I shook my head, fuzzy with confusion, but that just made me dizzy.
“You’ve been feverish and delirious for two days now,” he explained. “Almost three. But thanks to Neferet and Ajani, your fever has broken.”
Ah, I thought. That explains the scent.
Neferet had Heron’s training, and Ajani was skilled at mixing salves and unguents. Together, the two of them must have treated the stab wound Nyx had given me. Now that I was aware of it, I could actually feel a cooling sensation all along my flank, under a linen bandage. And the tightness of stitches. Heron’s medical bag had already been put to use. I was only sorry I was the one who’d necessitated it.
“They tell me you’re going to be all right,” Cai continued, his expression turning stern. “No thanks to your own damned stubbornness, I should say. You should have told me you were hurt.”
I struggled to sit up, feeling as if I was waking from a long sleep fraught with strange dreams. My limbs felt soft, but my head was beginning to clear. And I was very thirsty. I grabbed with both hands for the cup of watered wine that Cai lifted from the table beside the cot I lay upon. I gulped at it like it was the finest vintage, not the thin, sour mixture that it was. I finished it and handed the cup back, looking around the dimly lit room.
“Where am I?” I blurted.
“You’re a guest in my humble abode,” rumbled a voice from the shadows beyond the foot of the bed.
My mouth fell open as Arviragus stepped into the circle of lamplight.
“And believe me when I say that I’m just as surprised as you.”
No shade, but the man himself. Real as life and just as impossible.
Not a ghost. Not my imagination. Alive . . .
I felt the prick of tears as Cai made way for him to sit on the edge of the cot. I hugged Arviragus with all the strength I had—not very much at all—and he wrapped his great long arms around me, smoothing my hair as I wept into his shoulder.
“I thought you were dead,” I sobbed.
“I was, dear girl,” he murmured. “I was.”
I looked up into his face. “What happened?” I asked. “After Caesar’s Triumphs . . . I thought . . .”
“Yes, well.” He snorted. “It seems the fearsome old general had a change of heart. Couldn’t bear to rid himself of his best enemy after all.”
“I can hardly believe that of Caesar.”
“I can.” Arviragus shrugged. “In fact, I think it’s very much in character for him. So long as the world thinks I’m dead, it harms Caesar not at all to let me live and, indeed, assuages that small, deep corner of his soul that rebelled against the massacre of so many of my people. A tyrant has to find ways to live with himself. Leaving me alive was one of Caesar’s, even if that life wasn’t much of a step above death. That is, until you and your gaggle of gladiatrices arrived.”
I swallowed the tightness in my throat. Arviragus alive was a comfort I hadn’t expected. Not after everything that had happened. “Did Cai tell you of . . . ?”
“Sorcha?” The sorrow in his gaze was a deep as his compassion. He nodded. “I have made sacrifice to the goddess for her safe journey.”
He held my hand quietly until the storm of my grief passed over me again and I was able to look him in the eyes once more.
“What madness led you here, Fallon, of all places?” he asked.
“You did. You were my madness.”
I explained how his apparition had goaded me from my cell and, later, led me through the streets of Rome, and Arviragus shook his head in wonderment. “The Morrigan’s will is a very strange thing sometimes,” he said.
“Strange, perhaps,” Cai said. “But in this case, fortuitous.”
I looked up at him.
“I doubt we would have made it past the city at all if we’d kept to our original plan,” he explained. “The vigiles were already looking for us within hours of us coming to this place. They would have most likely caught up to us on the road south to Neapolis if we’d stayed that course.”
Vigiles, I thought. Rome’s watch guard. “News travels that fast?” I asked.
He nodded. “We must have missed a saddle or a chariot. Or one of the guards rode bareback to send word. But word has definitely reached the local constabulary. They’re said to be on the lookout for a band of escaped renegade gladiatrices from the Ludus Achillea, led by none other than Caesar’s darling Victrix herself. And as we all know—”
“The Roman mob has not forgotten Spartacus,” I said with a sigh.
“You’ve been branded a rebel and the leader of rebels.” Cai shook his head in disgust. “That makes you a political liability for Caesar. It’ll take a while for word to reach him of that, but when it does . . .”
“How do you know all this?”
“I have a friend, remember? One who is privy to the secrets of the city. And its men of power.” Cai poured another cup of watered wine and handed it to me. “I sent word to Kass about what had happened and asked her if she had any insights into our situation.”
Kassandra, I remembered. She had been kind to me—rescued me, really—on more than one occasion. A brothel slave, she was also a secret informant for Julius Caesar. A dangerous profession—in both respects—but she somehow managed to navigate that world with grace.
“What did she have to say?” I asked.
“She gave me the political lay of the land, and we’re in more trouble than I thought.” Cai sighed bleakly and I waited for him to continue. “There is a deep unrest brewing in the Republic, Fallon. The Optimates—the men Caesar is fighting right now—and the Populares, the ones who support him in this war . . . they are the public face of the conflict. The two major factions in the power struggle that everyone sees and knows. But, according to Kass, it is the Sons of Dis and those like them who are the monstrous visage lurking beneath.”
“The blade cuts both ways,” Arviragus mused. “The political climate is the very reason why men like Aquila suddenly feel they have the kind of agency to promote things like the Sons of Dis and get away with it. Public perception is everything to the Roman mind.”
Cai nodded. “And people like you and Sorcha, Fallon—the champions of Caesar, his stars of the arena, and favorites of the plebs—you’re only pawns in a much greater game here. A distraction and a bargaining chip, both.”
“And in Aquila’s twisted mind, a source of arcane power,” I said, looking down at my arm, where the cuts he’d made were healing, slowly becoming the thin white scars I would carry so long as I lived. “Let’s not forget that.”
Cai shifted uncomfortably at the thought, but nodded. “Yes,” he said. “In his mind. And the minds of his followers.”
“And now Sorcha’s dead because of it,” I said, crushing the renewed swell of agony that saying those words caused me. “Forget Aquila’s sick agenda. Even if he were to vanish from the earth right now—and what a pleasant thought that is—the way things stand, we’re going to have to find a way to clear our names. All of us. Or we’ll all live as fugitives for the remainder of our days. Numbered as they are.”