“It’s not for them. It’s for you,” Cai said, grabbing me by the shoulders and making me look at him. “Perhaps we’re not too late . . .”
“Too late for what?”
“The hemlock.”
“Cai—”
“Aeddan, find something she can sit down on.”
Aeddan heaved at the marble altar, tipping it over on its side. It fell heavily, and the scales and feather hit the floor with a crash.
“Cai! Aeddan—stop!” I shrugged out of Cai’s grip as he tried to make me sit. “Antonia, stay here!”
They froze, all of them staring at me as if I might shatter.
“I’m fine,” I said.
Antonia frowned. “But the hemlock—”
“I didn’t drink any hemlock.” I snorted. “The senator’s physician sent a cup of wine to my room every night to help me sleep. But I had such terrible dreams the first night, I just kept pouring the stuff out the window.”
Cai looked at me. “You didn’t drink the wine.”
I shrugged. “I didn’t want to seem rude.”
He laughed and hugged me fiercely.
“I’ve decided I’ll stick to good old Prydain beer,” I said, my voice muffled by his chest. “You Romans put too many strange things in your drink.”
Cai let go of me, grinning. “All right,” he said. “We’ll celebrate with a great foaming vat of the stuff when this is all over, but now it’s past time we left this place.”
He moved swiftly to the single door that led back out into the house and cracked it open, checking to see if there were any of the domus slaves about. It seemed the way was clear.
“Wipe the blood from your sandals on that one’s cloak,” he said, pointing to one of the dead vigiles. “Let’s go.”
Before we left the room, I put a hand on his arm. “Cai? I’m sorry about your father,” I said.
“No.” He shook his head, but I could see the anger—and the heartbreak—in his gaze. “I’m the one who should be sorry, Fallon. I should have believed Kass. And I damned well should have told you of her suspicions. Instead, I let my love for my father blind me, and I led us all into danger. Aeddan was right.”
I glanced at Aeddan, who looked back at me, a grim vindication in his eyes.
“You knew he knew?”
“He came to me when we first arrived here. I didn’t want to listen at first. But he was right.” Cai nodded at him. “And loyal. He sent for me first before going to get those thug Sons of Dis just now.” He looked back at the dead men on the floor. “I’m just glad I was with Antonia when he found me—she’s a walking weapon.”
Antonia threw him a casual salute with her nonweaponized hand as she finished cleaning the blood from her crescent blade.
“At any rate,” he continued, “so long as my father thinks Aeddan is still loyal to their order, then that’s an advantage we have. He might be able to get close to Aquila, and that might prove useful.”
The thought of getting anywhere near Pontius Aquila sent a chill through me, but he was right. And I owed Aeddan an apology when everything was said and done. Several, perhaps.
Cai slipped out through the ebony door into the corridor beyond and we followed him as he ran, heading in the direction of the stables, where the rest of my fellow gladiatrices waited with horses saddled and a gilded war chariot hitched up and at the ready. Elka grinned as she held out a full kit of armor that was an exact duplicate of the ceremonial Victrix gear I’d worn during Caesar’s Triumphs.
“Charon’s doing?” I asked.
She nodded. “The man has definite connections in the artisans’ guilds.”
Then she and Gratia helped me armor up. There would be no mistaking who I was as we rode through the city and north on the Via Clodia. All the way to the gates of the Ludus Achillea. Our destination, and our destiny.
As we rode, we fanned out in a V formation: Victrix in her chariot, followed by two wild-geese wings of fellow warriors, mounted on noble steeds, helmet crests tossing, cloaks flowing out behind us, weapons and armor gleaming. We presented a magnificent spectacle, worthy of the marble frieze that graced the main gates of the ludus, as we rode through the crowds that had lined the city streets, expecting us.
They parted before our horses like long grass before a storm gale.
And they were cheering.
Cai had the reins of my chariot and he drove, bareheaded and standing tall, his face set in a stern expression. I rode bareheaded too, standing behind him with my feet braced wide. I carried my helmet in the crook of my arm and left my hair unbound to stream behind me. The crowd recognized me instantly from my victories and threw laurel sheafs beneath the hooves of my chariot ponies. Some of them recognized Cai as the handsome young decurion who’d leaped the barrier to sweep me off my feet in a passionate kiss after my Triumphal win. If they’d thought before that the Achillea gladiatrices were rebels after the fashion of Spartacus—an unruly band to be feared and hated—that impression vanished in that instant. I could feel it.
We weren’t rebels or renegades.
We were defiant heroes, on our way to reclaim what was ours.
And once we got there, we’d give them a show they’d never forget. As we traveled up the Via Clodia, the crowd followed, swelling with each mile, a festival parade. When we arrived, the mob that had gathered in the fields and in the stands, beneath the striped awnings and banners snapping in the evening breeze, roared mad approval. The closer we got to the arena, the more I could feel the bloodlust that fogged the air, thicker than I’d ever tasted it. Even during the Triumphs. It pressed against my skin and made me feel, for a moment, like I was suffocating. The mob was the only reason we’d been able to engineer this challenge, but they were not why I was fighting. Not who I was fighting for. I was fighting for the girls I rode with. I was fighting with them.
This fight was for no one but us.
Another wave of shouts and cheers went up, echoing off the distant hills and shaking the very walls of the Ludus Achillea in front of us. Pontius Aquila would have no choice but to send out most, if not all, of his gladiators—male and female. If he and his fighters stayed hemmed in behind those walls, I had little doubt the mob would storm the ludus in outrage at being denied their bloody spectacle. At the very least, he and Nyx and his whole Amazona contingent would become little more than a laughingstock. There would be no more munera for the Sons of Dis—not from Aquila at any rate—and he would lose any influence he wielded in the political circles of the Republic. I smiled to myself grimly. The mob didn’t know it, but they were our most powerful weapon in rendering the Sons of Dis powerless. They might very well achieve their desired bloodshed this night, but I swore to the Morrigan, it would not be in the way they expected.