The Defiant (The Valiant #2)(67)

“I learned the hard way—I’m still learning—that every time I thought my goddess had abandoned me, it was in truth I who had turned away from her.” I put a hand on her arm. “You want a sacrifice? Make a sacrifice. Take a chance. Step outside the boundaries that have been placed around you, and make your lives your own.”

She fell silent then, and I could feel the weight of my words pressing heavily on her. I didn’t want to leave her with nothing but that burden. “What’s your name?” I asked.

She was silent for so long, I didn’t think she would tell me. But when I started to get up to leave, she said, “Kallista. My name’s Kallista.”

I sat back down and watched her for a moment as she went back to sharpening her blade. “Where did you learn to speak Latin, Kallista?” I asked, striving for a lighter tone. “I thought your tribe hated Rome—and all things Roman.”

“We do.” She shrugged, smiling a little now, but still staring into the heart of the fire. “I mean, they do . . . I’ve never been as sure. I was taught to hate them, but it’s hard to hate all Romans when some Romans are . . . kind.”

She reminded me so much of myself in that moment. I’d grown up hating Rome and Romans and one particular Roman most of all. And then that had all changed. Well—not all of it, maybe. I still didn’t understand the Roman mind and didn’t approve of a great deal of Roman culture, but I’d also met Romans like Cai and his father. Soldiers like Junius. I’d even found much to admire. Even—the Morrigan help me—in Julius Caesar himself.

The great bloody tyrant, who’d been kind to me.

“Who was kind to you?” I asked Kallista.

She turned her face to look at me and said, “My father.”

Of course. She must have been the progeny of one of the stolen boys from the other side of the island, and it wasn’t beyond believing that he might have been kind toward a daughter. Loving, even. I wondered . . .

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Secundus. His name is Secundus. Was.”

Secundus. The second son. The second out of five.

“What happened to him?” I asked, a sudden knot constricting my throat.

“Marsh fever,” Kallista said. “Four summers ago it was very bad. It took my mother first. Then him. We were even going to take him over the mountains, back down to the Roman town to see if they could help him, but he was too weak.”

Quint’s brother had been alive only four years earlier, I thought.

The cages we’d seen hadn’t been used in far longer than that. Maybe Secundus had lived a freer life here among the Amazons than Quint had thought. Maybe even one touched by love. With a daughter he cared for . . . Looking at Kallista then, I could see the close resemblance to Quint and wondered why it hadn’t struck me before that moment. Maybe it was because I just hadn’t been looking for it, but she had the same tawny coloring, the freckles and gray-blue eyes. Maybe, under different circumstances, she would have even had something of his sense of humor.

I stood abruptly and held out my hand to the girl.

She looked up at me, frowning.

“Come with me,” I said. “There’s someone you should be properly introduced to.”

Quint was, unsurprisingly, still sitting beside Elka. Because, perhaps a bit more surprising, she was still sitting beside him. The fire he’d built was bright enough to illuminate Quint’s face clearly through the shimmering heat and bursts of sparks climbing upward into the night. I opened my mouth to make the proper introduction, but I didn’t get the words out of my mouth before I heard a soft gasp. I turned to see Kallista staring at her uncle.

She looked at him—really looked at him, without his helmet on his head or a sword at her throat, without the veil of fear that would have fogged her eyes on the path when she’d ambushed us with arrows and fish—and she knew. I heard her murmur the word “Father . . .” under her breath, and the knot that had closed up my throat got tighter.

Quint looked back and forth from me to the girl, a frown of confusion on his face. Inasmuch as he’d come here to assuage his own feelings for never having tried to save his brother, it seemed not to have dawned on Quint that he might find—if not his brother—someone else who shared his blood.

“Quintus, this is Kallista,” I said.

“Uh, the fish girl, yeah?” he said.

“Her father was the one who taught her to speak Latin, Quint.”

He blinked at me for a moment. “That’s nice . . .”

“Your brother, Quintus.”

“My . . .”

It still took him another long moment. As if what I was telling him was something he quite simply couldn’t wrap his mind around. And then, finally, his jaw drifted slowly open, and his gaze shifted to the girl standing at my side.

“You’re . . . My brother Secundus is your . . . father?”

“Was.” Kallista nodded, her eyes filling with tears. “He always told me you were the idiot brother . . .”

Quint choked on a sudden, strangled laugh. “He always told me that too.”

She bit her lip—to keep it from trembling, I suspected. “He missed you so much,” she said, her voice breaking. “He . . .”

Then Quint was up and hugging her, and Kallista collapsed into that embrace. I looked over to see that Elka was blinking rapidly at the exchange, the gleam of unshed tears rimming her eyes, and my heart clenched in my chest. We’d both caught the look on Quint’s face when he’d seen the empty cages in the cave at the head of the path. His hopes—whatever they’d been—had been dashed in that moment. Finding Kallista might just have redeemed the journey for him.