Golden Son (18 page)

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 is 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 of 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 commands.

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.

“There you are.”

“Kill him!”
screams Cassius’s mother. “Kill him now!”

“No!” roars Imperator Bellona. Too late.

Mustang’s eyes widen.

I turn in time to see the circle dissolve, crumbling inward as though it were made of sand. Not altogether, but tentatively. One Bellona sprints at me in silence, low, deadly. Another follows. Then Tactus comes from the Augustus group. Then another lancer. I hear my friend’s war howl. A second echoes. There’s more than just one Gold present who was in my army.

Cagney au Bellona is first to me. My stolen blade rasps toward my neck. I duck, but I would have lost my head had Mustang not thrown up her own blade to deflect the slash. Sparks sting my face, and Tactus takes Cagney from the side, cutting her clean in half.

Screams.

The Bleeding Place collapses entirely. Golds of Bellona and Augustus sprint to protect their fellows. Others flee. Karnus slashes at Tactus—too much for my friend. I rush to his aid, saving him till Victra and others come between Karnus and us. Mustang is lost in the fray. I search frantically for her. A blade flashes at my head.

Shouts boom as the Sovereign calls for peace. But it is beyond her. A woman screams at Cagney’s

ruined body. Dozens of men and women, all with blades, slash into one another. Tactus tosses me the razor Cagney stole. Then he takes a blade through the shoulder defending me again. I spin to my friend’s aid and hack the arm off the Bellona man as he pulls his blade out of Tactus. I jerk my friend toward me. Slashing a path clear. A blade scratches my forearm. I glimpse Mustang in the chaos, covering Cassius’s wounded body. I don’t know if the Bellona will kill her. They let her sit at the table. Still, I don’t know. I rush toward her, throwing my weight into the bodies between us. Tactus helps.

I smash into a woman. Antonia. Her eyes light up as she brings a knife up to my stomach, but Victra, her sister, punches her in the face and Tactus starts kicking her in the head as she falls. Victra offers me a laughing smile until Karnus jerks her down by her hair. He’s fought off as Leto enters the fray, turning back the tide with the precise thrusts of his rainbow razor. The Telemanuses join him, father and son decimating the Golds who come before them with razors half the size of my body.

“Tactus, on me!” I shout.

Tactus is bleeding, but he’s up and howling madly like he’s still fighting beside Sevro. Together, we jump high in this easy gravity. He knows I go for Mustang. But the Bellona are too thick. Razors too deadly.

“Mustang!” I shout, fending two Bellonas off. Slash away one’s face and punch another in the throat with my aegis. Another joins them. And another, till there’s a thick Bellona bullwark blocking my path.

“Protect the ArchGovernor!” Mustang shouts at me, voice more composed than my own, making

me feel an idiot obsessed with chivalry. Of course she does not need me to save her. “Protect my father!” And though I can’t see her among the throng, I obey.

I let Tactus jerk me away by the collar toward our retreating line, which is being assailed from the side. Someone else roars for us to protect Augustus. Others scream to defend Imperator Bellona and Cassius. Many family lords have been carried away by armed cadres of family members, who back

out of the chaos with their blades at the ready. They flee the spire, using the lifts to take them from the place, as gravBoots were forbidden. It’s nearly deserted. The Sovereign’s Praetorians—purple-and-black-clad Obsidians and Golds—cluster around and fly her from the ruined gala. Razors and pulseBlades fill calloused hands. Grays come led by Golds in Praetorian purple to disperse us. They wear riot gear and their scorchers shoot painballs and scatterwaves at the battling families, scattering the Golds like summer flies.

“AUGUSTUS!” huge Karnus screams as he rushes from the Bellona ranks through the

scatterwaves like a madman. He knocks someone down with his shoulder, shatters a lancer ’s face with his aegis, and charges headlong at Augustus, hoping to kill his family’s rival in one fell swoop.

“AUGUSTUS!”

Leto, our best swordsman and Augustus’s ward, intercepts him in front of the ArchGovernor.

“Hic sunt leones!”
he calls to the sky.

Leto moves like the sea, fluid and terrible in his grace. He crashes Karnus back and is about to open him along the belly when suddenly he falters. Freezes mid-swing. Karnus stumbles back, then straightens, perhaps confused that he is still alive. He cocks his head at Leto, who reaches for his thigh, as though stung.

Leto sinks slowly to a knee, arms sluggish. His long hair tumbles over his face, then he seems to freeze in place, suddenly motionless in the center of the chaos. Sad eyes glow with the engine plume of a passing ship as it coasts peacefully into the horizon. He is beautiful in that moment before Karnus chops off his head.

“Leto!”
Augustus roars.

His eyes widen and he pushes against the Telemanus men, who bear him away. I glimpse the Jackal

tucking his silver stylus into his sleeve, the one he spun on his fingers as he proposed our secret alliance.

We lock eyes.

He grins toothily.

And I know I’ve made a deal with the devil.

13

MAD DOGS

We flee the top of the spire. I had to leave Mustang behind. She knows what she is doing. Somehow I had managed to forget that. She always knows what she’s bloody doing.

“They won’t hurt her,” Augustus says to me, and I believe it’s the first time I’ve seen emotion on his face. No. The second time. When he screamed for Leto, it was as if he’d lost a son. He looks that way now, face slack and older by twenty years. He lost his eldest son. He lost his second wife, the mother of his children. Now he loses the man he adopted to replace that son, and he fears for the woman who reminds him of that wife.

If they do hurt her, it’s on me.

I’ve set things in motion. For once, it couldn’t have gone better. Blood trickles down my hands, sheeting between the fingers, pooling around the cuticles in a horseshoe. Knuckles flex white where there is no blood. It disgusts me, but this is what my hands were made for.

We flee the place of winter and trees, having drenched it red. Many carry our wounded, nearly a dozen in number. Seven dead. Barely twenty unscathed in the entire entourage. Others are missing.

Matchless Leto is gone, Pliny’s aide was cut apart, and one of our Praetors took a blade in her neck from Kellan au Bellona.

I carry the Praetor in my arms and try to staunch the bleeding as we take the lift down the spire.

Hard chance. Victra presses a piece of her dress against the wound.

I’d give anything for a pair of gravBoots. We cluster tight around our lord. Razors out. Blood soaks my arm to the elbow. Sweat dribbles down my face and ribs. Red drops splatter at our cadre’s feet against the lift’s floor, dripping from hands, wounds, blades. Yet there are white smiles slashing the faces around me.

I’m hot in my uniform, so I undo the top buttons. Tactus bleeds beside me. His wound goes through his left shoulder. Clean thrust.

“It’s just blood,” he tells Victra, who worries over him.

“It’s a hole in you.”

“Not a strange thing.” He smiles at her waistline. “Goryhell. You’ve a hole in you, and you don’t see me complaining.
Sheeeeeeowww
.” He yelps as she jams a bandage from her dress onto his wound.

He laughs in pain a second more, then looks at me and shakes his head, eyes wild and happy.

“Training with Lorn au Arcos, man. You sneaky ponce.”

He saved me from Cagney. I nod and bump bloody fists, past slights and wagers on my life temporarily forgotten.