The Triumphant (The Valiant #3)
Lesley Livingston
I
“URI . . . VINCIRI . . .”
Standing with my eyes shaded against the brightness of the rising sun, I could hear the sacred gladiatorial oath I’d spoken beneath the light of the Huntress Moon whispering like a strange, secret song in my ears.
“Verberari . . . ferroque necari . . .”
I blinked and looked around, glancing over at Elka, who stood beside me in the practice yard, eyes closed, murmuring the oath.
“What are you doing?”
“Hm?” She opened one eye and peered at me.
“What are you doing?” I repeated.
“Just going over the oath,” she said. “‘I will endure to be burned . . . to be bound . . . to be beaten . . .’”
“‘And to be killed by the sword,’” I finished for her. “Yes. I know. I took it too, remember?”
“Right. Nothing in there about flying.”
Ah, I thought. So that’s what this is about.
“It’s not flying,” I said. “Think of it more as . . . uh, leaping large?”
“Imagine you’re a stone!” Quintus called encouragingly to Elka from the stands beyond the barrier fence. “A great, heavy stone flung from a catapult, flying over an enemy rampart—”
He broke off abruptly when Elka turned a glare on him that made me think she was, instead, imagining herself as the gorgon Medusa, turning him to stone. Quint had recently joined the Roman legion corps of engineers, and as a consequence, his speech was freshly littered with animated talk of siege engines and bank-and-ditch enclosures. It made him hard to understand at the best of times, but in this case, he did have a point.
So did Elka.
There was no mention of flying in the oath.
And yet, in spite of that particular omission, Kore and Thalassa—the Ludus Achillea’s two Cretan-born recruits—were still determined to make us do just that. Fly. Even if only for a moment . . . and right over the horns of an angry bull.
* * *
—
The two of them had first proposed we add the ancient art of bull-leaping to our collective skill set in the mess hall one afternoon. A sullen, steady rain had fallen for three days straight, making it impossible to practice in the yard without drowning in mud, and we were all restless.
“I’m bored,” Damya had sighed gustily.
“Don’t mope,” Ajani had consoled her. “The sun will shine again one day. And then you can go back to hacking things to bits.”
“That’s just it.” Damya shook her head. “I can hack things to bits with my eyes closed and both hands tied behind my back. I need a new challenge.”
To be fair, she wasn’t the only one.
It had been several months since we’d won back the ludus from our rival academy, the Ludus Amazona, and driven their master—and my own personal nightmare—Pontius Aquila into disgrace. The popularity of our fighters in subsequent matches had, unsurprisingly, risen dramatically from an already high point. The mob had gone wild for us. But that was months ago. And now . . . well, the mob was the mob. “Fickle” was perhaps the politest word I could conjure.
Now, when any of us stepped into the arena, there was a noticeable lull. If we weren’t leading a rebellion through the streets, it seemed, the plebs weren’t quite as interested. Neither were we. Our routines had become polished, precise . . . predictable. We needed something to spice up the act, as it were.
Hence Kore’s suggestion of death-defying acrobatic leaps.
Through the air.
Over bulls.
Flying . . .
“Sounds like a bad idea to me,” Damya had said at the time, shaking her head. “If the gods had meant for us to fly, they would have given us wings. Remember what-was-his-name? With the wax and feathers?”
“You mean Icarus?” Thalassa frowned across the table at her, reaching for an olive from a clay dish and popping it into her mouth. “Don’t be silly. The gods didn’t give Icarus his wings, his father Daedalus did. So he could fly away from imprisonment.”
“Right,” Damya snorted. “And look how well that worked out for him.”
“It didn’t work out well at all,” Thalassa explained patiently, either ignoring or having missed the sarcasm. “In his arrogance, Icarus flew too close to the sun and the heat melted the wax that held his wings together. He fell to his death in the sea and was mourned by sirens. It’s a warning. For men who think of themselves as gods. They all fall, eventually.”
“Yes,” Kore said, elbowing her sharply. “But we’re not doing that. No falling. We just need to find a willing bull and build a springboard that will fling one of us up into the air, high enough to avoid its horns.”
Discussion grew animated at that point. I grinned and sat back, watching my ludus sisters argue and lob bread rolls at each other, and realized, at some point, that Kore and Thalassa had actually convinced them all that introducing Cretan bull-leaping into our ludus routines was the way to go. A real guaranteed crowd-pleaser. I shook my head, thinking that it would, at the very least, keep my ludus mates occupied and out of trouble for a little while.
Then I realized that someone had volunteered me to make the first attempt.