24
Titus’s War
I did not kill Vixus. But I killed the chance of uniting the House. I
sprint down the keep’s winding stairwells. Shouts behind me. I pass
Titus’s lounging students; they’re sharing bits of raw sh they
managed to spear from the river. They could trip me if they knew
what I’ve done. Two girls watch me go by and, hearing their leaders
shouts, are too late in moving. I’m past their hands, past the keep’s
lower gatehouse and into the main square of the castle.
“Cassius!” I call up at the gatehouse to the castle where my men
sleep. “Cassius!” He peeks his head out the window and sees my
face.
“Oh. Shit. Roque!” he shouts. “It happened! Raise the Dregs!”
Three of Titus’s boys and one of his girls chase after me across the
courtyard. They’re slower than me, but another is coming from her
post on the wall to cut me o, Cassandra. Her short hair jingles with
bits of metal she’s woven in. Eortlessly, she hops down the eight
meters from the parapet, an axe in hand, and races to intersect my
path before I reach the stairs. Her golden wolf ring glimmers in the
ebbing light. She’s a beautiful sight.
Then my entire tribe pours out from the gatehouse. They bring
their makeshift packs, their knives and the beating sticks we carved
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from felled branches taken from our woods. But they do not set
toward me. They are bright, so they crank open the huge double
gates that separate the castle from the long sloping path leading
down to the glen. Mist seeps through the open gate and they
disappear into the murk. Only Quinn is left behind.
Quinn, the fastest of Mars. She bounds along the cobblestone like
a gazelle, coming to my aid. Her beating stick twirls in the air.
Cassandra doesn’t see her. A long golden ponytail ops in the chill
night air as Quinn winds up, a smile on her face, and blindsides
Cassandra from the ank, hitting her full-force in the knee with her
beating stick. The crack of wood on strong Gold bone is loud. So is
Cassandra’s scream. Her leg doesn’t break, but she ips onto the
cobblestone. Quinn does not slow her stride. She swoops in beside
me, and together we leave Titus’s pack behind.
We catch up with the others in the bowl of the glen. Setting across
the rugged hills, we aim toward our northern fort in the deep mist-
shrouded highlands. Vapor clings to our hair, dripping o in pearls.
We reach the fort well past midnight. It is a cavernous, barren tower
that leans over a ravine like a drunken wizard. Lichen covers the
thick gray stone. Mist swaddles its parapets and we make our rst
meal of the birds in the eaves of the single tower. Some escape. I
hear their wings in the dark night. Our civil war has begun.
Unfortunately, Titus is not a stupid enemy. He does not come for us
as we thought he would. I had hoped he would come try and lay
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siege to our northfort, that his army would see our res inside the
stone walls and smell the meat as it sizzled in fat. The sheep we
gathered earlier would have lasted us weeks, months if we had
water. We could have feasted every night. They would have broken
then. They would have left Titus behind. But Titus knows of my
weapon, re, so he avoids us so that his boys and girls cannot see
what luxuries we have.
He does not let his tribe alone long enough to think. Frenzy, war,
numb the sense in man. So they raid House Ceres from the sixth day
on, and he creates trophies for acts of bravery and violence, giving
boys and girls marks in blood on their cheeks that they bear
proudly. We slink along watching their war parties from the brush
and the tall grasses of the plains. Sometimes we gain a vantage on
the southern highland peaks near Phobos. From there we witness
the siege of House Ceres.
Around House Ceres, the smoke rises in a sullen crown. Apple
trees are hewn down. Horses crippled or stolen. Titus’s raiders even
lasso a torch from one of the Ceres ramparts in an attempt to bring
re to Mars’s castle. Ceres horsemen ride them down with pails of
water before they reach home. Titus shrieks in rage when this
happens and the Ceres horses y by, dashing the ame with water
before circling home. With his best soldier, the raspy Pollux, he
upends one of the horses with a tree branch fashioned like a pike.
The rider spills from the saddle and Pollux is on her. They take two
more slaves that day.
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It is on our eighth day in the Institute that I watch the siege with
Cassius and Roque from the highlands. Today, Titus rides the
captured horse beneath the wall of House Ceres with a lasso, daring
their archers to shoot their arrows at him and his horse. One poor
girl leans her head out to get a better angle with her bow. She draws
the arrow back to her ear, aims, and just before she is about to loose
the arrow, Titus hurls his lasso upward. It ails through the air. She
jerks back. Not fast enough. The lasso loops her neck and Titus kicks
his horse away from the wall, tightening the lasso. Her friends
scramble to grab her. They hold tight but are forced to let go before
her neck snaps.
Her friend’s screams echo across the plains as she’s jerked
violently down from the top of the wall and dragged by Titus back
to his cheering followers. There, Cassandra kicks the girl to her
knees and enslaves her with our standard. The ames from the
burning crops lick up into the twilight where several Proctors hover
with agons of wine and a tray of some rare delicacy.
“And violent hearts set harshest ame,” Roque murmurs from his
knee.
“He’s bold,” I say deferentially, “and he likes this.” His eyes
sparkled when I struck Vixus in the throat. Cassius nods along. “Too
much.”
“He is lethal,” Cassius agrees, but he means something dierent. I
look over at him. There’s a raw edge to his voice. “And he’s a liar.”
“Is he?” I ask
“He didn’t kill Priam.”
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Roque becomes quiet. Smaller than us, he seems a child as he
remains on a knee. His long hair is held in a ponytail. Dirt crusts his
nails, which scrabble in tying his shoes as he looks up.
“He didn’t kill Priam,” Cassius repeats. The wind moans over the
hills behind us. Night comes slow today. Cassius’s cheeks sink into
shadow; still, he’s handsome. “They wouldn’t have put Priam with a
monster like Titus. Priam’s a leader, not a warlord. They’d put
Priam with someone easy like one of our Dregs.”
I know where Cassius is going with this. It’s in the way he
watches Titus; the coldness in his eyes reminds me of a pitviper’s
gaze as it follows its prey. My insides turn sour as I do it, but I lead
Cassius in the direction he seems to want to go, inviting him to bite.
Roque tilts his head at me, noticing something strange in my
interaction with Cassius.
“And they would give Titus someone else,” I say.
“Someone else,” Cassius repeats, nodding.
Julian, he is thinking. He doesn’t say it. Neither do I. Better to let
it fester in his mind. Let my friend think our enemy killed his
brother. This is a way out.
“Blood begets blood begets blood begets blood …” Roque whispers
words into the wind, which carry themselves west toward the long
plain and toward the ames that dance in the low horizon. Beyond,
the mountains hunker cold and dark. Snow already gathers on their
peaks. It’s a sight to steal one’s breath, yet Roque’s eyes never leave
my face.
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I nd it a small pleasure that Titus’s slaves are not very eective
allies for him. Far from being indoctrinated as thoroughly as a Red
might be, these newly made slaves are stubborn creatures. They
follow orders or risk being labeled Shamed after graduation. But
they purposefully never do more or less than he demands; it is their
act of rebellion. They ght where he tells them to ght, whom he
tells them to ght, even when they should retreat. They gather the
berries he shows them, even if they know they are poisonous, and
pile stones till the pile falls over. But if there is an open gate leading
to the enemy’s fortress and Titus doesn’t tell them to go into it,
they’ll stand there and pick their butts.
Despite the addition of slaves and the razing of Ceres’s crops and
orchards, Titus’s force, which is quite sound at violence, is pitiful
when they attempt to do anything else. His men empty their bowels
in shallow latrines or behind trees or in the river in an attempt to
poison the students of House Ceres. One of his girls even falls in
after emptying her bowels into the water. She ails around in her
own waste. It’s a scene of comedy, but laughter has become seldom
except from the students of Ceres. They sit behind their high walls
and catch sh from the river and eat breads from their ovens and
honey from their apiaries.
In response to the laughter, Titus drags one of the male slaves up
in front of the gate. The slave is a tall one with a long nose and a
mischievous smile meant for the ladies. He thinks this is all a game
till Titus cuts o one of his ears. Then he cries for his mother like a
young child.
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The Proctors, even House Ceres’s, do not stop the violence. They
watch from the sky in twos and threes, oating about as medBots
whine down from Olympus to cauterize a wound or treat severe
head trauma.
On the twentieth morning of the Institute, the defenders throw a
basket of bread loaves down as Titus’s men attempt to batter in the
tall gate with a felled tree. The besiegers end up ghting each other
for the food only to nd that the bread was baked around razor
blades. The screams last till the afternoon.
Titus’s reply comes just before night falls. With ve newly minted
slaves, including the male with the missing ear, he approaches the
gate till he’s near a mile o. 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 dicult to pity her. At rst.
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.
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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.
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Soon there are no more slaves to take. House Ceres does not come
out after dark anymore, and their high walls are guarded without
ames. The trees outside the wall have all been cut down, but there
are crops and further orchards inside their long walls. Bread still
bakes and the river still ows 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.
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