The Triumphant, page 16
“He’s positioned himself farther down the hill, toward the town,” Cai said. “Making sure we don’t get any late-night visitors come to pay ancestral respects.”
“Good.” I nodded. “One surprise tonight was too many.”
Quint had his kit out and had already sawed through the arrow shaft with a small, serrated blade by the time we got there. By the light of the moon, I could see a sheen of sweat on Charon’s brow, but he lay there, propped on one elbow, as if he reclined on a dining couch in the triclinium of a rich Roman villa. He even managed a sardonic smile.
“Quint?” I asked.
“It’s field medicine I know,” he answered. “That’s all.”
“It’s enough,” Charon said. “Stop furrowing your brow—all of you—you’re going to give me a headache.”
“Do you want something to bite down on?” Quint asked.
“Are you offering a finger?” Charon snapped, getting impatient with the feathered end of the shaft still protruding from his flank. “Pull the damned thing out.”
I knelt in front of my erstwhile slaver and held out a hand. Wordlessly, Charon took hold of my wrist and braced himself as Quint put a knee against his spine and took a breath. Then, without so much as a warning count, he gave the thing a swift, smooth pull . . . and it was out. Charon gasped, and his head dropped forward for a moment. I helped lift the material of his tunic so that Quint could bind the wounds and saw that there was a small, neat red hole on the front of Charon’s torso, just under his rib cage. And surprisingly little blood. The edges of the wound seemed to have drawn together, even as I applied an antiseptic salve of honey and yarrow from the small clay pot in Quint’s field kit.
“Told you,” Charon grunted as I stepped back out of the way so Quint could pack the wounds and bandage-wrap them. “And no word of this to anyone beyond us four.” Quint and Cai frowned at each other, but then Charon explained his reasoning, the way he had to me, and they both agreed. They were soldiers. They understood the perils of shaky morale and the effect it could have.
“All right,” I said. “We won’t tell anyone else you got shot. But I want Sorcha to at least know about the shooter.”
Charon raised an eyebrow at me. “Because . . . ?”
“Because that was no lone bandit like you thought it might be,” I said. “That was a scout. For Aquila. His people . . . I think they’re hunting us.”
Quint chewed on the inside of his cheek, frowning as he listened. “What makes you think that?” he asked.
I held up the feathered end of the arrow Quint had pulled from Charon’s flesh. There was a tiny mark whittled into the shaft below where the fletching was attached. A carving of an eye—only circular and feathered around the edges, like the keen eye of a hawk.
“It’s Tanis’s mark,” I said. The name of the girl who’d once been a trusted Achillea gladiatrix was a bitter taste on my tongue. “Ajani taught her arrow-crafting—I’ve seen this mark dozens of times, usually at the center of a practice target.”
Charon plucked the arrow shaft from my fingers and examined it closely, his gaze keen in spite of the pain. After a moment, he handed the shaft back and frowned up at me. “You think she’s still with him?” he asked. “With Aquila?”
I shrugged, knowing full well she was. “She had nowhere else to go after we retook the ludus,” I said. “She was alone. Friendless—”
“She declared herself his creature,” Cai said, his mouth a hard, unforgiving line, “when she bartered her bow in service for her freedom.”
“Or, maybe, her life,” I said, wondering about this new, cold steel in him as he met my gaze. “And, let’s not forget, she thinks I betrayed her.”
Cai shook his head. “You didn’t—”
“I did,” I countered. “I didn’t have much of a choice, but I did.”
We stared at each other, waging a battle of wills that I wasn’t sure I fully understood in that moment. And then Cai exhaled sharply and turned away from me, saying, “Well, there’s no sense arguing that particular point at the moment—especially not if she’s still lurking around somewhere. I think you two”—he looked at Charon and Quint—“should get back to camp. Tell the others about our archer friend, and make sure they’re on their guard and ready to go at first light.”
I nodded in agreement. “I’ll take over watch until dawn.”
Quint held out a hand to help Charon stand as Cai turned to me. “I’ll watch with you,” he said.
As they picked their way through the tumble of grave ruins, I saw Charon was moving only a little awkwardly. But when he stumbled on a bit of uneven ground and briefly put a hand to his side, I hissed, feeling it in the scar I bore beneath my own ribs.
“It’s my fault,” I said, shaking my head. “She was aiming at me—and he knocked me out of the way.”
“That doesn’t make it your fault,” Cai said, his tone emphatic. Almost angry. “That makes it the fault of the one who shot the arrow.”
I turned and blinked at him. An uneasy tension had been building between us since I’d gone to visit him in the Ludus Flaminius. I didn’t understand it, but I could feel it—like the uncomfortable pressure of a deep bruise forming beneath your skin before you can even see it.
“Tanis. Yes,” I said. “Also my fault.”
I might have sounded mulish and irrational to him in that moment, but I simply couldn’t shake the image of Tanis on her knees in the rain and the mud that night we escaped the Ludus Achillea, crying out for me not to leave her as I galloped away. And maybe it was because we were sitting in the middle of a graveyard, but suddenly all of the friends—and enemies—I’d lost came back to stand in a circle around me, like the statues in my dreams. The Fury. Meriel. Leander. Nyx . . . Nyx, who would’ve stabbed me through the heart and walked away whistling if she could have. I’d lost them all, one way or another. And yet, Tanis was the one I couldn’t seem to shake . . .
Cai put a hand on my shoulder and turned me to face him.
He held my gaze with his own steady, unblinking one, and I saw a roil of emotion churning behind his eyes. “Listen to me, Fallon,” he said, his voice low and insistent. “If you’d gone back for her that night, they would have caught you and killed you. You know that.”
“I do know, Cai,” I said. “I really do. But . . . that’s the thing, isn’t it? At least I would have gone back for her. Instead, I saved myself. She’s not wrong in thinking I betrayed her. Tanis was terrified and alone, and I left her. After all my grand, hollow words about how we were a family, together, I failed her. If she’s become a monster . . . I helped make her one.”
“You also saved her life. Or have you forgotten that?”
I knew what he was talking about. Cleopatra’s nautical spectacle, when I’d cut Tanis down from the ship rigging after she’d fallen from the yardarm and become trapped.
I shook my head. “It’s not the same thing. The naumachia wasn’t real peril. It was a game. She probably wouldn’t have—”
“Stop! Fallon, just . . . stop. You have to stop shouldering everyone else’s failings. It’s a noble impulse, but . . .” He shook his head, his eyes burning into mine. “It’s also dangerous hubris.”
I blinked at him, startled and speechless. And suddenly angry. For him to attribute my feelings of guilt—of remorse—to that kind of . . . of arrogance . . . “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, and started to get up to walk away.
He grabbed me by the wrist. Not hard, but not a grip I was about to easily break. “I do,” he said. “And I’m not finished. Fallon, you have to learn to let people make their own mistakes and dig their own way out of the holes they fall in. Or not. You have to stop trying to rescue everyone at the expense of your own self.”
I shook my head. “That’s not what I do—”
“Then why weren’t you free and home and back with your people, living the life you always thought you were destined to live, in the weeks following Caesar’s Triumphs?” he said. “Why haven’t you ever accepted any of the offers of freedom set in front of you? I know why. Because you want to help people. So you stay. You do it for your sister. For your friends. You even did it for Nyx.”
“I—”
“You’ve done it for me.” His grip on my wrist loosened, but he didn’t let go. “And now you’re doing it for the queen of a far-off land you never even knew existed just a few years ago.”
When I looked at him, I could see the deep wells of compassion in his gaze. But I also saw the glint of implacable purpose. There, in the midst of a moonwashed city of the dead, ancient shadows lingering to hear our words, Cai was going to serve me the truth about me as he saw it, whether I wanted to listen to him or not.
“Sorcha chose to serve Caesar,” he continued. “The ludus girls—no fault of their own—were slaves before you ever met them. Cleopatra is a career politician and a master manipulator and knew perfectly well what she was getting into with Caesar . . . And I didn’t wind up in the Ludus Flaminius because of you, Fallon. I got there all on my own. I don’t blame you, and I refuse to let you blame yourself. That’s too easy—for both of us.” He let out a sigh of frustration. “We keep trying to treat each other as equals, and truthfully, we’re not very good at it. But I’ll be dead and damned if I’m going to let that be the thin end of the wedge that will one day drive us apart. I’m trying to change that. I’m trying to make you see—I’m trying to see for myself—that you can love someone and honor them and be their equal and not have to blame yourself for every bad thing that happens to them.”
“What about all the blood on my hands, Cai?” I asked. “And all the other blood spilled because I made a wrong choice? What if one day it’s Elka’s, or Ajani’s, or . . . what if one day it’s yours?”
To my surprise, he smiled at that. Gently.
“My fate is mine,” he said, letting go of my wrist so he could take both my hands in his and hold them tightly to his chest. “I want nothing more than to share it with you . . . but it’s mine. And I will not let you tear yourself to pieces if and when my end comes. Because it will be my end, Fallon.”
I didn’t even have words to tell Cai the dread that filled me at the barest thought of such a thing. As we sat there, my throat began to close and the sting of unshed tears burned behind my eyes. My mind tumbled back into the past, back to a different love, a different end . . . and Cai saw it happen. Like he could read my memories as clearly as if I’d written them out the way he could, with strokes of a charcoal stick on a papyrus scroll. I closed my eyes.
But he just squeezed my hands even harder and said, “I’m not Maelgwyn Ironhand, Fallon. And I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.”
I sucked in a sharp breath and opened my eyes at the sound of that name in his mouth, but the smile—sad and lovely and wonderful—never left Cai’s lips. And his eyes never lost their compassion.
“You’ve been carrying his shadow on your back since before the day I first met you,” he said. “And sometimes . . . sometimes, I admit, it’s hard. There were times when I thought I could almost see him in your eyes.”
“I . . . I didn’t know that.”
“In the days after we retook the ludus—after Aeddan died—it was worse.” Cai’s gaze faltered then, and he looked down at where our hands were clasped so tightly together between us. “For obvious reasons, of course—they were brothers, and they both loved you—and I wasn’t surprised, but . . . I hated seeing you hurt. And I hated them because of it. I hated dead men.”
I waited for him to look back up at me, searching his gaze when he did.
“Is that why you didn’t even try to argue when Caesar banished you to the Ludus Flaminius?” I asked. “Because you had to get away from me and my ghosts?”
“No.” He shook his head adamantly. “Oh, my dear heart, no. Leaving you was the last thing I ever wanted to do. After a while I realized that I couldn’t hate them for having done the same thing I had: falling in love with you. Although, I will admit . . . it’s not so easy sometimes living up to a ghost—but no. It was my own ghost that drove me there.”
“Your father.”
He nodded. “He tried to convince me that what he did was out of care for me. And there were moments—even after I put a sword through his guts—that I wanted so desperately to believe him.”
“We have that in common,” I said, remembering how my own father had been willing to bind me to a loveless marriage to keep me safe. What he thought of as safe, at least.
“I know,” Cai said. “And it’s cost us both dearly because we loved them and we honored them and we both thought—somehow—that we were blameful for their actions. But we weren’t. We aren’t. Not for anyone else. You don’t have to carry around ghosts and guilt anymore, Fallon. And neither do I. Those were their choices, not yours. And not mine.”
A stray night breeze picked up a strand of Cai’s long hair from around the side of his face and teased it across his brow. I untangled the fingers of my right hand from his and reached up to brush the hair back from his face. With that touch, a spark ignited in his gaze. He turned his head and leaned into the palm of my hand. His lips found my wrist, and he kissed the place where my pulse beat in time with my heart. When his hands came up to pull me closer, I heard myself draw a shaking breath.
“You’ve never—ever—had anything to live up to, Caius Varro,” I whispered. “Or anyone. Not with me.”
Cai’s head stayed dipped beneath mine as his mouth moved from my wrist to the inside of my elbow, and I shivered as he kissed the soft skin there, tipping my own head back so that I could see the stars overhead. My eyes drifted closed, and my free arm wrapped around Cai’s back. My fingers traced up the twin columns of muscle along his spine, until I reached the collar of his tunic and could slip my hand beneath to feel the warmth of his skin.
“This is dangerous,” I whispered.
“Horribly,” he murmured, not stopping.
“Foolish . . .”
“Irresponsible . . .”
I could feel the scars on his shoulder, like runes carved on stone. My head began to swim dizzyingly as my heart beat faster. “Tanis could still be near . . .” I murmured as Cai’s head lifted and he shifted his attention to my neck, kissing me just below the point of my jaw.
“We’re not talking about Tanis any more tonight,” he said, his voice gone husky. His hands moved up under my hair, fingers kneading the muscles at the back of my neck until I thought I might actually melt. “And anyway . . .” His teeth caught at my earlobe, sending little sparks of lightning shooting through me. “You said she rode off . . .”
“I did.” My head tipped all the way back.
Cai’s kisses traveled in a trail of fire down the front of my neck to the hollow at the base of my throat. “And you also said,” he murmured against my skin, “you thought you might have wounded her . . .”
“I did . . .”
I fell slowly backward until I felt the moss-covered ground beneath my shoulders, and Cai leaned over me, blocking out the moon, his hair hanging forward over his face. But not enough to hide the gleam of hunger in his eyes.
“She’s a coward,” he said, the weight of him pressing down on me. “And she’s lost the element of surprise.” His breath was hot on my cheek as he lowered his face down toward mine again.
“I thought we weren’t talking about her . . .” I gasped.
“We’re not. Don’t worry. She won’t be back.”
“Exactly . . .”
He made a sound like a low rumble of thunder in the back of his throat as my fingernails pressed hard into his skin, and I seriously considered adding to his collection of scars.
“Wait . . .” I dragged my nails across his shoulder blades, decision made. “How can you be so sure?”
He gasped, spine arching, and said, “Call it a soldier’s instinct.”
“You’re not a soldier anymore.”
“And you’re not a slave.” He paused to look me in the eyes, and I could almost feel the heat of that gaze on my face. “I’m no longer a patrician, and even if you are still a princess . . .”
“I’m not.” I grinned up at him. “I can assure you.”
“And we are together, alone, just us. With a roof of stars over our head and hours left until dawn. Just Fallon and Cai. For the first and—the way things are going—maybe last time for a long while . . . and I intend to take full advantage of that.”
I closed my eyes, drowning in a kind of bliss I’d never really known before as his hands traced the contours of my waist and hips, up the sides of my ribs. I felt his fingers tugging at the lacing on the front of my tunic. I lifted a hand to help with the knots and opened my eyes . . .
And froze.
A pair of wide yellow eyes, glowing in the moonlight, stared down at us from less than three arms’ lengths away.
“Cai . . .” I whispered.
He didn’t seem to hear me.
“Cai . . .”
“Fallon? What—”
“Shh!”
I nodded my chin up, without taking my eyes off the large gray wolf that stared back at me and huffed out a breath of blue mist through quivering nostrils. I could feel Cai’s arm muscles tense and heard the scrape of stone on stone as he picked up a rock. The wolf tilted his head and let out a low warning whine. Cai tossed the rock—not even attempting to hit the creature, more just to send a warning back—and the beast huffed again and backed up on shifting paws. Then he yawned, as if bored by a pair of silly lovestruck humans, and loped away with his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth.
Cai sat up, frowning. “I think he was laughing at us.”
“If he was, he had every right to do so,” I said ruefully, sitting up on my elbows and trying to catch back some of the breath Cai had stolen from me. “Some night watch we are. If a wolf can get that close . . .”
