by Pierce Brown
I have him.
“I give my blessing freely. What you do, do in my honor.” He leans toward me. “Rise, goldenborn. Rise, ironmade.” Augustus touches his finger to the blood and then presses the mark beneath his own eye. “Rise, Man of Mars, and take with you my wrath.”
I rise to whispers. This is no simple squabble now between boys. It is the battle of houses. Champion against champion.
“Hic sunt leones,” he says, tilting his head—part challenge, part benediction. What a vain swine of a man. He knows my desperation to stay in his good graces. He knows he stands playing with matches on a powder keg. Yet his eyes glitter lustfully, hungering for blood and the promise of power as I hunger for air.
“Hic sunt leones,” I echo.
I pace back to the center of the circle, nodding to Tactus and Victra. They touch the handles of their razors, as do the other aides. Our pack mentality is keen. “Prime luck,” Tactus says.
High above, ships swim quietly through the long-night. Trees sway in the breeze. Cities sparkle in the distance. Earth hovers like a swollen moon as I unravel my razor from my forearm.
Mustang comes to me as Cassius’s mother kisses his forehead.
“So you’re a pawn now?” she asks quickly.
“And you’re a trophy?”
She flinches before her lips curl into a slight sneer. “You say that to me? I don’t even recognize you.”
“Nor I you, Virginia. Serving the Sovereign now?”
But I do recognize her, despite the terrible gulf that now makes her feel more stranger than friend. The tightness in my chest is of her making. So too is the awkward tension in my hands as they yearn to touch her, yearn to hold her and tell her this is all a false guise. I’m not a pawn to her father. I’m more than that. All this is for good. Just not their good.
“‘Virginia.’” She cocks her head at me, smiling sadly as she spares a glance for the two thousand waiting Peerless. “You know, I’ve wondered over these last years … I suppose I should have wondered from the start, but you cut such a rare character—it was distracting. But I’ll ask now.” Her bright eyes cut through me, searching, judging. “Are you insane?”
I look over at Cassius. “Are you?”
“Jealousy? That’s ripe.” She leans in with a harsh whisper. “Shame you don’t respect me enough to suppose that I have my own plan. You think I’m here because my aching loins thrust me into Bellona arms. Please. I’m no bitch in heat. I protect my family by any means necessary. Who do you protect but yourself?”
“You betray your family by being with him.” I have no false answer that may parallel the truth. I must suffer being a villain in her eyes. Yet I can’t meet them. “Cassius is a wicked man.”
“Grow up, Darrow.” She looks like she’s going to say something deeper, but she just shakes her head and, turning, says, “He’s going to kill you. I’ll try to convince Octavia to end it early.” Her words fail her at first. “I wish you hadn’t come to this moon.”
She leaves me, giving Cassius a squeeze on the hand before joining the Sovereign’s entourage on the raised dais.
“Alone at last, my old friend,” Cassius says slashing me with a smile.
Once we were like brothers. We shared food and raced that first day at the Institute. Stormed House Minerva together. How he laughed when I stole their cook and Sevro their standard. We galloped over the plains that night underneath the light of twin moons. I remember the woe in his eyes when they captured Quinn. When my kin, Titus, beat him and pissed on him. How I felt the tears welling then, when we were like brothers, before it all fell apart.
The cinnamon-and-orange-flavored snow still falls. It settles in his curly hair. On his broad shoulders. It was in the snow that he last fought me. Buried rusty steel into my lower gut and left me dying in my own filth. I have not forgotten how he twisted that blade to make sure the wound did not close.
His blade is ebony now.
It curls in front of him, over a meter of narrow sword when solid. More than two meters of lashing razor whip when loosed with the toggle on the handle, which sends a chemical impulse through the blade’s molecular structure. Golden marks line the blade, telling the lineage of his family. Their conquests. The Triumphs thrown in their honor. Old, arrogant, powerful. My blade is naked, absent of embellishment.
“So, I’ve taken what’s yours,” he says, walking closer and nodding to Mustang.
I laugh, “She was never mine. And she’s certainly not yours.”
The White arrives, hustling forward in his robes. Head bald. Back crooked.
“But I’ve had her in ways you haven’t.” His voice lowers so only we might hear, “I wonder, do you lie alone at night, thinking of the pleasures I give her? Does it vex you that I know how she kisses? How she sighs when you touch her neck just so?”
I don’t answer.
“That she moans my name instead of yours?” He doesn’t laugh. He may loathe what he says, but he’d say anything to hurt me. In most ways, he’s not a bad man. He’s just my bad man. “In fact, she moaned as I went inside her this morning.”
“What would Julian say if he could see you now?” I ask.
“He’d echo mother and beg me to kill you.”
“Or would he weep at the devil you’ve become?”
He uncoils his razor and ignites his aegis. My own aegis hums as I activate it—an ion-blue transparent energy shield that bows slightly outward from my left glove, one foot long by two feet wide. Snow melts when I sweep the aegis near the ground. A corona of haze forms around the blue light.
“We’re all devils.” His sudden laugh floats up like a silk ribbon carried away with the breeze. “This was always your problem, Darrow. You have an inflated view of yourself. You think you have some sort of morality tucked away. You think you are better than us, when really you are less. Forever playing games you cannot master against people you cannot match.”
“I matched Julian well enough.”
“Bastard.” His face contorts, and he lashes forward, bellowing wordlessly, knocking me back before the White can give the benediction. They shout for us to stop, but as the razors scream, the shouts fade away and all eyes widen as man-killing metal wails through slow-falling snow. He uses the tenets of kravat. Four seconds of precise, kinetic violence, retreat. Assess. Engage.
We are the only the only sound in this strange place. The odd, high-pitched keen of an arching whip. The thrum of the solid blade. The crack as aegises on left arms spark white when blades slash into them. The crunch of snow and the creaking of leather.
Despite his anger, Cassius is perfect in his form. His feet shuffle, never crossing; his hips swivel as he lunges in the compact salvos. His breath comes measured, paced. He lashes his whip forward in a sweep, then hardens the blade and swings it up, aiming for my groin. His movements flicker fast. Trained. Honed by masters and Swords of the Society. It’s easy to see why he has devastated his opponents since childhood, why he gutted me at the Institute. Because his enemies fight like him, but slower. I don’t fight like them. I learned that lesson.
Now he will learn his.
“You’ve been practicing. You can match six moves a set,” he says, drawing back. He darts forward, feinting high and sweeping low to claim my ankles. “But you’re still a novice.” He sends a flurry of seven blows at me, almost skewering me through the right shoulder. I recognize the engagement pattern, but am still a fraction off his speed. I barely escape, throwing myself out of the way of a thrust at the last moment. Two more sets of seven come in quick succession. I barely escape the last, falling to a knee, panting, looking around at the gathered guests.
“Do you hear that?” he asks. I hear nothing but the wind and the throbbing of my heart. “That is the sound of dying alone. No one to weep. No one to care.”
“Arcos will care,” I whisper.
He stiffens. “What did you say?”
“Lorn au Arcos will care if his last student dies,” I say, dropping the false
ly ragged breath, straightening proudly. Cassius stares at me as if he’s seen a ghost. He hesitates. So too do those who hear what I say. “While you ate, I trained. While you drank, I trained. While you sought pleasure, I trained from the weeks after the Institute to the days before the Academy.”
“Lorn au Arcos doesn’t accept students,” Cassius hisses. “Not for thirty years.”
“He made an exception.”
“Liar.”
“Oh?” I laugh. “Did you think I came here to be killed? Did you think yourself entitled to my life? No, Cassius. I came here to cut you down before your parents.”
He steps backward, eyes dancing to his father, to Karnus. I cock my head at him. “Come now, brother. Don’t you want to see how well I can really fight?”
He pauses and I charge him like some night carnivore, shoulders hunched with primeval economy, quiet as the dark itself.
Lorn’s words come back to me. “A fool pulls the leaves. A brute chops the trunk. A sage digs the roots.” And so I peel apart his legs, sending set after set into him. Not for the four seconds the Golds teach. But for seven. Then six, alternating, then breaking the pattern. Twelve moves a set.
His defense is precise. And if I fought as he taught me to fight, I would die to him. But I was taught to move by my uncle, and to kill by a legend. I rage and spin, leaving my feet and striking down, beating him as a great hurricane slapping and smashing and hammering him back. And when he attacks, I bow to the side until such time that I can break him, as Lorn au Arcos trained me to do. Move in a circle. Never retreat backward. No attack opens when a man allows himself to be pushed backward. Use their force to create new angles. Flow around him. The Willow Way. Pretty, fluid, like a spring song in defense, then lashing and horrible as the branches of a willow in deep winter as glacial winds scream down from the mountains.
Inside me, Red meets Gold.
My blade flashes between whip and curved slingBlade. It crashes into his sword, and the aegis on his left side crackles from the force of my blows. Cassius falters. He’s a prizefighter getting pummeled by a back-alley brawler.
I’m laughing. Laughing madly and the crowd around is cheering in shock, some screaming when I hit Cassius’s aegis so hard it overloads. Sparks hiss from the unit on his arm. I rip open a wound there, one on his elbow, his kneecap, his ankle. I flick the blade up and slash his face. I stop and move backward fluidly, posing with whip as it slithers into a curved slingBlade. Those who watch this will never forget.
Women are screaming for Cassius. Lovers he has had in his youth, who now watch the man they grew with, the man who bedded them, left them with false promises, and made them think they’d just lost the strongest of a generation. They watch as another man turns him into a throbbing mess of blood.
I embarrass him. But it’s all for a purpose. All to make that simmering hatred between Bellona and Augustus boil over into war.
I pace about the circle like a caged lion till I come in front of Imperator Bellona.
“Your son is going to die,” I say savagely, a foot away from his face.
He’s thick. Square-jawed, kindly, with a pointed beard. His eyes shimmer with the promise of tears. He says nothing. He is a noble man, and he will follow the honorable path, even if it means watching his favorite son die.
Even in the midst of my rage, I feel the shame. Feel the horror of being the man who comes from the dark to savage a family. “Will you just watch?” I shout at the Bellona. Imperator Bellona’s wife is not so noble. She seethes, glancing at the Sovereign accusatorily. I see what she wants.
I go back at Cassius. They will have to watch and do nothing, as I watched Eo.
“Lady Bellona, are you noble enough to watch your Cassius die? Watch as he disappears from the world?” Her lips curl. She whispers to Karnus, to Cagney. “Is that the strength of House Bellona? Do you watch like sheep as the wolf comes amongst the fold?”
I make a grand show of it for the hot-blooded ones in the Bellona fold. Cassius tries to fight. He stumbles as I cut his kneecap, falling into the snow before scrambling desperately to his feet. His blood makes a shadow about his feet. This is how slowly he killed Titus. He’s panicked, glancing at his family, knowing it will be the last time he sees them. They have no Vale. This life is their heaven. Despite everything, it is a sad sight and I pity him.
Cagney, urged on by Lady Bellona, has already taken a step forward, her sharp, pretty face riven with rage. I just need to hurt her strong cousin Cassius a little more. But Imperator Bellona jerks her back with a stern hand. He glares darkly at Augustus, then peers around the assembly.
“No Bellona shall interfere. On my honor.”
Yet his wife does not agree. She aims one more pointed glance at the Sovereign, and the Sovereign raises a hand. “Hold!” she calls. “Hold, Andromedus!”
I’m actually stunned by the interruption.
All look to the Sovereign’s dais. Cassius pants for breath. She can’t be so stupid. Can she? The interruption confirms the rumors for me, for everyone. The Sovereign reveals her favoritism. She’s chosen the Bellona family. They will supplant the Augustuses on Mars. Cassius would have been important to that plan. Now, because of her miscalculation, he’s about to die and her plan is going to be squabbed. Still, I had no idea she’d do as she’s about to do. It is so stupid. So shortsighted. Her pride has made her a fool.
“There has been an addendum to the rules. Since the White was unable to give the customary benediction, the contest will be to death or yielding,” she declares, glancing at Cassius’s mother. “Those are the limits to the duel. So many of our prized children are lost at our schools. No need to waste these two prime men on account of schoolyard pranks.”
“My Sovereign,” Augustus calls, greedy for his bloody prize, “the law is clear. Once a contest is declared, the rules may not be altered by man or woman.”
“You cite laws. That’s a pleasant irony, coming from you, Nero.”
There are snickers from the crowd, which tell me rumors of his involvement with rigging the Institute for the Jackal are very much in fashion.
“My Sovereign, we stand with Augustus in this matter,” booms a voice. Daxo au Telemanus steps forward. Pax’s elder brother, tall as my friend was, but less beastly. More a pine tree than a great boulder of a man. Like his father, Kavax, his head his bald, but engraved with Golden angels. A mischievous sparkle dances in sleepy eyes nestled under great swirling eyebrows.
“Hardly a surprise,” snarls Cassius’s mother.
“Perfidy!” Kavax, Daxo’s father, roars. He alternates stroking his forked red beard and the large pet fox he cradles in his left arm. “This reeks of perfidy and favoritism. My temper is slow. But I find myself offended. Offended!”
“Careful, Kavax,” Octavia says icily, “some things cannot be unsaid.”
“Why else would he say them?” Daxo asks, glancing at the families from the Gas Giants, where he knows he will find allies in this debate. “But I believe he would counsel you now, my Sovereign: even your words cannot change law. Your father discovered this by your own hand, no?”
The Sovereign’s Furies step forward menacingly. For her part, the Sovereign allows herself only the strictest of smiles. “But, young Telemanus, you fail to remember, my word is law.”
This is something you do not do. A Gold may rule other Golds. But declare your rule at your own peril. The Sovereign has been so long on the Morning Throne that she has forgotten this. Her words are not law. They now become a challenge.
One I accept with open arms.
She knows the words a mistake when she meets my eyes and we both realize in that moment there is one move I can make that she cannot counter.
“You will not steal what is mine,” I growl.
I wheel on Cassius. He brings up his blade. He never let me yield in the mud of the Institute. He knows I will not let him yield now. His face goes pale as I charge. He’s thinking about all he’s about to lose. How very precious his life is
. A Gold to the end. Others shout at me to stop, screaming that it is unfair.
This is the definition of fairness.
They would have let me die.
He lunges for my throat. It’s a feint. He whips his razor down to wrap around my leg. He expects me to recoil. I charge straight at him, inside the arch of his swing, jump over his head in the low gravity, then swing my whip backward without looking. My whip coils around his extended right arm. I press the button that makes the razor contract, and with the sound of a frozen tree branch cracking in winter, I claim the sword arm of Cassius au Bellona.
It’s equal parts silence and screams. I do not turn, not for a long moment. When I do, I find Cassius still standing, teetering, not long for this world. No one else moves as Cassius falls. His father looks at the ground, silent.
“I said stop!” the Sovereign shouts. Two Furies jump from the dais, landing with their blades dancing into hand.
“Finish it,” Augustus shouts.
I stalk toward Cassius. He spits at me, lips trembling. Contemptuous even now. I raise my blade. Then a hand settles around my wrist. Not an iron grip. A soft one. Warm against my skin. Delicate.
“You’ve won, Darrow,” Mustang says quietly, coming around in front of me so her eyes meet mine. The Furies pause outside the circle. “Don’t lose yourself to this.”
I could not imagine Eo watching me from the Vale. In this hell, I’ve lost my faith. Mustang brings it sweeping back. Eo may watch me, or she may not. Only one thing is certain. Mustang watches me now, and what I see in her eyes is enough to let my hand fall to my side. It’s then she smiles, as if seeing me again for the first time in years.