The Triumphant (The Valiant #3)(43)
I nodded, knowing full well that they’d commit to that whether I impressed it upon them or not. They were Amazons. They’d die by their own hands if they outlived their queen. And Cleopatra was their queen now.
Across the yard I saw some of Sennefer’s men escorting the ludus staff toward the lake gate. “Where are they going?” I asked Sorcha.
“The queen has insisted that the Achillea staff—cooks, body slaves, blacksmiths, house servants—everyone is to be ferried across Lake Sabatinus to the estate she was occupying in Caesar’s absence,” she said. “She’s given instructions that they be taken in hand by the estate manager and found suitable employment.”
“I’m glad of it,” I said.
Sorcha nodded. “She is a good woman. A good friend.”
But I could see her heart breaking a little as she watched them go. The staff at the Ludus Achillea—servants and slaves both—had been unfailingly honorable in their service, and when she’d brought them together to tell them what was happening, not a single voice was raised in opposition. None of them had forgotten what it was like when Pontius Aquila had taken the ludus by force. And it would soon be reduced to ashes and blackened stone walls, anyway.
What I hadn’t expected was that Heron, our ludus physician, would be going along with the staff—and not with us. Again. The last time we’d fled the ludus, he’s stayed behind because of Lydia, to treat her injuries. Three months ago, she’d succumbed to them—or rather, to the damages wrought on her mind—drowning herself in Lake Sabatinus one night after Heron had gone to bed. I wasn’t certain the physician didn’t blame himself for it. Still, it hadn’t occurred to me he wouldn’t come with us. His refusal to prompted an argument from me when I found him in the herb garden we’d planted where Tartarus had once stood.
He forestalled my ire with a raised hand. “Fallon,” he said, “I’m not a warrior. I’m not young. And I’m not needed.”
“But—”
“You have more than enough to worry about without dragging along a fussy old man who cannot fight his own battles.” He shook his head and went back to gathering the last of the medicinal plants the garden would ever yield, perfuming the air around us with a bittersweet tang. “Neferet is one of you,” he continued. “She can take care of the girls and herself at the same time. Miss me if you will—I will miss all of you with all of my heart—but go with my blessings.”
It felt like losing another part of myself. Everything was falling away, and I couldn’t stop it. But I also couldn’t blame him for his choice. So instead, I hugged him hard and let him go. When I got back to the stables, Elka and Vorya were splashing lamp oil from large storage skins on the floors of the empty stalls. Gratia and Ajani followed close behind with torches.
“It’s a strange thing, isn’t it?” Vorya said, coming up to stand beside me as the first flames caught and began to lick greedily at the piles of straw and fodder. “To come together and build something—something real and right—and then have it all taken from you in an instant. By people you’ve never even met and have nothing to do with.”
“We’ll still be together,” I said, but I heard the hitch in my voice as the stable post I’d used for practice ever since arriving at the ludus—carving marks into it with my blades like notches on a druid seer stone—began to smolder. “We’ll still be sisters. We’ll still have . . .”
“Purpose?” Vorya said.
“I was going to say ‘each other.’” I turned so the others could hear me when I said, “But you’re right, Vorya. Our purpose is each other.”
How I hope that’s not just a hollow platitude, I thought bitterly.
But when Ajani threw her torch into the flames, she turned her back on the fire and walked toward me, wordlessly holding out her hands for me to take. I reached out, and she gave my fingers a tight squeeze, her expression serene. That gesture, and the simple fact that my friends hadn’t all just packed up and left on the barge along with the ludus staff . . . maybe it wasn’t all falling apart. Maybe the platitudes—like that one, and the ones I’d given Kallista and Selene—carried a kind of truth in them. Maybe home really was who you were with, not where.
“It’s just a stable post, after all,” I muttered.
Ajani glanced at me sideways but didn’t ask me what I meant by that.
Elka came to stand with us for a moment as Gratia whirled her torch above her head and lobbed it high into the rafters of the barn. The smoke began to rise into the stillness of the sky. Elka put an arm over Vorya’s shoulder; the expressions on both their faces remained stony. Varini mettle at work, I thought. I remembered the conversation I’d had with Elka when we’d first met and become fugitives on the run from Charon and his slavers. About how her tribe, if they decided to move somewhere else—because of war or famine or the whim of a Varini chief—would burn their houses before they left. I’d thought at the time that it was a ridiculous idea. Wasteful. I’d only ever done a similar thing out of sheer emotion. In a fit of despair, I’d thrown my most prized possessions into the fire on the night my father had denied me my place in his war band.
When I’d asked Elka what the Varini reasoning was, she’d answered, “There is only forward. Only tomorrow. No yesterday, no going back. And nothing of value is left behind, so nothing is truly lost.”