The Triumphant (The Valiant #3)(50)

I knelt in front of my erstwhile slaver and held out a hand. Wordlessly, Charon took hold of my wrist and braced himself as Quint put a knee against his spine and took a breath. Then, without so much as a warning count, he gave the thing a swift, smooth pull . . . and it was out. Charon gasped, and his head dropped forward for a moment. I helped lift the material of his tunic so that Quint could bind the wounds and saw that there was a small, neat red hole on the front of Charon’s torso, just under his rib cage. And surprisingly little blood. The edges of the wound seemed to have drawn together, even as I applied an antiseptic salve of honey and yarrow from the small clay pot in Quint’s field kit.

“Told you,” Charon grunted as I stepped back out of the way so Quint could pack the wounds and bandage-wrap them. “And no word of this to anyone beyond us four.” Quint and Cai frowned at each other, but then Charon explained his reasoning, the way he had to me, and they both agreed. They were soldiers. They understood the perils of shaky morale and the effect it could have.

“All right,” I said. “We won’t tell anyone else you got shot. But I want Sorcha to at least know about the shooter.”

Charon raised an eyebrow at me. “Because . . . ?”

“Because that was no lone bandit like you thought it might be,” I said. “That was a scout. For Aquila. His people . . . I think they’re hunting us.”

Quint chewed on the inside of his cheek, frowning as he listened. “What makes you think that?” he asked.

I held up the feathered end of the arrow Quint had pulled from Charon’s flesh. There was a tiny mark whittled into the shaft below where the fletching was attached. A carving of an eye—only circular and feathered around the edges, like the keen eye of a hawk.

“It’s Tanis’s mark,” I said. The name of the girl who’d once been a trusted Achillea gladiatrix was a bitter taste on my tongue. “Ajani taught her arrow-crafting—I’ve seen this mark dozens of times, usually at the center of a practice target.”

Charon plucked the arrow shaft from my fingers and examined it closely, his gaze keen in spite of the pain. After a moment, he handed the shaft back and frowned up at me. “You think she’s still with him?” he asked. “With Aquila?”

I shrugged, knowing full well she was. “She had nowhere else to go after we retook the ludus,” I said. “She was alone. Friendless—”

“She declared herself his creature,” Cai said, his mouth a hard, unforgiving line, “when she bartered her bow in service for her freedom.”

“Or, maybe, her life,” I said, wondering about this new, cold steel in him as he met my gaze. “And, let’s not forget, she thinks I betrayed her.”

Cai shook his head. “You didn’t—”

“I did,” I countered. “I didn’t have much of a choice, but I did.”

We stared at each other, waging a battle of wills that I wasn’t sure I fully understood in that moment. And then Cai exhaled sharply and turned away from me, saying, “Well, there’s no sense arguing that particular point at the moment—especially not if she’s still lurking around somewhere. I think you two”—he looked at Charon and Quint—“should get back to camp. Tell the others about our archer friend, and make sure they’re on their guard and ready to go at first light.”

I nodded in agreement. “I’ll take over watch until dawn.”

Quint held out a hand to help Charon stand as Cai turned to me. “I’ll watch with you,” he said.

As they picked their way through the tumble of grave ruins, I saw Charon was moving only a little awkwardly. But when he stumbled on a bit of uneven ground and briefly put a hand to his side, I hissed, feeling it in the scar I bore beneath my own ribs.

“It’s my fault,” I said, shaking my head. “She was aiming at me—and he knocked me out of the way.”

“That doesn’t make it your fault,” Cai said, his tone emphatic. Almost angry. “That makes it the fault of the one who shot the arrow.”

I turned and blinked at him. An uneasy tension had been building between us since I’d gone to visit him in the Ludus Flaminius. I didn’t understand it, but I could feel it—like the uncomfortable pressure of a deep bruise forming beneath your skin before you can even see it.

“Tanis. Yes,” I said. “Also my fault.”

I might have sounded mulish and irrational to him in that moment, but I simply couldn’t shake the image of Tanis on her knees in the rain and the mud that night we escaped the Ludus Achillea, crying out for me not to leave her as I galloped away. And maybe it was because we were sitting in the middle of a graveyard, but suddenly all of the friends—and enemies—I’d lost came back to stand in a circle around me, like the statues in my dreams. The Fury. Meriel. Leander. Nyx . . . Nyx, who would’ve stabbed me through the heart and walked away whistling if she could have. I’d lost them all, one way or another. And yet, Tanis was the one I couldn’t seem to shake . . .

Cai put a hand on my shoulder and turned me to face him.

He held my gaze with his own steady, unblinking one, and I saw a roil of emotion churning behind his eyes. “Listen to me, Fallon,” he said, his voice low and insistent. “If you’d gone back for her that night, they would have caught you and killed you. You know that.”