The Defiant (The Valiant #2)(77)
Aeddan was nothing like his brother.
And, for some reason, that suddenly made it harder to keep on hating him for Mael’s death. An accident? No, it hadn’t exactly been that. The two of them had fought with every heated intention of ending the other. I knew the feeling—the red rage that descends in the middle of a fight, the blind driving need to kill, to win, at whatever the cost. For Aeddan, the cost had been his own blood.
Like he’d said of Cai and his father. Blood. Betrayal. I knew he was wrong about Varro. And I knew, in my heart, that even if he was right . . . Cai—brave, honest, honorable to a fault Cai—would do the right thing.
Whatever the “right thing” was.
XV
“SO YOU’RE NOT only a slave trader, you’re a smuggler as well.”
“A successful businessman knows how to diversify.”
Quint nodded in open appreciation of Charon’s honesty. Or possibly his methods. Predictably, the slave master had been right when he’d said that the Amazons weren’t going to like his plan for getting them through the city. Kallista and the others did not take particularly kindly to the means by which he would smuggle not only their weapons but the girls themselves north up the Via Clodia, straight to the gates of the Ludus Achillea.
The weapons were easy enough. Upon docking on the west bank of the Tiber, inside the walls of Rome, Charon’s men had procured a cage cart, like the one in which Elka and I had been transported through Gaul as slaves. Only this one had a false floor with shallow compartments beneath—just roomy enough to hide a wealth of unsuspected hardware—camouflaged beneath a layer of straw.
The girls, on the other hand, were to travel hidden in plain sight. Riding in the cage cart, iron slave collars around their throats, shackles and chains at their wrists and ankles. It had taken a great deal of convincing on my part to reassure them that they weren’t, in fact, being taken to a slave auction for sale. Kallista had extracted blood oaths and promises, and at one point, I think she even cast a looming curse-in-waiting on my head should circumstances ultimately prove I’d been lying.
Growing up in an Amazon tribe must have been rough, I decided.
But when Charon and I had first devised the scheme to infiltrate the Ludus Achillea by way of our new warriors, we’d given them all an even rougher history, in order to account for their delivery to the academy.
“I’ll tell Nyx that my suppliers sent word they’d picked up this pack of lovelies from a pirate brothel in Tunisia that burned down a few months back,” Charon proposed. “I’ll say I offered them for sale to the Lady Achillea and that they’re already bought and paid for. I’ll even have the bill of sale with Sorcha’s seal on it as proof”—he gestured to Sorcha—“of the bargain.”
She almost smiled as she cocked an eyebrow at him and reached down the front of her tunic for the seal that hung perpetually from a chain around her neck. I wondered why they hadn’t taken it from her when she’d been a captive, but then—according to Pontius Aquila’s lie, and so the world—Sorcha was dead. And the seal was of no use to anyone.
“Nyx is hardly going to refuse delivery,” Charon continued. “Especially not of a whole new feisty crop of potential munera fodder for her master. In fact, knowing how she operates, she’ll probably take credit for the whole deal.”
I eyed the Amazons over my shoulder, none of whom remotely resembled the only girl I’d ever known who actually was a brothel worker. Every single one of them looked far more likely to cut a man’s throat in a bedchamber than anything else.
“Do you really think Nyx will believe all that?” I asked.
Charon shrugged. “I suppose that will depend on whether she’s ever been to a Tunisian pirate brothel.”
“Fair enough.”
It was a risk, but then again . . . so was the whole damned plan.
Sorcha would stay at Charon’s house in the city and help him coordinate our two disparate objectives. It was easy enough for her to move through the city in relative anonymity—the fame she’d earned as the vaunted Lady Achillea in her arena days had faded in the eyes, if not the minds, of her many ardent fans. And the elegant patrician figure she cut now bore almost no resemblance to the fierce mythic creature she’d been back in those days.
The same could not be said of her little sister and her companions. We had to adopt a different strategy altogether. Which was why, in the port of Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber where it emptied into the sea, we’d docked briefly for a single purpose: to bring onboard a shipment of empty wine barrels. I wasn’t about to risk sneaking myself and the Achillea girls off the ship in twos and threes. I would not risk a repeat of the scenario that had led to the loss of Meriel. But there was only one way I could think of to avoid it, and after mulling over the outlandish idea with Cai and Charon and the others, we’d agreed that it was the best—probably the only—hope of success we had.
I’d teased out my idea from a story Antonia had once told after the evening meal at the ludus, about the hero from her land named Odysseus, and how he and his war band had infiltrated a city hidden inside a wooden horse. Not having one of those handy, we’d had to make do.
“Whatever was in here previously was a cheap vintage,” Ajani muttered, crinkling her nose as she lifted one long leg over and climbed gingerly into the empty barrel. “And musty.”