The Triumphant (The Valiant #3)(63)

It was too high to jump to without help, so I cupped my hands to give Kallista a boost. She didn’t hesitate, just took a run, planted her foot in my hands, and vaulted onto the roof, disappearing from view. I heard angry shouting coming from inside the bathhouse and the sound of clay oil pots shattering. I glanced around, looking desperately for something I could use to climb on. There was nothing. I swallowed anxiously, knowing I was trapped . . .

“Fallon!”

I glanced up, astonished when I saw—not Kallista, but a pair of gleaming hazel eyes. Cai’s face staring down at me. Wordlessly, he thrust his hands toward me, and I grabbed hold. His arm muscles went taut, and with a jump from me and a heave of his shoulders, I was on the roof. I rolled over on the cracked and crumbling tiles, gasping for breath.

“You!” shouted a voice from below. “Haul your pasty carcass over here so I can climb on your back or I’ll cut your heart out and sink it in that swamp you call a bath!”

Cai and I exchanged a glance and scrambled to get down off the roof to the alley behind the bathhouse, where Kallista waited for us. I leaped down beside her and told her to strip off the cloak she wore. Cai followed, landing in a crouch beside me. When he stood, he turned to glare at me with equal parts frustration and relief, with maybe a little bit of anger thrown in. I realized that I hadn’t exactly had the opportunity to convey my hastily formulated plan to him. When “Cleopatra” and I had both suddenly bolted from the caravan, he must have thought the queen—or I, or both—had gone mad. And then when the actual Cleopatra had followed our lead . . .

“The queen!” I gasped. “She’s—”

“A lunatic,” Cai said. “You’re both . . .” He shook his head, sharing his glare with Kallista. “All three of you . . . utter lunatics. You know that? Mad.”

“Actually, Kallista and I are just dangerously reckless and desperate,” I said. “Cleopatra . . . ? She’s definitely mad.”

“Hsst.”

I frowned at Cai. “What?”

“What?” He frowned back.

“Did you hiss at me?”

“I don’t think so . . .”

I looked at Kallista, who shrugged.

“Hssst.”

I glanced around, blinking, and peered into the deep shadows beneath a gloomy taberna portico across the street—where the queen of Aegypt stood, draped in a drab brown woolen cloak that looked unbearably itchy, even from that distance.

She read my expression with uncanny accuracy as I ran toward her and shrugged her shoulders under the thing, saying, “It’s nowhere near as itchy as that damned carpet Sennefer smuggled me into Caesar’s chamber in. I pilfered it from a laundry line in a yard the next street over, but I left behind an earring in payment.”

I lifted an edge of the homespun fabric and saw that she still wore her azure cloak beneath—which she must have donned after I’d gone chasing after her decoy. Before she’d become her decoy’s decoy. “You packed two of the same cloak?” I asked. “I thought we were traveling light.”

“I might be a fugitive on the run,” she said, bright-eyed and flushed from dashing around the town, “but I’m still a queen, sweet girl. I never travel with only one of anything. For me, this is traveling light.”

“Majesty . . .” Cai said. “Respectfully, what in Hades are you doing here?”

“You’ve all been risking—and losing—your lives for me,” she said. “I decided enough was enough and I should lend a hand to help save my own skin. I practiced the athletic arts as a girl. And besides . . . I’m the daughter of the gods. Isis and Osiris protect me.” She said that last as if there was no shred of doubt in her mind. And I really don’t think there was.

“Sennefer?” I asked. “He must be—”

“Torn between hopping mad and nervous wreck, I’d imagine.” She grinned wickedly and shrugged. Then she looked back and forth between me and Cai and Kallista. “You should probably return me to him before he does himself any permanent damage.”

Back at the wharf, the very last of our gear was being loaded up the ramp onto the ship as the four of us came pelting out from between two warehouses, staggering on board moments before the ship’s captain gave the order to shove off. Sennefer came bounding across the deck, a blooming flush deepening his already deeply tanned face, eyes watery and hands fluttering like startled birds at the sight of his precious queen returned to him undamaged.

I grinned at Kallista and leaned on Cai, catching my breath as the ship drifted gracefully out into the middle of the harbor, sails unfurling. We were safe. At last. The sun had gained in strength throughout the day, finally burning through a layer of high, thin cloud cover as we hit the open seas and, one by one, the girls started to shed their cloaks, revealing the lean-muscled bodies—and abundant weaponry—that had been concealed beneath.

Darius, the captain, looked around, mouth agape, as it slowly dawned on him that we were not exactly Charon’s “cargo.” There was nothing about any of us that resembled slaves. Not anymore.

“I don’t know why you were so polite securing passage,” I heard him say to Charon. “With this lot? You could have just commandeered my ship without so much as a ‘by your leave.’”