Ajax chased Mandobracius the length of the dining room and out into the courtyard, and the crowd spilled out after them, carrying me along in their wake. A gust of wind spiraled down through the roofless courtyard, and two of the stands of torch sconces guttered and extinguished, plunging a corner of the impromptu arena into darkness. I caught a glimpse of Mandobracius as he spun on his heel and disappeared into the throng.
The house slaves scrambled amid cries of outrage to relight the torches. When they flared to life again, Ajax stood in the middle of a small clearing in the courtyard, turning in wary circles. His opponent was nowhere to be seen.
Then suddenly, I saw a black-feathered helmet crest bobbing up above the heads of the crowd. Ajax saw it too and lunged forward, thrusting his swords before him. The revelers shrieked—in real terror—and dove frantically out of the way as one of the beefy gladiator’s swords plunged into the naked chest of the man in the feathered helmet. Ajax’s prey staggered forward, into the open space beyond the crowd.
It was not Mandobracius.
The man’s torso was far too skinny and lacked the swirling tattoos. His helmet wasn’t even real. It was only a costume piece—one of the more elaborate masks at the party, designed to mimic Mandobracius’s armor. The man wearing it had probably been an ardent admirer.
Ajax realized his mistake a moment too late.
He let out a soft gasp and looked down to see two blades protruding outward from his chest, the points red with his own blood. Ajax’s spine arched, and he clawed weakly at the blades, sinking to his knees not more than a spear’s length in front of me. As he collapsed face-first on the marble floor, the crowd went mad with bloodlust, howling and cheering and shouting the victor’s name. I looked up from the dead man to see Mandobracius standing there, his tattooed chest heaving, the swords clenched in his fists painted dark with blood. Carried away in the moment, drunk on excitement as much as mandrake wine, I felt a savage elation. But when the bloodied gladiator raised his head and met my gaze, I felt my heart tear in two.
The gray eyes that looked out from behind the visor grate were as familiar to me as my own soul. The room began to spin, and suddenly I felt as though I was suffocating. I reached up and clawed the mask from my face, and the gladiator’s mouth soundlessly made the shape of a name. My name.
“Fallon?” He blinked rapidly. The bloodied blades wavered in his hands.
Mael?
“Is that really you? Fallon—it’s me.” He reached up and lifted the helmet off his head. There were raven feathers tied throughout his long dark hair. “It’s Aeddan!”
Aeddan . . .
No. That wasn’t possible. The last time I’d seen Aeddan, he’d killed his brother. It was the wine, the mandrake. I was hallucinating. As the apparition of Mael’s brother reached out for me, I turned and bolted from the room, fighting my way through the crowd as if the Raven of Nightmares herself had come to claim me.
“Fallon!” the apparition called after me. “Fallon!”
My name echoed through the marble halls behind me as I ran.
Domus Corvinus, I soon discovered, was like a labyrinth. Corridors turned into rooms that turned into atriums that turned into yet more corridors. The crowds thinned the farther away from the dining hall I got, until I was thankfully, mercifully alone. I stumbled through a breezeway out onto a terrace. I leaned heavily against a marble plinth topped with a sundial, trying to steady myself, but it did little to quell the sensation that I was back on the ship sailing across the Mare Nostrum. The ground seemed to swell and heave, and the clouds in the sky above my head—I could have sworn—were breathing.
It wasn’t Mael. Mael’s dead. And it wasn’t Aeddan.
No. It couldn’t be. Aeddan had run home after murdering his own brother.
I stared down at the Roman numerals carved into the weathered face of the sundial, trying to remember what they were.
One . . . two . . . three . . .
What was the next one called? I could never remember the names of the numbers, and Elka and I had laughed about it every time she’d asked me to call out a number on her target wheel.
Thirteen!
Someone at the ludus had once told me thirteen was unlucky.
The sky, dressed in garish hues, reeled above me, and the ground beneath me heaved like a wave. I thought I heard a raven cry out in the distance. And then a pair of grasping hands, like talons, reached out from the darkness behind me, and a voice said, “Fallon.”
I screamed.
And spun, flailing, wrenching violently out of the grip of whoever had me by the shoulders. A backward kick rewarded me with a grunt of pain, and suddenly I was free.
“Grab the bitch!” a female voice barked in the darkness.