Ixion shuffled through Thalestris’s keys until he found the one he wanted—a heavy black thing that looked like a claw—and inserted it in the lock. It uttered a groaning screech as he turned it, and the door swung ponderously open. He reached over, grabbed me by the shoulder, and wordlessly shoved me inside. I stumbled down another few shallow steps, gritting my teeth at the pain in my side, which had gone from dull throbbing to a searing burn. In the darkness, all I could see was a brief black corridor ahead, like a yawning maw waiting to swallow me. It terminated in a tiny cell, with a cage of bars for a door. My heart in my throat, I glanced over my shoulder at Ixion.
“I always wanted to lock one of you upstart bitches away to rot here in Tartarus,” Ixion said, grinning. “Bloody shame this place was never made proper use of while Achillea was in charge.”
Tartarus. Named after the mythical underworld dungeon.
I’d almost thought it was just a rumor. A thing to frighten the less tractable girls at the ludus into better behavior. Sorcha had never found the need to use Tartarus on anyone—not even Nyx—as a punitive measure. Not even me. Ixion reached for another key hanging on the wall outside the cell and opened the barred door. Wordlessly, he gestured me inside.
It was cold and dank, the air stale and heavy. The walls were rough-hewn stone, the floor dirt, and there was a single, tiny barred window smaller than my head set near the low ceiling that looked out onto a forgotten, weedy enclosure behind the stables. What used to be the stables.
Ixion pulled the cage door shut with a clang and hung the key back up, turning on his heel to disappear without a word. When he closed the outer door, I felt the tiny, tearing claws of panic begin to climb upward from the pit of my stomach, savaging the back of my throat. I swallowed hard to force the bile back down and shook my head to clear it.
First things first, Fallon, I thought.
Light from the guttering flames of the dying stable fire filtered through the tiny window, and in the dim orange glow, I pulled back my cloak and peered at the blood-soaked fabric of my sleeping tunic with a kind of shocked detachment. The tear in the material was small and neat—just the size of Nyx’s knife blade—and I had to tear it and make it larger so I could get a good look at the wound she’d made.
Another small, neat hole. In my flesh.
I’d been wounded before—cuts, bruises, all manner of hurts that had healed and left the marks on my skin that Cai had so deliciously mapped earlier that night—and I knew that the immediate order of business was to stanch the flow of blood that still oozed. I didn’t know how deep Nyx’s blade had pierced or whether she had damaged anything vital. If that was the case—if there was organ damage—I was probably already dead and just didn’t know it. But I wasn’t coughing blood, and that was a good sign. I lifted the hem of my cloak and, with fumbling cold fingers, tore off a wide strip. Then I carefully bound that as tightly as I could about my torso, wrapping it as many times as it would go and securely tucking in the loose end. I was sweating and panting by the time I was finished.
But I wasn’t dead. And I wasn’t giving up.
Brave thoughts, as I wavered and leaned against the wall, sliding down to sit on the dirt floor, my knees tucked up for warmth. My eyelids drifted shut, and I don’t know how long I stayed like that, a knotted lump of misery crouched in the darkness, before I heard a noise.
I looked up to see Pontius Aquila standing on the other side of the cage door. A single torch burned in a sconce on the wall, reflected in his dark gaze that was fixed upon me, unblinking. I don’t know how long he’d been standing there, but when my gaze met his, he smiled—a reptilian stretching of his thin lips, devoid of warmth.
“There she is,” he said. “My genius of the arena sands. My goddess muse of the blade and shield . . .”
I remembered back to the day I’d been sold in the Forum of Rome. When Sorcha had offered an exorbitant sum in order to wrest me from Aquila’s clutches. I hadn’t even known who—what—he was that day. I’d only known that I’d been instinctively, profoundly grateful that his bid had not won. I’d given thanks to the Morrigan and thought that she’d accepted it. That she’d shown me favor. Why then did the goddess see fit to punish me with this fate now?
Why take Sorcha from me and give me back to him?
“You’re my Victrix now.” Aquila took a step toward the bars, his eyes fever-bright.
Victrix. The name I’d borne so proudly since the Triumphs.
Was that it? I wondered. Had the Morrigan forsaken me because I’d pledged my warrior’s gifts in service to Caesar? To the enemy? I’d sought only to bring honor on the ludus. On my sister and myself. To help fulfill Sorcha’s dream of creating a place where the girls I’d fought and bled with could choose for themselves the lives they wanted to lead. That I’d had to make a deal with Caesar to do it shouldn’t have mattered, should it? I refused to believe that the goddess would consider him somehow more abhorrent than the man who stood before me . . . holding something in his hand. I squinted against the darkness to see what it was, and my blood ran cold in my veins. Between his manicured fingertips, Aquila held a single, slender feather wrought in silver. It gleamed red in the torchlight.
“What did you see?” Pontius Aquila’s voice was soft and breathless with genuine curiosity. “That night, at my domus. What did you see, little raven?”
What had I seen? The memory of that night, even twisted and distorted by a swirling fog of mandrake wine, was burned into my soul. Ajax, the gladiator, lying on the stone table in the underground cavern. Men in feathered masks crowding around his split-open carcass, greedily devouring the heart that had beat so strongly within his chest only a handful of moments earlier. It must have still been warm as they put it on the scales dish to weigh it against a silver feather.
The same silver feather that Pontius Aquila held up for me to see. I shrank back from it, pressing myself into the farthest corner of the cell as he ran the feather back and forth across the bars of my cage. The metallic edge made a sound like strumming the strings of an out-of-tune lyre.
“Caesar doesn’t know what he has in you,” Aquila said. “If he did, he never would have given you the chance to win your freedom. Not even the glimmer of that hope. No. He is a fool. I am no fool. I see you. I see your spirit. The power you have . . .” His voice stretched tight and thin as he spoke, skirling higher with a kind of feverish intensity. “The touch of your blood goddess on your soul . . . I can see her mark on you. You were born to kill, Fallon ferch Virico . . .”
The shock of hearing my full royal name on Aquila’s tongue filled me with a revulsion that must have shown on my face. Aquila took a step back from the cage bars, a sheen of sweat on his brow. He took a slow breath in through flaring nostrils, and his mouth quirked upward in an ugly smile.
“You’re surprised that I know your name,” he said. “I know all about you. More, perhaps, than you even know about yourself. I know how powerful you are . . .” He ran the feather back and forth across the bars of my cage again, drawing discordant music from the delicate silver thing. “And when you die,” he continued, “I will take that power and I will make it my own.”