The Defiant (The Valiant #2)(61)
The reaction from the Amazons was instantaneous. The circle of warriors spun outward, and their battle cries turned from exultant to enraged. Their sanctum had been violated, their ceremony disrupted. It wasn’t a transgression they were about to take lightly.
Good, I thought, feeling the snarl on my lips crack the war paint on my cheeks. Come on then . . .
In the chaos of that moment our young captive shook free of Arviragus’s grip and, yelping her own skirling war cry, bolted like a young deer up a twisting path to one side of the sprawling enclosure, disappearing behind one of the carved stone sentinels. Arviragus started to scramble after her, but I stopped him.
“Arviragus!” I shouted. “We’ll handle the Amazons—you get to Sorcha!”
At the sound of her name, Sorcha’s head came up fully and her eyes locked with mine. I saw her mouth form the shape of my name, and even though I couldn’t hear her voice, I felt my sister’s strength flow into my arms.
Then my view of her was cut off, obscured by a phalanx of Amazons as they moved toward us and we suddenly realized that the lamps they bore were in no way purely ceremonial. Thank the Morrigan, Quint seemed to realize it too. From his high hidden vantage point, he blew a sharp, frantic sequence on his whistle, and the Achillea gladiatrices snapped into a testudo formation as if we’d been practicing to join the legion all our lives.
It saved our lives.
Legion tactics. I fervently ignored the irony.
The flaming iron cage balls soared out of the darkness like stones hurled from catapults, slamming into the protective shell made from our wall of shields, and the darkness exploded into showers of sparks and cinder-bright smoke. The Amazons retreated, regrouped, and came at us again—from three sides. The whistle blew. And just like we’d practiced for hours on the boat, we shifted into position forming a defensive hollow square. Shields locked and held up and at an angle, we withstood that second frantic onslaught of the fire chains slamming into our wood-and-iron defenses. The thunder of the impact was like the gods themselves hammering against our shields.
But our shields held.
Our blades darted out like serpents’ tongues, sometimes tagging flesh.
And we advanced.
Step by practiced step, shifting one way or the other as Quint’s whistle signals pierced the din. With each onslaught, pine tar resin flew in thick, sticky gobs of flame from the iron cage balls at the end of the chains. Dangerous and devastatingly painful, the stuff would cling to any flesh it came into contact with and burn clean through to the bone. We weren’t about to let that happen. But we couldn’t hold them off forever. From behind the splintering wooden barrier, I glanced over at Cai on my left and saw that he was grimacing fiercely, his teeth bared in a savage grin.
“Is this what it’s really like in the legion?” I asked him breathlessly.
“No,” he said, stepping to the left as another series of whistles pierced the air. “This is much more fun!”
With each blast of Quint’s whistle, we moved through the steps of the martial dance of legion formations. We wheeled and spun, locked shields and advanced, switched positions and rush-attacked, frustrating the Amazons’ efforts to crush us or immolate us. Safe in formation we advanced, pushing the Amazons—who fought like the berserker warriors of legend, hurling themselves against our defenses—slowly backward, toward where the hills climbed sharply upward.
Behind our wall of shields, I looked down the line, left and right. To my right, Gratia and Elka held strong at the center of our broad wedge. Elka howled a stream of Varini curses, and Gratia’s teeth were bared like a tiger on the hunt. To my left, Cai and Ajani harried the attackers with darting blades through the narrow gaps in our formation. On the other side of Ajani, I saw Antonia duck low beneath her shield edge and swipe at the legs of an Amazon with the crescent-bladed sheath weapon strapped to her arm. An ugly scream told me she’d hit her mark, and suddenly there was an easing off in attack pressure as her comrades dragged the wounded woman away from our advance.
The urge to break formation and spill through that gap was almost overwhelming. It’s what the Cantii in me would have done. What the gladiatrix would have done too.
“Hold the line!” I called, deferring to my legionnaire self. “Advance on the line!”
Realizing the futility of their attacks, Thalestris and her sisters retreated behind a raised ridge of earth, and that’s when the arrows began to fly. They could hold us off indefinitely from that position. Except for one thing . . .
Cai and I realized it at the same time.
The heat from the fire chains was no longer coming in waves. Instead, it had become a constant, brutal presence pressing against our faces. The shields we’d taken from Charon’s boat might have been old and battered, the bright-painted designs faded and peeling from exposure to the wind and salt sea, but they were stout and well-made. They’d withstood the battering of the iron cages, cracking and splintering in places but holding together. The thing we hadn’t expected was that the flaming resin would stick to the shields.
And burn. Furiously.
Behind our shield wall, the air was almost too hot to breathe, and we were blinded by the scorching shimmer of the flames. It wouldn’t be long before we’d have to ditch the shields. But maybe just long enough . . .
“V!” I shouted. “V formation! Form on me, Achilleans!”