The Defiant (The Valiant #2)(38)

From the other side of the door.

I whirled around—nearly losing my balance and pitching face-first in the mud—to see a pair of narrowed eyes peering out through the grate at us. They widened when their gaze fell upon my face. I tried to say something—anything—but the face disappeared and the grate slid shut with a bang.

I felt a helpless sob hitching its way up my throat.

Then I heard the sound of bar-locks sliding and the heavy door opening.

“Miss Fallon . . . ? Is that you?” A man dressed in a worn cloak over a legion soldier’s gear reached out and grabbed me by the shoulder, pulling me inside with my weary pony in tow.

Unable to speak coherently, I put a desperate hand against his chest and beckoned behind me. One by one, Elka and the rest of the Achillea fugitives poured into the barren little courtyard, which could barely contain our numbers. Cai was the last one through, and he barked a terse command to Quint to shut the portal door. Horses and bodies milled around with me at the center, dizzy and swaying. The stone walls spun around me as I struggled to keep standing. This was the place where Arviragus had been imprisoned. The place where he’d died.

The place where he stood framed by the inner door to the prison . . .

His eyes went wide as his mouth formed the shape of my name.

After that, nothing. Only blackness and silence.

? ? ?

“Fallon . . .”

Something smelled strange. Not unpleasant, just . . . bracing. Pungent. Like juniper boughs fresh-cut and stacked for a bonfire at Samhain.

That must be it, I thought. Mael is trying to wake me so I can dress for the festival . . . Or, more likely, a round of sparring in the Forgotten Vale before the feast. A fight would be good right now, I thought. There’s something I ought to be fighting. Someone . . .

“I’ll be there in a moment,” I heard myself murmur. “I just need to find my sword first . . .”

I could feel my hand opening and closing on the bed beside me, searching for the hilt of a weapon. But what I found instead was another’s hand. Warm and strong and calloused, fingers gently wrapping around mine, keeping me still.

“It’s all right, Fallon,” that same voice said. Familiar, comforting. “You don’t need a sword. You don’t need to fight right now. You won.”

I opened my eyes to see Cai gazing down on me, the worried frown that creased his brow smoothing as I blinked up at him. “I did?”

He nodded. “You did.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Who was I fighting?”

“Yourself.”

I shook my head, fuzzy with confusion, but that just made me dizzy.

“You’ve been feverish and delirious for two days now,” he explained. “Almost three. But thanks to Neferet and Ajani, your fever has broken.”

Ah, I thought. That explains the scent.

Neferet had Heron’s training, and Ajani was skilled at mixing salves and unguents. Together, the two of them must have treated the stab wound Nyx had given me. Now that I was aware of it, I could actually feel a cooling sensation all along my flank, under a linen bandage. And the tightness of stitches. Heron’s medical bag had already been put to use. I was only sorry I was the one who’d necessitated it.

“They tell me you’re going to be all right,” Cai continued, his expression turning stern. “No thanks to your own damned stubbornness, I should say. You should have told me you were hurt.”

I struggled to sit up, feeling as if I was waking from a long sleep fraught with strange dreams. My limbs felt soft, but my head was beginning to clear. And I was very thirsty. I grabbed with both hands for the cup of watered wine that Cai lifted from the table beside the cot I lay upon. I gulped at it like it was the finest vintage, not the thin, sour mixture that it was. I finished it and handed the cup back, looking around the dimly lit room.

“Where am I?” I blurted.

“You’re a guest in my humble abode,” rumbled a voice from the shadows beyond the foot of the bed.

My mouth fell open as Arviragus stepped into the circle of lamplight.

“And believe me when I say that I’m just as surprised as you.”

No shade, but the man himself. Real as life and just as impossible.

Not a ghost. Not my imagination. Alive . . .

I felt the prick of tears as Cai made way for him to sit on the edge of the cot. I hugged Arviragus with all the strength I had—not very much at all—and he wrapped his great long arms around me, smoothing my hair as I wept into his shoulder.

“I thought you were dead,” I sobbed.

“I was, dear girl,” he murmured. “I was.”

I looked up into his face. “What happened?” I asked. “After Caesar’s Triumphs . . . I thought . . .”

“Yes, well.” He snorted. “It seems the fearsome old general had a change of heart. Couldn’t bear to rid himself of his best enemy after all.”

“I can hardly believe that of Caesar.”

“I can.” Arviragus shrugged. “In fact, I think it’s very much in character for him. So long as the world thinks I’m dead, it harms Caesar not at all to let me live and, indeed, assuages that small, deep corner of his soul that rebelled against the massacre of so many of my people. A tyrant has to find ways to live with himself. Leaving me alive was one of Caesar’s, even if that life wasn’t much of a step above death. That is, until you and your gaggle of gladiatrices arrived.”