Leander shook his head.
I felt a touch on my shoulder as Cai stepped up beside me. “What makes you think the Lanista is still alive?” he asked, his fingers tightening, as if he expected I might try to carve answers out of Leander’s flesh in chunks.
“Because Thalestris wants more than just her death,” Leander said. “She wants blood vengeance.”
Why? I wondered. For what? And then, in the next breath I knew.
Even as Leander said it out loud: “Vengeance for the death of her sister.”
I released Leander and stepped back, reeling.
Suddenly it all made sense. Thalestris wasn’t just a pawn in Aquila’s game. She’d been playing her own all along. I remembered the day I’d found the crow nailed to my door and had been convinced Nyx had been behind the evil prank. Even when she’d denied knowing anything about it. But Thalestris had been there, as I’d cleaned the blood from my door, and she’d told me how it was a warning I should heed. For Sorcha’s sake.
“Think on this,” she told me, “it would break the Lanista’s heart if she were to lose her beloved sister. Believe me. I know.”
It had broken Thalestris’s.
In the wake of the fateful battle that claimed her sister Orithyia’s life and secured my sister’s place as Lanista of the Ludus Achillea, Thalestris had donned a mask of forgiveness—of dearest friendship, even—but deep down, she’d harbored an implacable revenge for years.
Nurtured it, fed it and coaxed it to grow . . . and I understood.
I’d spent years of my life thinking my sister was dead. I could still feel the coal of hatred that had burned in my heart for Caesar, the man I’d thought responsible for her death. But how Thalestris had managed to hide her true feelings from Sorcha for so long . . . that was impossible for me to understand. My sister’s primus pilus and closest confidante, she could have killed Sorcha a thousand times in a thousand ways. In a sparring bout, in the dead of night, with a draught of poison . . . but no.
She wanted her broken.
Suddenly, I understood. Sorcha would know, before she died, that Thalestris had killed her dreams too. Her fight for the freedom of the Achillea gladiatrices—a dream that Thalestris had so very maliciously delivered into the grasping hands of Pontius Aquila. Along with Sorcha’s baby sister. Me.
The ultimate act of poetic vengeance.
I turned back to Leander. “How do you know all this?”
“One of the advantages of being a slave, domina.” He grinned bitterly. “No one ever thinks you’re listening.”
“I’m listening now,” I said and lowered my sword.
“When Nyx was sold to Aquila before the Triumphs,” he said, “I packed a cart with her gear while she and Thalestris talked. About you, domina, and about the Lady Achillea. Nyx was furious. She felt betrayed, she said. Thalestris told her not to worry—that Nyx would soon have her revenge on you . . . and that she would have her revenge on the lady.”
In his time at the ludus—sweeping, serving, bending his head, and averting his eyes—Leander must have heard, and seen, a great deal. I remembered then that the night Nyx had led me and Elka and Lydia to that cursed Bacchanale at the Domus Corvinus, it had been Leander who’d procured the key to the door to let us sneak out. And I remembered something else. He’d been whipped for it.
“You never told anyone what they said?” I asked. “You never told Sorcha?”
“I thought at the time that it was just talk.” He shook his head, and I could see genuine regret in his eyes. “Nothing but talk. I forgot about it almost as soon as I heard it, just like most things.”
“Why didn’t you say anything about the Lanista’s abduction earlier?” Cai asked. “That was far more than just talk.”
“Because Thalestris didn’t just give me coins.” Leander turned to him. “She also gave me a promise. She said she’d kill me if I so much as breathed a word of what I saw that night. She told me she would find me—hunt me down wherever I was—and split me open to spill my guts for the vultures. She was very convincing.”
I fought against the surging tide of desperate hope that swept over me. If I was to help my sister—save her—then I had to keep my wits about me. Listen to your head, not your heart, I could almost hear her say. Truth before hope. Strategy before passion.
“Aeddan—did you know Thalestris was still alive?”
He shook his head. “Pontius Aquila may have trusted me enough to think I wouldn’t turn against him, but that doesn’t exactly mean he considered me a close confidant. I didn’t know it was the Amazon who was working with him, and I saw nothing of what happened to her, or your sister, on the night of the ludus attack.”
I turned back to Leander. “Did she say anything else? Thalestris?”
Leander nodded. “When she was dragging the Lanista out through the kitchen—before she saw that I was awake—she was ranting. Laughing to herself and saying how she would take the Lanista away and make her pay. That she would sacrifice her to the goddess of the Amazons under the light of the Huntress Moon. How spilling of her blood would make their tribe mighty again. I think she has gone mad, domina. The goddess Nemesis has infected her mind.”
Maybe so. But at the very least, Sorcha was still alive. There was still a chance.
“Huntress Moon . . . the next full moon,” I turned back to Cai and the others, looking from face to face, unable in the wake of my fever to even think for myself what day of the week it was. “When is that? Does anyone know—”
“Fifteen days,” Neferet said. “Lucky for Achillea, there’s still time.”
“Depending on where Thalestris has taken her,” I said. “Leander?”
“Right . . .”
“Where?”
He nodded and held up a hand, and I could see him struggling to remember. The muscles of his throat worked as he swallowed hard, concentrating. “Corsica!” he said finally. “They’ve sailed to the island of Corsica.”
In the middle of the Mare Nostrum, I thought. And I felt my heart sink like a ship in those deep waters that I had no way to cross.
IX
I HEARD QUINT groan and looked over to see a pained expression on his face.
“Quintus?” Cai asked.
He sighed. “I was afraid he was going to say that.”
I remembered then that Cai had told me Quint was from Corsica. I struggled to remember what else I knew about the place, and the only thing that came to mind was something Cai had told me as the slave transport ship we were on sailed past the island, on that long-ago day when I’d been on my way to being sold in the marketplace of Rome.
He’d told me then that Corsica was inhabited mostly by . . . what was it? Right. I remembered: “Sheep. Bees. A few ill-tempered natives too intractable even to be useful as slaves.” That sounded like a fairly accurate representation of a tribe of Amazons . . .
“Why ‘afraid,’ Quint?” I asked.