“What happened to him?” I asked, a sudden knot constricting my throat.
“Marsh fever,” Kallista said. “Four summers ago it was very bad. It took my mother first. Then him. We were even going to take him over the mountains, back down to the Roman town to see if they could help him, but he was too weak.”
Quint’s brother had been alive only four years earlier, I thought.
The cages we’d seen hadn’t been used in far longer than that. Maybe Secundus had lived a freer life here among the Amazons than Quint had thought. Maybe even one touched by love. With a daughter he cared for . . . Looking at Kallista then, I could see the close resemblance to Quint and wondered why it hadn’t struck me before that moment. Maybe it was because I just hadn’t been looking for it, but she had the same tawny coloring, the freckles and gray-blue eyes. Maybe, under different circumstances, she would have even had something of his sense of humor.
I stood abruptly and held out my hand to the girl.
She looked up at me, frowning.
“Come with me,” I said. “There’s someone you should be properly introduced to.”
Quint was, unsurprisingly, still sitting beside Elka. Because, perhaps a bit more surprising, she was still sitting beside him. The fire he’d built was bright enough to illuminate Quint’s face clearly through the shimmering heat and bursts of sparks climbing upward into the night. I opened my mouth to make the proper introduction, but I didn’t get the words out of my mouth before I heard a soft gasp. I turned to see Kallista staring at her uncle.
She looked at him—really looked at him, without his helmet on his head or a sword at her throat, without the veil of fear that would have fogged her eyes on the path when she’d ambushed us with arrows and fish—and she knew. I heard her murmur the word “Father . . .” under her breath, and the knot that had closed up my throat got tighter.
Quint looked back and forth from me to the girl, a frown of confusion on his face. Inasmuch as he’d come here to assuage his own feelings for never having tried to save his brother, it seemed not to have dawned on Quint that he might find—if not his brother—someone else who shared his blood.
“Quintus, this is Kallista,” I said.
“Uh, the fish girl, yeah?” he said.
“Her father was the one who taught her to speak Latin, Quint.”
He blinked at me for a moment. “That’s nice . . .”
“Your brother, Quintus.”
“My . . .”
It still took him another long moment. As if what I was telling him was something he quite simply couldn’t wrap his mind around. And then, finally, his jaw drifted slowly open, and his gaze shifted to the girl standing at my side.
“You’re . . . My brother Secundus is your . . . father?”
“Was.” Kallista nodded, her eyes filling with tears. “He always told me you were the idiot brother . . .”
Quint choked on a sudden, strangled laugh. “He always told me that too.”
She bit her lip—to keep it from trembling, I suspected. “He missed you so much,” she said, her voice breaking. “He . . .”
Then Quint was up and hugging her, and Kallista collapsed into that embrace. I looked over to see that Elka was blinking rapidly at the exchange, the gleam of unshed tears rimming her eyes, and my heart clenched in my chest. We’d both caught the look on Quint’s face when he’d seen the empty cages in the cave at the head of the path. His hopes—whatever they’d been—had been dashed in that moment. Finding Kallista might just have redeemed the journey for him.
And then some.
Elka and I moved a discreet distance away, back to the other fire, to give uncle and newfound niece a chance to get better acquainted. Elka was silent for a while, poking at the charred wood with a stick, lost in thought.
“Family,” she murmured eventually. “It’s . . . something, ja? An important thing, I mean. Sometimes.”
“All times,” I said.
“For you, I guess.” She nodded her chin at Quint. “For him . . .”
“For you too.”
She raised a pale eyebrow at me over the flames.
“What do you think they are?” I gestured at the clusters of Achillea girls hunkered down in front of the fires on the other side of the clearing. “What do you think I am, you great thickheaded brute?”
“Besides a constant thorn in my shoe?” She grunted a laugh and then subsided back into silence, frowning. When she spoke again, it was with a shrug that I suspect was supposed to be casual but came off as more of a shudder. “I suppose you’re right.” She sighed. “Well . . . I guess it was nice while it lasted. Belonging to something and all that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You have your sister back, Fallon,” she said. “That’s what we came here to do. It’s over—the quest, the adventure . . . Now? We all go our separate ways.”
“What makes you say that?”
“What else is there for us to do? It was bad enough when we were just infamia. Now we’re outright rebel fugitives.”
“We are not.”
“We are.” She snorted in frustration at my stubbornness. “You can tell yourself another story if you like, little fox, but I’m the pragmatic one, remember?”
I snorted right back at her. “And were your pragmatic ears not listening back in Heron’s infirmary when I told you that, once we rescued Sorcha, we’d go back and retake the ludus?”
“Oh no, I was listening,” she said. “I just assumed you’d lost your mad little fox mind again.”
I shook my head and she tilted hers, regarding me warily.
“You were serious,” she said.
“Deadly.”
“Retake the ludus.”
“Mm-hm.”
“With what army?”
I opened my mouth, but found I had no immediate answer. Elka was right. I looked back over at our gladiatrix sisters. While we’d fared far better than our adversaries, we’d still collected an impressive degree of injuries. None of us had escaped without cuts and bruises of varying degrees. Neferet suspected Hestia might have a fractured bone in her wrist, and Anat had suffered an ugly shoulder burn when her shield had shattered during our fiery rush. Then there was Gratia, who kept telling everyone she was perfectly fine—even though it had taken more than a dozen stitches to close a deep gash on her thigh. I suspected the ample mead the Amazons had supplied before Neferet had begun stitching had gone a long way to influencing Gratia’s opinions of her own hurts.
Even before the fight, we’d been too few to win in a pitched battle against Nyx and Aquila’s contingent of gladiatrices and Dis warriors. The only thing going back to the ludus in our present state would achieve would be to land us in chains. And then, inevitably, in one of Pontius Aquila’s evil munera fights. I frowned and looked away from Elka, searching the darkness for the answer. My gaze drifted back over to where Kallista still sat with Quint, heads together, and then on past them to where the lights of the Amazon fires flickered through the trees just beyond the oppidum’s tumbled walls.
“We don’t need an army,” I said, responding, at last, to Elka’s question. “We need a war band.”