The Triumphant (The Valiant #3)(44)
She’d also said, rather more pragmatically, “You don’t leave a freshly made bed behind for your enemy to sleep in.”
That conversation still echoed in my head as, together, we turned and strode to the barracks building where the others waited for us. So we could perform our one last act of rebellion. Of fierce independence. Rome could not have us. Rome—whatever it was to become in the dawning days—would not have us.
* * *
—
It didn’t take any of us long.
Outside my cell, I could hear the others starting to gather in the corridor, but I still stood at the foot of my cot with my trunk open and the few things I would take with me laid out on top of a scant pile of clothing—tunics and breeches, nothing fancy. No stolas or pallas—I likely wouldn’t need such things where I was going, and I wouldn’t miss wearing the finery of a Roman lady. It had never suited me anyway. I was already wearing my armor, and my sword belt hung from my hips. My best warm cloak was fastened at my neck, and I’d laced up my best pair of boots tight around my ankles.
The rest was . . . sentimental. Small, but meaningful. A pair of silver brooches Sorcha had presented me with after I’d won a hard bout. A fine iron dagger that was a gift from Heron, the Sekhemet pendant Cleopatra had given me, my new oath lamp . . . the key to my cell in Tartarus.
Beside a stack of letters and drawings Cai had sent when he’d been on campaign, there was a neat pile of wax-sealed courier tubes containing the letters I’d sent to him at the Ludus Flaminius. Letters he’d never read and sent back to me unopened. I frowned down at them, wondering, and then gathered them all up and dumped them back into the trunk. With everything that had happened, I’d forgotten to ask Cai why he’d returned them. But it no longer mattered. That time apart had been hard on us both, and it seemed silly—petty, even—to bring it up now. I had Cai himself back—the letters could burn.
From the missives he’d sent me, I chose only one: the almost lifelike picture he had sketched of his hand. I rolled it carefully into a bronze tube and tucked it into the bottom of a canvas traveling pack. Then I shoved everything else I was taking in after it and yanked the straps tight. I took down the skin of lamp oil that hung on a peg by my washstand and splashed it on the floor and on my neatly made bed. Before I left, I remembered one last thing I needed to take: a small, sealed ebony wood box that sat on my windowsill and contained only a handful of earth.
I tucked that into my traveling pack too, and stepped out into the hall to join my ludus sisters. We exchanged silent glances. And then, as if it was some kind of ritual we’d rehearsed and enacted time and again, we each took a torch down from the iron brackets that hung on the corridor walls beside the doors to our rooms.
Like silent, cloaked statues of the warriors we’d become in this place, we stood. As one, we threw the torches into the cells, turned our backs, and strode in a line out of the ludus barracks and into the chill predawn air, leaving nothing but growing red light and the sounds of crackling flames behind us.
Not one of us looked back.
I thought, for a moment, that Gratia might have been on the verge of tears. But when I turned to her, I realized the glint in her eye was something else entirely. I tracked her gaze and saw that she was staring intently at where Acheron was lifting Cleopatra’s cumbersome trunks into a wagon—all bulging muscles and heaving chest, his copper braids tossing like the mane of a stallion. When Gratia noticed me looking at her, she shrugged and said, “What?”
“Nothing . . .” I shrugged. “I just thought you might be . . . upset?”
“About leaving here?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head. “I’ll be all right. A place is just a place. I’ve got you lot for company, and I’m sure I can find something new and interesting to occupy myself with until we get settled somewhere else . . .” And then, grinning in a somewhat predatory fashion, she loped across the yard to go lift heavy things and make Acheron nervous.
I was about to follow with the others when I saw Charon standing at the head of the path leading to the smallest of the ludus’s carefully manicured garden courtyards, all of which would soon be nothing more than ash and blackened stumps. As we approached, he nodded his head.
I turned to Elka. “Go on,” I said. “We’ll follow in a moment.”
“Don’t take too long,” she said. “Fire’s catching. If the wind shifts, this place will serve you for a funeral pyre just as well as it did for a training ground.”
“You’re not getting rid of me that easily,” I said.
She snorted and punched me in the shoulder, then hurried to catch up with the others. I turned back to Charon, and he led me a little way down the path into the garden, to where there was a stone bench set beneath a fig tree. The tree’s graceful, spreading branches were just beginning to unfurl pale green buds overhead, not even close to blooming.
It was only March.
“I wanted to speak to you for a moment, without the others around,” Charon said. His eyes narrowed, and he frowned as he looked at me. “Fallon . . . are you all right?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged, staring up hopelessly at the tree and telling myself the stinging in my eyes was from the smoke. “I don’t really know what that is anymore. We’re leaving—again—and this time it’s for good. Because there won’t be anything to come back to, even if we wanted to. And at the same time, I don’t know why that wounds me so, because I feel like all I’ve managed to do with my time here in this place has been . . . meaningless.”