The Defiant (The Valiant #2)
Lesley Livingston
I
CLEOPATRA, QUEEN OF Aegypt, was bored.
And so I found myself hanging from the deck rail of a galley, cursing loudly in the moments before my vessel was rammed again by an enemy ship and I was thrown into the waves, sparkling with sunlight, far below. This, I thought, was not how the campaign was supposed to go. My shipmates and I—all students of the Ludus Achillea, foremost academy dedicated to the training of female gladiators in all of the Republic of Rome—were supposed to be victorious in this, our very first nautical outing.
Instead, we were getting kicked all over the waves of Lake Sabatinus by the girls of our rival academy, the Ludus Amazona.
“Fallon!”
I struggled to look up to see who was calling me.
It was Elka—usually the first to notice whenever I got myself into trouble. I would have hailed her back, but I was too busy not letting go of either the railing or the hand of Leander, the ludus kitchen slave, whose life I was preoccupied with trying to save.
Leander couldn’t swim. He’d made that abundantly clear, even over the din of battle. So it was a bit of a mystery as to how he’d even wound up flailing around in the water in the middle of our mock sea battle, a spectacle staged at the behest of the queen of Aegypt.
The spectacle, itself, was less mysterious.
Gaius Julius Caesar, Consul of Rome, legendary general, owner of the Ludus Achillea, and Cleopatra’s paramour, had been gone from Rome for the better part of a year on another military campaign. Cleopatra, ensconced in his estate on the western bank of the River Tiber—but expressly unwelcome within the walls of Rome itself—had been driven to her wits’ end with restlessness.
So she’d packed up her entourage and headed north up the Via Clodia, to a private villa nestled on the banks of Lake Sabatinus, where her restlessness could, at the very least, enjoy a change of scenery. And the company of her dear friend, my sister Sorcha. Or, as she was known in Rome, the Lady Achillea, former champion gladiatrix and current Lanista of the Ludus Achillea.
One morning, not long after Cleopatra had arrived with a full entourage in the lake region, Sorcha dragged me along with her to an audience at the queen’s behest.
“I’m positively languishing with tedium!” Cleopatra had exclaimed that day, over roast peacock and raw oysters, served on the deck of her pleasure barge. “I want to have a celebration. A triumph of our very own to commemorate the new ownership of your ludus . . .”
For my part, I’d turned a surreptitious glance on Sorcha to see how she was reacting to Cleopatra’s suggestion, but my sister just nodded and calmly sipped at her goblet.
“Impending new ownership, Your Highness,” she said. “Once I receive the papers from Caesar—”
“Pssh.” Cleopatra silenced her with a wave. “They’re on their way, I’m sure. And then you too will be the queen of your own domain, my dear.” She paused to choose a honey cake from a tray. They were sprinkled with gold dust and sparkled in the sunlight. “Men shouldn’t be the only ones in this wretched Republic who can stage a spectacle to flaunt their accomplishments,” Cleopatra continued. “And you, my darling Sorcha, are definitely accomplished. As is your extraordinary sister.”
She turned one of her beguiling smiles on me then, and waved for my wine cup to be refilled. “The Optimates fight the Populares because they are afraid,” she said. “Afraid of change, of innovation. They are afraid of Caesar, and they are afraid of me. Caesar is a god among men, and I’m not shy about reminding him of that. They fear his power. And so they lure him into wars far away from my bed and company. It makes me waspish. Forgive me.”
“Nothing to forgive, Majesty,” I said.
“Of course.” She chuckled, licking honey and gold dust from her fingers. “You, Fallon, understand my restlessness. It was unkind of my lord to drag your handsome young decurion with him all the way to Hispania.”
I felt my cheeks reddening at the mention of Caius Antonius Varro. But, in truth, I’d been feeling a bit waspish myself about his protracted absence. I steadfastly ignored the eyebrow my sister raised in my direction.
“Never mind.” The queen grinned her sly grin at us. “While our boys are away . . . let’s throw a party.”
Cleopatra’s idea of a “party” had been to commission her very own scaled-down version of one of the more preposterous spectacles of Caesar’s Quadruple Triumph—a celebratory extravaganza of performances and processions wherein Rome had run riot with feasting and games, beast hunts and contests, for an entire month. Caesar had masterminded a closing spectacle he’d dubbed the naumachia: an actual sea battle, staged in a man-made basin dug into the banks of the River Tiber, with thousands of men—captives taken in Caesar’s many campaigns—sailing real warships. The fighting had been fierce. Deadly. And the river had run red for a day and a night afterward with blood.
Thankfully, Cleopatra wasn’t that bored.
She’d settled for a nonlethal game of capture the flag, a competition staged between our ludus and the gladiatrices of our rival, the Ludus Amazona—“I’ll invite that odious Tribune of the Plebs to lend us his girls for you to fight against,” the queen had decided with a wicked grin—and only two boats. The large, lumbering pleasure craft had been provided by one of her wealthier neighbors who owned a villa on the opposite side of the lake from the Ludus Achillea. The queen’s slaves had dressed the boats to look like miniature versions of the warships of Rome and Carthage. And we were to perform a spirited reenactment of the historic Battle of Mylea. Wherever that was. Whatever that was.
? ? ?
“Fallon!” Elka hollered at me again. “Stop messing around! We’re supposed to win this fight—”
I opened my mouth to yell back that I wasn’t exactly taking my leisure, but Leander shrieked again and lost his grip, tumbling back down into the sapphire water below.
I glanced skyward and sighed.
“Be right back!” I shouted to Elka.
Then I let go of the railing, plunging through the emptiness into the shock of the chill waves below. The armor I wore that day was thankfully light and flexible—leather, not bronze and iron—but it still dragged in the water, and for a few panicked moments I thrashed and kicked my legs, trying not to sink too deep. When I surfaced, gasping, and shook my hair out of my eyes, I could see Leander clutching helplessly at the air, only a few arm’s lengths away. I hadn’t been swimming in a long time—not since I’d become first a slave, then a gladiatrix—but I’d grown up on the banks of the River Dwr back home on the Island of the Mighty, and I had been swimming like a fish since I was a little girl, almost before I’d learned to fight.