The Defiant (The Valiant #2)(74)

I had my sister back. We had a ship and freedom, and we could have just as easily traveled west instead of east, round the Iberian Peninsula to sail clear all the way back to the Island of the Mighty. I pictured me and Sorcha, in the company of our very own royal war band of gladiatrices, marching straight up to the gates of Durovernum, right to very doors of our father’s great hall. King Virico Lugotorix would welcome his long-lost daughters with tears and open arms and great, foaming vats of good dark Cantii beer, and give us all land and cattle. We would build our own town and marry who we pleased. Charon would give up his slaver’s ways, and Sorcha would finally open her heart to him. My father would embrace Cai as a worthy suitor for his daughter’s hand, and my sister and I would build a kingdom as co-regents. And no tribe—not the Trinovantes, nor the Catuvellauni, nor the Coritanii—would dare to raid against us.

We would have peace . . .

And the girls left behind at the Ludus Achillea would pay the price.

With their lives.

The Sons of Dis would make them fight and kill, and feast on their brave hearts after they fell. And it would be all my fault. The pleasant, ridiculous fantasy of returning home shattered and fell to pieces all around me. The arena was my home now, I thought. And those girls, my family. I would fight with every strength in my soul for them. For their freedom. And pray to the Morrigan I would not fail.

“Fallon?” I heard Cai’s voice from close behind me. “Are you all right?”

I tried to say I was.

But in that moment, I suddenly felt so lost. I knew what I had to do, and why I had to do it, but I honestly didn’t know if I could. I feared, in that moment, that I would fail. Fall and be defeated and die a horrible death. And I didn’t know if I had the right to lead others to that same fate. In spite of the cloudy-bright sky overhead, I suddenly felt as if I was back in Tartarus, behind a wall of bars, staring into the black eyes of the man who wanted to claim my life and soul. That was the madness that I was willfully returning to face.

I questioned my own sanity.

“Are you afraid of what’s to come?” Cai asked me.

I turned to look up into his clear hazel eyes and could not find it within me to lie. “Yes,” I said.

He smiled at my answer and said, “Good.”

“Doesn’t that make me a coward?”

“No. Sweet Juno, Fallon, no.” He took me by the shoulders, his face close to mine, and I could see in his eyes that he wasn’t just trying to make me feel better. He meant what he said. “It makes you human,” he continued. “And it keeps you sharp. Caesar once told me—on the eve of a battle—that he did not want men under his command who didn’t have the good sense to be afraid to die. He wanted men who wanted to live. Only fools or desperate men rush blindly into the fray without giving at least a fleeting thought to what they stand to lose if they don’t come out the other side.”

“I grew up thinking that to be a warrior meant to have no fear,” I said. “To be brave above all else.”

He thought about that for a moment. “That’s one way to approach it, I suppose,” he said. “But I suspect real bravery is knowing fear intimately—I mean feeling it in the very center of your bones—and then going ahead and fighting anyway.”

I thought of what Pontius Aquila had said to me in my cage. About how he taunted me, saying he would take my courage, my bravery, and make it his own.

Fine, I thought. He can have it.

Instead, just as Cai said, I would keep my fear. And I would use that to bring Aquila and his vile Sons of Dis, and Nyx, and everyone who thought to cut me down, to their knees.

I reached up and pulled Cai’s head down so that I could kiss him.

“You don’t think any less of me,” I said, “now you know fear is my companion on the battlefield?”

“No.” He grinned. “I think you choose your companions very wisely. Well, except for maybe Quint. He’s not quite right in the head.”

I laughed. “No, he’s not. But with his help, we’ll send Aquila packing with his toga tucked up between his legs. Him and his wretched Sons of Dis.”

A flicker of a frown twitched between Cai’s brows. So brief, I thought I’d imagined it. “Right,” he said, as his gaze slipped from my face and drifted over my shoulder. “And his Sons of Dis . . .”

“We’ll send them screaming back across the River Styx to Hades,” I said.

I expected to see an answering spark in Cai’s eyes, but his gaze had turned cloudy and distant. I put a hand on his arm, but it was clear that he was suddenly miles away from me.

“Cai?”

He blinked at me, as if just then remembering I was there, and smiled. But when he opened his mouth to speak, we were interrupted by Charon, hailing from the captain’s perch. Cai shook his head, as if to dispel an unwelcome thought.

“Be right back,” he said, and kissed me on the top of the head.

I watched him stride across the deck, wondering. There were still unspoken things—those shadows on the chasm bridge—hovering between Cai and me.

When all of this is over, I thought, I will take him to our secret place in the ludus gardens and sit him down and talk those things to death. Then, once they are dead, I will forget they were ever there, and I will kiss Cai in the moonlight until it will seem like they never existed at all.