Juba removed the rag and squeezed it out into the little basin of tepid water they’d granted him. He resoaked it, vainly hoping it would be cooler than the air in this closed space, and resettled it on Octavian’s brow.
His stepbrother moaned but did not otherwise respond.
Run, Juba abruptly remembered.
That was what he’d shouted. Right before the power of the Shard had taken him and sent him to wherever he was now—Caesar had told him to run.
“You were saving me,” Juba whispered, staring down at the man he had hated for so long. “You were giving me a chance to get away.”
It didn’t make any sense. When Juba had awoken in this cell after the battle, Octavian had been relieved. Easy enough to understand, since he was the one who could use the Trident for him. A slave. That’s what Corocotta had thought him. No different than that little girl whom he’d he been using to wield the Lance. Of course Octavian didn’t want him to die.
And yet this—so foolishly seizing the Trident, trying to give him a chance to get away—this was something else.
Was it caring?
After all that Octavian had made him do—Quintus, those first men at sea, the hundreds at Actium—after all the death, was it possible that all along Octavian had truly viewed him as a brother? As family?
Sudden sounds stirred him from his thoughts. There was shouting, distant and muted. A noise like a roar.
Juba stood, trying to listen, the sodden rag in his hand dripping into the little basin. There was a bang that sounded as if it came from the building above them, and on the other side of the cell door heavy steps pounded down the hall as a guard shouted something he could not understand.
Screaming. A heat in the air.
Then a sudden eerie silence between the door and the distant commotion.
“Juba?” a voice suddenly shouted. “Juba? Are you down here?”
Juba blinked in the dim light. “Selene?” It couldn’t be her. But it sounded—
“Juba? Are you down here?”
“Selene!” Juba dropped the rag in the water and jumped to the door of the cell. He banged on it and shouted into the wood, “Selene!”
There was a thump against the wood beneath his hands, and then her voice was close. “Juba! Get back from the door!”
“Selene! What are you doing here? How did you—”
The air in the room seemed to groan, and Juba felt himself being pulled against the damp wood. The flame of the tallow candle flickered as it stretched in his direction.
“Get back!” he heard her shout.
Juba shoved himself away from the door, and—feeling as if he were fighting a horrible tide—he managed to throw himself on top of Caesar just moments before the wooden entry to the cell exploded inward with a splintering crash.
Wind erupted into the room, and clattering, broken boards. Juba shielded his eyes with one hand as he steadied himself with the other, the wood scattering across his back as he covered the emperor of Rome.
In a second, the wind was gone.
The little light had guttered out, and when Juba shook the debris off his neck and looked up at the open doorway, he saw Selene, his love, backlit against the light in the hallway. The shawl about her shoulders was drifting in what looked like a leftover breeze, and she was cradling something in her hands.
“Selene?”
“You’re all right,” she said, and she dropped what she had been holding into a satchel at her side.
“Selene, how did—”
She rushed forward as he stood, and she threw her arms around his neck, cutting off his words with kisses as if she’d never thought she’d see him again.
Juba embraced her in return, and as he did so he felt the hard plate between them. The Aegis of Zeus. The Shard.
Selene pulled away from his lips. Her eyes and cheeks were wet, but she was smiling. “We need to hurry,” she said. She kissed him one last time, and then she let go of him and ran back to the hall. She was out of sight for only a heartbeat, and when she returned she had the Trident. She threw it to him, and he caught it.
“I don’t understand how—”
Above the tumult they both heard a girl shouting Selene’s name.
Selene’s eyes were wide. She grabbed Juba’s arm and started pulling him forward. She was far stronger than he ever remembered. “We need to go.”
Juba took two steps, feeling like this was some kind of dream, and then he snapped out of it and stopped. He looked back at Octavian upon the bed. “I can’t just leave him.”
Selene’s grip bruised his arm. “There’s no time!”
Juba met her eyes. Her big, beautiful, bold eyes. “I can’t, Selene.”
The love of his life looked back and forth between them. Then she nodded. “Hurry,” she said, already reaching down for the fevered Caesar. “Come on.”
* * *
Outside, the world was on fire.
Selene had helped to carry the unconscious Octavian up the steps out of the little prison, and when they reached the top all Juba could see at first was smoke and flame. The walls of several buildings nearby were ablaze, and at least three men were blackened, smoking corpses in the open area around them. Corocotta’s slave girl stood at the top of the steps as they came up. Her back was to them, but Juba could see the Lance of Olyndicus was once more in her little hands, a tongue of fire flashing out against a group of men who’d tried to come around one of the buildings to their left.
Selene pushed Caesar’s weight onto Juba, then spun away from him and knelt, facing to the right.
Juba turned in that direction—speechless, paralyzed with shock—and he saw that four archers had taken position behind an overturned and smoldering wagon. They were drawing back on their bows.
Selene once more had something in her hands. Juba opened his mouth to cry out, knowing that it was already too late as the men loosed their strings. For an instant he could see the heads of the missiles flying straight and true, the wood shafts behind them vibrating from the acceleration of their flight, the rising curtain of gray smoke curling and twisting behind them as they sliced through it.
In the same moment a wind struck him against his back, pushing him forward a step toward the killing shafts. But a step beyond Selene the wind bent, turning upward toward heaven in a glorious sweep of natural power that he could see in the dust that it scraped from the ground and carried up with it in what seemed a wall of cloud. The four arrows hit it and were pushed upward, sailing high.
Then Selene’s cupped hands jerked forward, and the wall hurtled forward as well, as if commanded—bowing down upon itself and rushing forward like a wave. It crashed into the charred wagon, slamming it back into the archers, who fell screaming.
The booming voice of Corocotta split the crackling noise, echoing off the walls of the fort and the buildings around them, shouting commands that Juba could not understand.
“This way,” the slave girl urged.
Juba turned back toward her, saw that she was pointing toward a break in the fires. Through it he could see a gate of the hillfort. A way out.
Caesar was a dead weight, so Juba crouched down and let his stepbrother fall over his back and shoulders. With a grunt, still feeling barely recovered from his own weakness but knowing there was no other choice, he stood up and hefted him onto his shoulders, just barely managing not to drop the Trident in his right hand. “Selene!” he shouted. “Let’s go!”
There was no need. Selene was already passing him, calling the crippled girl by name—Isidora, Juba noted—and half-picking her up to help them move faster.
Corocotta continued to shout, and when they were nearly to the break in the fire, Juba finally saw why: Cantabrians were storming up the stairways to take positions above the gate. Dozens of bows were already being drawn against them.
No wind, no fire could stop them all.
“Down!” he shouted, and in the same moment he flung Caesar from his shoulder into the backs of the two girls—bruises are better than holes, he thought—and held out the Trident of Poseidon. He wrapped his hand around the Shard.