“For your own good—”
“And I know what he told you—”
“It’s blood, Fallon!”
“Like the blood you shared with Maelgwyn?” I scoffed. “That didn’t stop you from thrusting a knife through his heart!”
The minute the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. Aeddan’s face looked like I had just slapped him with an armored fist. I wished desperately that he would just go. Take what freedom he had and, once the ship docked, leave. Leave me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you expect from me, Aeddan—”
“Expect from you, Fallon?” His head snapped toward me, and his gaze burned where it fell on me. “I expect nothing. You’ve already taken everything from me that I could have ever hoped to offer. I have nothing. I am nothing. I have no tribe, no torc, no house . . . I have no brother—as you’ve so very graciously reminded me. No family. No honor. Thanks to you, Fallon ferch Virico, I’ve lost my very soul.”
“Then why do you stay? Why subject yourself to me like this?” I spat. “There’s a whole wide world out there. Leave, Aeddan.”
“That’s the irony of it.” He laughed bitterly. “I can’t. I’ve lost everything, and now, all I can do is make sure I don’t lose you. The one thing I could never have had in the first place. You can curse me, spit on me, ignore my warnings, and pretend I don’t even exist, but I will not leave you. I will do whatever I have to, to keep you safe. Because your safety, your life . . . your . . . you—the sum of all my nothings—is the only thing I have left.”
I stared at him, speechless and stunned.
“I expect nothing,” he murmured again, his gaze drifting from my face, unfocued. “But I’m not leaving.”
Silence descended between us, broken only by the snapping of the new sail overhead as it caught the wind and billowed full, and I realized in that moment that something I’d always accepted as truth was, in fact, a lie. Aeddan looked nothing like his brother. Nothing at all. I’d grown up thinking he and Mael were like two tapestries woven from the same threads. There were variations in the patterns, to be sure, but the similarities were far more striking than the differences. At least, that’s what I’d always thought. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Aeddan was nothing like his brother.
And, for some reason, that suddenly made it harder to keep on hating him for Mael’s death. An accident? No, it hadn’t exactly been that. The two of them had fought with every heated intention of ending the other. I knew the feeling—the red rage that descends in the middle of a fight, the blind driving need to kill, to win, at whatever the cost. For Aeddan, the cost had been his own blood.
Like he’d said of Cai and his father. Blood. Betrayal. I knew he was wrong about Varro. And I knew, in my heart, that even if he was right . . . Cai—brave, honest, honorable to a fault Cai—would do the right thing.
Whatever the “right thing” was.
XV
“SO YOU’RE NOT only a slave trader, you’re a smuggler as well.”
“A successful businessman knows how to diversify.”
Quint nodded in open appreciation of Charon’s honesty. Or possibly his methods. Predictably, the slave master had been right when he’d said that the Amazons weren’t going to like his plan for getting them through the city. Kallista and the others did not take particularly kindly to the means by which he would smuggle not only their weapons but the girls themselves north up the Via Clodia, straight to the gates of the Ludus Achillea.
The weapons were easy enough. Upon docking on the west bank of the Tiber, inside the walls of Rome, Charon’s men had procured a cage cart, like the one in which Elka and I had been transported through Gaul as slaves. Only this one had a false floor with shallow compartments beneath—just roomy enough to hide a wealth of unsuspected hardware—camouflaged beneath a layer of straw.
The girls, on the other hand, were to travel hidden in plain sight. Riding in the cage cart, iron slave collars around their throats, shackles and chains at their wrists and ankles. It had taken a great deal of convincing on my part to reassure them that they weren’t, in fact, being taken to a slave auction for sale. Kallista had extracted blood oaths and promises, and at one point, I think she even cast a looming curse-in-waiting on my head should circumstances ultimately prove I’d been lying.
Growing up in an Amazon tribe must have been rough, I decided.
But when Charon and I had first devised the scheme to infiltrate the Ludus Achillea by way of our new warriors, we’d given them all an even rougher history, in order to account for their delivery to the academy.
“I’ll tell Nyx that my suppliers sent word they’d picked up this pack of lovelies from a pirate brothel in Tunisia that burned down a few months back,” Charon proposed. “I’ll say I offered them for sale to the Lady Achillea and that they’re already bought and paid for. I’ll even have the bill of sale with Sorcha’s seal on it as proof”—he gestured to Sorcha—“of the bargain.”
She almost smiled as she cocked an eyebrow at him and reached down the front of her tunic for the seal that hung perpetually from a chain around her neck. I wondered why they hadn’t taken it from her when she’d been a captive, but then—according to Pontius Aquila’s lie, and so the world—Sorcha was dead. And the seal was of no use to anyone.
“Nyx is hardly going to refuse delivery,” Charon continued. “Especially not of a whole new feisty crop of potential munera fodder for her master. In fact, knowing how she operates, she’ll probably take credit for the whole deal.”
I eyed the Amazons over my shoulder, none of whom remotely resembled the only girl I’d ever known who actually was a brothel worker. Every single one of them looked far more likely to cut a man’s throat in a bedchamber than anything else.
“Do you really think Nyx will believe all that?” I asked.
Charon shrugged. “I suppose that will depend on whether she’s ever been to a Tunisian pirate brothel.”
“Fair enough.”
It was a risk, but then again . . . so was the whole damned plan.