The Defiant (The Valiant #2)(8)

“Then leave, why don’t you!” Gratia leaned forward, thrusting out her jaw.

“Stop it.” I stood, all that Cantii-souled happiness flaring to equally potent anger. “Stop it! No one’s going anywhere. Not even you, Tanis.”

“You’re not my owner, Fallon.” She shot to her feet, stumbling on her injured ankle. “Neither is your sister. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Don’t any of you understand that? No one owns us anymore. We’re all alone again. Just like we were before we came here. Only nothing about the prison has changed except the bars!” She turned and hobbled up the beach, disappearing into the darkness.

“Let her go,” Meriel said, rolling her eyes. “Where’s my mug?”

I stayed where I was, on my feet, and exchanged a look with Elka. After a moment, she shrugged and waved me in the direction Tanis had gone. I sighed and went after her. She hadn’t gone far. Just far enough to still hear the others’ laughter drifting on the night breeze.

I sat down beside her on the flat rock that looked out over the black glass mirror of Lake Sabatinus. A young crescent moon rode low in the cloudless starlit sky, as if gazing down at her luminous profile reflected in the water. The night was just bright enough for me to see the tracks of tears on Tanis’s cheeks. I sat there beside her, silent for a long moment.

“Are you really from a tribe of wanderers?” I asked quietly, when it became clear that she wasn’t going to start a conversation.

“Desert herders,” she sniffed, not looking at me. “What’s it to you?”

“Nothing.” I shrugged. “I just didn’t know that. How will you find them again if you leave us?”

I could see the prospect of that terrified her. Just as much as the prospect of staying. But if there was one thing all of us had learned in our time at the ludus, it was that you never admitted fear. Not if you could absolutely help it.

“I don’t know,” she admitted, finally.

I nodded and said nothing.

“Must be nice not to have to worry about such a thing,” Tanis continued. “For you, I mean.”

“How so?” I asked.

“You can just go back to your life as a pampered princess in Britannia once you win back your freedom,” she said. “But then, you’d probably miss all of those crowds yelling your name every time you so much as stepped onto the sand.”

“Is that what you think I care about?”

“Why wouldn’t you?” she asked, and I could tell she meant it. “The only time anyone yells my name in the arena is if they want me to get out of the way.”

“Ajani thinks very highly of you,” I said.

“That’s just because I can shoot.”

“That’s not a small thing, Tanis. You’re very good and—”

“I’m a coward, Fallon!” she spat vehemently. “Don’t you understand? I’m really good at fighting from a distance because I’m terrified of having to do it up close! All of the rest of you—you and Damya and Meriel and even Ajani, once she’s used up all her arrows—you all seem to think nothing whatsoever of charging headlong at a wall of swords! How? How do you do it? Every muscle in my body tries to run the other way.”

“But you don’t,” I said. “You haven’t. I mean—I’ve seen you stand your ground and fight. You—”

“Defend myself,” she sneered. “Badly. Elka was right. And I only ever did it because running would have just meant flogging once they caught up with me. Flogging if I was lucky.”

She glowered at me, as if daring me to contradict her. But I couldn’t. For the first time, I thought about what it must have been like for the girls at the ludus who hadn’t grown up wanting to do nothing more than swing a sword. I’d never seen that in Tanis before, but now that she’d said it, I tried to put myself in her place. When she’d been nothing but a slave—when she’d had no choice but to fight as a gladiatrix for the ludus—Tanis had fought alongside the rest of us, day in and day out. Fight or suffer punishment.

Now—in spite of Elka’s jest about us freely toiling under her lash—the actual threat of Thalestris’s whip was about to disappear with the advent of the Nova Ludus Achillea. And Tanis was afraid that, without that kind of external motivation, she would no longer be able to find it within herself to fight. To go into the arena and—spurred on by nothing but her own free will—risk defeat or injury. Or death.

I could see the muscles in her jaw working as I sat there looking at her. It had taken a good deal of courage to admit it. But I wasn’t sure I could make her see it that way.

Instead, I asked, “How’s the ankle?”

She stuck out her leg and flexed her foot. “Hurts. But it’ll heal.” She fell silent for a long moment and I thought maybe that was the end of our conversation. But then she said, “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For saving me back on the ship.” She shrugged. “And for not trying to tell me I’m wrong now. We both know I’m no fighter, Fallon. If I have a destiny, I don’t think it’s here.”

“I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion if I were you, Tanis.” I put a hand on her shoulder. “Wait and see. You might find that, once you no longer have to fight . . . you might want to. And you might just do it better.”