The Defiant (The Valiant #2)(43)

“You never told anyone what they said?” I asked. “You never told Sorcha?”

“I thought at the time that it was just talk.” He shook his head, and I could see genuine regret in his eyes. “Nothing but talk. I forgot about it almost as soon as I heard it, just like most things.”

“Why didn’t you say anything about the Lanista’s abduction earlier?” Cai asked. “That was far more than just talk.”

“Because Thalestris didn’t just give me coins.” Leander turned to him. “She also gave me a promise. She said she’d kill me if I so much as breathed a word of what I saw that night. She told me she would find me—hunt me down wherever I was—and split me open to spill my guts for the vultures. She was very convincing.”

I fought against the surging tide of desperate hope that swept over me. If I was to help my sister—save her—then I had to keep my wits about me. Listen to your head, not your heart, I could almost hear her say. Truth before hope. Strategy before passion.

“Aeddan—did you know Thalestris was still alive?”

He shook his head. “Pontius Aquila may have trusted me enough to think I wouldn’t turn against him, but that doesn’t exactly mean he considered me a close confidant. I didn’t know it was the Amazon who was working with him, and I saw nothing of what happened to her, or your sister, on the night of the ludus attack.”

I turned back to Leander. “Did she say anything else? Thalestris?”

Leander nodded. “When she was dragging the Lanista out through the kitchen—before she saw that I was awake—she was ranting. Laughing to herself and saying how she would take the Lanista away and make her pay. That she would sacrifice her to the goddess of the Amazons under the light of the Huntress Moon. How spilling of her blood would make their tribe mighty again. I think she has gone mad, domina. The goddess Nemesis has infected her mind.”

Maybe so. But at the very least, Sorcha was still alive. There was still a chance.

“Huntress Moon . . . the next full moon,” I turned back to Cai and the others, looking from face to face, unable in the wake of my fever to even think for myself what day of the week it was. “When is that? Does anyone know—”

“Fifteen days,” Neferet said. “Lucky for Achillea, there’s still time.”

“Depending on where Thalestris has taken her,” I said. “Leander?”

“Right . . .”

“Where?”

He nodded and held up a hand, and I could see him struggling to remember. The muscles of his throat worked as he swallowed hard, concentrating. “Corsica!” he said finally. “They’ve sailed to the island of Corsica.”

In the middle of the Mare Nostrum, I thought. And I felt my heart sink like a ship in those deep waters that I had no way to cross.





IX




I HEARD QUINT groan and looked over to see a pained expression on his face.

“Quintus?” Cai asked.

He sighed. “I was afraid he was going to say that.”

I remembered then that Cai had told me Quint was from Corsica. I struggled to remember what else I knew about the place, and the only thing that came to mind was something Cai had told me as the slave transport ship we were on sailed past the island, on that long-ago day when I’d been on my way to being sold in the marketplace of Rome.

He’d told me then that Corsica was inhabited mostly by . . . what was it? Right. I remembered: “Sheep. Bees. A few ill-tempered natives too intractable even to be useful as slaves.” That sounded like a fairly accurate representation of a tribe of Amazons . . .

“Why ‘afraid,’ Quint?” I asked.

“I was born in a fishing village on the east coast of Corsica,” he said. “Youngest of five boys—hence the name: Quintus. My mother sent me and two of my brothers away to the mainland when I was ten.”

“Why did she send you away?” Elka asked.

He paused and glared at the ground between his feet, a strange expression that was half regret, half anger crossing his face. “Because she didn’t want us to be taken,” he said. “Like one of her other boys had been. My brother Secundus . . .”

“Taken by who?” Elka asked.

Quint lifted his gaze to meet hers directly and said, “The Amazons.”

Cai and I exchanged a glance.

“That’s what they call themselves,” Quint continued. “They’re not really—everyone knows there haven’t been any real Amazons for over a century—but don’t tell them that . . .” He looked about, the muscles of his jaw working. “Is there any drink left around here?”

Arviragus silently went and fetched him a mug of ale. Quint took a deep pull and huffed a sigh as the rest of us gathered around to listen to his story.

“In the early days, a hundred years ago or more, when the Greeks first sailed the Mare Nostrum and discovered Corsica, they colonized it,” he began. “No one else had really paid it much attention before that time, but they thought it might be worth establishing a trading port or two in the coves where the marsh flies weren’t so bad. They brought slaves with them, of course, and some of those slaves were, to my understanding, Amazons. Real ones. Or the daughters of them, at least.”