My sword.
The only thing other than me that had survived the long journey from Durovernum. The thing that had convinced Charon that I had value and had prompted my sister to buy my life for a ridiculous amount of money.
It seemed that she had commissioned a new leather sheath for it, dyed black and embossed with the intricate, tortuously beautiful artwork of our people. Sorcha belted the sword around my waist and, as its comforting weight settled against my left hip, my hand dropped reflexively to rest on the hilt. It felt as though a severed limb had suddenly been sewn back onto my body.
But then I noticed that on my right hip there hung a second—empty—sheath. I frowned in confusion, then glanced up into my sister’s face. With a start, I saw that there was the thin line of a scar, beneath the blue-painted designs on her forehead, running from the shock of silver in her hair down to her over-dark eye. She stared down at me, her expression fierce and hard, as her right hand crossed her body to her own left hip, and she drew the sword she wore.
It was a twin to my blade.
The sword she had carried into battle the last time I’d seen her.
With a swift, brief-as-lightning flourish, she resheathed the blade in the empty scabbard on my hip. A murmur rippled through the watchers beneath the portico. The dimachaerus technique—fighting with two swords—was a rare choice among gladiatrices, and so the second sword was a rare gift. Of course, no one there watching would come close to understanding the true significance of Sorcha’s gift to me.
I wasn’t even sure if I understood it.
But when I looked up into my sister’s face, for a moment I saw something dark and shining moving in her gaze. Then the moment was gone, and Sorcha spun away from me to thrust her arms skyward, fingers splayed, rings and bracelets glittering, and her voice rang into the night air in the ancient war cry of the Cantii. For a fleeting instant, I wondered just what Caesar thought of that. But when he neglected to instruct Caius to step forward and run my sister through with his sword, I decided that he must not care.
She must make him a lot of money, I thought bitterly.
Thalestris stepped forward to join my sister, her deep voice ringing out with the words that we, as initiates, were compelled to echo back.
“Uri . . . vinciri . . . verberari . . . ferroque necari.”
I will endure to be burned . . . to be bound . . . to be beaten . . . and to be killed by the sword. It was the sacred gladiatorial oath, sworn by men and women alike when they joined the ranks—willingly or no—of the gladiatoria.
“I don’t really care to endure any of that,” Elka muttered, “given a choice.”
But there was no choice. That was the whole point.
“Simple words. Simple promises,” Sorcha said as Thalestris’s voice echoed to silence. “This oath is the oath we all swear. Not to a god, or a master, or even to the Ludus Achillea . . . but to our sisters who stand here with us. Our sisters. This is the oath that binds us all, one to one, all to all, so that we are no longer free. We belong to each other. We are bound to each other. In swearing to each other, we free ourselves from the outside world, from the world of men, from those who would seek to bind us to Fate and that which would make us slaves. We sacrifice our liberty so that, ultimately, we can be truly free.”
I swallowed the hard knot of fear and uncertainty that stopped up my throat and joined my voice with the others that rang out like chimes in the darkness. And once I did, I felt as though someone had unearthed a box buried deep inside of me. There was a lock on the box, rusted shut, but I could almost feel the turn of a key. I had not come to this place of my own accord, and I had not come looking for my long-dead sister. But the Morrigan had nonetheless led me to find her again. And now, within the confines of these walls, in this place of women warriors, with my sword back at my side, maybe I could begin to look for myself.
But that would come later, on the training grounds.
First, there were the formalities of the rest of the evening to endure. As our voices died away into the darkness, Caesar stepped down from the dais and approached his newly sworn-in gladiatrices, the other ludus masters following in his wake for what seemed to be an informal inspection of our ranks, which meant we were obliged to stand there while Caesar and his guests paced back and forth across the torchlit yard, discussing our various physical attributes as if we were a flock of new lambs and they were a gathering of discerning butchers.