The Defiant

  “Wake up, bright little thing . . .”

  The smell of stale wine filled my nostrils.

  “Arviragus . . . ?” I blinked in confusion.

  The mighty Gaulish chieftain the Romans called Vercingetorix sat on his haunches on the floor of my cell, waiting for me to wake. For a moment, I thought I saw him in the glory of his youth. When he’d visited my home of Durovernum and taught me how to wrap my child’s hands around the hilt of a sword. His mane of auburn hair spilled over his shoulders, and a neatly trimmed beard framed his handsome face above a thick gold torc that circled his neck. He held a sword in his hands, and the hilt glinted in the pale wash of light through the window.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again.

  No. Not a sword. A wine cup.

  And his hair and beard were grown wild and tangled, his face lined with defeat. But his eyes. They hadn’t changed. They burned with an intensity that made it feel as though Arviragus could look right through me and deep into my soul. And why not?

  Arviragus was dead.

  At the end of Caesar’s Quadruple Triumphs, the mighty Roman general had paraded the proud Gaulish chieftain through the streets of Rome, so that all the people of that great city could marvel and jeer at the most fearsome of Ceasar’s adversaries. I remembered Sorcha telling me how then, after the spectacle, Arviragus would be taken away and strangled out of view of the mob. A small mercy, that, I thought at the time. Leaving the last shreds of his dignity intact . . .

  And yet, here he was. Watching me keenly through hard, glittering eyes as I struggled to make sense of the moment. When it seemed he was sure that I was fully conscious, he grinned at me and raised the wine cup in a mocking salute.

  “Ave, Victrix,” he said, in a voice of gravel and rust. “All hail the conquering hero.”

  “I don’t feel very heroic,” I murmured.

  “Quite right. So you shouldn’t.” He turned and spat in the dust. “You didn’t see this coming? Neither you nor your sister? I thought I taught you better than that, bright little thing . . .”

  My head swam dizzily.

  I felt the heat from a shaft of sunlight falling on my face . . .

  I heard laughter and looked up to see a vision of my sister, lithe and lovely and young as a dappled fawn, holding out her hand to help me stand. She grinned down at me, her freckled face framed by a cloud of flyaway hair, and in her other hand she held a wooden sword. The laughter I’d heard was low and musical and came from the handsome young man with auburn braids who sat on a stump, watching me and my sister fight.

  He stood and walked toward us, stopping to pick up my sword where it lay in the grass. It looked like a tiny toy in his great hand as he bent down to give it to me. “Better,” he said, his eyes twinkling with amusement.

  “But I still lost,” I grumbled, snatching the sword from his hand with my baby-chubby fingers.

  “And why is that?” he asked.

  “Because . . .” I frowned, thinking hard about how my sister had beat me. “Because I started watching her sword . . . ?”

  “Good!” Sorcha beamed at me. “You’re learning.”

  Young Arviragus nodded, pleased, even though I’d been defeated. “Bright young thing!” He tousled my hair. “While the weapon does one thing at a time, the wielder does many. And they will tell you what they’re doing—and what they’re going to do—but you must pay attention. To their feet, their shoulders, their eyes . . . That way, you’ll always know what’s coming. In a fight, you always need to look six, seven, eight moves in advance. Remember that. And remember this—it’s never over until your enemy is dead at your feet. Never—”

  “Ha!” I barked a baby battle cry and ducked under his arm, catching Sorcha by surprise and slapping her sword out of her hand with mine. She yelped as I jumped to tackle her, and together we fell to the ground, rolling and laughing and play-pummeling each other with our fists as Arviragus cheered both of us on . . .

  The memory faded.

  I found myself back in the dank gray confines of Tartarus, with a ghost.

  “Sorcha let herself grow soft,” Arviragus said in a ragged growl.

  “She didn’t—”

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  My throat closed on a sob and I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t find the words to deny it. My heart ached for the sister I’d found after so many years only to lose again. I shook my head sharply to banish my fevered delusion, but that only made the walls swim before my eyes. Arviragus stayed put.

  He sighed and drank from his spectral cup. “You, though,” he continued. “I thought you had an edge that would keep. Did the adoration of the crowds go to your head, little one?”

  “If it did, it’s your fault,” I snapped, in no mood to be lectured by a delusion. “You were the one who told me to charm them. Beguile them. Seduce the mob, you said.”

  “That’s the thing about seduction, Fallon.” Arviragus leaned forward, the wine stench rolling in his wake like fog. “Never get seduced in return.” He chuckled mirthlessly. “What else did I say?”

  I struggled to remember the advice he’d given me that day. It seemed so very long ago . . . Ah. Right. “Be brave, gladiatrix,” Arviragus had counseled. “And be wary. Bright things beget treachery. Beautiful things breed envy. Once you win Caesar’s love, you’ll earn his enemies’ hate.”

  Hate. Or desire. I hadn’t listened. I’d earned both, and there was nothing I could do about it now. “Go away, old man,” I muttered. “You’re dead.”

  He laughed. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “But you are.”

  “Are you here then to guide me to the Blessed Isles?”

  “Eh? Oh no.” He paused in the middle of drinking to wag a finger at me. “You’re not wriggling off the fishhook that easy. The Morrigan’s not done with you yet, bright little thing. Not by half. So if I were you, I’d start thinking of a way out of this mess you’ve got yourself into.”

  “What am I supposed to do? I’m in a prison cell.”

  Arviragus laughed. “You’re whining to the wrong man on that score.”

  “How did you escape?”

  “The wrong way,” he said, lifting his cup and tapping the rim. “Maybe one day, I’ll escape the right way . . .”

  A fresh wave of shivering washed over me, cold then fever-hot, and when it had passed, I was alone again. Arviragus was gone, and I would die there in Tartarus—forgotten, defeated, a pile of dust and dry bones with no funeral pyre to carry the embers of my soul to the Blessed Lands of the Dead when I was gone. The Morrigan had truly forsaken me . . . No. The goddess was good. She hadn’t lost faith in me—I needed to believe in her. I closed my eyes and whispered her triple name in my mind over and over. Macha, Nemain, Badb Catha . . .

  Then I heard the rustling of wings above me.

  I glanced up to see a crow perched on the sill of the tiny barred window, tilting its head to stare at me with one bright black eye.

  “Fury!” I exclaimed, and the bird answered with a soft caw.

  In the days leading up to Caesar’s Triumphs, I had been the target of a series of nasty pranks culminating in someone nailing a live crow to my door to try and frighten me badly enough to drop out of the competition. The intimidation had failed, and the bird, poor thing, had been nursed back to health by Neferet. The girls had adopted her as a kind of pet and called her Fury in honor of my first-ever opponent.

  “Fury,” I called gently, scrambling to my feet and lifting my arm. “Come. Come here, girl . . .”

  She tilted her head this way and that, croaked at me, and then hopped down off the sill onto the wrist of my outstretched arm. A spark of hope flared in my chest as I carried her over to the barred door to the cell. It was locked from the outside, and only the iron key—hanging on the opposite wall from a hook above a shelf, so tantalizingly close an
d just out of reach—would open it. Without that key, I wasn’t getting out of that cell, let alone out of Tartarus.

  One of the things we learned about Fury, once she’d healed, was how clever she was. She easily learned tricks and seemed to delight in performing them for us. One of those tricks was fetching things. I nudged the bird off my wrist and onto the crossbar of the cell door. She twitched and ruffled her wings and looked at me expectantly.

  “Fetch, Fury,” I said, and stared pointedly at the key.

  The key was fashioned in the shape of an owl, the sacred bird of the Roman battle goddess Minerva, and I sent up a silent desperate plea to the Morrigan in the hopes that the two goddesses—and their creatures—were on friendly terms. I stretched out a hand, reaching with splayed fingers toward the key hook. The reach made the wound in my side burn fiercely and pulled at the thin lines of the cuts Aquila had carved on my arm, drawing fresh beads of bright blood welling to the surface through the rust-dark scab that had already formed there.

  I wondered just how long it had been since I’d been locked away in Tartarus. Hours? Days, even, maybe . . . Elka and the others probably thought I was already dead.

  Fury was my only chance.

  “Come on . . .” I cajoled her in a singsong rasp. “That’s it . . . the key, Fury . . . pick it up and bring it here. Bring it to me, Fury . . .”

  She tilted her head, swinging it from side to side, her bead-black eyes looking from me to the key. I held my breath as she took a few little hops and flapped up into the air to land on the little shelf beside the key hook. I felt a surge of giddy hope.

  The Morrigan was still with me. She’d sent her servant to help me . . .

  Fury shifted back and forth from foot to foot.

  “Come on . . .” I encouraged her. “Get the key . . .”

  She pecked about on the ledge with her sharp black beak.

  “Good girl . . . good . . .”

  A rustling in a dark corner suddenly caught her attention, and she launched herself off the ledge, swooping down to catch a mouse in her talons. Then she flapped through the bars of the door, past my head, and back out the window grate to enjoy her repast in the yard.

  “Oh, Lugh’s teeth!” I cursed as she disappeared from sight. “You stupid bird!”

  Sent by the Morrigan, indeed.

  Fury was only a crow, doing what crows did. Hunting, not helping. And I had only myself to berate. She was a bird, that was all. Not some kind of mystic messenger, not my salvation, just a bird. I fell back against the wall. The crushing weight of aloneness felt like a suffocating blanket, and the silence left behind in the wake of Fury’s ruffling wings was deafening. In my despair, I half hoped Arviragus would appear to me again.

  He didn’t.

  My heart sank. But then a key scraped in the door lock at the end of the gloom-dim corridor, and it leaped back upward into my throat. I froze as the heavy door swung open and a pale wash of starlight silhouetted a soldier’s helmet and cloak.

  Cai! I thought, pulling myself up to my feet. He’s found me!

  No.

  The shadowed, featureless figure stepped forward and I saw not a crimson helmet crest but a spray of black feathers. Not a red decurion’s cloak but a soot-black drape of cloth hanging in deep folds. One of the guards from the Ludus Amazona, come to take me to Pontius Aquila or end my life. The cloak billowed in his wake like wings as he strode swiftly down the hall toward my cell, and I skittered back into the far corner at his approach. He reached for the key I hadn’t been able to cajole Fury into delivering to me, and unlocked the door.

  When I didn’t move, he huffed impatiently.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he snapped. “Come on!”

  I blinked at the sound of words spoken in my own language.

  “Aeddan . . . ?”

  He seemed to realize, then, that the helmet he wore obscured his features. Aeddan reached up and pulled off the headgear. Beneath it, he still wore his dark hair long, but his face was more angular than I remembered it.

  “Do you want rescuing or not?” he asked.

  For a moment, I didn’t think I’d heard him right. “I—what?”

  “I’m rescuing you. What do you think I’m doing here?” He stepped over the threshold of the cell and took me by the wrist, but I shrugged angrily out of his grip.

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” I said. “You’ll only take me to him. To Aquila.”

  “That was the furthest thing from my mind.”

  “You work for him.”

  “He thinks I do.”

  “He trusts you.” I pointed to the key ring still clutched in his hand. “How else would you have known where to find me? How did you get those keys?”

  “He trusts me because he assumes I bear a grudge against you,” Aeddan said, visibly struggling to curb his impatience. “I can’t think why—I mean, you only rejected me as unworthy of your hand, set me and my brother against each other, humiliated me in front of the entire Circus Maximus during the Triumphs . . .” He shook his head and looked for a moment as if he’d talked himself out of my rescue. “As for the keys, I found them in the desk in the Lanista’s scriptorium. I took them when Aquila was busy rifling through her documents.”

  He held them up and I realized that they were, indeed, Sorcha’s ring of keys and not the ones belonging to Thalestris.

  “What happened to my sister, Aeddan?” I asked. “Did you—”

  “No!” Aeddan turned a withering stare on me. “No, Fallon. I’ve only killed my own sibling. But thank you for reminding me of just how much a monster you think me.”

  “I—”

  “We have to go.” He glanced down the corridor, then back at me. “Now.”

  Still I hesitated.

  “Do what you will,” he said, throwing up a hand in frustration. “But if you want out of here, I’m sorry to say that it’ll either be with me . . . or with Ixion. One of us will most definitely take you to Aquila. Eventually.”

  That was all the motivation I needed.

  I was still half-convinced Aeddan was lying. But I was also half-convinced that this was the moment Arviragus had prepared me for. My one chance for escape. I glanced back over my shoulder as I ducked out into the corridor, but the cell was empty. Of course it was.

  He’s not there, Fallon, I thought. He was never there. Arviragus is dead.

  I knew that. But it still felt as though I was leaving him behind. Again.

  I tugged my cloak close about me to hold myself together—mind and body—and stumbled out of Tartarus behind Aeddan. Once out in the yard, he put an arm out to stop me while he checked around the corner.

  “As for your question on how I found you,” Aeddan continued in a low murmur, “the Morrigan showed me the way.”

  He nodded down at the tiny half-moon opening at the base of the stone wall we were pressed against. My cell window. I saw Fury, hunched there in the weeds, making short work of the unfortunate rodent she’d caught. When she saw us looking at her, she uttered a breathy little croak and flapped into a nearby tree.

  “I’d almost given up on looking when that crow there came flapping through that grate,” he said. “It caught my attention, and that’s when I heard your curses coming from inside that building. I tried my luck with the key ring, and . . . Fallon?” He shook me by the shoulder. “Fallon—are you all right? It’s only a bird. I was joking about the Morrigan.”

  “I know.” I knew he was joking. But Fury had saved me. The Morrigan had heard my prayers and given me this chance. Now it was up to me to make the most of it and prove her faith in me wasn’t misguided. “I know . . .”

  Aeddan frowned at me in concern, then shook his head. “Come on.”

  The air was cool and wet, and I could smell the tang of charred wood as we hurried past the blackened stumps of timber suppo
rts, the only thing left of the stables. The ludus chariot ponies were all picketed on a line out in the yard, and one lifted his head and whickered softly when he saw us. We froze at the noise, but other than the horses, the stable yard was deserted.

  Aeddan grabbed me by the wrist then, dragging me stumbling after him. We made our way across the midden yard and down a servants’ corridor, toward the gate that led out to Lake Sabatinus. All the buildings were dark, including the barracks, off to our left. I pulled Aeddan to a stop and shrugged out of his grip again.

  He glared at me, then glanced around to make sure we were still alone and unseen. “What?”

  “I’m not leaving without the others.”

  “Fallon—”

  “I’m not leaving without the others.”

  Aeddan knew me, well enough to know that arguing was of no earthly use. He would either have to help me help my comrades or sound the alarm and have me thrown back in Tartarus.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked. “What’s the present situation?”

  “The ludus domestic staff were allowed to keep to their quarters,” he said. “Aquila doesn’t consider them a threat. But your friends and those two legionnaires are being held all together in the infirmary. Under guard. Aquila has returned to the capital and left Nyx and that brute Ixion in charge, along with a handful of guards. But they’re spread thin between guarding the Amazona gladiatrices and the Achillea ones.”

  I nodded, trying to clarify my thinking through the fog of pain that still wrapped around my brain. I could picture Nyx luxuriating in the Lanista’s private quarters, gorging herself on food and wine and lording it over the ludus staff. I didn’t think I’d have to worry much about her.

  “What else can you tell me?” I asked Aeddan.

  Aeddan hesitated for a moment, his expression bleak. Then he said, “The reason the Tribune has gone to Rome is that he is arranging for a very lavish, very private munera to be held here at the ludus.”

  “Like the night at the Domus Corvinus.”

  Aeddan nodded. “Only this time, instead of a pair of gladiators fighting to the death, they’ll have their pick of a whole crop of talented young gladiatrices to pit against each other. On the night of the next new moon—when the gods turn their blessed light away from the world—Pontius Aquila will return here with all of his rich, twisted friends, and . . .”