shut behind him, I blinked at Cai in bewilderment. To be fair, he seemed a bit bemused himself, but he shook it off and held out a hand to me.

  “Did I mention my father’s a bit overprotective?” He smiled ruefully.

  I thought of my own father. Of how he’d been willing to marry me off to a boy I hadn’t loved just to keep me from becoming a warrior. To save me from myself. I supposed that I couldn’t really blame Varro.

  I sighed and took Cai’s hand. “I know the feeling.”

  He pulled me close and kissed my forehead.

  “I don’t really look that bad, do I?” I asked when he lifted a hand to smooth my hair back from my face.

  Cai laughed. “I think you look perfect,” he said. “But then, I’m hardly one to judge. According to my father, I’m halfway across the River Styx myself.”

  I looked down at the stack of vellum on the scriptorium desk and picked up the stylus Cai had used to write the challenge to Pontius Aquila.

  “Do you think your father will try to stop us?” I asked. “When he learns what we’re going to do?”

  “He can try.” Cai shrugged. “But I don’t think he will. For all my father is a politician and a businessman, there’s one thing I know about him: He’s a man who hates injustice. I have a feeling that once he knows what’s really going on, he’ll be more than happy to do what he knows, in his heart, is the right thing.”

  It was reassuring to hear his sentiment echo mine about Cai himself.

  Kass and Aeddan could believe what they wanted.

  I would believe in the good of the people I knew to be good. I felt a weight I hadn’t really realized I’d been carrying lift from my shoulders. There were still others heaped there, but that one, at least, was gone.

  “Is what we’re planning here folly?” I asked, wondering—not for the first time—how in the wide world we were going to pull off such an audacious scheme and take back the ludus.

  “Folly? Maybe.” Cai tilted my chin up so that I was looking into his eyes as he smiled at me. “Or maybe it’s just what you do. You fight, Fallon. And I’ll fight alongside you. We all will.”

  “Of course we will.” I looked over to see Quintus poking his head through the doors the senator had just left through. “Was that the good Senator Varro I just saw storming off in the direction of the stables?” he asked.

  “Aye.” Cai nodded. “Apparently, word of the ludus ‘rebellion’ traveled faster than winged Mercury and forestalled his journey to Greece.”

  “That’s not going to become an impediment to our plans, is it?” Quintus frowned worriedly.

  Cai shook his head. “I don’t think so. My father has a less than elevated opinion of the Tribune of the Plebs. As I told Fallon, I suspect that he’ll rather cheer us on in this endeavor.”

  Something occurred to me then. “Cai . . .”

  He turned to me.

  “Don’t tell your father Sorcha still lives,” I said. “She’s our secret weapon. She needs to stay secret. None of this will work without her. And none of it will work if anyone even suspects that she still lives. If so much as a hint on the breeze drifts over the walls of the ludus and reaches Aquila’s ears, we’ll fail.”

  Cai frowned, clearly at odds with the idea of deceiving his father—even if only through the act of omission—but I think he also knew I was right. We hadn’t even told Cai’s freedman servant, a boy named Actaeon, who delivered messages to and from when we sent him running to Charon’s. Where Sorcha remained, hidden away and safe, and—I imagined—restless and cranky.

  “I understand,” Cai said. “I won’t say a word about your sister.”

  • • •

  The rest of the details of our plan—and the challenge—we were more than happy to share with Senator Varro. In fact, it was to our advantage to do so. For the past year, ever since the Quadruple Triumphs had ended and Caesar had left the city on campaign, there had been an increasingly clamorous demand for games. Distractions. The mob was easily bored, particularily in the wake of the Triumphs—an entire month of gruesome spectacle that had whetted their appetites for excitement and bloodshed.

  Of course, the mob didn’t know about the Sons of Dis.

  They only knew what they’d been told.

  About me and my friends . . . about our so-called rebellion.

  What we had to do was get them excited enough—without actually stirring them to fear or panic—so that we could use them as shield and surety against our arrest the second we stepped foot out in public again. So we’d circulated rumors that the renegade Victrix would present herself and her war band for judgment—in trial by combat—to the Tribune of the Plebs and his noble fighters. And there, in front of everyone, decide the matter as to just how guilty we were.

  Then we had the announcements sent out.

  Excitement in the city, or so I was told, was instantaneous. And fevered.

  The senator, for his part, was instrumental in convincing other key members of the senate that this was a better—a safer—way of dealing with a rebel uprising than what had happened before with Spartacus. And it had the added benefit of distracting the mob from the current political situation. With the tacit agreement, then, of the men in power, spectator stands went up
in the fields outside the ludus where, we’d been informed, Pontius Aquila had taken up residence. And we would be allowed to travel there in peace on the day of the challenge tournament. It set my teeth on edge to think of that despicable man living in the Lanista’s quarters, but I comforted myself with thoughts of all the frantic hammering and sawing of the carpenters building the makeshift arena just outside the wall. I sincerely hoped that it was keeping the gracious Tribune awake long into the night.

  • • •

  Finally, it was the day. Everything that could be done had been. All that was left was for us to show up. And fight. And win. I felt as though my nerves were threads of lightning sparking and flashing beneath my skin. My heart, full of thunder like a storm cloud. That evening, we would take back our home.

  Or die trying.

  Cai and Quint were at the stables with the gladiatrices, and Aeddan and I were on our way to meet them there. We strode down a long, light-filled corridor in a wing of the house I was less familiar with, Aeddan three paces ahead of me and as prickly and silent as ever. I knew we should make haste, but for reasons that escaped me, I found myself slowing as we approached a richly carved door made of ebony wood and silver. I’d never seen it open, but that day it was a handsbreadth ajar, and there was a flickering illumination spilling out from within. I couldn’t say why, but I was drawn to that light. I stopped in front of the door and, after a moment’s hesitation, pushed it slowly open.

  “Fallon?” Aeddan said, stopping to turn back, an irritated frown on his face. “What are you doing?”

  Satisfying my curiosity, I supposed, was the easiest answer.

  Listening to the whispers of the Morrigan was probably more truthful.

  The room beyond the door was windowless and unfurnished, with high, wide double doors set into the opposite wall that must have led out to the main courtyard, if I remembered the layout of the house correctly. I’d certainly never seen them open, though. In fact, it felt as if this room had been kept shut up and locked tight for a long time. The air was oppressive, and it had the stuffy, close feeling of a vault.