by Pierce Brown
Titus’s reply comes just before night falls. With five newly minted slaves, including the male with the missing ear, he approaches the gate till he’s near a mile off. He parades in front of the slaves, holding four long sticks in his hand. These he gives to each of the slaves except the girl he pulled down from the ramparts with a lasso.
With a low bow to the Ceres gate, he waves a hand and orders the slaves to commence beating the girl. Like Titus, she is tall and powerful, so it is difficult to pity her. At first.
The slaves hit the girl gingerly with the initial swings. Then Titus reminds them of the shame that will forever mark their names if they do not obey; they swing harder; they aim for the girl’s golden head. They hit her and hit her till her shouts have long faded and blood mats her blonde hair. When Titus grows bored, he drags the wounded girl back to his camp by her hair. She slides limply over the earth.
We watch from our place in the highlands, and it takes Lea and Quinn both to stop Cassius from sprinting down into the plains. The girl will live, I tell him. The sticks are all show. Roque spits bitterly into the grass and reaches for Lea’s hand. It’s odd seeing her give him strength.
The next morning, we discover that Titus’s reply did not stop with the beating. After we retired to our castle, Titus snuck back in the dead of night to hide the girl directly in front of the Ceres gate underneath a thick blanket of grass, gagged and tied. Then he had one of his female followers shriek during the night to pretend she was the slave at the camp. She screamed of rape and violations.
Maybe the captured Ceres girl thought she was safe under the grass. Maybe she thought the Proctors would save her and she would go home to mother and father, home to her equestrian lessons, home to her puppies and her books. But in the early dark of morning she is trampled as riders, enraged by the fake screams, gallop from the Ceres fortress to rescue her from Titus’s makeshift camp. They only learn of their folly when they hear the medBots descending behind them to carry her broken body up to Olympus.
She never returns. Still the Proctors do not interfere. I’m not sure why they even exist.
I miss home. Lykos, of course, but also the place where I was safe with Dancer, Matteo, and Harmony.
Soon there are no more slaves to take. House Ceres does not come out after dark anymore, and their high walls are guarded. The trees outside the wall have all been cut down, but there are crops and more orchards inside their long walls. Bread still bakes and the river still flows within their ramparts. Titus can do nothing but savage their land and steal what remains of their apples. Most have been sown with needles and stingers from wasps. Titus has failed. And so, as do those of any tyrant after a failed war, his eyes turn inward.
25
TRIBAL WAR
Thirty days into the Institute and I’ve not seen evidence of another enemy House except for the smoke signs of distant fires. House Ceres’s soldiers roam the eastern fringes of our land. They ride with impunity now that Titus’s tribe has retreated into our castle. Castle. No. It has become a hovel.
I come upon it with Roque in the early morning. Fog still clings to the four spires and light struggles to penetrate the dreary sky of our highland climate. Sounds from inside the stone walls echo into the quiet morning like coins rattling about in a tin can. Titus’s voice. He’s cursing at his tribesmen to get up. Apparently few do. Someone tells him to go slag himself, and it’s little wonder. The bunk beds are the only real amenity the castle has, no doubt put there to encourage slothfulness. My tribe has no such amenities; we sleep on stone curled next to one another around our crackling fires. Oh, what I’d give for a bed again.
Cassius and I slink along the slanted dirt road that leads to the gatehouse. We can hardly even see it, the fog is so thick. More sounds from inside. It seems like the slaves are up. I hear coughs, grumbling, and a few shouts. A long creak and the clatter of chains means the gate is opening. Cassius pulls me off to the side of the road, tucking us into the mist as the slaves shuffle past. Their faces are pallid in the low light. Hollows make homes in their sunken cheeks, and their hair has been dirtied. Mud-caked skin around their Sigils. He passes near enough to me that I smell his body odor. I stiffen suddenly, worried he will again smell the smoke on me, but he doesn’t. Beside me, Cassius is quiet, yet I feel his anger.
We sneak back down the path and watch the slaves toil from the relative safety of the woods. They are not Aureates as they scrub shit and scavenge for berries in the sharp thistlebushes. One or two are missing ears. Vixus, recovered from my attack except for a huge purple bruise on his neck, walks around slapping at them with a long stick. If the test is to unite a fractious House, I am failing.
As early morning fades and appetites change with the arrival of warm sunshine, Cassius and I hear a sound that makes our skin prickle. Screams. Screams from the high tower of Mars. They are a particular sort, a kind to darken the spirits.
When I was a boy in Lykos, my mother was serving me soup at our stone family table the night of a Laureltide. It was a year after my father died. Kieran and Leanna sat with me, neither yet older than ten. A single light unit flickered on and off above the table, so Mum was shrouded in darkness except her arm from the elbow down. Then came the scream, muffled by distance and the twists of our cavern township. I still see how the broth quivered in the ladle, how my mother’s hand shook when she heard it. Screams. Not of pain, but of horror.
“What he’s doing to the girls …,” Cassius hisses to me as we slink away from the castle as night descends. “He’s a beast.”
“This is war,” I say, though the words sound hollow even in my own ears.
“It’s school!” he reminds me. “What if Titus did this to our girls? To Lea … to Quinn?”
I say nothing.
“We would kill him,” Cassius answers for me. “We would kill him, cut his prick off and shove it in his mouth.” And I know he’s also thinking of what Titus must have done to Julian.
Despite Cassius’s mutterings, I take his arm and pull him away from the castle. The gates are locked against the night. There is nothing we can do. I feel helpless again. Helpless as when Ugly Dan took Eo from me. But I am different now. My hands turn to fists. I am more than I was then.
On our way back to our northfort, we see a glimmer in the air. Golden gravBoots shimmer as Fitchner descends. He’s chewing gum and holds his heart when he sees our evil glances.
“Whatever did I do, young friends, to earn such glares?”
“He’s treating the girls like animals!” Cassius seethes. Veins in his neck stand out. “They are Golds and he is treating them like dogs, like Pinks.”
“If he is treating them like Pinks, then it is because they merited no better in this little world than Pinks do in our big world.”
“You’re joking.” Cassius can’t understand. “They are Golds, not Pinks. He’s a monster.”
“Then prove you’re a man and stop him,” Fitchner says. “As long as he’s not murdering them one by one, it is not our concern. All wounds heal. Even these.”
“That’s a lie,” I tell him. I’ll never be healed of Eo. That pain will last forever. “Some things do not fade. Some things can never be made right.”
“Yet we do nothing because he has more fighters,” Cassius spits.
An idea sweeps over me. “We can fix that.”
Cassius turns to me. He hears the deadness in my voice just as I see it in his eyes when he speaks of Titus. That’s a peculiar thing we share. We’re made of fire and ice—though I am not sure which of us is ice and which is fire. Nevertheless, extremes rule us more than we’d like; that is why we are of Mars.
“You have a plan,” Cassius says.
I nod coldly.
Fitchner watches us two and he grins. “About gorydamn time.”
The plan starts with a concession only someone once a husband could make. Cassius cannot stop laughing when I tell him the details. Even Quinn snorts a laugh the next morning. Then she’s off, running like a
deer to Deimos Tower to bring my formal apology to Antonia. She’s to meet me with Antonia’s response at one of our supply caches near the Furor River, north of the castle.
Cassius guards our new fort with the remainder of our tribe, in case Titus tries to attack while Roque and I go to the supply cache during the day. Quinn does not come. Dusk does. Despite the dark, we trace the path she would have taken from Deimos Tower. We go till we reach the tower itself, which sits in the low hills surrounded by thick woods. Five of Titus’s men lounge around its base. Roque grabs me and pulls me down into the woods’ brush. He points to a tree fifty meters distant where Vixus sits hidden in wait on a high branch. Did they catch Quinn? No, she’s too fast to be caught. Did someone betray us?
We return to our fort by early morning. I’m sure I’ve been more tired, but I can’t remember when. Blisters ruin my feet despite the fitted shoes, and my neck peels from long days in the sun. Something is wrong.
Lea meets me by the fort’s gate. She hugs Roque and looks up at me like I’m her father or something. She is not her usual timid self. Her birdlike body shakes not from fear, but anger.
“You have to kill that piece of filth, Darrow. You have to cut his slagging balls off.”
Titus. “What happened?” I look around. “Lea. Where is Cassius?”
She tells me.
Titus captured Quinn as she was on her way back from the tower. They beat her. Then Titus sent one of her ears here. It was meant for me. They thought Quinn was my girl, and Titus thinks he knows my temper. They got the reaction they wanted, just not from me.
Cassius was on watch and as the others slept he snuck away to the castle to challenge Titus. Somehow the brilliant young man was arrogant enough to think hundreds of years of Aureate honor and tradition would survive the sickness that has consumed Titus’s tribe in only a few weeks. The Imperator’s son was wrong. And he is also unused to having his heritage be of such little consequence. In the real world, he would have been safe. In this small one, he is not.
“But he’s alive,” I say.
“Yeah, I’m alive, you Pixie!” Cassius stumbles shirtless out of the fort.
“Cassius!” Roque gasps. His face pales suddenly.
Cassius’s left eye is swollen shut. Lips are split. Ribs purple as grapes. His other eye is bloody. Three dislocated fingers shoot out like tree roots, and his shoulder is odd. The others stare at him with such sadness. Cassius was the Imperator’s boy—their shining knight. And now his body is a ruin, and the looks upon their faces, the pallid cast to their skin, tell me that they have never before seen someone beautiful mutilated.
I have.
He smells like piss.
He tries to play it off as some lark. “They beat the slag out of me when I challenged him. Hit me with a shovel on the side of the head. Then stood around and had themselves a circle piss. Then they tied me up in that stinkhole keep, but Pollux set me free, like a good lad, and he’s agreed to open the gate if we need it done.”
“I didn’t think you were so stupid,” I say.
“Of course he is, he wants to be one of the Sovereign’s knights,” Roque mutters. “And all they do is duel.” He shakes his long hair. Dirt crusts the leather band that holds it in a ponytail. “You should have waited for us.”
“What’s done is done,” I say. “We go ahead with the plan.”
“Fine,” Cassius snorts. “But when the time comes, Titus is mine.”
26
MUSTANG
Part of Cassius is gone. That invincible boy I first met is somehow different. The humiliation changed him. I can’t decide how, though, as I straighten his fingers and help him fix his shoulder. He falls down from the pain.
“Thank you, brother,” he says to me, and cups the side of my head to help himself up. It is the first time he says it. “I failed the test.” I don’t disagree with him. “I went in there like a plum fool. If this were anywhere else, they would have killed me.”
“Least it didn’t cost you your life,” I say.
Cassius chuckles. “Just my pride.”
“Good. Something you have in abundance,” Roque says with a smile.
“We have to get her back.” Cassius’s own grimace fades as he looks at Roque, then at me. “Quinn. We have to get her back before he takes her up to his tower.”
“We will.” We bloody will.
Cassius and I go east according to my plan, farther than we have gone before. We stay to the northern highlands, but we make sure we walk along the high crests visible to the open plains below. East and east, our long legs taking us fast and far.
“A rider to the southeast,” I say. Cassius doesn’t look.
We pass through a humid glen where a dark loch offers us the chance to catch a drink across from a family of deerling. Mud covers our legs. Bugs flit over the cold water. The earth feels good between my fingers as I bend to drink. I dunk my head and join Cassius in eating some of our aging lamb. It needs salt. My belly cramps from all the protein.
“How far east of the castle do you reckon we are?” I ask Cassius, pointing behind him.
“Maybe twenty klicks. Hard to peg it. Feels farther but my legs are just tired.” He straightens and looks where I point. “Ah. Got it.”
A girl on a dappled mustang watches us from the edge of the glen. She has a long covered bar tied to her saddle. Can’t make out her House, but I have seen her before. I remember her like it was yesterday. The girl who called me a Pixie when I fell off that pony Matteo put me on.
“I want her horse to ride back,” Cassius tells me. He can’t see out his left eye but his bravado is back, a little too forcefully. “Hey, darling!” he calls. “Shit, that hurts the ribs. Prime ride! What House are you?”
I’m worried about this.
The girl rides to within ten meters, but she has the sigils on sleeve and neck covered with two lengths of sewn cloth. Her face is streaked with three diagonal lines of blue berry juice mixed with animal fat. We don’t know if she is from Ceres. I hope not. She could be from the southern woods, from the east, from the far northeastern highlands even.
“Lo, Mars,” she says smugly, looking at the sigil on our jackets.
Cassius bows pathetically. I don’t bother.
“Well, this is swell.” I kick a stone with my shoe. “Lo … Mustang. Nice sigil. And horse.” I let her know having a horse is something rare.
She is small, delicate. Her smile is not. It mocks us. “What are you boys about in the hinterlands? Reaping grain?”
I pat my slingBlade. “We have enough back home.” I gesture south of our castle.
She suppresses a laugh at my feeble lie.
“Sure you do.”
“I will be even with you.” Cassius forces his battered face into a smile. “You are stunningly beautiful. You must be from Venus. Hit me with whatever is under that cloth on your saddle and take me back to your fortress. I’ll be your Pink if you promise not to share me and to keep me warm every night.” He takes an unsteady step forward. “And every morning.” Her mustang takes four back till he gives up trying to steal her horse.
“Well, aren’t you the charmer, handsome. And by that pitchfork in your hand, you must be a prime fighter too.” She bats her eyelashes.
Cassius puffs out his chest in agreement.
She waits for him to understand.
Then he frowns.
“Yup. Uh-oh. You see, we didn’t have any tools in our stronghold except those pertaining to our deity, soooo you must have encountered House Ceres already.” She leans forward in the saddle sardonically. “You don’t have crops. You just fought those who do, and you don’t have any better weapons, clearly, or you would be carrying them with you. So Ceres is in these parts as well. Likely in the lowlands near the woods for crops. Or near that big river everyone is talking about.”
She’s all laughing eyes and a smirking mouth in a face shaped like a heart. Hair so golden it sparkles in the sun and flows down her back in braids.
> “So you are in the woods?” she asks. “North in the highlands, probably. Oh, this is fun! How bad are your weapons? You clearly don’t have horses. What a poor House.”
“Slag,” Cassius makes a point of saying.
“You seem pretty proud of yourself.” I put my slingBlade on my shoulder.
She raises a hand and wiggles it back and forth. “Sort of. Sort of. More proud than Handsome there should be. He’s full of tells.” I shift my weight on my toes to see if she notices. She moves her horse back. “Now, now, Reaper, are you going to try and get in my saddle too?”
“Just trying to knock you out of it, Mustang.”
“Fancy a roll in the mud, do we? Well, how about I promise to let you up here with me if you give me more clues as to where your castle squats? Towers? Sprawls? I can be a kind master.”
She looks me up and down playfully. Her eyes sparkle like a fox’s might. This is still a game to her, which means her House is a civil place. I’m envious as I examine her in kind. Cassius didn’t lie; she is something to look at. But I’d rather knock her off her mustang. My feet are tired and we’re playing a dangerous game.
“What Draft number were you?” I ask, wishing I’d paid more attention.
“Higher than you, Reaper. I remember Mercury wanted you something awful, but his Drafters wouldn’t let him pick you in the first round. Something about your rage metric.”
“You were higher than me? So you’re not Mercury then, because they chose a boy instead of me, and you’re not a Jupiter, because they took a gorydamn monstrous kid.” I try to remember who else was chosen before me, but I can’t, so I smile. “Maybe you shouldn’t be so vain. Then I wouldn’t know what Draft you were.”
I notice the knife under her black tunic, but I still can’t remember her from the Draft. Wasn’t paying attention. Cassius should have remembered her the way he looks at girls, but maybe he can only think of Quinn and her missing ear.