“You come to me at the head of a storm,” my friend says, gray beard blowing sideways in the wind as he looks at the waves far beneath. “Did you know there are boys here on this ocean world who take skiffs into gales worse than this? Lads from the dregs of the Grays, Reds, even Browns. Their bravery is a mad, crazed sort.” He points out from the balcony with a heavy finger to the roiling black water, where waves crest ten meters high. “They call them stormsons.”
The gravity here is maddening. Everything floats. At 0.136 of Earth’s gravity, every step I take must be measured, controlled, else I’ll burst upward fifteen feet and have to wait to flutter back down. A fight here would be like a ballet underwater. I wear gravBoots just to move comfortably.
The old man watches the ocean world move around his island. He is as he always told me to be—a stone amid the waves; wet, yet unimpressed by all that swirls about him. Saltwater spray drips from his beard. Burnished gold eyes blink against the storm’s bitter wind.
“When you are in the salt, you feel like every gale is the world ender. Every wave the greatest that has been. These boys ride the gales in rapture at their own glory. But every now and then, a true storm rises. It shatters their masts and rips the hair from their heads. They do not last long till the sea swallows them whole. But their mothers have wept their deaths long before, as I wept for yours the first day we met.”
He stares at me intensely, mouth pinched behind his thick beard.
“I never told you, but I was not raised in a palace or in a city like many of the Peerless you know. My father thought there to be two evils in the world. Technology and culture. He was a hard man. A killer, like the rest of them. But his hardness was found not in what he could do, but in what he wouldn’t do, in his restraint. In the pleasures he denied himself, and his sons. He lived to a hundred and sixty-three without the help of cell rejuvenation. Somehow he lived through eight Iron Rains. But still he never valued life, because he took it too often. He was not a man to be happy.”
I watch the former Rage Knight, Lorn au Arcos, lean over the balcony of his castle. It is a limestone fortress set amid a sea ninety kilometers deep. Modern lines shape the place. It is not medieval, but a meld of past and present—glass and steel making hard angles with the stone island—so like the man I respect above all other Golds of his generation.
Like him, this castle is a harsh place when the storms come. But when the storms fade, sunshine will bathe this place, shining through her glass walls, glinting off her steel supports. Children will run its ten-kilometer length, through its gardens, along its walls, down to the harbor. Wind will tickle their hair, and all that Lorn will hear from his library is the crying of gulls, the crash of the sea, and the laughter of his grandchildren and their mothers, whom he guards in place of his dead sons. The only one missing is little Lysander.
If all Golds were like him, Reds would still toil beneath the Earth, but he would have them know their purpose. It doesn’t make him good, but it makes him true.
He’s thick and broad and shorter than I. He lets his empty whiskey tumbler go and permits the wind to swoop it sideways. It falls and the sea swallows it whole. “They say you can hear the dead stormsons whooping in the wind,” he mutters. “I say it’s the crying of their mothers.”
“Storms of court have a way of drawing people back in,” I say.
He laughs a derisive laugh, one that scorns the idea that I would know anything about the storms of court, anything about the winds that blow.
I came to him in secret, flying with a single ship, my five-kilometer destroyer Pax . I told my master he would not help us. But I held on to hope he would want to help me. Yet now that I see Lorn au Arcos again in the knotted flesh, I’m reminded of the nature of the man, and I worry. He knows my captains and lieutenants are listening through the com unit in my ear. I paid him respects and showed it to him so that he would not assume our conversation to be a private one.
“After more than a century of living, my body does not yet betray me.” One would think him to be in his midsixties, at first glance. Only his scars truly age him. The one on his neck, like a smile, was given to him four decades ago by a Stained in the Moon Kings’ Rebellion, when the Governors of Jupiter’s moons thought to make their own kingdoms after Octavia deposed her father as Sovereign. The one that claims part of his nose came from the Ash Lord, when they dueled as youths. “You’ve heard the expression ‘The duty of the son is the glory of the father’?”
“I have said it myself.”
He grunts. “I have lived it. I have lost many for my own glory. I have set my ship into the storm on purpose. Each time with women and children in tow.” He lets the waves speak for a moment. They crash on the rocks and then pull backward, slurping as they go, drawing things to the sea they call Discordia.
“It is not right to live so long, I think. My great-granddaughter was born last night. I still have the smell of blood on my fingers.” He holds them out—like tree roots, crooked and calloused from the holding of weapons. They tremble slightly. “These took her from the darkness to the light, from warmth to the cold, and cut the cord themselves. It would be a fine world if that was the last flesh they cut.”
He relaxes his hands and sets them on the cold stone. I wonder what Mustang would say to this man. Seeing them face-to-face would be like watching fire trying to catch on stone. She balked at my plan in public, but then again, that was all our design. Plans within plans within plans.
“To think about what hands feel,” Lorn mutters. “These have felt the lifeblood of my sons as their hearts pumped it out of their bodies. They’ve felt the cold of a razor’s hilt as they stole the dreams of youth. They’ve worn the love of a girl and a woman and then felt those heartbeats fade to silence. All for my glory. All because I chose to ride the sea. All because I do not die easily as most.” He frowns. “Hands, I think, were not meant to feel so much.”
“Mine have felt more than I’d wish,” I say. I feel the snap go through them that I felt at Eo’s hanging. The texture of her hair. I remember the warmth of Pax’s blood. The chill of Lea’s pale face in the cold morning after Antonia butchered her. The grainy red smear of haemanthus blossoms. Mustang’s bare hip as we lay by the fire.
“You are young still. When you’re white-haired, you’ll have felt even more.”
“Some men don’t grow old.” No Helldiver does.
“No. Some don’t.” He pokes Augustus’s lion’s badge on my dark uniform. “And lions do not live so long as griffins. We can fly away from things, you see.” He brandishes his own family ring and flaps his arms foolishly, drawing a smile from me. He wears it along with his House Mars ring. “You were a pegasus once, were you not?”
“It was the symbol … is the symbol of Andromedus.” My false Gold family. But the symbol reminds me of Eo. She pointed out the Andromeda Galaxy to me before she died. It means so much and so little all at once.
“There’s honor in staying what you were,” he says.
“Sometimes we have to change. Not all of us are born rich as you.”
“Let us go find Icarus in the forest.” He mentioned him often on Mars, but I’ve never seen Lorn’s favorite pet. “Carolina conspired with Vincent to make him a new toy. I think you’ll appreciate it.”
“Where are your children? I’d love to see them again.”
“East wing till you leave.”
“I’m that dangerous?”
He does not answer.
I follow my friend in off the balcony just as one of Europa’s clouds spits blue lightning across the dark sky. Her oceans buck and heave as great swells of water slither and seep along the white walls, as if the world of oceans conspired to swallow the man-made island. Despite all this, the castle and the raging storm still seem so small when I see how Jupiter consumes the night sky behind the clouds—a textured gas giant staring down at us like the head of some great marble god.
As we walk through the stone villa, Lorn happily greets every servant we pass. He sees people, not Colors. Most have been with him for years. I should have studied with him. But then I would have ended up here, a better man, but unable to change anything so many months’ journey from the Core.
Children’s toys litter the halls. His family is here—dozens of loved ones he brought together after he left public life. Most live scattered in the southern archipelagoes in the warmer waters near the equator. Hurricanes forced them north this month to take refuge with Grandfather Lorn. Seems the storm followed them.
He pushes open a grand glass gate, leading me into the center of his citadel. Here, he keeps himself a forest, one several acres large and open to the air. The walls stretch around the forest, closing it off from the vicious waves. Lorn’s standards whip high in the air—a roaring purple griffin on a field of snow white. Rain falls on the trees, hissing into their needles until he activates a pulseBubble. Then the rain sizzles on its roof and folds up in thick clouds of vapor. He walks ahead of me, and I linger, taking small black spikes no longer than my fingernails from a hidden pouch in my sleeve. I scatter them through the moss just outside the door.
“You came to me in a stolen vessel of war asking for my ships and my men. Why?” Lorn asks, looking back curiously. I speed up my gait and drop a few more spikes when he turns again. I’m waiting for him to mention Lysander.
“Because half of Mars is still held by forces loyal to the Bellona and the Sovereign. To free Mars from them, we need your ships and your men. Once we have them, the Moon Lords and the ArchGovernors of the Rim will come to our aid against the Core.”
“So you need me to aid you in your treason?”
“Is it treason for a dog to bite its master’s hand when the master tries to kill it?” I ask.
“Terrible metaphor.” He stops, peers around the forest, searching. “Ah.” We set off again.
“The point is: I need your help.”
He spits on the mossy ground and motions me to follow him up a hillside. My boots crack a water-sodden log. “Why should I care about you?”
“Because you trained me.”
“I also trained Aja au Grimmus.”
“For some reason, I think you like me more than her.”
“And why’s that?”
“I have a sense of humor.”
He laughs. “Aja can be funny.”
“Surely you’re joking.”
“You meet a man, you know him. You meet a woman, she knows you.” He laughs to himself about some memory. “Might be easier thinking her some terror in the night. But she’s flesh and blood. She has friends. She has family. And she thinks you a threat to them.”
“Yet she’s the one who killed my friend.”
“Yes. I heard. You had the child. Clever tactic.” He squints back at the razor curled around my arm. “Does everyone wear their razor like a fool now?”
“It’s the fashion.”
“It’s meant to be looped on the hip. You’ll cut your arm off by accident.” He sighs. “Your generation … So arrogant. Changing things for no reason. I wonder, arrogant boy, did you think that if you rode in here with your stolen ship that I, a man of a century, would follow you to battle? That I would put in danger all my servants, all my family, all I love, for you? Someone who rejected me when I asked him to join my house?”
I ignore his bitterness. “You left the Society for a reason, Lorn. Can you remember why?”
“To avoid loud fools.”
“I think you left because you thought the Society sick. Because it was not worth sacrificing for anymore.”
“Stop barking at me, puppy.”
“So I’m right.”
“No. You’re not right.” He wheels angrily. “I left the Society not because it is sick, but because it is dead. The Society was created to instill order. Men were made to sacrifice so that humanity endured. They were given Colors, lives limited and ordered so that we could destroy the timeless cycle of our race—prosperity to greed to war. Gold was meant to shepherd the other Colors, not devour them. Now we are trapped again in that cycle, the very thing we endeavored to avoid. So the Society? The beautiful sum of all human enterprise? It’s been dead and rotting for hundreds of years, and those who fight over it are but vultures and maggots.”
“So it wasn’t Brutus’s death.” I speak of his youngest son, who was married to Octavia au Lune’s deceased daughter.
“That was an accident.”
“A convenient accident,” I say. “There are rumors that Octavia’s daughter was organizing a coup against her mother.”
“I don’t entertain rumors,” he says darkly.
“If you help me, I can give you your grandson back.”
“Lysander has been raised so long with poison in his ear that now it’s in his blood. He is not my kin.”
“You’re not that cold. Lorn, I’ve met the boy. He’s more like you than her. He isn’t wicked. Fight for him.”
Lorn stares quietly at the rain falling against the pulseShield.
“You fight a tyrant to replace her with a tyrant,” he says wearily. “This is the same game I have seen a hundred times. Do you even know who you serve?”
“I have a feeling you’re about to tell me.”
“I’ll not stop being your teacher just because you’ve stopped listening. Sit. I don’t want Icarus to be bothered by this damn story.” He sits on a large stone and instructs me to take a place opposite him. I do. He hunches forward and plays with the thick House Mars ring on his finger.
“House Augustus was always strong, I’m sure you know that. Even when Mars was little more than a mine for helium-3. They bribed or killed their way into owning most of the governmental contracts. And as their pockets swelled, so did their influence. They became, along with several other families—including the Bellona and my own—the lords of Mars. There was one family of greater power, however, named Cylus. They controlled the ArchGovernorship and were favored by the Senate and the sitting Sovereign.
“When your master, then simply called Nero, was seven, his father found himself in dispute with Julius au Bellona, Cassius’s grandfather. Nero’s father attempted to have the Browns who served the Bellona poison the entire family at supper. The plan failed. A housewar began.
“Nero’s father summoned his bannermen and led them against the Bellona and the ArchGovernor Cylus, who had declared his forces for Julius au Bellona. The sitting Sovereign did not intervene, and instead allowed the two families to go to war. Eventually, Nero’s father found himself besieged in Agea when his fleet was destroyed and captured around Phobos.
“Cylus put House Augustus to death, sparing only young Nero from punishment. He was allowed to live so that an aged family that had partaken in the Conquering did not disappear from history. It is said that ArchGovernor Cylus even gave young Nero grapes to quench his thirst because there was no water as the city burned around them. After that, he raised him in his own court.
“Twenty years later, Nero, who had always been considered an honorable and honest man, much unlike his wicked father, asked for Iona au Bellona’s hand in marriage. She was the youngest and favorite daughter of old Julius.”
He stares up at water droplets falling from the needles of overhanging evergreens. “I knew her well. My sons were her playmates. I knew Nero too. I liked him, even if he was a little cold as a child.
“With hopes of mending the lingering wounds of past generations and making Mars strong and unified, ArchGovernor Cylus agreed. Bellona married Augustus.
“It was a beautiful wedding. I attended, representing the Sovereign as the Rage Knight. And I had a wonderful time of it. I’d never seen Iona so happy as she was in that stern young man’s arms. But that night, when the Bellona family returned to their estate with the rest of their family, a package arrived. Inside, old Julius found his daughter’s head. Grapes stuffed in Iona’s mouth along with two wedding rings.
“He summoned his daughters and sons, including Cassius’s father, and flew to the Citadel to ask for justice from ArchGovernor Cylus, as he had twenty years prior when the Augustuses first rose up.
“But instead of his old friend, he found young Nero on the ArchGovernor’s throne, backed by Praetorians and two Olympic Knights. I was among them, having been told that Cylus was a threat to the Society by my Sovereign. I did as I was commanded. The House of Cylus was wiped out and stricken from record.
“I found out later, Nero contrived an agreement with the daughter of the sitting Sovereign. You know her as Octavia au Lune. Younger then, she convinced her father to give Nero the throne of Mars and his revenge; in return, she earned Nero’s support when she led the faction that overthrew and killed her father five years later. That is the man you started a war for.”
“I didn’t know this,” I say quietly.
“History is written by the victors.”
Lorn looks at me and the lines on his face seem to deepen. “I don’t want to go to war, Darrow. In my time, I have seen a moon burn, because one man would not bow. I have led a million warriors shot from warships to invade a planet. You cannot begin to understand the horror of it. You think only of how beautiful it will be. But they are men. They are women. They have families. And they die by the thousands. And you will be helpless to protect even the best of your friends.
“Ah!” He points uphill. “There’s Icarus.”
Rain drips from the pines as we push through the lower tree boughs to find Icarus, Lorn’s pet griffin, sleeping in a great bed of moss on a high promontory inside the small forest. Icarus’s paws curl into his body. His wings curve around him as he sleeps—iridescent and glittering with droplets of water. His great eagle’s head is nearly larger than I, one of his eyes half the size of my skull. The Carvers made him well.
“He looks peaceful when he sleeps,” Lorn says.
“He’s bigger than any I’ve seen,” I say, unable to conceal the awe in my voice.
“You’ve not been to the pole of Mars or Earth, then.”
“No. Where did you buy him?”
“Martian Carvers made him for my family. Damn that fashionable Zanzibar twit. Icarus is of the same genus as the beasts in the high aeries in Mars’s north pole. The ones they use to terrify Obsidians into believing magic is real.” He strokes the sleeping giant. “Are you still in love with the ArchGovernor’s daughter?” He glances back at me hopefully. “Is that why you do this? I heard about her and the Bellona.”
“It isn’t about what happened between her and Cassius.”
“No?” He sighs. “I could have understood that, at least. You were sloppy in that, you should know. The Irenicus Folly would have done him in three moves.”
“I wasn’t sloppy. I was making a show.”
“Sloppy. Violets are showmen. Did I train you to be a showman?”
I move past him to pet Icarus. “So you do care about me.”
He does not answer me for a spell, and it’s then that I know the moment I’ve dreaded most is nearly upon us. “In another life, you would have been one of my sons, Darrow. I would have found you earlier, before whatever happened that filled you with this rage. I would not have raised you to be a great man. There is no peace for great men. I would have had you be a decent one. I would have given you the quiet strength to grow old with the woman you love. Now all I can give you is a chance. Icarus ,” he booms.
His griffin stirs by his side, its amber eye showing me my reflection. The ground shudders as the creature moves, uprooting a tree as easily as I’d pull a hair.
I move back from the beast, unsure of Lorn’s intentions.
“What is going on?” I ask Lorn.
“Look to your ship.” He points upward in the night. Through a break in the clouds, we can see my long ship glittering in orbit. She’s no longer alone. Ten torchShips come for her now, slipping around the cover of Europa’s equator to capture the Pax .
“A Praetorian death squad waits for you inside my home, Darrow. Aja au Grimmus leads them. They will take you, chain you, and bring you before the Sovereign.”
“You betrayed me?” I ask.
“No. They arrived days ago. They threatened. What could I do? Kellan au Bellona leads their fleet. It will destroy or capture your ship. I can’t stop that. But I do not want you to die. So Icarus will take you to an island where I have hidden a ship for you. Use it to escape.”
“Will they hurt your family if I escape?”
“They may try,” he growls. “That is the consequence of your decision and mine.”
He stands with his back to the sea.
“I want to fade in peace. So please, leave and never return, Darrow.”
He gestures to Icarus and I see a thin saddle upon the beast—the new toy of which he spoke. But I do not need to flee. I shake my head for what is about to happen.
“I’m sorry, my friend. But I cannot allow that.”
“Allow?” he asks, turning.
“You will join us in this war.” My razor uncoils. “Whether you like it or not.” I speak into my com, telling the Howlers to prepare to rise and the Titans to bring the ships around.
The blood drains from his face and he looks at the beast emblazoned upon my tunic. “A lion after all.”