The Defiant (The Valiant #2)(68)

And then some.

Elka and I moved a discreet distance away, back to the other fire, to give uncle and newfound niece a chance to get better acquainted. Elka was silent for a while, poking at the charred wood with a stick, lost in thought.

“Family,” she murmured eventually. “It’s . . . something, ja? An important thing, I mean. Sometimes.”

“All times,” I said.

“For you, I guess.” She nodded her chin at Quint. “For him . . .”

“For you too.”

She raised a pale eyebrow at me over the flames.

“What do you think they are?” I gestured at the clusters of Achillea girls hunkered down in front of the fires on the other side of the clearing. “What do you think I am, you great thickheaded brute?”

“Besides a constant thorn in my shoe?” She grunted a laugh and then subsided back into silence, frowning. When she spoke again, it was with a shrug that I suspect was supposed to be casual but came off as more of a shudder. “I suppose you’re right.” She sighed. “Well . . . I guess it was nice while it lasted. Belonging to something and all that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You have your sister back, Fallon,” she said. “That’s what we came here to do. It’s over—the quest, the adventure . . . Now? We all go our separate ways.”

“What makes you say that?”

“What else is there for us to do? It was bad enough when we were just infamia. Now we’re outright rebel fugitives.”

“We are not.”

“We are.” She snorted in frustration at my stubbornness. “You can tell yourself another story if you like, little fox, but I’m the pragmatic one, remember?”

I snorted right back at her. “And were your pragmatic ears not listening back in Heron’s infirmary when I told you that, once we rescued Sorcha, we’d go back and retake the ludus?”

“Oh no, I was listening,” she said. “I just assumed you’d lost your mad little fox mind again.”

I shook my head and she tilted hers, regarding me warily.

“You were serious,” she said.

“Deadly.”

“Retake the ludus.”

“Mm-hm.”

“With what army?”

I opened my mouth, but found I had no immediate answer. Elka was right. I looked back over at our gladiatrix sisters. While we’d fared far better than our adversaries, we’d still collected an impressive degree of injuries. None of us had escaped without cuts and bruises of varying degrees. Neferet suspected Hestia might have a fractured bone in her wrist, and Anat had suffered an ugly shoulder burn when her shield had shattered during our fiery rush. Then there was Gratia, who kept telling everyone she was perfectly fine—even though it had taken more than a dozen stitches to close a deep gash on her thigh. I suspected the ample mead the Amazons had supplied before Neferet had begun stitching had gone a long way to influencing Gratia’s opinions of her own hurts.

Even before the fight, we’d been too few to win in a pitched battle against Nyx and Aquila’s contingent of gladiatrices and Dis warriors. The only thing going back to the ludus in our present state would achieve would be to land us in chains. And then, inevitably, in one of Pontius Aquila’s evil munera fights. I frowned and looked away from Elka, searching the darkness for the answer. My gaze drifted back over to where Kallista still sat with Quint, heads together, and then on past them to where the lights of the Amazon fires flickered through the trees just beyond the oppidum’s tumbled walls.

“We don’t need an army,” I said, responding, at last, to Elka’s question. “We need a war band.”

“I fail to see the distinction.”

I felt myself smiling as a hazy, half-formed plan began to coalesce in my mind. “When I was a little girl,” I said, “all I ever wanted was to follow in my sister’s footsteps and join my father’s royal war band. Warriors, Elka. Not soldiers. Not mercenaries. Not Aquila’s killers. Not even gladiatrices, fighting alone. No. What we need to be to make this happen is warriors. Few, fearsome, and fighting as a family.”

She shook her head. “We’re not enough.”

“No.” My gaze drifted back toward Kallista. “But we will be.”





XIII




THE SUN BROKE over the horizon as we were finishing a breakfast of fish and crabmeat wrapped in grape leaves on a bed of soft, roasted grains, washed down with cups of cold spring water. The repast had been left for us, laid out on flat stones at the edge of our encampment, some time before dawn broke. Even if it was grudging, one couldn’t fault the Amazons for their hospitality. Which was only surpassed by their enthusiasm to get us started on our way, I thought, as Areto and a small council of the older members of the tribe came to bid us farewell.

Unfortunately for them, I suspected—hoped, rather—that there would be a slight delay before we left them to their rugged solitude.

As we made our final preparations to depart, I kept glancing off into the distance, where Cai and Quint had gone, waiting anxiously for them to return. Sorcha noticed my fretfulness and asked me what the matter was.

“Nothing,” I murmured. “Nothing . . .”

Then I saw movement beneath the trees, and I turned to grin at her.