The Defiant (The Valiant #2)(13)
“You’ve done what you had to to survive. And you’ve thrived.”
“We both have.”
She nodded, her gaze thoughtful and fixed on a faraway vision in her mind. She missed home, I knew. We both did. When Sorcha had made a deal with Caesar, she’d done it to save our father’s life, pure and simple. My deal had been a bit more complicated. But both had meant neither of us would return home any time soon.
“We could send word . . .” It wasn’t the first time I’d suggested it.
“To what end, little sister?” She sighed. “No. Far better for Virico to think of his daughters happy in the Lands of the Blessed Dead with our mother, rather than living in the marble halls of his worst enemy halfway across the world.”
She hugged me—a brief, hard hug—and sent me back to my practice. I made my way to the equipment shed, thinking about what she’d said. She was right. And there was no way Father would ever know the difference anyway, I reasoned to myself. Aeddan was the only one who even knew that Sorcha and I still lived, let alone where and how, and Aeddan was an outcast and a murderer. He would no sooner return home than I would.
The last time either of us had seen the shores of Prydain had been shortly after the night of my seventeenth birthday and the feast in my father’s great hall that had ended in heartbreak. And bloodshed. The night I’d asked Maelgwyn Ironhand, the boy I’d loved, to wait for me to be made a member of my father’s royal war band before pleading for my hand in marriage.
Warrior then wife—that was what I had decided.
And then the door slammed in the face of both those dreams. My father had not made me a warrior but he had tried to make me a wife, in the worst possible way. By giving me, instead, to Mael’s brother Aeddan. They’d fought . . . and Mael had died. And I’d run away from the whole sorry mess, only to find myself a slave. And then a gladiator.
Sorcha was right, Virico was better off never knowing. If he ever found out the truth of that night—how, in trying to protect me from a life of danger, he’d instead set me on a path headed straight to the arenas of Rome—he would never forgive himself. I still wasn’t even sure I’d forgiven him. But there was also a part of me that wondered if my father’s decision hadn’t been a part of the goddess Morrigan’s plan for me all along. It had set my feet on the path that had led, ultimately, to the Ludus Achillea. To Sorcha. To the one place where I truly seemed to belong.
I thought about that as I chose the blades I would practice with that afternoon. I was what I was. A gladiatrix. More than that—I was Victrix.
And that was the way I wanted it.
? ? ?
Life at the Ludus Achillea carried on, and almost a week after the senator’s visit we were still hosting an utterly joyless pack of Amazona gladiatrices. My patience with them was wearing extremely thin. They were a sullen and humorless lot and cast a pall over the practice pitch—made worse by the gloomy presence of their black-garbed “escorts”—and, on top of that, I was beginning to give up hope I’d ever get another letter from Cai.
Even Elka had begun to take pity on me.
“I’m sure everything is fine,” she said that morning, putting a hand on my shoulder after I’d let loose with a particularly exuberant stream of cursing, having absentmindedly bashed my shin in practice right in front of a contingent of smirking Amazona girls. Elka must have noticed—as had I—that there’d been no mail courier at the gates that morning. Again. “He’s probably just too busy hacking Caesar’s enemies to bits to pick up a quill.”
I stood there, unwilling to be mollified, glaring bleakly at Elka as her gaze slid away and drifted over my head.
“On the other hand,” she continued after a moment, “I suppose it’s possible that he’s forgotten about you entirely.”
My glare, I’m sure, went from bleak to baleful.
“I mean . . . probably not.” She rolled an eye at me. “But you never know. Soldiering is a lonely life. Tedious. All that marching through foreign towns filled with strange women. Those Hispanian girls . . . I’ve heard they can beguile a man with a dance.”
“A dance . . . ?”
She nodded. “They do it barefoot and—”
“The only dancer I’m interested in wears sandals and carries two swords.”
I spun around at the sound of a familiar voice just beside my ear.
“Cai!”
Decurion Caius Antonius Varro—real as life and standing not two paces away—grinned down at me, his clear hazel eyes sparkling with light. I felt a huge smile split my face, ear to ear. A laughing Elka slapped me on the shoulder and wandered off. It took every last infinitesimal amount of self-control I could muster not to throw myself into Cai’s arms and devour him with kisses, right there in front of the whole academy and those of the Ludus Amazona who cared to watch.
“Would you honor me with a dance, Victrix?” he asked.
I stood there, speechless, drinking in the unexpected sight of him. Every line and angle, the planes of his face beneath the brim of his helmet, and the contours of his body beneath his armor. He was sun-browned and leaner than I remembered, with a week’s worth of stubble on his jaw and dust on his arms and legs. He was glorious.
Cai handed his horse’s reins to a fellow legionnaire, who nodded sharply and led his horse, and that of another soldier who accompanied him, toward the stables. The other soldier walked up beside Cai and stood, fists on his hips, gazing after Elka as she walked away, tossing her long pale braids over her shoulder. For a moment, I thought the young man’s head might actually twist off its stalk as he craned his neck to keep her in view.