The Triumphant (The Valiant #3)(98)

I thought about that. “Most likely the Catuvellauni,” I said. “They’re a brawling, marauding lot with a long-honored favorite pastime of attacking the Cantii. But they’re also lazy. They don’t really like to put too much effort into warring. Cuts into their beer drinking.”

“Do they still work?” Ajani asked. “The catapults, I mean?”

“Oh, aye!” Quint nodded, circling the mechanisms, kicking at the wooden wheels and cogs and tugging on the heavy ropes. “A bit creaky, but yeah. They’d work. Just . . . it looks as though they likely abandoned them when they realized it’s far more fun flinging the stones than it is finding them.”

Elka frowned at him, and Cai took up the explanation while Quint continued to poke and prod at the fittings on the machines.

“A catapult without something to hurl is useless,” Cai said. “The Catuvellauni were likely far more interested in actually fighting your people and stealing their cattle than they were in having to quarry boulders or peck around the surrounding fields, looking for decent-sized rocks to load the machines with. If they’re as easily distracted as you say, they probably got frustrated after heaving over the first few shots and then gave up.”

“Right!” Quint jogged back over to us, a man with a look of focused purpose. “They’re not legion. We are. We don’t give up.” He turned to me. “And neither do you.”

“I don’t want to heave great stones at my own father’s house, Quint,” I said. “That’s not the way to get his attention.”

He shook his head. “Not what I had in mind,” he said, and his gaze drifted over to where Elka stood. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Elka . . . ?”

“What?” she asked, suddenly wary.

I couldn’t blame her.

“You’re not bound to your old ludus oath anymore, are you?” he said.

She glanced back and forth from him to me to Cai and back to Quint and said, even more warily, “No . . .”

“Good!” His smile grew larger. “Then you can just make up another one that does include flying.”



* * *



—



This is madness, I thought, as I scrambled up onto the platform of the wood-and-rope contraption meant for rocks, not girls. If human beings were meant to fly, surely the gods would have given us wings . . .

And then, suddenly—shockingly—I remembered what Sorcha had said to me in her room in Cleopatra’s palace just before she died. She’d told me that she’d dreamed of a raven flying through the sky . . . on the wings of an eagle. I’d thought, at the time, that perhaps she was talking about my swords. But now I understood. I was the Morrigan’s raven. And the wings she’d sent me—the catapults left behind in the Forgotten Vale—had been built by Romans.

I was Sorcha’s dream.

I’d even said it myself back in Gesoriacum: “I’ll get us into my father’s great hall, even if I have to grow the Morrigan’s own wings to fly there.”

Of course, I hadn’t meant it quite so literally. But it seemed that all of the prophecies—intended or not—were converging upon me. I thought about Olun on the path. And about the path he’d seen for me. I thought about Sorcha. I wished with all my heart she were with me in that moment. Then I realized . . . she was. She would never leave me. She was my sister.

And I was her Morrigan’s Flight.

But this time, I would not soar alone in the sky.

I’d volunteered to take flight all on my own, but my other sisters—my sister gladiatrices—would hear nothing of it. There were, they said, five siege engines. So there were going to be five girls going over the wall. Quint had checked and double-checked the machines. He’d test-fired them all, without loading them, and declared them ideal for his intended purpose: launching me and four other girls over the walls of Durovernum. Kore and Thalassa had volunteered almost immediately, citing, of course, their experience with bull-leaping on Crete. And Ajani and Elka weren’t about to let me go without them. The catapults were small. Portable, but still relatively powerful. And Quint assured us they would easily propel us over the wall without actually killing or wounding us in the process. He hoped.

“Just . . . uh, go limp,” he’d said. “Tuck your head in. That sort of thing . . .”

We dragged the things, like lumbering behemoths, to a section of the wall that had no sentries to startle or, more importantly, shoot at us. And it was in sight of our target. We’d decided that we would take aim as best we could—as best Quint, with his engineering experience, could—at the great broad expanse that was the roof of my father’s great hall, rising up above the walls of the town. It was a perfect target: a gentle slope of thick thatch, it would cushion our landing. Hopefully. As I settled myself onto the wooden platform in a loose, ready crouch, Kronos stood with his arms crossed over his broad chest, shaking his head. But there was also the barest hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, which made me feel the tiniest bit better about our impending act of lunacy. He actually thought it would work. And Kronos wasn’t what I would call an optimist on the best of days.

Cai and I had worked out the details and timing of what would happen once we were successfully inside the town, based on my best guesses as to how my father and his chiefs might react to my sudden reappearance. Cai would either receive a signal from me within an hour’s time, or he wouldn’t. We had come up with contingencies either way.