The Valiant (The Valiant #1)(38)

It was stained with blood.





XVI



“GLADIOLUS!”

The mocking epithet rang out across the practice ground, and I groaned, knowing it was most likely directed at me. Again. I glanced up from stretching out my calf muscles to see Nyx crossing the sand, her long dark braids swinging behind her and Thalestris’s wooden staff slung carelessly over her shoulder.

My guts knotted in apprehension. That morning, Elka had scoffed when I told her of the crow and the feather and said I shouldn’t worry about a silly attempt to spook me. But I could tell that she was amused by the prospect of stirring up a little trouble among the other gladiatrices, whose ranks we would soon officially join. If we survived the training.

“Gladiolus!” Nyx shouted again. “You! The skinny Celt.”

I gritted my teeth. Decent food, a bed that wasn’t the floor of a cage, and an overabundance of exercise had begun to restore my body after the rigors of the slave train. But I still had a long way to go before my strength and reflexes were back to where they should have been.

“Today you’ll spar with . . .” Nyx’s gaze roamed over the ranks of the other students. “Gratia.”

I swore under my breath. Here, I thought, was my payment for Elka’s mischief. Gratia was an ox-necked thing who didn’t speak so much as she just grunted, and she handled her wooden gladius—the practice weapon meant to approximate a Roman short sword—like a stone mallet. Nyx grinned coldly at my reaction and gave me a sharp nudge with the end of her staff.

“Get going, gladiolus,” she said. “The day’s wasting away.”

I endured a round of thoroughly crushing sparring with Gratia and, after all the other girls had retired to either the dining hall or the baths, slunk off to a corner of the stable yards to sit under the noon sun and massage my aching shoulders. I sat there, staring dully at the ground and watching my shadow creep out along the ground past the edges of my toes. Gratia fought in the style of the murmillo gladiators, with sword and heavy shield. It suited her physique—and her penchant for thoughtless brutality—and made her something of a force to be reckoned with in the arena. It also compensated for her utter lack of personality.

And that was something that the masters of the ludi, the gladiatorial games, coveted above all else.

Flair.

The ludus fight instructors drilled that into us almost as much as weapons technique. Winning a fight was one thing. Winning the crowd was another. But I had yet to even settle on a particular style. Most of the new girls had already begun to discover their natural inclinations toward one style of fighting over another. Me? The sword and round shield were as familiar to me as walking, but the majority of the other gladiatrices fought that way. I’d never distinguish myself with such common methods. I could shoot a bow and drive a chariot, and I certainly threw a spear well enough . . . and I sincerely doubted whether any of the girls at the ludus could even come close to executing the Morrigan’s Flight, even Nyx. The fleeting remembrance of that morning back in the vale triggered a wave of emotions that swept over me.

I had done it. And Mael had seen me do it.

Maelgwyn Ironhand.

Lethal and beautiful, every move—every cut and thrust, slash and block and feint—had been, for him, like dancing, as if Mael had heard music no one else could. Sometimes, when I’d watched him practice with his blades, I almost thought that I could hear it too.

That music had been silent since the night he died.

On a bench near the stables, there was a stack of short wooden staves that had been roughly carved to uniform lengths and now sat waiting to be turned into practice weapons. I walked over and picked up two that looked to be of equal balance. They needed shaping, sanding, and polishing, and leather wrapped around their hilts. But, for my purposes, they’d do nicely.

I looked around to see if there was anyone to watch me. There wasn’t. The only other creature in sight was the swaybacked donkey that stood placidly munching at a hay manger. I gave him a sideways look and vowed in that moment I would learn—and not only learn, but master—the gladiatorial style of the dimachaerus: the double-sword-wielding warrior who fought with a blade in each hand.

Mael had been the Cantii equivalent of a dimachaerus, an absolute genius with two blades. Growing up, he had developed a series of drills for himself. For two years he’d tried to get me to fight two-handed with him, but I’d been happy with my sword and shield and spear. And the other young Cantii warriors soon tired of getting themselves beaten black and blue fighting against him. So, mostly, he fought the weathered stump of an ancient, lightning-blasted oak. Mael used it as a practice post, and the old forest guardian bore the scars of its encounters with his blades graciously. I thought about all the times I’d sat in the grass watching him practice, and wondered if I could reproduce those patterns from memory.

There was only one way to find out.

I walked over to the stable post and took up a ready stance in front of it. I closed my eyes for a moment and remembered the rhythms, the sounds of the patterns of Mael’s drills. Then slowly, tentatively, I began to emulate them. At first, I was clumsy. Awkward. And then, gradually less so.

I could feel the heat of the sun moving across my back, shifting from one shoulder to the other before the clack-clack-clack of my swords against the stable post began to sound like something other than a demented woodpecker. I don’t know how much longer it was before I fell so deeply into the patterns that I closed my eyes and the rhythm didn’t break, or even slow down.