The Triumphant, page 19
“But that’s”—Darius glanced from Charon to the harbor and back again—“within the hour!”
“So it is.”
“Too soon.” The shipmaster shook his head. “No. No . . . Not enough time. We’ve no extra provisions laid in. No food, no water—”
“Then it’ll be a hungry trip,” Charon cut him short. “But worth your effort. More than worth it, I promise you.”
Darius’s calloused fingers departed his ear and roamed over his head, scratching at the back of his neck and then the scruff on his chin as he chewed over Charon’s extraordinary request, thinking. “Well, we could put in at Ostia, I suppose—”
“No. No coastal Italia ports of call until Messana.”
“Wh-what?” the master sputtered. “No coastal ports? You mean sail by way of Sardinia? That’ll double our traveling time! At least! You’re mad. I’ll have a mutiny on my hands—”
“Listen to me”—Charon clamped a hand on Darius’s shoulder—“and listen well, old friend. At the end of this journey you will be handsomely paid. I promise you that. Far beyond what you’re expecting. And you’d be wise to leave these lands for a while yourself, regardless. I’ve friends in Ephesus and Carthage—and elsewhere—who’d be happy to trade with you. Half my own fleet is docked at Lepsis Magna right now. I can write letters, make introductions . . . Believe me when I tell you that the Romans are soon to be a bit too occupied with backstabbing and bloodletting to care much about trade.”
Darius said nothing for a long moment. When he spoke again his tone was carefully neutral—a tone I suspected most men would adopt when speaking of Caesar for the next little while, until loyalties were known. “So it’s true then,” he said. “The great tyrant’s dead.”
Charon nodded. “And we must look to our own interests.”
“I heard a whisper on the wind only an hour or so gone,” Darius murmured, shaking his head, “but I just assumed it was rumor. Idle gossip. Maybe a bit of wishful wondering . . .”
“Do we have a deal?” Charon asked.
Darius frowned deeply, and for a long moment, I thought he would say no. But after a bit of negotiating, an agreement was inevitably reached. The negotiations included a hefty price per head and the wagons and horses we’d ridden in on. Which really wasn’t a problem. We wouldn’t be needing them again. Satisfied with the price he would receive, Darius turned his attention over Charon’s shoulder to the wagons—and their occupants.
“Is that what this is, then?” Darius asked. “You’re off to sell a pack of girls?”
“Never mind the girls,” Charon said. “Can we go aboard? Time is of the essence . . .”
“You’ll have to wait while we finish unloading what cargo we shipped in with.” Darius waved toward the sparsely populated southern end of the wharf. “You can wait out of the way until that’s done.”
Charon visibly reined in his impatience and said, “Be quick about it, then. Before the tide or my mind changes.”
XVI
I COULDN’T KEEP the anxious fluttering in my chest from moving up into my throat as we waited and waited and the tide rose higher and higher. Soon it would begin to turn, racing with the afternoon sun back out to sea, and we needed to go with it. The last time I’d been on a dock, waiting for the moment to board and cast off, I’d been ambushed.
And Meriel had died.
I paced and fidgeted and finally hunkered down in the lee of Cleopatra’s wagon and pulled a whetstone from the pouch at my belt. I figured, to pass the time, I’d sharpen one of the already perfectly sharp weapons I bore.
“I hate boats,” Elka sighed, sliding down to crouch beside me.
I snorted and was about to point out just how much fun we’d had during Cleopatra’s naumachia, but it suddenly became clear that the dock where we waited was far less deserted than any of us had thought. This time when Tanis struck, relentless as a toothache, there was no warning from the Morrigan.
No whisper in my ear . . .
But I heard the arrow’s hiss and ducked as the black-fletched shaft sank with a thud into the side board of the wagon, just beside my head. Elka and I exchanged a surprised glance as another one clattered off the iron wheel hub and grazed my thigh. Cai’s horse screamed a warning whinny and reared violently, throwing him from the saddle to land hard on the uneven cobbles. Quint shouted his name and leaped from his own saddle to help. Everyone in the other carts ducked for cover, and Elka and I scrambled up into Cleopatra’s wagon, diving flat behind the high wooden sides.
At first, I wasn’t sure where the arrow fire was coming from—the missiles seemed to have more than one trajectory—but Ajani knew.
“There!” she said, pointing. “She’s on the roof and running. She can target us from different vantages. So long as she has arrows, she can keep us pinned down. And if I know her mind, she has a lot of arrows.”
“Wonderful,” I muttered.
I doubted very much that Tanis was alone. If I were her, I thought, I wouldn’t risk attacking us single-handedly. Rather, I guessed she’d doubled back after murdering Hestia and losing Acheron, and gathered the remaining members of her Dis fellows. They could be waiting for us anywhere. In any doorway, any alley . . .
“Ajani, can you—”
She shook her head, her brow creased in frustration. “My quiver’s near empty,” she said. “And she has all the cover. We’re fish in a fountain waiting to be speared here. Someone’s got to draw her off.”
I scanned the faces of the Amazon girls who still clustered around Cleopatra in the wagon bed, keeping her hidden behind the relative safety of her stacks of traveling trunks. Three of them, including Selene, were tall. Too tall for what I had in mind—Tanis had seen the queen enough times at the Ludus Achillea to be familiar with Cleopatra’s build. Two were less than my height, but broad-shouldered. And then there was Kallista. Wiry, lean-muscled, and fleet-footed, about the right height . . .
“Majesty,” I said, crawling over to where Cleopatra crouched, “can you take off your cloak without too much difficulty?”
She was the only one of our little traveling band who wore a cloak dyed a shade of rich azure blue. The rest of us wore dun colors or undyed wool. She blinked at me with her wide, dark eyes and then nodded.
“Kallista?” I said, turning to her.
She nodded, already guessing what I had in mind, and reached up to the plain bronze brooch that held her own cloak around her neck, unfastening it with nimble fingers. Then she took the queen’s cloak and shrugged it up around her shoulders, fastening the brooch and tugging it closed in front, pulling the deep cowl up over her head to hide her face and hair.
“Ready?” I asked when she was done.
She looked at me, eyes shining with a kind of frantic excitement. “Ready.”
“Don’t take any chances,” I said. And then amended that to: “Don’t take any unnecessary chances. I’ll be right behind you—‘chasing’ you—and I’ll have your back if you get into any real trouble. We just need to buy enough time for Charon’s captain to finish stowing his cargo and for everyone to get aboard. All right?”
She nodded again, grinning, and reached up to grip the sides of the wagon.
“Good,” I said, squeezing her shoulder hard and then letting go. “The Morrigan guide your feet. Now go!”
Nimble as a fawn, Kallista leaped, vaulting over the side of the cart and landing in a neat crouch on the cobbles. Then I did what Acheron had done back on the road—the thing that had drawn so much unwanted attention down upon the queen in the first place.
I raised my voice and shouted, “My queen! No!”
Kallista played her part to perfection, shouting back at me in Greek, her voice tinged with what sounded like unbridled panic. Greek was a language Kallista had learned from her father—Quint’s older brother—on Corsica, and it was one that Cleopatra was not only fluent in but spoke frequently.
“Majesty!” I shouted as made a desperate grab for her—missing, intentionally, by inches. “Come back! It’s not safe!”
Then she ran. The azure cloak spread wide behind her, like a brilliant slash of sunlit sky streaming through the dreary gray shabbiness of Cosa, Kallista pelted down a side alley, faster than I’d ever seen anyone run. In an instant, she was out of sight, leaping over a low wall like a gazelle and disappearing down an alley.
“Tell Charon to get everyone on board that ship,” I said to Elka. “Now.”
Then I vaulted over the wagon side, sprinting madly after my runaway “queen.” Kallista was clever. She’d paused just out of sight, waiting for me to catch up. Then, at the first opportunity, she took a hard right, heading down a twisting narrow alley that angled east through the city away from the docks. I followed her long enough to make sure Tanis had taken the bait. When I heard the sound of sandals on clay roof tiles above me and the slap of a bowstring—followed by the clatter of an arrow missing its target—I knew our ruse had worked.
But I also knew the kind of peril I’d put Kallista in. I’d have to hurry.
Tanis was fairly adept at dealing damage from a distance. Up close . . . not as adept. It was something the other girls at the ludus had teased her about, and that was one of the things, I suspected, that had contributed to her turning against us when all the other girls who’d remained Aquila’s captives hadn’t. It was a regret I harbored in my heart but one I still planned to use against her. I just had to get close enough. With all of Tanis’s concentration focused so narrowly on trying to put an arrow through “Cleopatra’s” blue cloak, I dropped back in my pursuit—not half because I could barely keep up with Kallista myself—and let Tanis get ahead of me on the rooftops. While she could track Kallista from on high, I could track her by following the trail of broken roof tiles her passage had knocked into the streets.
I drew a few black glares, but no Cosan tried to stop me as I ran through the winding, narrow alleys. When I sensed Tanis had come to a stop on the roof of a smithy just ahead of me, I circled around to the other side of the squat, ugly building and found a stack of crates I could use to climb up to the roof. The clanging from the blacksmith’s hammer within and the column of smoke belching upward from the forge fires helped hide my approach.
Tanis had another arrow nocked and ready to fire.
She pulled the bowstring taut beside her ear . . .
And I hurled myself at her, hitting her with my shoulder, hard in the center of her back. She arched like her bow with a grunt of pain, and the arrow shot harmlessly skyward. Then together we tumbled off the roof into the street below. As I landed, I gave thanks to the Morrigan that Cosa maintained its streets in such poor condition. We hit soft-packed dirt instead of unforgiving paving stones. Tanis’s arrows spilled from the quiver on her back, scattering into the ruts and gutters, and she landed heavily on her bow. I heard the sharp snap of the wood as it cracked in two.
I was back on my feet before she had a chance to get up on her hands and knees, and I delivered a swift kick to her ribs. The breath left her lungs with a pained grunt, and she curled in on herself, rolling away from me. I followed, and all of the fear and frustration of the last few days—Vorya dead, Hestia dead, our home gone forever—it just poured out of me. With a snarl like a lioness, I lurched toward Tanis and grabbed her by the front of her tunic. I hauled her to her feet and drove my fist into her face. Her head snapped back, and blood flew in a thin arc from her mouth. She staggered a few steps, barely raising her hands to defend herself, but a fiery red mist descended like a curtain before my eyes, and I hit her again. And again. And then I drew my sword—the new one Charon had given me, with the eagle symbol on it—and, grabbing a handful of her tunic again, I drew back my arm and leveled the blade at her throat. I was breathing so heavily my chest was heaving and my throat burned.
I’d never felt such raw fury. Not even in the arena.
Tanis’s face, so close to mine, was a mess of blood, tears, and dirt . . . and fresh bruises blossoming in the shape of my knuckles. There was both fear and defiance in her gaze. I couldn’t tell if there was any regret. But I did see something that I wasn’t expecting: bravery.
She lifted her chin and stared down the length of my sword, directly into my eyes. “Go on,” she said through a mouthful of blood and spittle. “Make an end of it.”
Every muscle in my arm was on fire to do just that. Holding myself back in that moment felt like holding back someone else. Someone with a raging thirst for vengeance. For retribution . . .
“What’s wrong, Fallon?” Tanis asked, her mouth twisting around my name in a grimace of pure, acrid wretchedness. “You left me behind to die that night, but you won’t kill me yourself?”
And I saw, in that moment, that what Tanis hated wasn’t me. It wasn’t the girls who’d been her sisters. It was her own self. I felt a sudden welling up of shame in my breast. And pity . . .
“No.” I shook my head and took a weary step back, letting go of her tunic and dropping my sword arm down to my side. “I won’t kill you, Tanis.”
She laughed bitterly. “I’m not even worthy of that in your eyes?”
“You want to embrace Death so badly?” I snapped. “You’ll have to seek him out without my help. I’m sure your new master will point you down the right road. But beware. The grave isn’t an ending for him. It’s a beginning. Think long on how you really wish to spend eternity, Tanis. Now get out of my sight before I change my mind.”
Her eyes narrowed—as if she didn’t quite believe that I would just let her walk away—and she wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, smearing the blood that had gathered at the corner of her lips across her cheek.
“Go!” I shouted, and sheathed my blade.
Like a deer suddenly released from the spell of the Huntress, she spun on her heel and bounded away from me down the twisted alley, disappearing in an instant. Unless Tanis could find herself a brand-new bow somewhere in the rag-end shops of Cosa before we sailed, I thought, she would trouble me and my friends no further.
But it seemed that, blinded by my own anger, I’d somehow forgotten she hadn’t ridden into town alone. Because when I took to my own heels—heading back to the wharf, cutting through a narrow alley to emerge in the open square that served as the town forum—I almost ran straight into the black-cloaked back of one of the Dis riders.
He must have tethered his mount somewhere and was now prowling the streets looking for the fugitive queen of Aegypt. In my dirt-stained cloak, with my weapons hidden and my hair tucked back under my cowl, I very likely could have passed for just a regular citizen from Cosa but for the fact that I gasped audibly when I saw him standing there, like a shard of darkness in the middle of the town square. He spun around and looked down at me. I staggered back a few steps as he drew a wickedly curved sica blade from the sheath at his hip and, without pausing for thought, slashed at my head.
I cursed my telltale reaction and dropped to my knees, throwing myself forward into a diving roll that took me beneath his blade and past his reach. I was a bit surprised that no one in the square even blinked an eye at the seemingly random attempted beheading in their midst. When I lurched to my feet and started to run—spinning a stout older woman carrying a basket of bread loaves into the path of the Dis assassin and shouldering aside a pair of merchants—I earned a smattering of shouted curses, but that was the extent of the general reaction. How often did this sort of thing occur in a place like Cosa, I wondered as I dodged a laden mule and ducked past a fishmonger’s stall. Everyone seemed so utterly unruffled by it. Not that it mattered. I just hoped it meant my pursuer was unlikely to receive any help from the local populace in catching me.
Unfortunately, he didn’t need their help. He had a partner.
And his partner was right on Kallista’s heels.
I saw the blue blaze of her cloak out of the corner of my eye and headed in that direction just as another shard of darkness—a second Dis assassin—stepped out of a doorway right in front of me, axe held high and poised to throw at her fleeing back. I shouted to draw his attention, and he turned to see me running straight for him. He swung his axe, expecting I would dodge to his left—the only space available in the narrow lane—but instead, I ducked right, and as the momentum of his axe swing shifted his body on an angle, I bounced off his armored chest, spun myself around, and kept on running after Kallista . . .
Right into a blind alley.
A dead end.
She stood there, a look of blank disbelief on her face. As if there had to be an escape path there somewhere . . . I glanced around wildly. There wasn’t. Just three doors, two of them boarded up, the last with a dilapidated wooden sign above advertising a public bathhouse. We were caught. Cornered. The first Dis assassin appeared then at the far end of the alley and joined his partner, the two of them moving languidly toward us, supremely confident that they’d run their quarry to ground. I could tell by the look in their eyes, they meant to enjoy what came next.
“I wish I had my fire chain,” Kallista murmured.
“I wish you did too,” I said as I stepped in front of her and drew my swords . . .
And then there was a shout.
The azure flutter of the queen’s cloak flashed past again—behind our assailants, who’d turned to look and now frowned at each other in confusion. I blinked and glanced back at Kallista, not trusting my own eyes either. But when my ears reported back the slap-slap-slap of dainty sandals pelting down the lane, I swore under my breath.
That, I thought, is the real Cleopatra.
And she was playing decoy for us!
I grabbed Kallista by the wrist and shouldered open the bathhouse door, shoving her through ahead of me and slamming the door shut. Outside, I could hear our assailants cursing in confusion.
“Which one is the bloody queen?” one of them asked.
“So it is.”
“Too soon.” The shipmaster shook his head. “No. No . . . Not enough time. We’ve no extra provisions laid in. No food, no water—”
“Then it’ll be a hungry trip,” Charon cut him short. “But worth your effort. More than worth it, I promise you.”
Darius’s calloused fingers departed his ear and roamed over his head, scratching at the back of his neck and then the scruff on his chin as he chewed over Charon’s extraordinary request, thinking. “Well, we could put in at Ostia, I suppose—”
“No. No coastal Italia ports of call until Messana.”
“Wh-what?” the master sputtered. “No coastal ports? You mean sail by way of Sardinia? That’ll double our traveling time! At least! You’re mad. I’ll have a mutiny on my hands—”
“Listen to me”—Charon clamped a hand on Darius’s shoulder—“and listen well, old friend. At the end of this journey you will be handsomely paid. I promise you that. Far beyond what you’re expecting. And you’d be wise to leave these lands for a while yourself, regardless. I’ve friends in Ephesus and Carthage—and elsewhere—who’d be happy to trade with you. Half my own fleet is docked at Lepsis Magna right now. I can write letters, make introductions . . . Believe me when I tell you that the Romans are soon to be a bit too occupied with backstabbing and bloodletting to care much about trade.”
Darius said nothing for a long moment. When he spoke again his tone was carefully neutral—a tone I suspected most men would adopt when speaking of Caesar for the next little while, until loyalties were known. “So it’s true then,” he said. “The great tyrant’s dead.”
Charon nodded. “And we must look to our own interests.”
“I heard a whisper on the wind only an hour or so gone,” Darius murmured, shaking his head, “but I just assumed it was rumor. Idle gossip. Maybe a bit of wishful wondering . . .”
“Do we have a deal?” Charon asked.
Darius frowned deeply, and for a long moment, I thought he would say no. But after a bit of negotiating, an agreement was inevitably reached. The negotiations included a hefty price per head and the wagons and horses we’d ridden in on. Which really wasn’t a problem. We wouldn’t be needing them again. Satisfied with the price he would receive, Darius turned his attention over Charon’s shoulder to the wagons—and their occupants.
“Is that what this is, then?” Darius asked. “You’re off to sell a pack of girls?”
“Never mind the girls,” Charon said. “Can we go aboard? Time is of the essence . . .”
“You’ll have to wait while we finish unloading what cargo we shipped in with.” Darius waved toward the sparsely populated southern end of the wharf. “You can wait out of the way until that’s done.”
Charon visibly reined in his impatience and said, “Be quick about it, then. Before the tide or my mind changes.”
XVI
I COULDN’T KEEP the anxious fluttering in my chest from moving up into my throat as we waited and waited and the tide rose higher and higher. Soon it would begin to turn, racing with the afternoon sun back out to sea, and we needed to go with it. The last time I’d been on a dock, waiting for the moment to board and cast off, I’d been ambushed.
And Meriel had died.
I paced and fidgeted and finally hunkered down in the lee of Cleopatra’s wagon and pulled a whetstone from the pouch at my belt. I figured, to pass the time, I’d sharpen one of the already perfectly sharp weapons I bore.
“I hate boats,” Elka sighed, sliding down to crouch beside me.
I snorted and was about to point out just how much fun we’d had during Cleopatra’s naumachia, but it suddenly became clear that the dock where we waited was far less deserted than any of us had thought. This time when Tanis struck, relentless as a toothache, there was no warning from the Morrigan.
No whisper in my ear . . .
But I heard the arrow’s hiss and ducked as the black-fletched shaft sank with a thud into the side board of the wagon, just beside my head. Elka and I exchanged a surprised glance as another one clattered off the iron wheel hub and grazed my thigh. Cai’s horse screamed a warning whinny and reared violently, throwing him from the saddle to land hard on the uneven cobbles. Quint shouted his name and leaped from his own saddle to help. Everyone in the other carts ducked for cover, and Elka and I scrambled up into Cleopatra’s wagon, diving flat behind the high wooden sides.
At first, I wasn’t sure where the arrow fire was coming from—the missiles seemed to have more than one trajectory—but Ajani knew.
“There!” she said, pointing. “She’s on the roof and running. She can target us from different vantages. So long as she has arrows, she can keep us pinned down. And if I know her mind, she has a lot of arrows.”
“Wonderful,” I muttered.
I doubted very much that Tanis was alone. If I were her, I thought, I wouldn’t risk attacking us single-handedly. Rather, I guessed she’d doubled back after murdering Hestia and losing Acheron, and gathered the remaining members of her Dis fellows. They could be waiting for us anywhere. In any doorway, any alley . . .
“Ajani, can you—”
She shook her head, her brow creased in frustration. “My quiver’s near empty,” she said. “And she has all the cover. We’re fish in a fountain waiting to be speared here. Someone’s got to draw her off.”
I scanned the faces of the Amazon girls who still clustered around Cleopatra in the wagon bed, keeping her hidden behind the relative safety of her stacks of traveling trunks. Three of them, including Selene, were tall. Too tall for what I had in mind—Tanis had seen the queen enough times at the Ludus Achillea to be familiar with Cleopatra’s build. Two were less than my height, but broad-shouldered. And then there was Kallista. Wiry, lean-muscled, and fleet-footed, about the right height . . .
“Majesty,” I said, crawling over to where Cleopatra crouched, “can you take off your cloak without too much difficulty?”
She was the only one of our little traveling band who wore a cloak dyed a shade of rich azure blue. The rest of us wore dun colors or undyed wool. She blinked at me with her wide, dark eyes and then nodded.
“Kallista?” I said, turning to her.
She nodded, already guessing what I had in mind, and reached up to the plain bronze brooch that held her own cloak around her neck, unfastening it with nimble fingers. Then she took the queen’s cloak and shrugged it up around her shoulders, fastening the brooch and tugging it closed in front, pulling the deep cowl up over her head to hide her face and hair.
“Ready?” I asked when she was done.
She looked at me, eyes shining with a kind of frantic excitement. “Ready.”
“Don’t take any chances,” I said. And then amended that to: “Don’t take any unnecessary chances. I’ll be right behind you—‘chasing’ you—and I’ll have your back if you get into any real trouble. We just need to buy enough time for Charon’s captain to finish stowing his cargo and for everyone to get aboard. All right?”
She nodded again, grinning, and reached up to grip the sides of the wagon.
“Good,” I said, squeezing her shoulder hard and then letting go. “The Morrigan guide your feet. Now go!”
Nimble as a fawn, Kallista leaped, vaulting over the side of the cart and landing in a neat crouch on the cobbles. Then I did what Acheron had done back on the road—the thing that had drawn so much unwanted attention down upon the queen in the first place.
I raised my voice and shouted, “My queen! No!”
Kallista played her part to perfection, shouting back at me in Greek, her voice tinged with what sounded like unbridled panic. Greek was a language Kallista had learned from her father—Quint’s older brother—on Corsica, and it was one that Cleopatra was not only fluent in but spoke frequently.
“Majesty!” I shouted as made a desperate grab for her—missing, intentionally, by inches. “Come back! It’s not safe!”
Then she ran. The azure cloak spread wide behind her, like a brilliant slash of sunlit sky streaming through the dreary gray shabbiness of Cosa, Kallista pelted down a side alley, faster than I’d ever seen anyone run. In an instant, she was out of sight, leaping over a low wall like a gazelle and disappearing down an alley.
“Tell Charon to get everyone on board that ship,” I said to Elka. “Now.”
Then I vaulted over the wagon side, sprinting madly after my runaway “queen.” Kallista was clever. She’d paused just out of sight, waiting for me to catch up. Then, at the first opportunity, she took a hard right, heading down a twisting narrow alley that angled east through the city away from the docks. I followed her long enough to make sure Tanis had taken the bait. When I heard the sound of sandals on clay roof tiles above me and the slap of a bowstring—followed by the clatter of an arrow missing its target—I knew our ruse had worked.
But I also knew the kind of peril I’d put Kallista in. I’d have to hurry.
Tanis was fairly adept at dealing damage from a distance. Up close . . . not as adept. It was something the other girls at the ludus had teased her about, and that was one of the things, I suspected, that had contributed to her turning against us when all the other girls who’d remained Aquila’s captives hadn’t. It was a regret I harbored in my heart but one I still planned to use against her. I just had to get close enough. With all of Tanis’s concentration focused so narrowly on trying to put an arrow through “Cleopatra’s” blue cloak, I dropped back in my pursuit—not half because I could barely keep up with Kallista myself—and let Tanis get ahead of me on the rooftops. While she could track Kallista from on high, I could track her by following the trail of broken roof tiles her passage had knocked into the streets.
I drew a few black glares, but no Cosan tried to stop me as I ran through the winding, narrow alleys. When I sensed Tanis had come to a stop on the roof of a smithy just ahead of me, I circled around to the other side of the squat, ugly building and found a stack of crates I could use to climb up to the roof. The clanging from the blacksmith’s hammer within and the column of smoke belching upward from the forge fires helped hide my approach.
Tanis had another arrow nocked and ready to fire.
She pulled the bowstring taut beside her ear . . .
And I hurled myself at her, hitting her with my shoulder, hard in the center of her back. She arched like her bow with a grunt of pain, and the arrow shot harmlessly skyward. Then together we tumbled off the roof into the street below. As I landed, I gave thanks to the Morrigan that Cosa maintained its streets in such poor condition. We hit soft-packed dirt instead of unforgiving paving stones. Tanis’s arrows spilled from the quiver on her back, scattering into the ruts and gutters, and she landed heavily on her bow. I heard the sharp snap of the wood as it cracked in two.
I was back on my feet before she had a chance to get up on her hands and knees, and I delivered a swift kick to her ribs. The breath left her lungs with a pained grunt, and she curled in on herself, rolling away from me. I followed, and all of the fear and frustration of the last few days—Vorya dead, Hestia dead, our home gone forever—it just poured out of me. With a snarl like a lioness, I lurched toward Tanis and grabbed her by the front of her tunic. I hauled her to her feet and drove my fist into her face. Her head snapped back, and blood flew in a thin arc from her mouth. She staggered a few steps, barely raising her hands to defend herself, but a fiery red mist descended like a curtain before my eyes, and I hit her again. And again. And then I drew my sword—the new one Charon had given me, with the eagle symbol on it—and, grabbing a handful of her tunic again, I drew back my arm and leveled the blade at her throat. I was breathing so heavily my chest was heaving and my throat burned.
I’d never felt such raw fury. Not even in the arena.
Tanis’s face, so close to mine, was a mess of blood, tears, and dirt . . . and fresh bruises blossoming in the shape of my knuckles. There was both fear and defiance in her gaze. I couldn’t tell if there was any regret. But I did see something that I wasn’t expecting: bravery.
She lifted her chin and stared down the length of my sword, directly into my eyes. “Go on,” she said through a mouthful of blood and spittle. “Make an end of it.”
Every muscle in my arm was on fire to do just that. Holding myself back in that moment felt like holding back someone else. Someone with a raging thirst for vengeance. For retribution . . .
“What’s wrong, Fallon?” Tanis asked, her mouth twisting around my name in a grimace of pure, acrid wretchedness. “You left me behind to die that night, but you won’t kill me yourself?”
And I saw, in that moment, that what Tanis hated wasn’t me. It wasn’t the girls who’d been her sisters. It was her own self. I felt a sudden welling up of shame in my breast. And pity . . .
“No.” I shook my head and took a weary step back, letting go of her tunic and dropping my sword arm down to my side. “I won’t kill you, Tanis.”
She laughed bitterly. “I’m not even worthy of that in your eyes?”
“You want to embrace Death so badly?” I snapped. “You’ll have to seek him out without my help. I’m sure your new master will point you down the right road. But beware. The grave isn’t an ending for him. It’s a beginning. Think long on how you really wish to spend eternity, Tanis. Now get out of my sight before I change my mind.”
Her eyes narrowed—as if she didn’t quite believe that I would just let her walk away—and she wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, smearing the blood that had gathered at the corner of her lips across her cheek.
“Go!” I shouted, and sheathed my blade.
Like a deer suddenly released from the spell of the Huntress, she spun on her heel and bounded away from me down the twisted alley, disappearing in an instant. Unless Tanis could find herself a brand-new bow somewhere in the rag-end shops of Cosa before we sailed, I thought, she would trouble me and my friends no further.
But it seemed that, blinded by my own anger, I’d somehow forgotten she hadn’t ridden into town alone. Because when I took to my own heels—heading back to the wharf, cutting through a narrow alley to emerge in the open square that served as the town forum—I almost ran straight into the black-cloaked back of one of the Dis riders.
He must have tethered his mount somewhere and was now prowling the streets looking for the fugitive queen of Aegypt. In my dirt-stained cloak, with my weapons hidden and my hair tucked back under my cowl, I very likely could have passed for just a regular citizen from Cosa but for the fact that I gasped audibly when I saw him standing there, like a shard of darkness in the middle of the town square. He spun around and looked down at me. I staggered back a few steps as he drew a wickedly curved sica blade from the sheath at his hip and, without pausing for thought, slashed at my head.
I cursed my telltale reaction and dropped to my knees, throwing myself forward into a diving roll that took me beneath his blade and past his reach. I was a bit surprised that no one in the square even blinked an eye at the seemingly random attempted beheading in their midst. When I lurched to my feet and started to run—spinning a stout older woman carrying a basket of bread loaves into the path of the Dis assassin and shouldering aside a pair of merchants—I earned a smattering of shouted curses, but that was the extent of the general reaction. How often did this sort of thing occur in a place like Cosa, I wondered as I dodged a laden mule and ducked past a fishmonger’s stall. Everyone seemed so utterly unruffled by it. Not that it mattered. I just hoped it meant my pursuer was unlikely to receive any help from the local populace in catching me.
Unfortunately, he didn’t need their help. He had a partner.
And his partner was right on Kallista’s heels.
I saw the blue blaze of her cloak out of the corner of my eye and headed in that direction just as another shard of darkness—a second Dis assassin—stepped out of a doorway right in front of me, axe held high and poised to throw at her fleeing back. I shouted to draw his attention, and he turned to see me running straight for him. He swung his axe, expecting I would dodge to his left—the only space available in the narrow lane—but instead, I ducked right, and as the momentum of his axe swing shifted his body on an angle, I bounced off his armored chest, spun myself around, and kept on running after Kallista . . .
Right into a blind alley.
A dead end.
She stood there, a look of blank disbelief on her face. As if there had to be an escape path there somewhere . . . I glanced around wildly. There wasn’t. Just three doors, two of them boarded up, the last with a dilapidated wooden sign above advertising a public bathhouse. We were caught. Cornered. The first Dis assassin appeared then at the far end of the alley and joined his partner, the two of them moving languidly toward us, supremely confident that they’d run their quarry to ground. I could tell by the look in their eyes, they meant to enjoy what came next.
“I wish I had my fire chain,” Kallista murmured.
“I wish you did too,” I said as I stepped in front of her and drew my swords . . .
And then there was a shout.
The azure flutter of the queen’s cloak flashed past again—behind our assailants, who’d turned to look and now frowned at each other in confusion. I blinked and glanced back at Kallista, not trusting my own eyes either. But when my ears reported back the slap-slap-slap of dainty sandals pelting down the lane, I swore under my breath.
That, I thought, is the real Cleopatra.
And she was playing decoy for us!
I grabbed Kallista by the wrist and shouldered open the bathhouse door, shoving her through ahead of me and slamming the door shut. Outside, I could hear our assailants cursing in confusion.
“Which one is the bloody queen?” one of them asked.
