He took a step forward.
“The girl is correct, Tribune Aquila,” he said. “I will vouch for it upon my soul’s oath until such time as the document can be produced. With all respect, I must assert that the rightful ownership of this ludus passed from Julius Caesar to the Lady Achillea—the arrangements and transfers of monies finalized just this morning—and I myself have seen the further testament she herself signed, willing it unto Thalestris in the event that—”
“This testament?” Aquila interrupted, withdrawing a vellum scroll from a fold of his toga, as if he’d held it there in anticipation of such a challenge. “Ah. Yes . . .”
He unrolled the vellum with a snap of his wrist, and even in the darkness, I could see the bold black hand—words stroked across the document beneath my sister’s careful script—that had been added to the document. There was a signature beneath it, and the blob of a wax seal. I recognized it as an imprint of a coin Thalestris wore around her neck on a chain, bearing the likeness of winged Nemesis. The goddess of vengeance.
My dream came back to me, and Uathach’s voice whispered a dread warning in my mind. Vengeance . . .
“I believe, physician,” Aquila continued, pleasantly conversational, “insofar as you are a learned man, you would find everything in order were you to read this document in full. Your former Lanista’s legal—and binding—pledge that, in the event of her demise, the Ludus Achillea passes without limitation into the keeping of her primus pilus and longtime comrade, Thalestris the Amazon. And here”—he pointed to the heavier-handed script at the bottom of the document—“you would see Thalestris’s subsequent—and equally binding—pledge to deliver those same goods and chattels over into my ownership for the sum total of one silver denarius. Which I paid the Amazon in full not more than half an hour ago.”
“And where is Thalestris now?” Heron asked the Tribune, his gaze narrow and piercing.
“Who can say, really?” Aquila smiled thinly. “Probably halfway across Etruria by now, I dare say. Poor thing was utterly unnerved by the savagery of this attempted rebellion of yours.”
Thalestris. Unnerved.
Impossible.
The only thing I could think—the only thing that made any sense—was that Thalestris, as fiercely loyal to my sister as she’d always been, was dead too. Pontius Aquila must have taken the seal from around her neck. Forged her signature or forced it from her hand before ending her life. My sister and her primus pilus—the two fiercest warriors I’d ever known—gone.
Aquila shrugged and carried on, weaving his ridiculous fiction as if rehearsing what he would say to the courts when he returned to Rome with Sorcha’s will clutched tight in his grasping fingers. “Whilst my people subdued the uprising, Thalestris begged me to accept her offer in the hopes that I could restore order where she, tragically, could not. I graciously accepted, granted her clemency, and released her back into the wild.” He uttered a brief laugh at his humorless joke, before his expression went flinty again. His eyes were black and bleak and hungry as his gaze raked over us where we stood, horrified. “The rest of you, however,” he continued, “won’t benefit from such leniency. You’ll all need to learn the kind of respect and obedience toward me, as your new owner, that the Lady Achillea so very clearly neglected to instill in you.”
I saw Heron grow pale.
This was no misunderstanding. No error of perception on Aquila’s part that could be cleared up in a matter of moments with the right words from the right people. This was a runaway cart that had been set in motion a long time ago and had finally picked up enough speed to carry us all hurtling over a cliff. And while no one who was a passenger in that cart felt they deserved to be there, it was Lydia who was the first one to protest—by throwing the rest of us under the cart’s wheels, as if there was a chance it could save her neck.
“I’m not one of them!” she suddenly blurted, lurching out into the center of the courtyard, wild-eyed, her hair waving in a cloud around her face.
“Lydia—”
“Shut up, Fallon!” She ran to Aquila, bare arms outstretched, her pleading shaded with a kind of desperate, wheedling flirtatiousness. “She’s one of their leaders, you know—she’s probably the one who murdered the Lanista! I’m loyal to the Republic!”
Pontius Aquila’s gaze swept unblinking down upon her like she was a beggar in a back alley. Beneath contempt. I winced, sensing what would likely come next. Lydia seemed to sense it too. She was shallow, but she wasn’t stupid.
She took a step back, eyes darting side to side, like a cornered animal.
“Nyx, my dear friend . . .” She turned her pleading to the girl who’d spent their time together treating Lydia more like a lackey than a dear friend. “You know I’m just like you. I’m on your side! Tell the Tribune—”
That was as far as she got.
The crack of leather echoed across the yard.
Lydia screamed and dropped to the ground as Nyx’s whip caught her on the side of her face and blood poured onto the sand from between her fingers. I saw Gratia clamp a hand over her mouth as, between one breath and the next, the whip cracked again as it sliced across Lydia’s shoulders, rending the fabric of her thin linen sleeping shift and drawing an arc of bright blood. She shrieked again in agony, and before I’d really thought about what I was doing, I put my head down and ran at Nyx.
When she’d been at the ludus, Nyx had been very good at dishing out punishment with a chariot whip. It seemed she’d gotten even better at it in the intervening months. But that was with a target more than an arm’s length away. In close quarters, it was a useless weapon. If Nyx couldn’t get a windup, she couldn’t crack the whip to devastating effect, and that was what I was counting on. I ducked under her arm and tackled her to the ground.
I’d thought only to keep her from killing Lydia. I hadn’t anticipated what would happen next: Nyx went utterly mad. I heard her growl like an animal as she thrashed beneath me. She brandished the heavy butt end of the whip like a club and caught me on the side of the head with it. Stars burst in front of my eyes, and I reeled back. Nyx was on her feet in an instant. The whip in her hand cracked again, the lash slapping viciously into the dirt beside me as I rolled frantically, half-blinded by the blow to my head. I tried to crawl, but Nyx slammed the whip across my back like a truncheon. Then again. And again.
How many nights had she lain awake, dreaming of the kind of revenge she would take on me for that moment in the arena? The moment when I’d ruined her life. I’m sure that’s how she’d framed it in her mind.
I’d thought, at the time, that I’d been trying to save her life.