The Triumphant (The Valiant #3)(88)

It was a variation on the same thing he’d been telling me for days. The same thing I’d been telling myself. I was still having a hard time listening to either of us. Making myself believe.

“Once there, as I understand it, he would then have to convene with these Coritani chiefs. And you’ve already told me they’re a prickly lot, yes?”

I nodded. They were.

“Right. Well. Assuming they’re even interested in any plan of Aquila’s to storm Durovernum—and they don’t just kill him outright for being a meddling foreigner—they, in turn, will have to gather their forces. Also correct?”

I nodded again.

Cai took both my hands in his and made me look at him. “That, in itself, could take weeks. We have time, Fallon.”

Quint was in absolute agreement that the military logistics—even for what was essentially nothing more than a large-scale slave raid on my home—were complicated. “Now, see, the legions are a smooth-running machine that have entire contingents to deal with all that stuff. But both of us”—he hooked a thumb at Cai—“have had experience dealing with auxiliary troops and barbarian mercenaries and, by Juno’s perfect teeth, it’s a nightmare! A true wonder anything ever gets conquered in those situations.”

“You have a problem with ‘barbarians’?” Elka asked sweetly.

Cai interjected before Quint could get himself into trouble.

“Even if Aquila does get there before we do,” he said to me, “your people aren’t just going to march out of their front gates with their hands in the air in surrender. Look how long Arviragus held out against Caesar’s finest legions at the siege of Alesia. And Pontius Aquila will only have mercenaries and whomever he gathers from this rival tribe of yours. Virico might not even need us!”

He’d told me variations of the same thing probably a hundred times by that point, so much so that Elka was mouthing his words along with him and rolling her eyes. And I knew that it was true enough. We might very well be marching to rescue a town secure in its own military might. Virico Lugotorix might not even open his gates for us. I said as much.

“Well, that would be irony, I suppose,” Cai said, his mouth twisting in wry grin. “But, either way, we won’t know until we arrive . . . Fallon?”

He put a hand on my shoulder as I stared out at the setting sun. The day had been long. All the days in Aegypt under the unblinking white eye of the desert sun had been so, but as we traveled north, afternoons seemed to be taking longer and longer to become evening. I had lost track of the turning of the year’s wheel living in lands where the seasons weren’t so very different from each other. But suddenly a horrible realization crashed down on me.

“Fallon.” Cai’s fingers tightened on my shoulder. “Are you all right?”

I shook my head. “Your people aren’t just going to march out of their front gates with their hands in the air in surrender,” Cai had said. No . . . but they might very well go dancing into the fields beyond the walls of Durovernum with no weapons ready to grasp in those hands . . .

“Litha,” I said, the word sticking in my throat gone suddenly dry with fear. “Midsummer.”

Cai and Quint exchanged confused glances, and Elka frowned at me.

I looked back and forth between them. “We’re approaching the longest day of the year.”

“The solstice?” Quint asked. “What of it?”

“That’s when Aquila will attack,” I said.

Cai let go of my shoulder. “Tell me.”

“I don’t know what you Romans do or how you celebrate the . . . the . . .”

“Solstice.”

“Yes. Solstice.” I tried to keep my voice steady against the rising tide of dread I felt in my heart. “But at home . . . it is a time of plenty and a celebration of peace. For all the tribes. It is our custom to leave our towns and go out into the fields to celebrate. We build bonfires and we sing and dance and feast. And we leave our weapons behind, laid at the foot of our beds.”

“And Yoreth knows that,” Cai said.

“Yes.”

Quint nodded. “She’s right. That’s when they’ll attack.”

I looked back and forth between him and Cai and saw the soldiers in them in that moment. The soldier’s resolve to make it to the field of battle, even if they had to kill themselves to do it. Cai smiled at me—an expression of grim anticipation.

“Well then,” he said. “We’d best not dawdle when we make port at Massilia.”



* * *



—

Once we did make port at Massilia, our journey would take us on a trek overland through the forests and fields of Gaul, north to the port of Gesoriacum. It was the very first place I’d set foot on land after I’d been stolen from Durovernum by Charon’s slavers and taken across the sea . . . the beginning of my journey, all those endless days past, to the Forum in Rome, where I was sold to a school for female gladiators. We would, in essence, be replicating that endless, horrid trek in reverse, starting from Massilia—hopefully without Alesian bandit encounters this time—and I was sure Elka was probably thinking the same thoughts as me.

About where we’d started. And how far we’d come . . .

In Massilia, we bid our Aegyptian crew safe travel home and parted ways. The next day I waited, consumed with impatience and counting the hours, while Kronos acquired wagons for transport and together all the girls packed them up and were waiting while Cai and Quint went on a last errand into the city. When they returned to where we’d camped in the fields north of Massilia’s walls, I felt a shock of displaced memory shiver through me.