No.
I was near the river. I had gone in the exact opposite direction from where I’d meant to go. I cursed loudly, then clamped my hand over my mouth. Aeddan could be somewhere nearby. I’d be a fool to alert him to my presence. The only way I wanted him to know I was there was when he looked down to see my sword in his guts.
Cautiously, I pushed through a screen of saplings and found myself at the broad bank of the River Dwr. A break in the clouds spilled down moongleam, and I looked down to see my reflection staring back at me from the dark water, green eyes glowing like the eyes of the cats we kept to kill rats.
And I will kill a rat this night, I thought.
I wrapped my heart in fury to keep the despair at bay as I knelt on the sodden grass of the riverbank to retrieve my sword from my bedroll. Before I could reach it, the moon disappeared behind the clouds again. As the river turned back to blackness, I caught the glimpse of a shadow looming up behind me in the reflection. I spun around, thinking Aeddan had found me first. My hand went instead for my dagger, only to remember I’d left it lying in the embers of my home fire.
It wasn’t Aeddan.
A broad-shouldered man swung his fist like a mallet at my head. I fell, consumed by a dark red tide.
? ? ?
When I awoke, I knew from the motion of the wet planks beneath me that I was on a boat, gliding silently down what I guessed was the Dwr.
Out of the cauldron and straight into the flames, I thought as a cold dread pierced the nausea that already knotted my guts. This was the second time I’d been hit on the head in less than a day. I groaned and opened my eyes.
The man from the riverbank was sitting on a bench in the middle of the little skiff, staring at me. Seeing that I was awake, he crouched down in front of me and grabbed my chin, forcing me to look up into his face. His eyes were two different colors—one watery blue, the other muddy brown. I opened my mouth in anger, but he put a finger, rough and calloused, to my lips.
“Shh . . .” He grinned, an ugly twisting of his mouth behind a matted beard. “Cry out and that’ll be the last sound you make. You understand?”
His other hand pressed a knife blade up under my left ear. The scream building in my throat died instantly. I couldn’t escape if I was dead.
“There’s a good little Cantii bitch.” His mismatched gaze roamed over me. “She’s not too ugly,” he called quietly over his shoulder to the skiff’s other occupant, a dark-haired man who pulled easily at the oars. Then he turned back to me and rolled the dagger blade over my cheek. “If you behave, I won’t have to ruin your face. You might even fetch a decent price.”
A slave trader, I thought, numb with disbelief. The lowest kind of creature—cunning peddlers always looking to capture and barter the lives of anyone unfortunate enough to cross their path unawares. My tribe came by most of our bond-slaves through war and raids. Traders were reviled as parasites, a blight that had accompanied Rome to our shores.
This one wore no torc. No arm-ring. No ornamentation of any kind to mark him as a freeman or anything other than lowborn. Of course, I realized, neither did I in that moment. I wore none of the embellishments that would have marked me as the daughter of a king. I had disavowed that status. My arms and neck were bare. No gold dangled from my ears. My boots and tunic were muddied and torn from my mad dash through the forest. They probably thought I was just a lowly thrall, easy picking. They were wrong. And I’d show them that—as soon as I could get to my sword.
“Were you running from someone, little slave?” asked the man at the oars. He spoke Latin like all the traders did, so I could understand him well enough, but his voice had a rolling lilt that I couldn’t place.
I ground my teeth together and said nothing. They laughed quietly at my silence. Over his shoulder, I could just make out the shape of a galley riding low in the water.
“No matter,” he said, guiding the skiff toward the ship. “Whoever it is, you’ll be far enough away from them once we get to Rome.”
? ? ?
Rome.
The word stunned me like another blow to the head. Over the sound of the waves lapping the sides of the skiff, I could hear muffled voices drifting down from the galley deck—male, gruff, hissing hard-edged words into the night, and a smaller, forlorn noise. Weeping. A girl. Maybe a young boy. Silenced with the sharp ring of a slap. It seemed I wasn’t the only prey the slavers had hunted that night. But I was probably the only one foolish enough to have run right into their arms.