“How so?” I asked.
“You can just go back to your life as a pampered princess in Britannia once you win back your freedom,” she said. “But then, you’d probably miss all of those crowds yelling your name every time you so much as stepped onto the sand.”
“Is that what you think I care about?”
“Why wouldn’t you?” she asked, and I could tell she meant it. “The only time anyone yells my name in the arena is if they want me to get out of the way.”
“Ajani thinks very highly of you,” I said.
“That’s just because I can shoot.”
“That’s not a small thing, Tanis. You’re very good and—”
“I’m a coward, Fallon!” she spat vehemently. “Don’t you understand? I’m really good at fighting from a distance because I’m terrified of having to do it up close! All of the rest of you—you and Damya and Meriel and even Ajani, once she’s used up all her arrows—you all seem to think nothing whatsoever of charging headlong at a wall of swords! How? How do you do it? Every muscle in my body tries to run the other way.”
“But you don’t,” I said. “You haven’t. I mean—I’ve seen you stand your ground and fight. You—”
“Defend myself,” she sneered. “Badly. Elka was right. And I only ever did it because running would have just meant flogging once they caught up with me. Flogging if I was lucky.”
She glowered at me, as if daring me to contradict her. But I couldn’t. For the first time, I thought about what it must have been like for the girls at the ludus who hadn’t grown up wanting to do nothing more than swing a sword. I’d never seen that in Tanis before, but now that she’d said it, I tried to put myself in her place. When she’d been nothing but a slave—when she’d had no choice but to fight as a gladiatrix for the ludus—Tanis had fought alongside the rest of us, day in and day out. Fight or suffer punishment.
Now—in spite of Elka’s jest about us freely toiling under her lash—the actual threat of Thalestris’s whip was about to disappear with the advent of the Nova Ludus Achillea. And Tanis was afraid that, without that kind of external motivation, she would no longer be able to find it within herself to fight. To go into the arena and—spurred on by nothing but her own free will—risk defeat or injury. Or death.
I could see the muscles in her jaw working as I sat there looking at her. It had taken a good deal of courage to admit it. But I wasn’t sure I could make her see it that way.
Instead, I asked, “How’s the ankle?”
She stuck out her leg and flexed her foot. “Hurts. But it’ll heal.” She fell silent for a long moment and I thought maybe that was the end of our conversation. But then she said, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For saving me back on the ship.” She shrugged. “And for not trying to tell me I’m wrong now. We both know I’m no fighter, Fallon. If I have a destiny, I don’t think it’s here.”
“I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion if I were you, Tanis.” I put a hand on her shoulder. “Wait and see. You might find that, once you no longer have to fight . . . you might want to. And you might just do it better.”
She frowned, unconvinced, but at least I was able to talk her into coming back and joining the others. By the time we returned to the fire, it was as if the sniping between the girls had never happened. Meriel pressed a mug into Tanis’s hand and made room for her in the circle of bodies. I sat there, silent, looking from face to firelit face and thinking about just how much that circle of girls had come to mean to me in such a relatively short time. I didn’t want any of them to leave the ludus. Not Tanis, not even Meriel or Lydia. They were my sisters, and I wanted them to stay and fight with me—as much as I wanted to fight for them.
Elka threw another log on the fire, and the flames belched clouds of sparks into the night. The general merriment continued undiminished all around me, highlighted by Leander’s outrageous flirtations with each and every one of us.
“My heart belongs only to you, sweet Ajani!” he was saying, looking every bit the cheerful, leering satyr through the shower of sparks. “But also you, fair Damya.”
“Ha.” She grinned back at him, and I thought she might actually be enjoying his advances. Except her idea of flirting back was “It would, if I ripped it out of your chest and kept it in a jar.”
Leander swallowed his next retort, and Damya threw back her head and laughed, slapping him so heartily on the back that she almost knocked him into the fire. I tried to laugh along at the banter, but my own thoughts started to careen away from me. My own heart, I suddenly remembered, had been missing for months. Stolen and carried away into battle in far-off lands. By Caius Antonius Varro, decurion in Caesar’s legions . . .
I sighed.
Clearly, I thought, I’ve drunk far too much of the kitchen boy’s beer tonight. Still, the warmth of the fire on my face made me close my eyes and imagine it was Cai’s breath on my skin as he leaned close to kiss me.
“You sigh any louder and somebody’s going to tattle to Heron that you’ve got a case of evil humors,” Elka’s voice murmured in my ear as she sat down beside me and handed me another cup of beer.
I opened one eye and squinted at her.
“I know it’s just love-pining,” she said, “but he’ll march you to the infirmary to have you stuck with bloodletting skewers and wrapped in one of his stinking poultices.”
I opened my other eye and grumbled something unpleasant under my breath before gulping my drink. Elka nodded and drank from her own cup.
“How long since you’ve heard from him?”
“Weeks,” I said sourly. “Four of them less a day, to be exact. Plus however many hours it’s been since I woke up this morning.”
“At least you’re getting the knack of the Roman calendar.”
“Barely.”
“And you’re learning to read their letters.”
“Less than barely.”
The Cantii had no written language. All our stories were told face-to-face, passed down through the songs and poems of our bards. We had no need for scribbled marks on tablets and scrolls to convey our hearts and minds to others.