I was dressed in a simple tunic provided by the ludus. An ugly, shapeless thing stitched of undyed linen and belted with a plain leather belt. It was indistinguishable from the ones Elka and the other new arrivals wore. And distinguishing oneself, I soon learned, was at least as important in the arena as winning.
Meriel made an exaggerated show of waiting patiently as I retrieved my weapon and held it at the ready again. The wooden blade trembled only a little in my hand, but the small round wicker practice shield strapped to my left wrist felt heavy as iron as I lifted it into position. Meriel circled to my left, threatening with her trident, the net held down by her side. I’d never fought against such weapons before, and I thought they were ridiculous—more suited to a fishing skiff than an arena. I didn’t know how to defend against them.
Maybe I didn’t have to. Why defend when all I had to do was attack?
My sister Sorcha’s voice echoed in my mind: “Weapon or target . . . Choose, Fallon!”
Weapon.
With a snarl, I ducked low beneath the whistling swipe of Meriel’s trident and, with a distinctly un-defensive move, batted it from her fist with the edge of my shield. The tactic would have left me wide open for a thrust, except that her spear was tumbling through the air and landed far from her reach.
Now I have a weapon, and she doesn’t—
Wrong. The net in her other hand whipped forward like a living extension of her arm. The lead weights at its corners stung painfully as the thing tangled around my legs and I went down in a heap for a second time. I was angry enough to beat Meriel. I just wasn’t strong enough.
She snorted. “You’ll never win a bout the way you fight.”
I bit back a retort and kicked at the hemp snare.
“At least you bruise pretty colors, gladiolus,” Meriel said, snapping the net out from under me with a flick of her wrist, leaving stripes of angry purple welts on my legs. “That ought to get the crowd’s attention. Assuming you ever make it to a real arena.”
She grinned and bent down to pick up her trident and, slinging it over her shoulder, walked away. Whistling.
The crowd of other girls broke up and went back to their own practice, all except Nyx. In the short time I’d been at the Ludus Achillea, I’d noticed that she seemed to be the nominal leader among a group of the academy’s “veteran” students. Veterans like Meriel. We were of a similar age, I reckoned, and from what I’d heard in passing, I knew Nyx had been virtually raised at the academy from the time she was nine years old, an orphan of Greek peasants killed in a tribal raid.
As one of the senior gladiatrices, she often acted as a kind of lieutenant to Thalestris, drawing up sparring-partner lists and scheduling drills, and so far, on her watch, I’d faced off against most of the academy’s toughest fighters—even in my less than optimal condition. By comparison, the other girls who’d arrived only a few weeks earlier than me hadn’t even really started sparring yet. They were still doing basic strength and agility drills, facing off mostly against practice dummies. It was either a testament to my obvious if rusty skills . . . or an attempt to cull the weakest member of the herd.
Nyx leaned against a practice post, arms crossed, watching me as I climbed wearily to my feet. Her expression was unreadable. I couldn’t tell if she was mocking me or not, but I decided to find out. I took a step toward her, but Thalestris appeared in that moment, stalking back and forth across the yard with her wooden staff in hand, and I wasn’t about to bring that kind of trouble down on my head. Nyx had an ally in Thalestris, and one of the first things I’d developed on arrival at the Ludus Achillea was a healthy respect for its chief fight mistress.
The girls of the Ludus Achillea had paired off again and returned to sparring. I watched them for a moment, all so different and yet each one the same—each one striving to be the shining star in the arena—and I knew I’d been right when I’d first suspected that the ludus “sisterhood” might be a treacherous sea to navigate. Meriel, with her sea god’s trident, was a painful reminder of that. Back in Durovernum, I’d had the luxury of choosing whom I fought against, but that was clearly no longer an option. I headed toward the weapons storage building so that I could maybe find a throwing spear or a bow to practice solo with.
But I knew that eventually I was either going to have to face my fellow ludus-mates head-on or curl up like a hedgehog and let them kick me around the pitch.
Weapon or target, my sister always said.