The Triumphant (The Valiant #3)(46)
“There isn’t anyone worse than him.”
“My father was.”
I looked up into his face and realized that Cai had already resolved himself to leave behind everything he’d ever had too. His father’s vast fortune, the city he’d called home, and the legion he’d pledged life and loyalty to. We were about to head toward the port of Cosa and ships. But it felt as if, once on those ships, we’d be setting a course toward the edge of the world and out into the abyss. And at the end of it all, Cai might be the only thing I’d have left to hang on to. But as our eyes met, and I saw the shadow of his father haunting his gaze, I wondered if he’d rather not just let go himself and drown. I wasn’t about to let that happen. Not after everything we’d already been through.
“You heard what Caesar said.” I squeezed his hands back just as hard. “The son is not the father. And you are the best of men, Caius Varro. In spite of him.”
He tried to smile, but I knew, without him saying it, that he held the elder Varro responsible in large part for what was happening to us. To the ludus. And because he was his father’s son, he would have to bear the burden of that guilt too, until such time as he could atone for those dread wrongs. It was his Roman way.
As his gaze dropped away from mine, I saw a tiny frown tick between Cai’s brows. He let go of my hand to touch a fingertip to the pommel of my new sword. I reached down and drew it from its scabbard, handing it to him so he could take a closer look.
“From Charon. I think he still feels bad for stealing me away from home,” I said with a casual shrug. “And for threatening to kill me. And for almost getting me killed. More than once . . .”
Cai shook his head. “I think he believes in you.”
“Whatever it is I’ve become.”
“A wandering hero, of course.” He leaned down and kissed me on the forehead. “Like in the old epic stories. Odysseus or Achilles.”
With one more kiss, and a last fleeting smile, Cai went to finish packing the wagon so we could leave on our adventure. Behind me, the flames continued to grow, casting their light on the faces of my friends as we gathered together beneath the main gate. I looked up at the carved image of Achilles and the Amazon warrior queen Penthesilea frozen in time on the lintel stone over the ludus gate that Senator Varro had given Sorcha as a gift. The figures, poised on the brink of deadly battle in the heat of the Trojan War, were already darkening with smoke.
I knew something of those stories Cai spoke of. They always started with leaving home. And finished with coming back to a place where peace and harmony were restored. But we weren’t leaving anything to come back to. How, then, could we have a happy ending?
Or any kind of ending at all?
XIII
WE MADE IT as far as the Tarquin Valley on the first leg of the journey, just as the sun was sinking into his watery bed, far out over the Mare Nostrum. The sky in the east was already dark, and I could see the pinpricks of stars fading into view. An eerie glow behind the dark hills heralded the rising of the moon.
Down across the rolling hills that swept toward the coast, we could see the winking lights of the town of Tarquinii. With the breeze wafting inland, I could smell the salt marshes. I had been here once before—there was a fledgling ludus nearby that some of us had fought in tournaments at—but the town itself was a tumbledown place. I’d been told it had started out as an Etruscan settlement that had been largely abandoned over time. The evidence of its ancient roots was everywhere, especially in the vast, crumbling necropolis—a city of the dead—that surrounded the town itself, sprawling and spreading up into the surrounding hills like a creeping leprosy.
In the distance, wolves howled at the moon as it crept up over the horizon, bloated and blue, casting deep shadows in the gullies between the rolling hills. We pulled the wagons off the road and hid them behind the walls of a stone courtyard that must have once been a mortuary garden for a person of some importance. A shiver traced up and down my spine. But as unsettling and forlorn as the Tarquinii necropolis was, it had the advantage of being utterly deserted after nightfall. Or so we hoped.
“Reminds me of that night in Alesia,” Elka said, rubbing her arms against a sudden shiver of gooseflesh. “This place is full of ghosts.”
I felt it too.
Cai and Quintus took first watch. Acheron went with them, tracing a wide berth around the wagon where Sennefer was helping Cleopatra step down. I think he was still a bit flummoxed to find himself in the presence of royalty—especially her particularly robust manifestation of royalty—and more female gladiators than he’d even known existed. Most of whom (Gratia’s mildly terrifying flirtations notwithstanding) regarded him with curious, skeptical, warning glances. Acheron might have been with us, but he wasn’t one of us. Not yet. Still, I was glad to have another proficient fighter along for the journey. Even as I prayed to the Morrigan that we would have no opportunity to call upon those skills.
“No fires,” Cai said before he went to find a vantage point where he could settle himself to watch for any movement beyond our little encampment.
I looked over to see Sennefer flush almost instantly to purple. Turning back to Cai, I raised an eyebrow and nodded my head at the queen’s steward about to launch into a full-blown flap.
Cai sighed. “One fire,” he amended the order. “A small one. In there.”