The Defiant (The Valiant #2)(59)
“I guess I don’t really have much choice then, do I?” she said, dryly.
I admired her courage. It didn’t even seem like bravado as she stood and dusted herself off. Then without a backward glance, she turned and started up the path, muttering about the waste of perfectly good fish.
Cai came up beside me. “Fallon,” he said, putting a hand on my arm, a frown of worry on his brow. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said, shrugging out of his grip, even though I didn’t really meant to.
His lips disappeared in a white line and he nodded brusquely. “Good.”
“Let’s keep moving,” I said, and gestured to the others to follow.
The path angled steeper the farther up we hiked. I turned to glance over my shoulder at the line of gladiatrices following me up the hill. From my vantage point, they looked like an armored serpent, twisting its way up the path, a line of round, many-colored scales upon its back. We’d decided, collectively, to bring the shields from the ship, carrying them on our backs. Just in case. I hoped we wouldn’t need them. But never again would I decline the opportunity for an advantage in a fight, and if the Amazons, like the Cantii and the Arverni and—as far as I could tell, almost anyone who wasn’t a soldier in the Roman legion—fought as individuals, then our newly learned defensive tactics might come in handy.
If it came down to a fight.
And I knew in my heart that it would.
Thalestris wouldn’t give up without one, but I wondered about her fellow Amazons. Were they really the fearsome fighting force of legend? Warrior women fueled by the magic of their gods, adversaries of legendary heroes? Our sullen young captive didn’t seem quite so mystical. I glanced around me as we ascended—at the signs of what seemed to have been a once-prosperous settlement. There were stone ruins dotted here and there beneath the trees, but no signs of recent habitation. And then the path crested a rise and opened up before us to reveal a sweeping, terraced landscape. I could see the remains of fortifications and walls, tumbled structures and stone pillars. At the center, there was a broad, roughly circular enclosure, like a natural arena, watched over by several tall stone sentinels carved in the shapes of weapons and warriors with stern, glowering faces. From the way Quint had described it, I thought this must be the oppidum—the settlement that had been built by the original inhabitants of the island and then abandoned, only to be taken over by the Amazons once they had escaped their Greek masters.
The place looked forsaken, silent and still, long uninhabited. Except . . .
Not far ahead, Quint had stopped in front of the hollowed-out curve of a massive boulder that formed a shallow cave that might have provided scant protection from the elements. He stood staring into the shadowy niche, and following his glance, I could see why. There were cages there, beneath the low stone overhang. Empty, but big enough to have once held one or two occupants each. I watched as Elka reached out and put a hand on Quint’s shoulder.
“Quintus,” she said quietly. “You don’t know—”
“Yeah,” he said. “I do. They kept him in one of these. I know it.”
“Quint . . .”
“It doesn’t matter now.” He shrugged off her hand. “Come on. Let’s go.”
I looked back at Arviragus, who had a firm grip on our young Amazon captive, and knew by the way she was staring at the cages that Quint was right. That’s exactly what they’d been used for. The look on Arviragus’s face told me he recognized them for what they were too.
“Where are your people?” I asked the girl.
She looked at me, her gaze flinty. “Don’t worry,” she said, her focus drifting over my shoulder. “They’re coming.”
“What?” I rounded on her. “You said they wouldn’t be expecting us—”
“They’re not!” she said, pointing behind me at where the pale round ghost of the full moon was just rising into the dusky sky. “They come for the sacrifice.” Then she pointed at a rough-hewn menhir in the center of the main clearing, a pillar carved from a single stone darker than the surrounding rock and taller than the tallest man. In the fading light, I realized that there were ropes circling it.
Ropes that bound my sister Sorcha to the stone, holding her immobile.
The sacrifice.
Sorcha’s head hung down, hair obscuring her face. I sucked in a breath at the sight of her and was suddenly assailed by a strikingly vivid memory from my childhood. When I was five or six years old, Durovernum was attacked by raiders who’d sailed in shallow-keeled boats all the way up the River Dwr. They thought themselves brave but in reality were just too stupid to realize what they were up against. The fighting had been brief, vicious, and—on their end—lethal to a man. About the only thing the raiders managed was to set fire to a grove of pine trees near the town walls. I remembered my outrage as a child, because it was one of my favorite places to play. I also remembered the smell—the sharp, potent tang of blazing pine sap.
I could taste it. Acrid green smoke. Just a hint on the breeze . . .
“Look sharp!” I hissed. “We’re not alone!”
An understatement.
The moon rose before us, the sun set behind, turning the oppidum into a stone bowl filled with misty purple shadows. But in the distance, I could see thin lines of black smoke rising, and the branches of the olive trees glowed orange with the reflected light of flames.