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 res. House
Ceres’s soldiers roam the eastern fringes of our land. They ride with
impunity now that Titus’s tribe has retreated back 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 stonewalls 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 res. 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 o to the side of the
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road, tucking us into the mist as the slaves shue 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
stien 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 ickered on and o above the table, so
Mum was shrouded in darkness except her arm from the elbow
down. Then came the scream, mued 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.
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“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 o 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 dierent now. My hands turn to sts. 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.”
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“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 ghters,” Cassius spits.
An idea sweeps over me. “We can x 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 re and ice—though I am not sure which of us
is ice and which is re. 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 o,
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
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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 fty 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
tted 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 lth, Darrow. You have to cut his
slagging balls o.”
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
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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 ngers 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 o 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.
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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.”
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