The Valiant (The Valiant #1)(21)
The brigand was just . . . gone.
In that moment, I completely understood why, young as he was, Charon’s men respected—or, perhaps, feared—him. With one swift motion, Charon had grabbed the brigand by the shoulder and yanked him around. Two more moves and the man lost first his sword hand . . . and then his head.
His blade, hilt still clasped in dead fingers, spun through the air. The man’s head toppled from his neck and bounced away into the undergrowth, the whites of his eyes glinting in the moonlight. The headless torso slumped to the ground, and Charon wiped his blade on the dead man’s sleeve. The relief I felt was followed swiftly by a stab of fear. Elka and I had been rescued only to find ourselves once more in the hands of our captor.
And he wasn’t very happy with us.
Charon stepped over the corpse at his feet and grabbed me by the slave collar, hauling me close so that I was almost nose to nose with him. I could smell wine on his breath. He’d probably been traveling in ease, riding in his private covered wagon, when the cage cart had overturned. Although my pulse thrummed in my throat, beating wildly against the knuckles of Charon’s fist, I forced my eyes to meet his. If I was going to die, I was going to stare into the face of my death when it happened.
I held my breath. But after another long moment, I saw the white fury fade from behind the slave master’s eyes.
“You cost me a man, and you cost me a wagon, and yet here I am, rescuing you from the ravages of your own stupidity,” he hissed. “I must be mad.”
“Leave me here among these ruins, then,” I said, half-defiant, half-afraid he would do just that, “and I’ll trouble you no more.”
“Don’t tempt me,” he said. “Listen to me. You’re a fool, and you know nothing. You don’t even know what you’re worth. But I do.”
My eyes snapped back up to his face.
“And that’s the only reason you’re still alive,” he said. “But understand this: If you try and pull a stunt like this again, if you even so much as think about running, I swear by all the gods, I will stake you to the ground myself and leave you for the wolves.”
He let go of my slave collar, and I stumbled back a step, knocking into Elka. She put out a hand to steady me. Charon jabbed a finger at the tall Varini girl. “And you,” he said. “You’ve already cost me blood money. I should kill you right now just for the trouble you’ve caused.”
I felt Elka’s fingers close tightly on my arm, but she said nothing.
“I can’t sell you dead,” he growled. “But if you don’t fetch a price that’ll make it worth my trouble, I’ll sell you instead to some fat Roman bastard senator who’ll make you wish you were dead.”
He turned and gestured to his men to collect us and our surviving attackers, who now knelt in the dust at the feet of the slavers. “Get them back down to the road. And get a chain on these other animals. Might as well glean all the profit we can from this misbegotten night.”
“What of Clodhar?” Hafgan asked, nodding toward the road.
“What of him?” Charon said. “He’s dead. His incompetence cost me a cart and a night’s rest. He can lie in that ditch till the scavengers scatter his bones.”
He turned and stalked off into the night, leaving his men to deal with us. I turned to Elka, who kicked at the iron links that bound us together.
“I guess we’re stuck with each other then,” she said. “For the time being.”
“There are worse fates,” I said.
She rolled an eye at me.
“Not many, but some.”
A grin flickered across Elka’s face as Charon’s men barked at us to get moving. The slave chain hissed sullenly along the ground, but I realized that I really was grateful that the tall, fierce Varini girl was tethered to the other end.
IX
FROM THAT POINT ON, the journey south became a drudgery of crushing sameness. The days crawled past the bars of my cage, the landscape veiled in a pall of dull yellow road dust: hills, then forests, then fields rolled by; waving golden crops ripe for harvest replaced by fields of stubbly, shorn stalks; pale blue skies and high pink clouds giving way to the vaulting darkness above me as I lay sleepless, shivering and aching.
And then, one day, our caravan crested a high hill, and there, laid out like a dream before us, was a place I never, in my wildest flights of fancy, could have imagined: the port of Massilia, sprawled on the coast of a vast sea the Romans called Mare Nostrum. From the time when I was barely old enough to run like a wild creature out beyond the walls of Durovernum, Sorcha and I would go down to the market stalls to barter with the traders for bolts of fine, bright cloth and pink salt and spices from lands where the sun was so hot, they said, you could die of its kiss.
One of the traders, a thick-bodied man with skin like boiled leather, would dock his ship at Durovernum twice a year and spin tales of the cities he’d seen and the people he’d traded with. I would perch on the bales of merchandise stacked on the docks and listen to his stories of far-off lands. That was where I had first heard of the great middle sea, whose waves washed the shores of many different lands, lands like Greece and Rome and Aegypt. The trader had told me that Mare Nostrum meant “Our Sea” in Latin, and I had marveled at the arrogance of Rome, which would dare to lay claim to the very elements of the earth. The goddess must have laughed at them, I’d thought. I certainly had.