“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.”