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 and 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.