“Hail, Emperor.” The Gaul saluted a rock-hard arm up at the Imperial box.

The Emperor looked at Vix. “Have you anything to say, Gladiator?”

Vix launched himself forward and sank the knife deep into the Gaul’s knee.

The Gaul screamed. Vix tugged the blade free and took off running.

ARIUS’S belly crawled up the back of his throat. Freezing sweat trickled down his spine and the smells of the arena hit him like a slap: fear, sweat, iron, fresh-raked sand, the rotted flesh on the breath of the lions, the stains of old blood. Any minute now he’d wake up—he’d wake up and it would be him out on the arena sand, waiting for an enemy to strike.

But it wasn’t him.

It was Vix.

The Gaul’s first angry sweep whistled through Vix’s hair. He stumbled away from the next feint, reeled back from a vicious thrust. The Gaul’s curved blade ripped through his tunic. Thea moaned, and Arius’s hand tightened around hers until the bones ground together.

Remember the drills, Vix. Arius felt terror clench somewhere inside his chest, a tight frozen ball, but he didn’t dare let it thaw. He willed his thoughts out to the impossibly small red spot in the arena, calm as if this were just another training exercise behind the vineyard. Remember what I taught you. Because there’s no mercy here for beginners, Vix, no start-over for mistakes.

Vix fell to one knee in the sand. The hand with the knife supported his trembling weight. The Gaul stepped forward, dragging a ruined leg and raising a shining sword.

Thea moaned again.

Kill him. Arius sent the thought out to his son. Not what he wanted, making his son a killer at thirteen, but this was the Colosseum and here the rules were different. Kill him, Vix. Find a way.

Vix flung a handful of sand into the Gaul’s eyes. The Gaul yelled and stepped back blindly. Vix ducked under his shield and stabbed.

Arius froze. The Colosseum waited.

When Vix crawled out from under the still body of the Gaul, they clapped. When he dragged himself to his feet, they cheered. When he retrieved his knife and scrubbed the blood off his face with an unsteady hand, they howled. Howled for twenty minutes, raining rose petals and silver coins down on his head. As they had once done for Arius.

Praetorians hauled Vix out of the arena and hoisted him on their shoulders, dousing his bristly hair with wine and thumping him on the back. Vix hardly seemed to notice. He stared around him with blank dazed eyes as they trooped him up to the Imperial box, and Arius remembered his own first arena kill in the middle of that deafening crash of applause.

Not like you imagined, is it, boy?

“I give you Vercingetorix!” The Emperor took Vix’s arm and raised it high, spurring another wave of cheers. Domitian’s voice carried over the screaming, the stamping, the clapping, all the way to the last tier of spectators at the top of the arena. “Vercingetorix, son of the Barbarian!”