The Defiant (The Valiant #2)(86)
They parted before our horses like long grass before a storm gale.
And they were cheering.
Cai had the reins of my chariot and he drove, bareheaded and standing tall, his face set in a stern expression. I rode bareheaded too, standing behind him with my feet braced wide. I carried my helmet in the crook of my arm and left my hair unbound to stream behind me. The crowd recognized me instantly from my victories and threw laurel sheafs beneath the hooves of my chariot ponies. Some of them recognized Cai as the handsome young decurion who’d leaped the barrier to sweep me off my feet in a passionate kiss after my Triumphal win. If they’d thought before that the Achillea gladiatrices were rebels after the fashion of Spartacus—an unruly band to be feared and hated—that impression vanished in that instant. I could feel it.
We weren’t rebels or renegades.
We were defiant heroes, on our way to reclaim what was ours.
And once we got there, we’d give them a show they’d never forget. As we traveled up the Via Clodia, the crowd followed, swelling with each mile, a festival parade. When we arrived, the mob that had gathered in the fields and in the stands, beneath the striped awnings and banners snapping in the evening breeze, roared mad approval. The closer we got to the arena, the more I could feel the bloodlust that fogged the air, thicker than I’d ever tasted it. Even during the Triumphs. It pressed against my skin and made me feel, for a moment, like I was suffocating. The mob was the only reason we’d been able to engineer this challenge, but they were not why I was fighting. Not who I was fighting for. I was fighting for the girls I rode with. I was fighting with them.
This fight was for no one but us.
Another wave of shouts and cheers went up, echoing off the distant hills and shaking the very walls of the Ludus Achillea in front of us. Pontius Aquila would have no choice but to send out most, if not all, of his gladiators—male and female. If he and his fighters stayed hemmed in behind those walls, I had little doubt the mob would storm the ludus in outrage at being denied their bloody spectacle. At the very least, he and Nyx and his whole Amazona contingent would become little more than a laughingstock. There would be no more munera for the Sons of Dis—not from Aquila at any rate—and he would lose any influence he wielded in the political circles of the Republic. I smiled to myself grimly. The mob didn’t know it, but they were our most powerful weapon in rendering the Sons of Dis powerless. They might very well achieve their desired bloodshed this night, but I swore to the Morrigan, it would not be in the way they expected.
They could choke on the blood we would spill for all I cared.
As the sun began, finally, to sink over the far distant hills, painting the arena purple with dusk, hundreds of torches flared to life. The roars of the crowd were like the gales of a summer storm, thundering in waves across the fields to slam into the walls of the ludus and roll back again over the makeshift stands. The sloping hills that cradled the lake on either side gathered the noise and echoed with the roars of “Victrix! Victrix!” making it seem as though the crowds of spectators were even larger than when I’d fought during the Triumphs in the Circus Maximus.
Their cries shook my bones.
Even as my sister walked out onto that field of combat in my place.
Dressed in my Victrix armor.
XVII
I LAY IN the bottom of a boat, drifting across the silent water of Lake Sabatinus, half a mile away from the Ludus Achillea, listening to the faint dull roar of the crowds. I reached over, searching for Cai’s hand. His fingers, long and strong and calloused, tightened on mine, and he flicked a glance toward me, his clear hazel eyes glinting in the starlit darkness. The sun had long set, but there were so many torches burning in the makeshift arena in front of the ludus that the sky in the southwest seemed lit on fire.
Still, I was grateful that it was the night before the new moon. The overarching darkness would make it easier for Sorcha, wearing my Victory helmet, to pass as me. And with any luck, it would also serve to help us infiltrate the Ludus Achillea from the lakeward side.
It has been Arviragus’s strategy—one that he’d suggested to me when I’d told him back on Corsica about my idea to retake the ludus. Something learned from his time battling Julius Caesar in the forests of Gaul: Never commit all your forces to only one front of attack. As strategies went, it certainly wasn’t groundbreaking in its innovation. But then again, Pontius Aquila was no soldier, and I could only hope that he didn’t have the necessary strategic instincts to become one. With the massive spectacle we’d orchestrated in front of the ludus, I was counting—hoping, praying—on him having committed all, or at least most, of his defensive elements to dealing with the roaring tigers clawing at his front gate.
Leaving the back door open to the silent, sneaky rats.
It had gone according to plan, so far.
Once our contingent of gladiatrices had arrived at the field arena, we’d made our way through the excited throng, straight to the pavilion tent Charon had commissioned to have built for us at the south end of the makeshift arena—a waiting place where the combatants could prepare for the coming spectacle, away from the raucous crowds. Sorcha had been waiting inside the tent since before dawn, and she and I had gone about our business swiftly and with minimal chatter. I shrugged out of my armored breastplate and battle kilt, my greaves and bracers and helmet, and handed over my signature weaponry—my dimachaerus swords.