The Defiant (The Valiant #2)(2)

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“Fallon!” Elka hollered at me again. “Stop messing around! We’re supposed to win this fight—”

I opened my mouth to yell back that I wasn’t exactly taking my leisure, but Leander shrieked again and lost his grip, tumbling back down into the sapphire water below.

I glanced skyward and sighed.

“Be right back!” I shouted to Elka.

Then I let go of the railing, plunging through the emptiness into the shock of the chill waves below. The armor I wore that day was thankfully light and flexible—leather, not bronze and iron—but it still dragged in the water, and for a few panicked moments I thrashed and kicked my legs, trying not to sink too deep. When I surfaced, gasping, and shook my hair out of my eyes, I could see Leander clutching helplessly at the air, only a few arm’s lengths away. I hadn’t been swimming in a long time—not since I’d become first a slave, then a gladiatrix—but I’d grown up on the banks of the River Dwr back home on the Island of the Mighty, and I had been swimming like a fish since I was a little girl, almost before I’d learned to fight.

“Stop struggling!” I sputtered as I wrapped an arm around Leander’s torso. “Relax—I’ve got you!”

He went limp, more from relief, I think, than any conscious effort to follow my command, but it made things easier. In fairly short order, I’d managed to drag him back to shipside. I hallooed my fellow gladiatrices and, after a moment, Damya appeared at the railing, blinking down at me.

“This is no time for a swim!” she shouted.

“Tell him that,” I said through gritted teeth as a wave washed over my head, making my eyes sting. There was a tang to the lake water, and I glanced over at the remains of the skiff Leander had been rowing. The fragile little craft had been impaled on our boat’s elaborately carved prow when we’d run him over. He’d been ferrying over a fresh supply of libations from the ludus stores to Cleopatra’s barge and decided to row a path straight through the middle of the battle. Shattered clay amphorae leaked wine that stained the water red—as if in merry parody of Caesar’s spectacle—and a few escaped beer barrels floated serenely back toward the shore. Over on the queen’s barge, cries of outrage mingled with gales of laughter at the mishap. Truthfully, I thought, it sounded as if the revelers had already imbibed quite enough that afternoon as it was.

“Throw me a rope!” I shouted.

I looped the line around Leander’s torso under his arms and waited, treading water, until Damya got him up on deck. Then she tossed the rope back down and hauled me aboard, the muscles of her arms bulging beneath the bronze bands she wore. As I threw a leg over the rail and flopped onto the deck like a landed trout, a ragged cheer went up from the barge across the water for my heroic rescue. I lay there gasping, feeling rather less heroic than ridiculous.

Up in the rigging, perched high above my head, Tanis was calling out the positioning of the other ship’s flag, which they kept moving around the deck to keep it safe from our attempts to board their vessel and capture it. Tanis was a promising young archer—she’d sworn her oath the same night Elka and I had—but she’d proved herself fairly useless in close combat. So we’d sent her up to the high vantage point where we could put her keen eyes to use.

Every time the ships drew abreast of each other, we exchanged fighters, with some of our girls leaping to their ship and the reverse. Even though the blades we fought with that day were wooden practice swords, accidents happened. Not just accidents. There was still a good deal of bad blood between the Achillea and Amazona ludi. During Caesar’s Triumphs, our two schools of warriors had been pitted against each other in a huge pitched battle meant to commemorate Caesar’s conquest of Britannia, and there had been bloodshed. Even death. We’d all made enemies that day.

The worst one I’d made had been originally from my own ludus.

A gladiatrix named Nyx.

Nyx had never been a friend. But she’d been sold to Pontius Aquila, the owner of the Ludus Amazona, after Caesar had chosen me over her to perform in the lead role of his Spirit of Victory. It wasn’t something Nyx had taken lightly or well. Neither was the fact that, in the midst of the spectacle, I’d bested her—with a little help from Elka and her trusty spear—in a chariot duel.

All of that was more than enough cause for Nyx to hate me.

But I’d taken it one step further.

When Caesar had conferred the ceremonial sword of freedom on me for my performance, I’d asked instead for him to grant that freedom to her. In doing so, I’d effectively had Nyx barred from ever again taking up arms as a gladiatrix in the arena. It was the worst thing I could have done to her, in her mind. The fact that I’d done it for her own good was something that I’d never been able to tell her. She wouldn’t have listened anyway.

I hadn’t seen her since that day.

Which was probably one of the reasons I still had all my limbs in good working order. Nyx left behind a band of cronies, but, without her driving malevolence, they were about as bothersome as horseflies. In the dining hall or the bathhouse, that is. In the arena, we were all capable—if we weren’t careful, and sometimes if we were—of inflicting a great deal of damage. But that, of course, was rather the point. For our spectators and patrons, at least.

I’d long since realized that Roman civilization was a thin veneer. The spectacle of our “sea battle” with the excitement of the flag-capture challenge was entertaining for Cleopatra’s party guests, certainly, and we put on a good show. But it was the thrill of real danger that set Roman hearts racing. The idea that we were willing—and able—to maim and kill for the amusement of the mob. Even draped in silks and jewels, sipping wine and slurping oysters, that’s what the men and women on that gilded barge really were. A bloodthirsty mob.