Gratia didn’t seem to think the reputation was warranted, though, and her scorn was almost hotter than the bonfire’s flames. Thalestris always rode her hard on technique, and Gratia, clearly, was fed to the teeth with it—along with the trout Thalestris had caught that afternoon. “In their mead-addled dreams they are,” she scoffed. “Where I come from, we know these things. The Amazons—if they ever even truly existed—died out hundreds of years ago. They’re just a myth now.”
“Well, she seems pretty Amazon to me,” Lydia said, sloshing more wine into her cup. “Why are we arguing about this again?”
“Because we’re all a bit drunk,” Damya offered philosophically.
Gratia nodded. “And Thalestris is a bitch.”
“And,” I said, “we all wish we were able to fight just like her.”
The grumbling and muttering ground to a silent halt. Elka raised her cup.
“Ave, Thalestris,” she said with a wry grin.
“Ave, Thalestris,” Meriel echoed, punctuating the sentiment with a snort before downing the contents of her cup.
And then, one by one, the other girls raised their cups in salute.
“Ave!”
“Ave to that hard-arsed, cold-eyed, wicked, brilliant, hobnailed gorgon,” Damya agreed enthusiastically.
“Who, if the gods are kind,” murmured Ajani, “is fast asleep in her bed and has heard none of this.”
“Here’s to many more blissful years toiling—of our own free will—under her merciless lash!” Elka said, elbowing me. “Right, little fox?”
We all laughed at that. At the joke, but also at the giddy prospect of soon—very soon—becoming rulers of our own destinies. Free to leave the ludus if we chose, but staying to fight because we wanted to. Outwardly, it wouldn’t even look like much of a change. But inwardly . . . my Cantii soul burst with happiness at the very idea—
“What . . . what happens if we don’t want to stay?”
The laughter died to mute silence. One by one, we all turned to look in the direction of the voice that had asked that question. Tanis. Ajani’s archer protégé. The girl I’d cut down from the rigging on the ship that afternoon. Even in the flickering firelight, I could still see the angry red welts from the rope on her ankle.
“I mean . . .” Tanis shrugged, looking from face to face, and shut her mouth.
“You mean what?” Meriel leaned forward, tilting her head as if trying to understand words spoken in an unknown tongue. “Leave here? Where in the great world would you go? You don’t even know where you’re from, Tanis. Your tribe was a bunch of wanderers. At least here you belong.”
“That’s what you think.”
“And you don’t? Last time I watch your back in a fight.”
“That’s not what I meant, Meriel. Don’t be such a bitch.”
“What exactly did you mean then, gladiolus?” Meriel sneered, calling Tanis by the nasty little nickname we’d all suffered under when we’d first arrived at the ludus. Gladiolus: a play on the word for the spear-shaped blooms that grew tall in the ludus gardens, pretty but so easily cut down. It was how Nyx, the top dog at the academy at the time, would remind a raw recruit of her lowly status in the ranks of the students—not fighters, but flowers.
“Hey!” I snapped, silencing them both before things got out of hand. “Both of you, back away. Nyx is long gone, and we don’t play those kinds of games anymore. We’re equals, like Achillea said—”
“Achillea?” Tanis scoffed. “You mean your sister, Sorcha? I’m sure she sees you as exactly equal to the rest of us.”
I blinked at her in surprise. When the girls of the ludus had discovered, in the wake of the Triumphs, that the Lady Achillea was actually my sister, I’d worried what their reactions would be. If they would think that I’d be shown some kind of favoritism because of it. But when that hadn’t happened and Sorcha had continued to work me just as hard as—and sometimes harder than—the rest of the girls, they’d all come to accept it without any resentment. At least, I’d thought so . . .
“Tanis, I was defending you—”
“I don’t need you to defend me, Fallon! I can defend myself.”
“Not really.” Elka shrugged. “I mean—good with a bow, but you’re terrible in hand-to-hand.”
Ajani winced. “Elka—”
“Shut up!” Tanis screeched. “You’re all horrible!”
“Then leave, why don’t you!” Gratia leaned forward, thrusting out her jaw.
“Stop it.” I stood, all that Cantii-souled happiness flaring to equally potent anger. “Stop it! No one’s going anywhere. Not even you, Tanis.”
“You’re not my owner, Fallon.” She shot to her feet, stumbling on her injured ankle. “Neither is your sister. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Don’t any of you understand that? No one owns us anymore. We’re all alone again. Just like we were before we came here. Only nothing about the prison has changed except the bars!” She turned and hobbled up the beach, disappearing into the darkness.
“Let her go,” Meriel said, rolling her eyes. “Where’s my mug?”
I stayed where I was, on my feet, and exchanged a look with Elka. After a moment, she shrugged and waved me in the direction Tanis had gone. I sighed and went after her. She hadn’t gone far. Just far enough to still hear the others’ laughter drifting on the night breeze.
I sat down beside her on the flat rock that looked out over the black glass mirror of Lake Sabatinus. A young crescent moon rode low in the cloudless starlit sky, as if gazing down at her luminous profile reflected in the water. The night was just bright enough for me to see the tracks of tears on Tanis’s cheeks. I sat there beside her, silent for a long moment.
“Are you really from a tribe of wanderers?” I asked quietly, when it became clear that she wasn’t going to start a conversation.
“Desert herders,” she sniffed, not looking at me. “What’s it to you?”
“Nothing.” I shrugged. “I just didn’t know that. How will you find them again if you leave us?”
I could see the prospect of that terrified her. Just as much as the prospect of staying. But if there was one thing all of us had learned in our time at the ludus, it was that you never admitted fear. Not if you could absolutely help it.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, finally.
I nodded and said nothing.
“Must be nice not to have to worry about such a thing,” Tanis continued. “For you, I mean.”
“How so?” I asked.
“You can just go back to your life as a pampered princess in Britannia once you win back your freedom,” she said. “But then, you’d probably miss all of those crowds yelling your name every time you so much as stepped onto the sand.”
“Is that what you think I care about?”
“Why wouldn’t you?” she asked, and I could tell she meant it. “The only time anyone yells my name in the arena is if they want me to get out of the way.”
“Ajani thinks very highly of you,” I said.
“That’s just because I can shoot.”
“That’s not a small thing, Tanis. You’re very good and—”
“I’m a coward, Fallon!” she spat vehemently. “Don’t you understand? I’m really good at fighting from a distance because I’m terrified of having to do it up close! All of the rest of you—you and Damya and Meriel and even Ajani, once she’s used up all her arrows—you all seem to think nothing whatsoever of charging headlong at a wall of swords! How? How do you do it? Every muscle in my body tries to run the other way.”
“But you don’t,” I said. “You haven’t. I mean—I’ve seen you stand your ground and fight. You—”
“Defend myself,” she sneered. “Badly. Elka was right. And I only ever did it because running would have just meant flogging once they caught up with me. Flogging if I was lucky.”
>
She glowered at me, as if daring me to contradict her. But I couldn’t. For the first time, I thought about what it must have been like for the girls at the ludus who hadn’t grown up wanting to do nothing more than swing a sword. I’d never seen that in Tanis before, but now that she’d said it, I tried to put myself in her place. When she’d been nothing but a slave—when she’d had no choice but to fight as a gladiatrix for the ludus—Tanis had fought alongside the rest of us, day in and day out. Fight or suffer punishment.
Now—in spite of Elka’s jest about us freely toiling under her lash—the actual threat of Thalestris’s whip was about to disappear with the advent of the Nova Ludus Achillea. And Tanis was afraid that, without that kind of external motivation, she would no longer be able to find it within herself to fight. To go into the arena and—spurred on by nothing but her own free will—risk defeat or injury. Or death.
I could see the muscles in her jaw working as I sat there looking at her. It had taken a good deal of courage to admit it. But I wasn’t sure I could make her see it that way.
Instead, I asked, “How’s the ankle?”
She stuck out her leg and flexed her foot. “Hurts. But it’ll heal.” She fell silent for a long moment and I thought maybe that was the end of our conversation. But then she said, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For saving me back on the ship.” She shrugged. “And for not trying to tell me I’m wrong now. We both know I’m no fighter, Fallon. If I have a destiny, I don’t think it’s here.”
“I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion if I were you, Tanis.” I put a hand on her shoulder. “Wait and see. You might find that, once you no longer have to fight . . . you might want to. And you might just do it better.”
She frowned, unconvinced, but at least I was able to talk her into coming back and joining the others. By the time we returned to the fire, it was as if the sniping between the girls had never happened. Meriel pressed a mug into Tanis’s hand and made room for her in the circle of bodies. I sat there, silent, looking from face to firelit face and thinking about just how much that circle of girls had come to mean to me in such a relatively short time. I didn’t want any of them to leave the ludus. Not Tanis, not even Meriel or Lydia. They were my sisters, and I wanted them to stay and fight with me—as much as I wanted to fight for them.
Elka threw another log on the fire, and the flames belched clouds of sparks into the night. The general merriment continued undiminished all around me, highlighted by Leander’s outrageous flirtations with each and every one of us.
“My heart belongs only to you, sweet Ajani!” he was saying, looking every bit the cheerful, leering satyr through the shower of sparks. “But also you, fair Damya.”
“Ha.” She grinned back at him, and I thought she might actually be enjoying his advances. Except her idea of flirting back was “It would, if I ripped it out of your chest and kept it in a jar.”
Leander swallowed his next retort, and Damya threw back her head and laughed, slapping him so heartily on the back that she almost knocked him into the fire. I tried to laugh along at the banter, but my own thoughts started to careen away from me. My own heart, I suddenly remembered, had been missing for months. Stolen and carried away into battle in far-off lands. By Caius Antonius Varro, decurion in Caesar’s legions . . .
I sighed.
Clearly, I thought, I’ve drunk far too much of the kitchen boy’s beer tonight. Still, the warmth of the fire on my face made me close my eyes and imagine it was Cai’s breath on my skin as he leaned close to kiss me.
“You sigh any louder and somebody’s going to tattle to Heron that you’ve got a case of evil humors,” Elka’s voice murmured in my ear as she sat down beside me and handed me another cup of beer.
I opened one eye and squinted at her.
“I know it’s just love-pining,” she said, “but he’ll march you to the infirmary to have you stuck with bloodletting skewers and wrapped in one of his stinking poultices.”
I opened my other eye and grumbled something unpleasant under my breath before gulping my drink. Elka nodded and drank from her own cup.
“How long since you’ve heard from him?”
“Weeks,” I said sourly. “Four of them less a day, to be exact. Plus however many hours it’s been since I woke up this morning.”
“At least you’re getting the knack of the Roman calendar.”
“Barely.”
“And you’re learning to read their letters.”
“Less than barely.”
The Cantii had no written language. All our stories were told face-to-face, passed down through the songs and poems of our bards. We had no need for scribbled marks on tablets and scrolls to convey our hearts and minds to others.
Rome, and Romans, were different. And so I’d resolved to learn their written words as best I could. Sorcha had made a tutor available to any of the girls at the ludus who wished to avail themselves, though few of them did. Ajani, with her quiet thirst for knowledge, was one. I was another. Admittedly, I had a very specific reason for doing so. An armor-wearing reason with laughing hazel eyes and an infuriatingly kissable mouth who was, at present, a whole wide world away from me, smiting the enemies of the great and mighty Caesar.
Before he left, I’d promised Cai that I would try to write. Or rather, that I would try to dictate letters to Heron, the ludus physician, and perhaps the only man I would trust with such words. And Cai had promised me, in turn, that he would send me letters back whenever he could. Letters written in basic—very basic—Latin. Usually the missives were no more than two or three lines of neat black script on a square of papyrus or vellum. But beyond the words and phrases I could recognize, like “smile” and “miss you”—or, depending on how Caesar’s campaign fared, “fight” and “enemy” and “seige”—Cai always sent me something else. He sent me pictures. They made my chest ache for him.
Because they were magic. And they were just for me.
Like the murals painted on the walls of the Ludus Achillea—scenes from the arena captured and frozen into single unending moments—Cai’s charcoal drawings of people and places, birds and animals and flowers struck me speechless when I gazed at them.
Every few weeks, a scroll sealed in a copper tube would arrive at the ludus, delivered by courier along with whatever other correspondence there was for the Lanista or the other girls. There wasn’t much of the latter—most of us didn’t have anyone to correspond with outside of the walls of the academy—and so I always felt a little guilty when the courier would ride through the gates and the other gladiatrices would sigh or snicker or, some, gaze longingly at the letters I received. In the privacy of my cell, though, that guilty twinge would vanish the instant I twisted open the seal.
Inside were scenes of the countrysides Cai and the legions marched through: rolling hills dotted with strands of trees, craggy ravines seamed with creeks, soaring forests, and endless plains. Sometimes, he drew the creatures that inhabited those places: a herd of deer grazing, an eagle perched on the high, bare branch of a lonely pine, a crow sitting on the peak of an army camp tent, wings hunched against the wind and black eyes gleaming bright. And always, beneath the sketch, Cai would write the name of the thing in neat black letters to help me learn their names in his language.
Cervos. Aquilam. Corvo.
My favorite of all the drawings he’d sent me, though, wasn’t a pretty landscape or an animal. It was a picture of his hand. When I’d first unrolled the vellum scroll, my breath had caught in my throat because I could recognize it plainly. That familiar, calloused palm lay open and upturned as if Cai held it out for me to take. The scroll lay on top of all the others in the trunk at the foot of my pallet in my cell. I’d taken it out to look at it almost every day since he’d sent it. But what I’d told Elka had been truth. I hadn’t received anything from him in almost a month. And I was beginning t
o worry that something was wrong.
The spirit of the beer I’d drunk that night began to work its maudlin magic on me, and I felt a proper sulk coming on. But before it had a chance to take hold, I noticed that the ludus guards had wandered close. I stood and stretched and announced somewhat unneccesarily that I was going to turn in for the night, as we were once more rounded up and herded back through the gates. It was an ungentle reminder that, until those papers arrived from Caesar, we weren’t free.
Still, as we passed the new-built barracks where the Amazona girls were quartered that night, and I saw the black-clad brutes who guarded their cells, I counted myself infinitely fortunate that, over a year earlier, in the Forum of Rome, a certain slave trader had been canny enough to sell me to my very own sister. I shuddered to think what would have happened to me if Pontius Aquila’s bid had won out that day.
III
THE NEXT MORNING I awoke with a head full of sheep’s wool and bootnails. My dreams had been full of drowning—dark figures in black cloaks lurking beneath the waves like statues on the seabed, waiting to drag me down and away from the sun and my sisters, away from the ludus forever . . .
I blamed a certain kitchen slave’s barrels of beer and doused my face with cold water from my washstand until I could open my eyes without wincing.
“Are you still mooning over your decurion?” Elka asked, peering at me as we stretched out our muscles in the lee of the equipment shed wall before practice.
“No,” I snapped.
“Ah. I thought so.” She nodded. “That would explain your mood, then.”
“I said no—”
“Maybe his father can give you some insight into your true love’s whereabouts these days,” she said with a casual shrug, turning away to pluck a practice javelin from the weapons rack.
“What?” I blinked at her.
“The good Senator Varro?” She turned a guileless expression on me. “I heard he’s in the main yard with a big old oxcart. Some sort of gift for the Lanista, according to Kronos. I think they’re waiting for you—”