The Valiant (The Valiant #1)(62)

“I haven’t!”

“Good.” She nodded, then paused. “Why ever not?”

“Sorcha!”

“I only mean that he’s kind, rich, from a powerful family, and not unhandsome. I wouldn’t ever allow it, of course, but I’d at least understand.” She stopped snipping and regarded me seriously for a long moment. “You’re not pining for a boy from home, are you? Maelgwyn Ironhand? I know you two were close, but—”

“Mael’s dead.”

Sorcha fell silent. She’d grown up with Mael and Aeddan too. “I’m sorry to hear that. What happened?”

I closed my eyes and could picture the fog-bound lane from that night . . . but not Mael’s face. “Virico gave me away to . . . to someone else.” My next words dropped, leaden, from my lips: “They fought. Mael lost.”

“Did you love this other boy?”

“No.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that the other boy had been Aeddan.

“Then why would Father do such a thing?” Sorcha frowned.

“Because I wanted to join his war band, and he didn’t want me to fight and die like you.” I glowered at her reflection. “Like he thought you had.”

She laid down the scissors and lifted my hair off my shoulders, smoothing it down my back. “I’m sorry to hear it, Fallon. Truly. And I wouldn’t have allowed it if I’d been there.”

“Well, you weren’t,” I said.

Her reflection gazed at me for a long moment, cool and appraising. Finally, she seemed to come to a decision about something.

“I’m going in to the capital tomorrow morning to take possession of six new chariot ponies,” she said. “Thalestris is too busy with the younger girls’ training, and Kronos and I will need an extra hand. I was going to take Nyx, but I want you to come with me instead. And while we’re there, I want to show you something that might help you understand. Now go. Meet us at the stables at daybreak. Don’t be late.”

Help me understand what? I wondered.

? ? ?

The next morning, Sorcha turned a corner off a bustling street near where we had left our wagon at a stable close to the Circus Maximus. She led me down a narrow lane, Kronos following close behind us, until it dead-ended in front of a small, squat residence, an unassuming structure with only a single heavy door and no windows. Sorcha tugged on a rope hanging by the door, sounding a bell on the other side of the featureless wall. After a long moment, a small square opened behind a metal grate, and a man peered out. When he saw my sister, he closed the door again without a word, and I heard the sounds of lock and key and of a heavy slide bar grating as it was hauled aside.

The heavy oak door swung inward, and Sorcha nodded for me to precede her inside. The man who’d opened it was armored like a legionnaire, but he was older and battle-scarred.

“Lady,” he said to my sister in a voice like a boot heel crunching gravel. “He’s not expecting you—”

“I know. Is he well?”

The man shrugged bulky shoulders. “Is he ever?”

Kronos waited by the gate as the man gestured us across a tiny courtyard open to the sky to where he unlocked another heavy iron-bound door and let us through into the dim vestibule of the interior building. The only source of light came from a few torches set in wall sconces. Unlike most of the Roman houses I’d been in up to that point, there were no windows here, no airy colonnades, no natural light.

The room was long and narrow. In the far corner, at the opposite end from where we stood, I could see a brazier glowing, but it did little to illuminate the figure that sat hunched and wrapped in a cloak on a low couch. I glanced at Sorcha, who put a firm hand on my shoulder and walked me forward.

“My lord?” she called out softly as we approached.

The figure didn’t move.

“My lord?” she called out again, louder this time. “Arviragus?”

Arviragus? I thought. No. No—that can’t be him!

But it was.

The man the Romans had called Vercingetorix—the godlike chieftain of the Arverni—who’d come within a handsbreadth of beating Julius Caesar himself, sat with his arms resting on his knees, long hands hanging limply in front of him. He stared into the fire, and there wasn’t even a flicker in his eyes to indicate he knew we were there.

“They used to keep him in the Tullianum,” Sorcha said in a low murmur. “It’s a prison here in Rome, a dreadful subterranean place. But when it started to look as though he might actually die there, they moved him to this place. A cage with some comforts, but still a cage.”

“Why keep him alive all these years?” I whispered.

“Because there hasn’t been a proper Triumph since Alesia.”

“But why didn’t Caesar just kill him there? On the battlefield?”

“Because Caesar is a shrewd conquering hero,” she said. “And Alesia is very far away from Rome. Remember what your fight masters have told you, Fallon—it’s what you’ve been training for all these weeks. The mob loves spectacle above all else. And Caesar plans to give them exactly that. He’s kept his greatest adversary alive so that, when the time came for his Triumphs, he could parade Arviragus in front of the plebs to show the people how fearsome the Arverni chief was. To remind them why they need Caesar to lead and protect them.”