The Defiant (The Valiant #2)(28)

“What am I supposed to do? I’m in a prison cell.”

Arviragus laughed. “You’re whining to the wrong man on that score.”

“How did you escape?”

“The wrong way,” he said, lifting his cup and tapping the rim. “Maybe one day, I’ll escape the right way . . .”

A fresh wave of shivering washed over me, cold then fever-hot, and when it had passed, I was alone again. Arviragus was gone, and I would die there in Tartarus—forgotten, defeated, a pile of dust and dry bones with no funeral pyre to carry the embers of my soul to the Blessed Lands of the Dead when I was gone. The Morrigan had truly forsaken me . . . No. The goddess was good. She hadn’t lost faith in me—I needed to believe in her. I closed my eyes and whispered her triple name in my mind over and over. Macha, Nemain, Badb Catha . . .

Then I heard the rustling of wings above me.

I glanced up to see a crow perched on the sill of the tiny barred window, tilting its head to stare at me with one bright black eye.

“Fury!” I exclaimed, and the bird answered with a soft caw.

In the days leading up to Caesar’s Triumphs, I had been the target of a series of nasty pranks culminating in someone nailing a live crow to my door to try and frighten me badly enough to drop out of the competition. The intimidation had failed, and the bird, poor thing, had been nursed back to health by Neferet. The girls had adopted her as a kind of pet and called her Fury in honor of my first-ever opponent.

“Fury,” I called gently, scrambling to my feet and lifting my arm. “Come. Come here, girl . . .”

She tilted her head this way and that, croaked at me, and then hopped down off the sill onto the wrist of my outstretched arm. A spark of hope flared in my chest as I carried her over to the barred door to the cell. It was locked from the outside, and only the iron key—hanging on the opposite wall from a hook above a shelf, so tantalizingly close and just out of reach—would open it. Without that key, I wasn’t getting out of that cell, let alone out of Tartarus.

One of the things we learned about Fury, once she’d healed, was how clever she was. She easily learned tricks and seemed to delight in performing them for us. One of those tricks was fetching things. I nudged the bird off my wrist and onto the crossbar of the cell door. She twitched and ruffled her wings and looked at me expectantly.

“Fetch, Fury,” I said, and stared pointedly at the key.

The key was fashioned in the shape of an owl, the sacred bird of the Roman battle goddess Minerva, and I sent up a silent desperate plea to the Morrigan in the hopes that the two goddesses—and their creatures—were on friendly terms. I stretched out a hand, reaching with splayed fingers toward the key hook. The reach made the wound in my side burn fiercely and pulled at the thin lines of the cuts Aquila had carved on my arm, drawing fresh beads of bright blood welling to the surface through the rust-dark scab that had already formed there.

I wondered just how long it had been since I’d been locked away in Tartarus. Hours? Days, even, maybe . . . Elka and the others probably thought I was already dead.

Fury was my only chance.

“Come on . . .” I cajoled her in a singsong rasp. “That’s it . . . the key, Fury . . . pick it up and bring it here. Bring it to me, Fury . . .”

She tilted her head, swinging it from side to side, her bead-black eyes looking from me to the key. I held my breath as she took a few little hops and flapped up into the air to land on the little shelf beside the key hook. I felt a surge of giddy hope.

The Morrigan was still with me. She’d sent her servant to help me . . .

Fury shifted back and forth from foot to foot.

“Come on . . .” I encouraged her. “Get the key . . .”

She pecked about on the ledge with her sharp black beak.

“Good girl . . . good . . .”

A rustling in a dark corner suddenly caught her attention, and she launched herself off the ledge, swooping down to catch a mouse in her talons. Then she flapped through the bars of the door, past my head, and back out the window grate to enjoy her repast in the yard.

“Oh, Lugh’s teeth!” I cursed as she disappeared from sight. “You stupid bird!”

Sent by the Morrigan, indeed.

Fury was only a crow, doing what crows did. Hunting, not helping. And I had only myself to berate. She was a bird, that was all. Not some kind of mystic messenger, not my salvation, just a bird. I fell back against the wall. The crushing weight of aloneness felt like a suffocating blanket, and the silence left behind in the wake of Fury’s ruffling wings was deafening. In my despair, I half hoped Arviragus would appear to me again.

He didn’t.

My heart sank. But then a key scraped in the door lock at the end of the gloom-dim corridor, and it leaped back upward into my throat. I froze as the heavy door swung open and a pale wash of starlight silhouetted a soldier’s helmet and cloak.

Cai! I thought, pulling myself up to my feet. He’s found me!

No.

The shadowed, featureless figure stepped forward and I saw not a crimson helmet crest but a spray of black feathers. Not a red decurion’s cloak but a soot-black drape of cloth hanging in deep folds. One of the guards from the Ludus Amazona, come to take me to Pontius Aquila or end my life. The cloak billowed in his wake like wings as he strode swiftly down the hall toward my cell, and I skittered back into the far corner at his approach. He reached for the key I hadn’t been able to cajole Fury into delivering to me, and unlocked the door.