The Defiant (The Valiant #2)(20)

The stables were on fire.

The stables where Cai and his two friends were sleeping.

I threw on a cloak and ran down the hall, pounding on the doors of the other girls’ rooms as I ran. Servants were already stumbling out into the yard by the time I got there, half-asleep and calling for buckets and water. Cai was there too, leading a pair of horses from the stalls under the pall of smoke, and I gasped with relief at the sight of him. When I glanced over my shoulder, I saw that most of the other girls had come running from the barracks behind me.

I hurried to untie the donkey from his post in the yard and saw Antonia lugging a heavy pail of water with her one hand across the yard. Cai ran by with another pair of terrified chariot ponies, Quint and Tully following right behind with more. Then Kronos was there, directing the kitchen staff to form a bucket line, but I couldn’t see Thalestris anywhere. Elka ran past, blonde hair streaming on the wind, as she hurried from stall to stall, throwing open the doors to let the panicked horses out. I saw Neferet carrying a wicker cage that held a squawking young raven—once nailed to my door in an attempt to frighten me—that she’d nursed back to health and kept as a pet in the barn. My mind flashed back to the dream. My sister wearing a cloak of iron raven’s feathers . . .

Sorcha was nowhere in sight.

“Go!” Kronos shouted when he saw me. “Find the Lanista!”

My heart in my throat, I ran for the main house.

As I pounded up the path, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the guest barracks, in the far west quadrant of the compound, were eerily silent and dark. When I reached Sorcha’s chambers, I found the place had been wrecked. Couches and tables were overturned, goblets smashed, and oil lamps spilled and smoldering on the finely woven rugs. Scrolls and the copper tubes they were stored in were scattered everywhere. One tube had the wax seal destroyed and was lying on her desk, empty. The tapestry of Achilles and Penthesilea on the wall had been torn in half, leaving only the dying Amazon queen hanging to stare down impassively at a pool of blood that was spreading in a slow creep across the tiled floor.

And Sorcha was gone.

I turned and bolted back out the door, a horrible foreboding writhing in my stomach like a nest of snakes. Back out in the courtyard of the ludus, it was chaos. Firelit darkness and shrieks, human and animal, tore the night air. On the sentry walkway that ran along the top of the compound’s outer wall, I saw figures dressed in black cloaks and helmets. The guards from the Ludus Amazona. For a confused moment, I thought they were helping defend us from attack . . .

But then I saw that the front gate was already open.

And the guards were faced inward, their weapons trained on us.

On my friends, my fellow warriors, some of whom lay bleeding on the ground, while others fought fiercely—most of them barehanded—against the girls of the Ludus Amazona, who were all dressed in dark tunics and armed to the teeth. My mind reeled in confusion at the betrayal. The ludus had been attacked, I thought, but like the old tale of the Trojan horse, the enemy had come from within. And opened the door to our downfall.

There was an unfamiliar chariot standing just inside the outer courtyard, and I knew, instinctively, who it belonged to. I didn’t even need to turn to see him stalking the perimeter of the chaotic scene to know he was there. I could feel his presence like a cold, oily fog, poisoning the air. Pontius Aquila. The Collector. My mind flashed back to that horrible night at the Domus Corvinus, to the memory of the men in black masks devouring the heart of a fallen gladiator in the caverns beneath Aquila’s mansion, and I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach.

The only thing other than Aquila’s presence that could have made this night as terrible as that one was . . .

“Gladiatrices!”

A familiar female voice, harsh and harrowing like the shriek of an angry crow, rang out in the darkness.

Nyx.

As if conjured out of the night by my very thoughts, Nyx leaped down from the sentry walk, cloak spread wide—darkness against the dark sky—like the Raven of Nightmares to land in the courtyard not thirty paces from me. In one hand, she carried the chariot whip she’d once used as a weapon against me. The braided leather rope hissed along the ground in her wake, writhing and twitching like a venomous serpent. One by one, the Achillea girls turned to stare, uncomprehending, at the girl who’d once been one of us.

“Rebels!” she continued, cracking her whip. “I call upon you to throw down your weapons!”

What rebels? What weapons?

The alarm raised by the barn fire had brought us all tumbling out of our beds and into the night without a thought to reach for swords and spears first. Which, I realized, had likely been the point of that blaze. The Amazona girls and their guards were armed, to be sure, but the only ones from our ludus who’d had weapons at the ready were the night watch. And they all—to a man—lay dead upon the ground. Nyx, as she spoke, was obliged to step over a prone body as she made her way toward us.

I wondered if Quint’s gambling and drinking had dulled their reactions.

I wondered if Cai and I were to blame . . .

I glanced around wildly for him then and saw Cai standing with Quint and Tully, all three of them with soot-blackened faces from leading the horses to safety. Four of the Amazona guards prodded them forward to join the defeated clump of gladiatrices at the center of the yard, and Quint suddenly lunged for one of the guard’s weapons. I gasped in horror as an archer up on the sentry walk spun and aimed, loosing an arrow, at the same time as Cai shouted for Quint to stop and threw himself forward in a tackle that brought his second in command to the ground. The arrow grazed past Quint’s cheek . . . and lodged in the breast of legionnaire Tullius, who was right behind him and never saw it coming.