Elka and I and the five other new recruits entered through the archway, dressed in identical white linen tunics and belts and sandals. We wore our hair unbound and our faces unpainted. All the other girls—full-fledged gladiatrices—waited for us, dressed in the same white tunics, but the resemblances ended there. Over the course of innumerable bouts in arenas large and small, scattered throughout Rome and the surrounding countryside, each of the girls had accumulated trophies and keepsakes and ornaments. Not surprisingly, there was an abundance of weapons and armor. The gladiatrices of the Ludus Achillea wore them proudly that night, as badges of well-deserved honor.
I looked around at all the swords, daggers, tooled-leather wrist bracers and greaves, and armored girdles and breastplates decorated with symbols and scenes. Some of the girls wore torcs about their necks, like the one I’d left in the embers of my hearth fire back home, and some wore no jewelry at all but had painted the skin of their bodies with swirling designs or had woven feathers and beads into their hair.
There were seven of us being formally inducted into the ludus that night, and we wore nothing to distinguish us.
We hadn’t earned that yet.
The intoxicating scent of stone pine incense drifted through the indigo night as we walked out into the circle of torches. I recalled the same scent from the gladiatrix graveyard, and I remembered the anonymous, snickering disdain I’d heard mixed in with the sounds of weeping that night. I wondered fleetingly if Ismene had made more friends here than enemies before she’d died.
Will I?
I stopped myself from reaching up to touch the raven feather I’d tied into my hair before leaving my cell. The thing had become almost a talisman to me. In the darkness a war horn sounded, like the Morrigan herself blowing her bronze carnyx, and I felt the cold finger of fate trace up my spine. As the shrill, shimmering notes died to silence, we stood, shoulder to shoulder, facing the ranks of gladiatrixes we would soon join.
Beneath the training-ground portico, I could see a group of men sitting in carved wooden chairs, speaking in low tones, aristocratic heads bent together. Dignitaries and lanistas from other ludi invited for the occasion, they would be entertained with a lavish feast in the ludus guest residences afterward. I recognized one of the men who stood there, the one with the silver hair and hawkish features that they had called the Collector. He’d tried to purchase Elka and me at the auction, and had stormed off after being outbid by the Lanista. He looked even more unhappy now than he did then, and he seemed to be actively trying to avoid another man in the gathering.
I’d seen enough of his stone likenesses scattered around Rome to guess his identity from his torchlit profile, but even if I hadn’t, I would have known him instantly. Here was a man who wore power like a cloak, effortlessly, comfortably. The thrill I felt at having been chosen to swear the oath conflicted with the raw dread of knowing just who, exactly, I was swearing my oath to. Gaius Julius Caesar, proconsul of Rome, the great dictator himself, had come to the ludus to attend the oath swearing of his newest crop of thorny wildflowers.
At his side sat a woman, Caesar’s mistress—although none dared call her so out loud—the Aegyptian queen, Cleopatra. Her slender frame was draped in the soft folds of a snowy-white cloak, the hood pulled up so that I couldn’t see much of her face. But when she laughed at something Caesar said, it sounded like the chiming of silver bells. I found myself craning my neck to try and catch a better glimpse of her, wondering what kind of woman could so enthrall the most powerful man in the world.
Standing off to one side of the aristocratic gathering were several soldiers, Caesar’s praetorian guard, and Caius Antonius Varro, dressed in full ceremonial armor. Our eyes locked for a moment, and the ghost of a smile curved the Decurion’s lips, softening his angular face. For a moment, I found myself frozen in his gaze. What did he see when he looked at me standing there, surrounded by my fellow gladiatrices? Did he still see the wild-eyed slave girl from the ship? Or did he now see me as the warrior I’d always known myself to be?
But then my attention was ripped away from him as, with another blast of the war horn, she appeared: the Lady Achillea, lit by the red-gold flames of the torches, driving a war chariot through one of the far archways.
No.
Not the Lady Achillea.
Sorcha of the Cantii.
My sister. Returned from the Morrigan’s halls.
XVIII
THE FLAMES OF THE TORCHES flared wildly in a gust of night wind, turning the dark air crimson. There was a tremendous roaring in my ears as all the blood rushed from my head, and I thought I might faint. Sorcha of the Cantii stood tall in the war cart, holding the reins steady in her hands. My sister was alive.
The practice arena spun in dizzying circles all around me as Sorcha drew the horses to a stop in front of us and stepped down from the chariot platform. Gone was the Roman garb of Lady Achillea—the stola and palla, the crested helmet. She was dressed instead in the traditional garb of a Cantii war chief, wearing a forest-green cloak fastened with a massive silver brooch at her right shoulder. I wondered giddily if the statue of the goddess in the courtyard didn’t look upon her with raw envy.