The Defiant (The Valiant #2)(9)
She frowned, unconvinced, but at least I was able to talk her into coming back and joining the others. By the time we returned to the fire, it was as if the sniping between the girls had never happened. Meriel pressed a mug into Tanis’s hand and made room for her in the circle of bodies. I sat there, silent, looking from face to firelit face and thinking about just how much that circle of girls had come to mean to me in such a relatively short time. I didn’t want any of them to leave the ludus. Not Tanis, not even Meriel or Lydia. They were my sisters, and I wanted them to stay and fight with me—as much as I wanted to fight for them.
Elka threw another log on the fire, and the flames belched clouds of sparks into the night. The general merriment continued undiminished all around me, highlighted by Leander’s outrageous flirtations with each and every one of us.
“My heart belongs only to you, sweet Ajani!” he was saying, looking every bit the cheerful, leering satyr through the shower of sparks. “But also you, fair Damya.”
“Ha.” She grinned back at him, and I thought she might actually be enjoying his advances. Except her idea of flirting back was “It would, if I ripped it out of your chest and kept it in a jar.”
Leander swallowed his next retort, and Damya threw back her head and laughed, slapping him so heartily on the back that she almost knocked him into the fire. I tried to laugh along at the banter, but my own thoughts started to careen away from me. My own heart, I suddenly remembered, had been missing for months. Stolen and carried away into battle in far-off lands. By Caius Antonius Varro, decurion in Caesar’s legions . . .
I sighed.
Clearly, I thought, I’ve drunk far too much of the kitchen boy’s beer tonight. Still, the warmth of the fire on my face made me close my eyes and imagine it was Cai’s breath on my skin as he leaned close to kiss me.
“You sigh any louder and somebody’s going to tattle to Heron that you’ve got a case of evil humors,” Elka’s voice murmured in my ear as she sat down beside me and handed me another cup of beer.
I opened one eye and squinted at her.
“I know it’s just love-pining,” she said, “but he’ll march you to the infirmary to have you stuck with bloodletting skewers and wrapped in one of his stinking poultices.”
I opened my other eye and grumbled something unpleasant under my breath before gulping my drink. Elka nodded and drank from her own cup.
“How long since you’ve heard from him?”
“Weeks,” I said sourly. “Four of them less a day, to be exact. Plus however many hours it’s been since I woke up this morning.”
“At least you’re getting the knack of the Roman calendar.”
“Barely.”
“And you’re learning to read their letters.”
“Less than barely.”
The Cantii had no written language. All our stories were told face-to-face, passed down through the songs and poems of our bards. We had no need for scribbled marks on tablets and scrolls to convey our hearts and minds to others.
Rome, and Romans, were different. And so I’d resolved to learn their written words as best I could. Sorcha had made a tutor available to any of the girls at the ludus who wished to avail themselves, though few of them did. Ajani, with her quiet thirst for knowledge, was one. I was another. Admittedly, I had a very specific reason for doing so. An armor-wearing reason with laughing hazel eyes and an infuriatingly kissable mouth who was, at present, a whole wide world away from me, smiting the enemies of the great and mighty Caesar.
Before he left, I’d promised Cai that I would try to write. Or rather, that I would try to dictate letters to Heron, the ludus physician, and perhaps the only man I would trust with such words. And Cai had promised me, in turn, that he would send me letters back whenever he could. Letters written in basic—very basic—Latin. Usually the missives were no more than two or three lines of neat black script on a square of papyrus or vellum. But beyond the words and phrases I could recognize, like “smile” and “miss you”—or, depending on how Caesar’s campaign fared, “fight” and “enemy” and “seige”—Cai always sent me something else. He sent me pictures. They made my chest ache for him.
Because they were magic. And they were just for me.
Like the murals painted on the walls of the Ludus Achillea—scenes from the arena captured and frozen into single unending moments—Cai’s charcoal drawings of people and places, birds and animals and flowers struck me speechless when I gazed at them.
Every few weeks, a scroll sealed in a copper tube would arrive at the ludus, delivered by courier along with whatever other correspondence there was for the Lanista or the other girls. There wasn’t much of the latter—most of us didn’t have anyone to correspond with outside of the walls of the academy—and so I always felt a little guilty when the courier would ride through the gates and the other gladiatrices would sigh or snicker or, some, gaze longingly at the letters I received. In the privacy of my cell, though, that guilty twinge would vanish the instant I twisted open the seal.
Inside were scenes of the countrysides Cai and the legions marched through: rolling hills dotted with strands of trees, craggy ravines seamed with creeks, soaring forests, and endless plains. Sometimes, he drew the creatures that inhabited those places: a herd of deer grazing, an eagle perched on the high, bare branch of a lonely pine, a crow sitting on the peak of an army camp tent, wings hunched against the wind and black eyes gleaming bright. And always, beneath the sketch, Cai would write the name of the thing in neat black letters to help me learn their names in his language.