“You were the one who pleaded with Caesar for my place as decurion!”
“So you could see for yourself firsthand what kind of monster he is.”
“Caesar doesn’t eat the hearts of his warriors!”
“No, he just turns them into useless lumps of quivering, fearful flesh.” Varro drew the sword that hung from his belt and took a step forward. “Get out of my way, Caius.”
“You know I won’t.”
“Then you’ll die.”
Cai’s father was a head taller than his son, and even though he’d been retired from legion duty for almost as long as Cai had been alive, he’d clearly lost none of his strength or prowess with a blade. But he’d also clearly never fought a gladiator before. Cai had. With two swords, as dimachaerus, all so that he could spar with me.
What I’d learned on the boat, and on Corsica, was that a legionnaire was drilled in such a way that attacks and defensive moves came automatically, without thought. Denizens of the arena were drilled to think on their feet. To improvise and innovate. Varro might have thought it was weakness to fight with such a lack of discipline. I knew, in certain situations, it was strength. Cai knew it too. He knew it so well that his father never even anticipated that, while one of Cai’s blades parried his hard-struck blow, the other was on its way to finding the side gap in his breastplate.
I watched in horror as, without the slightest hesitation, Cai thrust the blade between his father’s ribs. Right to the hilt. Varro’s eyes went wide and his mouth fell open in a silent gasp. The sword dropped from his hand and he reached for his son’s face.
“My son . . .” he murmured, his eyes clouding.
“You have no son,” Cai said, teeth clenched in a frightful grimace. “I renounce you, and your name, and your blood. I will not perform the rites for you, old man. I will not put coins for the Ferryman on your eyes. You go to Hades with no issue, no legacy, and no hope to ever walk the fields of Elysium beside my mother’s shade.”
Varro uttered a wordless, strangled sound of protest as Cai pushed him away and then stood, the sword in his left hand dripping red, to watch impassively as his father’s body slumped in a heap on the ground. When Cai turned to me, there was no sadness in his eyes. No more remorse or grief. Only a slow-fading fury.
“Fallon . . .”
He strode toward me, dropping to his knees, to take me by the shoulders.
“Fallon, can you speak? Are you all right?”
I nodded, still retching and gasping for breath. The dark umbra at the edges of my vision made it seem like I was looking up at him through a portal, and I still wasn’t able to talk. But I could stand. And I could fight.
“Give . . . give me my swords, Cai,” I managed finally in an ugly rasp as I staggered to my feet with his help. I could still feel his father’s hands around my throat, crushing the life out of me. “I’m going to finish this.”
“We’ll finish this together,” he said.
He pulled me close and bent his head to mine, kissing me hard on the lips. Then, without a second glance at the body on the ground, he retrieved my swords from where I’d dropped them when Varro had winded me with the pitchfork. He handed them to me, and together, we advanced toward the main gates of the ludus.
Leaving his father, and his father’s hate, far behind.
? ? ?
We headed back to where Quint and Kallista waited with the others.
“What happened to Varro’s men?” I asked.
Quint snorted. “Seems these girls really were spoiling for a fight,” he said. “All of them.”
Damya grinned. “I like them,” she said. “Where’d you find them?”
“I’ll tell you all about it when we’re done,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Swiftly, silently, we made our way to the main yard of the compound. There, we prepared for what I hoped would be the final act in the drama. The sounds of clashing weapons drifted back over the walls, but the ludus was almost entirely deserted. Pontius Aquila had turned out all his fighters, and he himself sat beneath a torchlit awning, high on a constructed platform that extended out from the guardwalk that topped the ludus walls. The platform was decorated in such a way that you could be forgiven for thinking it was Caesar himself who sat there. Even from that distance, I could see Aquila was surrounded by a crowd of fatuous, fawning men dressed in voluminous togas, and flanked by armed guards dressed head to toe in black. Their collective attention was wholly focused on the fighting that took place down below. I squinted past the fading spots that still clouded my vision and saw Aeddan was up there too, standing off to one side and dressed in the black garb of the Dis warriors. Clearly Aquila still trusted him. I wondered how Aeddan could stand being that close to the man.
I wondered even more how Tanis could.
She stood there, bow in her hand and a quiver on her back, dressed in black armor, and a wave of bitter disappointment swept over me. She truly was lost to us, and her betrayal of the ludus was my fault. I’d failed her.
I would not fail the others.
I glanced over my shoulder and saw that Damya and the Achillea girls had formed up behind Cai; the Amazons, behind Quint. In front of us, the main courtyard lay open to sky, with nothing and no one to come between us and the gates, which stood wide that night, a testament to Aquila’s arrogance. Then again, how much arrogance was it, really, when his forces clearly outnumbered ours?
Or so he thought.
I was also fairly certain Aquila expected that the moment “Victrix” succumbed to the perilous combination of Nyx’s vicious onslaught and the hemlock Varro had supposedly been dosing me with, the Achillea warriors would lose all heart and either flee the field or be cut down like wheat before the scythe.
But he was about to be disappointed.
And it was Nyx who would falter. That, I swore to the Morrigan.
I signaled to Cai and Quint, and, together, we all moved out. Keeping to the cover of the shadows beneath the walls, I led my gang of stealthy warriors to the open, beckoning gates. Signaling them to wait, I peered around, spying through the crack between the great oak doors and their enormous bronze hinges.
Nyx’s back was to the ludus. The timing couldn’t have been better.
I stepped into the empty archway.
The warriors at my back followed.
Sorcha saw us standing there, framed by the yawning maw of the gates, like the Morrigan’s own war band, loosed from our bonds in the Lands of the Blessed Dead and sent forth to exact the goddess’s vengeance on the unworthy. Sorcha raised her sword in that moment and backed off. I suspected that Nyx was already furious and frustrated at not having been able to kill “me” yet, and that must have only added to her confusion. She wasn’t alone.
The crowd expressed their confusion and displeasure right along with her.