The Triumphant (The Valiant #3)(76)

He laughed when I mentioned it and said, “Yes, well. The real ones were lovely too.”

“You know you never actually conquered us,” I said, comfortable with making such a statement to the ghost of a man when I never would have dared with the man himself. “You know that . . .”

He shrugged noncommittally.

“But you could have returned,” I pressed. “Planted your golden eagles in the soil of Prydain and left them there.”

He nodded. “Aye. I could have.”

I looked at him through narrowed eyes, hearing in the tone of his voice something I would have never suspected of mighty Caesar. Reluctance. “You could have,” I said, “but you didn’t.”

He shook his head and rose to his feet, picking up the poker to stoke the brazier coals to brighter fire. “No, Fallon,” he said. “I didn’t. And I wouldn’t have, even if I’d lived to be an old man. I made the decision to leave that destiny for another. For one who comes after me.”

“Why?”

He held the poker out in front of him like a sword and grinned at me. “Because there need always be worlds left to conquer.”

“Even for you?”

“For me. For Rome.” He sat down on the step again, his gaze drifting past me, past the marble columns that ringed us round. His eyes searched the distance beyond the temple. “There must always be that which is beyond one’s grasp. Else what is there to strive for?”

This from a man who had put the stamp of his foot down on the soil of countries I hadn’t even known existed growing up. I shook my head and sighed. “I don’t know if I’ll ever fully understand the Roman mind.”

He laughed. “That’s because you don’t need to. And it would poison your own mind if you did. You are a pure creature, Fallon. A pearl of great price. I envy you that. And I wonder sometimes . . .”

“Wonder what, my lord?”

“What you would have become had you stayed where you were, running wild through your forests and fields.”

“I would have become what I am still, Caesar,” I said. “What I have always been. A Cantii warrior.”

“Indeed . . .”

He looked at me with almost fatherly affection, and I felt a twist in my heart that he was dead and I’d been able to do absolutely nothing to alter that fact. And then I felt another, sharper twist that I should feel that way for him.

“A remarkable girl from a remarkable people,” he said. “It would not surprise me if one day your little island became an empire to be reckoned with all on its own.”

My little island? With my father, the king. Ruling—just like all the other kings back home—from the hearth of a stone hut, lord over herds of cows and squabbling chieftains. I shook my head. I had seen Rome now, and I had seen Aegypt, and I had seen the magnificent cities and the bustling towns in between. A Prydain empire? Great Caesar’s ghost was dreaming.

And so was I.

But dreamers wake. And I woke then too.

The brazier was cold. Dark.

Useless, I thought. The goddess hadn’t sent me a destiny or a direction. She’d sent me a vision of a dead man with delusions. I was no closer to knowing what to do or where to go than I had been before I’d come to this place. I pushed myself up to one elbow on the reed mat and stared up at the stone visage of the lion-headed goddess reproachfully. Not even the Morrigan was so cryptic in her messages—if a message it had even been.

I sighed in the darkness lit only by torches hanging on the lotus columns. Perhaps it was my own fault. Maybe I’d done something wrong. Or maybe the goddess only spoke to her own people. I rolled up onto my knees and looked down into the black mirror of the reflecting pool. I saw only the moon above and a bounty of stars framing my own face. For a moment.

And then I saw something else.

The glint of torchlight on a dagger blade raised high over my head . . .

And Acheron’s face, smiling triumphantly, over my shoulder.





XX


I GASPED AND lunged forward, diving into the temple’s reflecting pool as the blade descended. I felt the wind of the slash between my shoulder blades in the instant before the water closed over me. Beneath the surface, I kicked for all I was worth, knifing through the water toward the far end of the pool. Faster, I hoped, than Acheron could run.

But he wasn’t running.

I swam the full length of the pool and scrambled to hoist myself up out of the water. But when I turned around, I saw that Acheron was still at the other end of the temple, lounging in the lap of the Sekhemet statue, spinning the dagger he carried in his hand like a top. I ducked behind a lotus pillar and pressed myself against it, my tunic dripping wet and clinging to me. My hands went automatically to the scabbards at my sides . . . and found them empty.

“Where are you going to go, Victrix?” he called. “They’ve locked you in for the night, and no one knows you’re here. No one but me.”

The shadow in the palace garden, I remembered suddenly. After Cleopatra had summoned me and told me to seek out the goddess, I thought I’d seen something. Someone.

“You were in the queen’s garden last night.”

“I was,” he said. “I was going to kill her, you see. But I can always get around to that later. Because no one will suspect I was the one who killed you first. No one knows you’re here.” He laughed. “Not even your precious soldier boy.”