“I’m fine. I just haven’t been sleeping too well—”
“Then I’ll have my physician prepare you a draught before bed.” He put a hand up. “No arguments.”
All that being said, the senator turned and strode across the room, the matter clearly decided. As he pulled the oak doors shut behind him, I blinked at Cai in bewilderment. To be fair, he seemed a bit bemused himself, but he shook it off and held out a hand to me.
“Did I mention my father’s a bit overprotective?” He smiled ruefully.
I thought of my own father. Of how he’d been willing to marry me off to a boy I hadn’t loved just to keep me from becoming a warrior. To save me from myself. I supposed that I couldn’t really blame Varro.
I sighed and took Cai’s hand. “I know the feeling.”
He pulled me close and kissed my forehead.
“I don’t really look that bad, do I?” I asked when he lifted a hand to smooth my hair back from my face.
Cai laughed. “I think you look perfect,” he said. “But then, I’m hardly one to judge. According to my father, I’m halfway across the River Styx myself.”
I looked down at the stack of vellum on the scriptorium desk and picked up the stylus Cai had used to write the challenge to Pontius Aquila.
“Do you think your father will try to stop us?” I asked. “When he learns what we’re going to do?”
“He can try.” Cai shrugged. “But I don’t think he will. For all my father is a politician and a businessman, there’s one thing I know about him: He’s a man who hates injustice. I have a feeling that once he knows what’s really going on, he’ll be more than happy to do what he knows, in his heart, is the right thing.”
It was reassuring to hear his sentiment echo mine about Cai himself.
Kass and Aeddan could believe what they wanted.
I would believe in the good of the people I knew to be good. I felt a weight I hadn’t really realized I’d been carrying lift from my shoulders. There were still others heaped there, but that one, at least, was gone.
“Is what we’re planning here folly?” I asked, wondering—not for the first time—how in the wide world we were going to pull off such an audacious scheme and take back the ludus.
“Folly? Maybe.” Cai tilted my chin up so that I was looking into his eyes as he smiled at me. “Or maybe it’s just what you do. You fight, Fallon. And I’ll fight alongside you. We all will.”
“Of course we will.” I looked over to see Quintus poking his head through the doors the senator had just left through. “Was that the good Senator Varro I just saw storming off in the direction of the stables?” he asked.
“Aye.” Cai nodded. “Apparently, word of the ludus ‘rebellion’ traveled faster than winged Mercury and forestalled his journey to Greece.”
“That’s not going to become an impediment to our plans, is it?” Quintus frowned worriedly.
Cai shook his head. “I don’t think so. My father has a less than elevated opinion of the Tribune of the Plebs. As I told Fallon, I suspect that he’ll rather cheer us on in this endeavor.”
Something occurred to me then. “Cai . . .”
He turned to me.
“Don’t tell your father Sorcha still lives,” I said. “She’s our secret weapon. She needs to stay secret. None of this will work without her. And none of it will work if anyone even suspects that she still lives. If so much as a hint on the breeze drifts over the walls of the ludus and reaches Aquila’s ears, we’ll fail.”
Cai frowned, clearly at odds with the idea of deceiving his father—even if only through the act of omission—but I think he also knew I was right. We hadn’t even told Cai’s freedman servant, a boy named Actaeon, who delivered messages to and from when we sent him running to Charon’s. Where Sorcha remained, hidden away and safe, and—I imagined—restless and cranky.
“I understand,” Cai said. “I won’t say a word about your sister.”
? ? ?
The rest of the details of our plan—and the challenge—we were more than happy to share with Senator Varro. In fact, it was to our advantage to do so. For the past year, ever since the Quadruple Triumphs had ended and Caesar had left the city on campaign, there had been an increasingly clamorous demand for games. Distractions. The mob was easily bored, particularily in the wake of the Triumphs—an entire month of gruesome spectacle that had whetted their appetites for excitement and bloodshed.
Of course, the mob didn’t know about the Sons of Dis.
They only knew what they’d been told.
About me and my friends . . . about our so-called rebellion.
What we had to do was get them excited enough—without actually stirring them to fear or panic—so that we could use them as shield and surety against our arrest the second we stepped foot out in public again. So we’d circulated rumors that the renegade Victrix would present herself and her war band for judgment—in trial by combat—to the Tribune of the Plebs and his noble fighters. And there, in front of everyone, decide the matter as to just how guilty we were.
Then we had the announcements sent out.
Excitement in the city, or so I was told, was instantaneous. And fevered.
The senator, for his part, was instrumental in convincing other key members of the senate that this was a better—a safer—way of dealing with a rebel uprising than what had happened before with Spartacus. And it had the added benefit of distracting the mob from the current political situation. With the tacit agreement, then, of the men in power, spectator stands went up in the fields outside the ludus where, we’d been informed, Pontius Aquila had taken up residence. And we would be allowed to travel there in peace on the day of the challenge tournament. It set my teeth on edge to think of that despicable man living in the Lanista’s quarters, but I comforted myself with thoughts of all the frantic hammering and sawing of the carpenters building the makeshift arena just outside the wall. I sincerely hoped that it was keeping the gracious Tribune awake long into the night.
? ? ?
Finally, it was the day. Everything that could be done had been. All that was left was for us to show up. And fight. And win. I felt as though my nerves were threads of lightning sparking and flashing beneath my skin. My heart, full of thunder like a storm cloud. That evening, we would take back our home.
Or die trying.
Cai and Quint were at the stables with the gladiatrices, and Aeddan and I were on our way to meet them there. We strode down a long, light-filled corridor in a wing of the house I was less familiar with, Aeddan three paces ahead of me and as prickly and silent as ever. I knew we should make haste, but for reasons that escaped me, I found myself slowing as we approached a richly carved door made of ebony wood and silver. I’d never seen it open, but that day it was a handsbreadth ajar, and there was a flickering illumination spilling out from within. I couldn’t say why, but I was drawn to that light. I stopped in front of the door and, after a moment’s hesitation, pushed it slowly open.