The Defiant (The Valiant #2)(37)
The farther we got from the ludus, the better I should have felt. But I didn’t. Instead, Tanis’s cries for help rang in my ears. And dread thoughts of Nyx at our heels, or Aquila waiting for us in Rome, wrapped around me in a suffocating embrace. Cai tried to calm me, to make me rest for a moment, but I couldn’t. I needed to keep moving or I would crumple. Fold in on myself and wilt into fevered oblivion. The bandage beneath the tunic covering my wound was damp, sticky, and hot to the touch. Only the darkness and my cloak concealed the fact that blood was running down my flank, collecting in my boot. The breath rasped in my lungs, and my vision blurred and sparkled with flickering red fire at the edges.
“How many?” I asked Elka during a rest, dizzy and nauseous, unable to make myself do a proper head count. Or maybe it was just that I didn’t want to know who’d been left behind. “How many of us are there?”
“Twelve,” she answered. “Thirteen if you count that ridiculous kitchen boy. Plus the soldiers, and your gloomy friend from Aquila’s own ludus.”
“That’s all?”
She bit her lip. “The others didn’t make it out.”
“Help me, Fallon!” Tanis’s voice cried out in my head.
I squeezed my eyes shut and wiped the rain from my face. Then I turned and called for everyone to mount up. Before our escape, Elka had asked me where we were going to go, and I hadn’t been able to give her an answer. Rome was, we decided, out of the question entirely. Pontius Aquila had a home there, the vast, sprawling Domus Corvinus. He had servants. Friends. The Sons of Dis. Eyes and ears everywhere . . . and even in the twisting streets and tangled districts of Rome, there was nowhere any of us could think of to hide. The townhouse where the Ludus Achillea lodged our gladiatrices when in Rome was the first place Aquila would look for us. Caesar’s estate across the river might have been an option if Caesar was there, but of course, Caesar and his Populares were halfway across the wide world fighting wars with the Optimates, wars that had angered his fellow Romans—one of the reasons we were now fugitives. Charon the slave trader, my patron in the arena, had a house in Rome, but I had no idea where or how to find it. Neither did Cai.
Together, we’d come to the conclusion that our best bet was to try to skirt the eastern edge of the city heading south. If we could just outrun the news of our so-called “gladiatrix rebellion” long enough to make it to Neapolis, or even as far as the province of Sicilia, we might stand a chance. It was decided. But all that changed as we approached the walls of the city.
The rain had begun to ease and a haze of mist seeped up out of the ground. In the distance, I could just make out the contours of the Seven Hills of Rome, dotted with villas and temples, crisscrossed with roads and meandering open markets and gathering places. A teeming hive of humanity that, the closer we rode, looked like an empty cursed place, the windows shuttered against the hour and the weather and not a soul on the streets.
Not a soul except for one . . .
Riding in a chieftain’s war chariot a hundred paces ahead of me.
A voice called to me on the wind with the sound of a whetstone on rust.
“Fallon . . .”
I lifted a shaking hand to wipe the rainwater from my eyes.
It was him. Arviragus.
I peered into the fading darkness and could only just make out his forest-green cloak and auburn hair, spread wide on a ghostly wind generated by the passage of his ghostly chariot. He didn’t so much as glance over his shoulder at me, but I knew why he was there.
To lead us to a safe haven . . .
The Morrigan had sent his shade back from the Lands of the Blessed Dead to lead me and my friends. And I would follow. Head swimming, vision blurring, I wound my hands tightly in my horse’s mane to keep from falling off, and urged her from a canter to a gallop as the chariot began to pull away just outside the city gates.
Behind me, I heard Cai frantically shouting my name as my horse broke away from the rest, asking me where in Hades did I think I was going. I started to laugh. Because if that was where Arviragus in his war chariot was about to lead me . . . if Hades was where we were bound . . . then by the gods—his, mine, and Rome’s—I would follow him all the way down.
? ? ?
As it turned out, I didn’t have to go quite that far. I had to follow my ghost king only through the gates of Rome and down a tangle of deserted streets to a narrow twisting lane in a questionable part of town not far from the Circus Maximus. But when I turned the corner, Arviragus had vanished and the street dead-ended in front of a plain stone wall featuring only a single, heavy door set with a small grated window.
I dismounted—which is to say, fell off my horse—and lurched through the ankle-deep mud toward the door to pound on the oak planks with the butt of my sword. The war chariot was nowhere in sight. But I shouted Arviragus’s name in a voice gone hoarse with fever.
“Fallon!” Elka shouted, grabbing me by the shoulders and dragging me away from the door. I think she must have been calling me for a long time. “Are you mad, leading us into the city? What are we doing here? Someone’s going to call the watch and have us arrested! You don’t even know who lives there.”
I turned to her, my mind awash in confusion.
Live there? No one lived there. Arviragus was dead, and this had been his prison. Now it was nothing but a cold empty—
“What in the name of Jupiter do you want?” asked a gruff, angry voice.