The Triumphant (The Valiant #3)(81)

“I promised her I would keep you away,” Charon said to me, ignoring the others.

“I have to see her,” I said. “I have to speak with her.”

“I—”

“Please, Charon.”

Maybe it was the “please” that did it—a word not many people used when dealing with a slave trader—or maybe it was just that he simply didn’t have any strength left himself to stop me. But his shoulders slumped, and he took a step back and let me pass.

I stepped into the room, and the smell of blood—fresh and stale both—assaulted my nostrils. Inside her chamber it was a contained whirlwind of chaos, centered around the bed on the raised platform. Slaves hurried back and forth with basins and cloths and incense burners, waving fans to rid the room of the stench of sickness and a fog of pungent medicinal smells. Cleopatra was there in a simple sleeping sheath, sitting tense and upright in a backless chair surrounded by a handful of her women. Her hair was held back from her face by a plain linen band, and her face was bare of her usual cosmetics. Her gaze on my sister was focused, unblinking, and her cheeks were dry.

Neferet’s weren’t. When she saw me, she ran to me.

My friend, my ludus sister, was weeping and trying desperately not to.

“I’m so sorry, Fallon,” she said.

“Is she . . .” I swallowed hard, trying to speak past the fist that seemed jammed in my throat. “Is . . .”

There was a man there, bald, wearing a floor-length linen kilt belted around his waist and no shirt or pectoral collar. He was skinny, his chest showing the ridged bones of his rib cage, and he was spattered up to his elbows in blood. Sorcha’s blood, welling from an incision he’d already made on her scalp.

“Her injuries are grave,” Neferet explained in answer to my unfinished question. “Old and new, the damage to the inside of her skull has been compounded. And it’s worsening. Blood has been collecting, pooling there—like a bruise, like I told you—pressing on her brain. The physicians have been keeping her pain-free with poppy draughts, but last evening, she began having seizures.”

While I was in a temple. Talking to phantoms.

My brave, glorious sister . . .

“What is that man doing?” I asked quietly. I was trying hard not to shake.

“He’s trying to release the pressure.”

“He’s . . .” I couldn’t say the words. But I knew then that he was the kind of surgeon Neferet had told me about on the boat, when Sorcha had been ill and confused. He was cutting a hole in my sister’s skull.

Neferet laid a hand—very gently—on my arm. “Maybe we should wait outside.”

I hesitated, but then Sorcha moaned like an animal, and the sound of the bone saw was like someone filing the burrs from a sword blade with a dull, rusty rasp. The smell of burning, though, was what finally drove me from the room. Outside in the corridor I collapsed against Cai. Charon had told him what was happening—I thankfully didn’t need to—and he led me outside to sit on a garden bench while the sun rose, gilding the waves out in the Great Harbor of Alexandria.

“I have to speak to her,” I kept saying. “I have to tell her. We have to go home. She has to come with me. I can’t . . . I can’t do this . . . I . . .”

He didn’t try to comfort me with empty promises about how she would be all right. About how we would go triumphantly home together. He just wrapped his arms around me as I shook. I don’t know how long we sat there. It must have been an hour. Maybe two. I suppose it could have been a day or two and I don’t know that I would have noticed the difference. But eventually Cleopatra herself came out to find me. To tell me Sorcha was dead, I thought.

But instead, she said, “She wishes to see you now.”

Then she held out her hand and led me back into Sorcha’s room.

I could still smell the blood. And the burning. But faintly. A waft of cedar incense perfumed the air, masking most of the odor, and the room itself was pristine and orderly. The bed linens were crisp and tucked neatly around the limp figure lying there, with Charon sitting close beside, holding her hand.

They had shaved my sister’s head, and there was a small square bandage covering half of her forehead, just above her left eye. And the white of that eye was crimson. But other than that, she looked surprisingly well. Pale but smiling, her head cushioned on a thick pillow. I remembered how her eyes had shone so brightly at the banquet. How relaxed and happy she’d seemed. How serene and untroubled in the days since. I knew now that it must have been the Aegyptian medicines, the draughts of poppy wine they had been giving her.

“Fallon?”

“I’m here, Sorcha.”

“See?” she said. “Not dead yet. You were worried for nothing.”

“I wasn’t worried.” I tried to smile, but it felt like the muscles of my face were frozen stiff. “I always thought you would die in battle. I mean, I already thought you had. Now I just assume you’re unkillable. And you’ll be well again soon. I know it. You have to get well, Sorcha. There’s a battle still to fight, you and me, together. Aquila has gone to Prydain, and Father—”

“Fallon.” She tried to quiet my babbling. “Fallon.”

“I . . .”

“Dear little sister.” She could still smile at me.