The Triumphant (The Valiant #3)(51)

“I do know, Cai,” I said. “I really do. But . . . that’s the thing, isn’t it? At least I would have gone back for her. Instead, I saved myself. She’s not wrong in thinking I betrayed her. Tanis was terrified and alone, and I left her. After all my grand, hollow words about how we were a family, together, I failed her. If she’s become a monster . . . I helped make her one.”

“You also saved her life. Or have you forgotten that?”

I knew what he was talking about. Cleopatra’s nautical spectacle, when I’d cut Tanis down from the ship rigging after she’d fallen from the yardarm and become trapped.

I shook my head. “It’s not the same thing. The naumachia wasn’t real peril. It was a game. She probably wouldn’t have—”

“Stop! Fallon, just . . . stop. You have to stop shouldering everyone else’s failings. It’s a noble impulse, but . . .” He shook his head, his eyes burning into mine. “It’s also dangerous hubris.”

I blinked at him, startled and speechless. And suddenly angry. For him to attribute my feelings of guilt—of remorse—to that kind of . . . of arrogance . . . “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, and started to get up to walk away.

He grabbed me by the wrist. Not hard, but not a grip I was about to easily break. “I do,” he said. “And I’m not finished. Fallon, you have to learn to let people make their own mistakes and dig their own way out of the holes they fall in. Or not. You have to stop trying to rescue everyone at the expense of your own self.”

I shook my head. “That’s not what I do—”

“Then why weren’t you free and home and back with your people, living the life you always thought you were destined to live, in the weeks following Caesar’s Triumphs?” he said. “Why haven’t you ever accepted any of the offers of freedom set in front of you? I know why. Because you want to help people. So you stay. You do it for your sister. For your friends. You even did it for Nyx.”

“I—”

“You’ve done it for me.” His grip on my wrist loosened, but he didn’t let go. “And now you’re doing it for the queen of a far-off land you never even knew existed just a few years ago.”

When I looked at him, I could see the deep wells of compassion in his gaze. But I also saw the glint of implacable purpose. There, in the midst of a moonwashed city of the dead, ancient shadows lingering to hear our words, Cai was going to serve me the truth about me as he saw it, whether I wanted to listen to him or not.

“Sorcha chose to serve Caesar,” he continued. “The ludus girls—no fault of their own—were slaves before you ever met them. Cleopatra is a career politician and a master manipulator and knew perfectly well what she was getting into with Caesar . . . And I didn’t wind up in the Ludus Flaminius because of you, Fallon. I got there all on my own. I don’t blame you, and I refuse to let you blame yourself. That’s too easy—for both of us.” He let out a sigh of frustration. “We keep trying to treat each other as equals, and truthfully, we’re not very good at it. But I’ll be dead and damned if I’m going to let that be the thin end of the wedge that will one day drive us apart. I’m trying to change that. I’m trying to make you see—I’m trying to see for myself—that you can love someone and honor them and be their equal and not have to blame yourself for every bad thing that happens to them.”

“What about all the blood on my hands, Cai?” I asked. “And all the other blood spilled because I made a wrong choice? What if one day it’s Elka’s, or Ajani’s, or . . . what if one day it’s yours?”

To my surprise, he smiled at that. Gently.

“My fate is mine,” he said, letting go of my wrist so he could take both my hands in his and hold them tightly to his chest. “I want nothing more than to share it with you . . . but it’s mine. And I will not let you tear yourself to pieces if and when my end comes. Because it will be my end, Fallon.”

I didn’t even have words to tell Cai the dread that filled me at the barest thought of such a thing. As we sat there, my throat began to close and the sting of unshed tears burned behind my eyes. My mind tumbled back into the past, back to a different love, a different end . . . and Cai saw it happen. Like he could read my memories as clearly as if I’d written them out the way he could, with strokes of a charcoal stick on a papyrus scroll. I closed my eyes.

But he just squeezed my hands even harder and said, “I’m not Maelgwyn Ironhand, Fallon. And I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.”

I sucked in a sharp breath and opened my eyes at the sound of that name in his mouth, but the smile—sad and lovely and wonderful—never left Cai’s lips. And his eyes never lost their compassion.

“You’ve been carrying his shadow on your back since before the day I first met you,” he said. “And sometimes . . . sometimes, I admit, it’s hard. There were times when I thought I could almost see him in your eyes.”

“I . . . I didn’t know that.”

“In the days after we retook the ludus—after Aeddan died—it was worse.” Cai’s gaze faltered then, and he looked down at where our hands were clasped so tightly together between us. “For obvious reasons, of course—they were brothers, and they both loved you—and I wasn’t surprised, but . . . I hated seeing you hurt. And I hated them because of it. I hated dead men.”