is too much excitement for my old bones. Let the boy sulk. He’ll come around.”
Ash stiffened. “He doesn’t have to come around,” she said, and she realized no one had said anything like that through all of this. “He has a choice.”
Even if he chose not to help Kula. Even if Ash ended up back where she started, with no leads on how to destroy Ignitus or how to keep her country from slipping away into starvation.
Tor glared at her. Ilena shot her a look of surprise before it darkened into suspicion.
Ash continued, mouth dry. “I’ll speak to him. I can . . . I’ll make sure he knows that he has a choice.”
In truth, she wanted to see what he thought of her now. Maybe she had been right to always hide her true feelings about Ignitus. Maybe she had been right to sulk in loneliness rather than show her true self and hope that someday, someone would see her and understand.
“There. The girl will get through to him,” Seneca declared as though it was her idea.
Elias grunted, exasperated, and mumbled something about having to load Madoc’s armor. He left, stomping away.
Ilena gave Ash a weighted stare. “He’s scared,” she said. “Be patient. Please.”
That narrowed her focus. She could help Madoc. He didn’t deserve to deal with this immense burden alone. He didn’t deserve to feel like some plaything of the gods when all he wanted was a soft life, safe with those he loved.
Ash’s throat swelled.
Char, singing her old Kulan songs as they cooked supper. Tor, rustling her awake so the two of them could watch the sun rise. Rook, Taro, Spark—and even Madoc, looking at her the way he had when they’d been standing side by side after they’d found Stavos’s body. As if her presence was comforting.
She shot out the door, racing through the dusty arena after Madoc.
Fifteen
Madoc
WHEN MADOC HAD left the preparation chamber, he’d wanted to go home to the quarter. To sleep off his thunderous headache in his own tiny bunk, and wake a stonemason again—a pigstock nobody whose only concerns were mixing mortar and ranking the chariots driven in by the master architects. But when he’d reached the main exit of the arena, a crowd had gathered to celebrate his victory, so he’d stolen a guard cloak near the weapons depository and gone out a side exit.
He hadn’t intended to come to the temple, but it wasn’t the first time he’d ended up here when he’d been lost.
Soul energy. Anathreia.
Each thought kicked against the base of his skull as he climbed the stone steps past the beggars in their worn tunics. He kept replaying what he’d done to Jann in the arena—the swell of his own veins, the rightness of Jann’s surrender. Madoc still couldn’t remember fully what had happened, and it worried him, but not nearly as much as having his skin sanded off by Geoxus if he learned Madoc had used an energeia not sanctioned by the rules of war.
Madoc pulled the hood of his cloak lower as a group of children raced by, fighting with wooden swords and handfuls of pebbles.
Cassia. Petros. Elias. Ash.
They were all pulling him in different directions. A month ago, no one had cared who he was or what he did. Now it seemed like the whole city knew his name, and most of them wanted him to kill someone.
He didn’t know if he was capable of that.
He didn’t want to find out.
The temple was open to the air, two dozen pillars hoisting up a sloped stone roof. The east side made up the closed sanctuary, the walls the priests lived within separated from the arena by a single road that transported gladiators and their training entourages to a private entrance that led to the facility’s preparation chambers. Madoc walked that road now, skirting the edge of the sanctuary, until he reached the steps that led into the temple’s main atrium, and the door that held the offering box.
This was where he’d come as a child when Petros had kicked him out. Where his frantic prayers to Geoxus had led him. Where he’d eventually met Cassia. How many times had he prayed here since then? The location had hardly been necessary—Geoxus was part of the earth, this city’s foundation, and he heard Madoc’s words wherever there was stone. But Madoc had come to the temple again and again, drawn by the quiet, and the sense of safety that always put his mind at ease.