The Valiant (The Valiant #1)(17)
“This isn’t a chance. This is madness,” she said in a low, frantic voice. “Listen to me—I was born into my lot. I’ve been a slave my whole life, with never the chance to be anything but. And I’ll still gladly take that fate over running wild through this countryside, waiting to be caught and killed by lawless men. Killed if you’re lucky. You heard what Charon said.”
I looked over her shoulder, out at the deep, dark, utterly still forest.
“I heard him,” I said. “I don’t believe him. These hills are deserted. There is nothing here but the spirits of the Arverni murdered by Caesar’s legions.” I said it in a voice loud enough to almost make myself believe it. “Stay here if that’s what you want.” I lifted her hand from my shoulder. “But I’ll take my chances with dead men, lawless or not.”
“Wait.” She bent down and yanked off her worn leather slippers and held them out. When I hesitated, she thrust them at me. “Take them,” she urged, nodding at my own bare feet. “Take the shoes and my prayers to the goddess for you. You’ll need them both.”
The girl’s gaze was strangely compassionate. She knew just by looking at me that I wasn’t like her. I wasn’t a slave—I never had been. I’d only ever been a princess and a warrior. The irony, I realized, was that she was stronger than me because of it. This was a girl who would choose to stay chained if it meant that her odds of survival were even so much as a hairsbreadth better. And there was strength in that choice—the sheer, bloody-minded will to survive no matter how dreadful the circumstance. Maybe honor wasn’t always something won by a blade, I thought. And maybe it couldn’t be so easily stripped away, even in servitude.
I ducked my head and snatched the shoes from the girl’s fingers, shame heating my cheeks. “Thank you,” I murmured as I stuffed my feet into them.
The soles of the leather slippers were almost worn through in places, but they fit snugly. As I straightened up from tying the lacings, my Varini shackle-mate reached down and grasped a fistful of the iron links that tethered us together.
“If you slow me down,” she growled, “I’ll hack your foot off with a sharp stone.”
“I won’t slow you down,” I said. “So long as you keep your big, flat feet out of my way.”
Pale blue eyes blinked at me for a moment. Then the Varini grinned—an expression utterly devoid of mirth—and said, “Run.”
VII
IT WAS AWKWARD AT FIRST—the Varini girl’s legs were longer than mine—but once we settled into a rhythm, we made surprisingly good speed through the forest, navigating an increasingly steep incline by moonlight.
But then my foot hit something hard and angular, and I stumbled and fell forward onto my hands and knees. The tall blonde stumbled to a stop, cursing in her own tongue before spinning on her heel to tower over me, one fist clenched.
“Clumsy idiot!” she snarled, her voice a raw scrape of sound in the darkness. “I told you if you slowed me down I’d—”
“Hack my foot off,” I snapped. “I remember.”
I looked down at the thing that had tripped me and tugged on it. With one good heave, I stood to face the Varini, lifting a short, broad-bladed sword streaked with dirt. I smiled as she froze, staring at the weapon in my hand.
“Perhaps I should just remove yours instead,” I suggested sweetly, “and save us both the burden of each other’s continued company.”
In the silver wash of a moonbeam, I could see the dints and burrs of battle damage along the edge of the sword’s blade. Beneath a generous layer of rust, it didn’t even so much as glimmer in the pale light. But it was still a weapon. A useful one.
One of a pair, it seemed.
My moment of superiority vanished as the Varini’s eyes suddenly narrowed and she lunged for the pile of leaves at my feet. When she stood, her fist was wrapped around the hilt of her own found weapon—another sword, almost identical to the one I held. We had stumbled upon a weapons cache left over from the great battle of Alesia.
I knew the stories. I’d heard them told around the fire of my father’s great hall. Four year earlier, word had reached our tribe that, across the sea, the king named Arviragus—the mighty Arverni chieftain, the brave rebel the Romans had come to know by his war title, Vercingetorix—had been defeated by Julius Caesar in his wars against a confederation of Gallic tribes. And not just defeated. Shamed. Shackled and dragged off to Rome in chains like an animal. I shuddered at the thought. I couldn’t imagine a worse fate for such a man.
Alesia had been the battle that had ended the war. Caesar had surrounded the fortified town with not one but two rings of earthworks and hunkered down for a devastating siege. The defenders had eventually sent their women and children out into the no-man’s-land between the fortifications, hoping that Caesar would allow them to go free. He hadn’t. Instead, he’d let them starve.
Desperate, the Gauls had eventually been forced out of the town and into pitched battle with the legions, to no avail. And Arviragus had ultimately surrendered—but not before tens of thousands of Gaulish Celts had died. Tens of thousands more had been taken as slaves. And the once-bustling town of Alesia—what remained of it—had been left to rot, surrounded by crumbling fortifications and ditches filled with bones and brackish water. And, it appeared, ancient rusting weapons.