Red Rising (29 page)

“Is a pricklicker!”
I mock.

Then a horse’s flank thumps into my back and I stumble toward the monstrous boy. I’m doomed. He could have gotten me with his pike. Instead, he hugs me. It’s like being embraced by a golden bear that keeps screaming its own damn name. My back cracks. Mother-mercy. He’s squeezing my skull. My shoulder aches. Bloodyhell. I can’t breathe. I’ve never met a force like this. Dear God. He’s a bloodydamn ogre. But someone is howling. Dozens of howls. Back popping.

Pax roars his personal victory. “I have your captain! I piss on you, Mars! Pax au Telemanus has slagged your captain! Pax au Telemanus!”

My vision flickers black and fades. But the rage in me does not.

I roar out one last bit of wrath before I faint. It’s cheap. Pax is honorable. I still mash his grapes flat with my knee. I make sure to get both as many times as I can. One. Two. Three. Four. He gawps and collapses. I faint atop him in the mud to the sound of Proctors cheering.

Sevro tells me the story as he picks through the pockets of our prisoners after the battle. After Pax and I finished one another off, Roque
sallied into the glen with Lea and my tribe. Mustang, the crafty girl, escaped into the castle and manages yet to hold it with six fighters. All the prisoners of Mars she captured won’t be hers until she touches them with the tip of her standard. Fat chance. We have eleven of her men and Roque digs up our standard to make them our slaves. We could besiege our own castle—there’s no storming its high walls—but Ceres or the rest of Minerva could come at any time. If they do, Cassius is supposed to ride to give Ceres Minerva’s standard. It also keeps him away while I cement my position as leader.

Roque and Antonia come with me to negotiate with Mustang at the gate. I limp up and favor a cracked rib. It hurts to breathe. Roque takes a step back so that I am most prominent when we reach the gate itself. Antonia wrinkles her nose and eventually does the same. Mustang is bloody from the skirmish and I can’t find a smile on her pretty face.

“The Proctors have been watching all of this,” she says scathingly. “They’ve seen what happened in that … place. Everything—”

“Was done by Titus,” Antonia drawls tiredly.

“And no one else?” Mustang looks at me. “The girls won’t stop crying.”

“No one died,” Antonia says in annoyance. “Weak as they are, they will repair themselves. Despite what happened, there’s been no depletion of Golden stock.”

“The Golden stock …,” Mustang murmurs. “How can you be so cold?”

“Little girl,” Antonia sighs, “Gold is a cold metal.”

Mustang looks up at Antonia incredulously and then shakes her head. “
Mars
. A gruesome deity. You’re fit for this, aren’t you lot? Barbarity? Past centuries. Dark ages.”

I don’t have a mind to be lectured by an Aureate about morality.

“We would like you to leave the castle,” I tell her. “Do so with your men and you may have those we captured. We won’t turn them into slaves.”

Down the hill, Sevro stands beside the captives with our standard in hand; he’s tickling a disgruntled Pax with a horse hair.

Mustang jams a finger into my face.

“This is a school. You realize that, yes? No matter the rules your House decides to play by. Be ruthless all you gorywell like. But there are limits. There are slagging limits to what you can do in this school, in the game. The more brutal you are, the more foolish you look to the Proctors, to the adults who will know what you’ve done—what you’re capable of doing. You think they want monsters to lead the Society? Who would want a monster for an apprentice?”

I see a vision of Augustus watching my wife dangle, eyes dead as a pitviper’s. A monster would want a student in his own image.

“They want visionaries. Leaders of men. Not reapers of them. There are limits,” she continues.

I snap. “There are no goddamned limits.”

Mustang’s jaw tightens. She understands how this will play out. In the end, giving us back our horrible castle won’t cost her anything; trying to keep it would. She might even end up like one of the girls in the high tower. She never thought of that before. I can tell she wants to leave. It’s her sense of justice that is killing her. Somehow she thinks we should pay, that the Proctors should come down and interfere. Most of the kids think that about this game; hell, Cassius said it a hundred times as we scouted together. But the game isn’t like that, because life isn’t like that. Gods don’t come down in life to mete out justice. The powerful do it. That’s what they are teaching us, not only the pain in gaining power, but the desperation that comes from not having it, the desperation that comes when you are not a Gold.

“We will keep the Ceres slaves,” Mustang demands.

“No, they are ours,” I drawl. “And we will do with them what we like.”

She watches me for a long moment, thinking.

“Then we get Titus.”

“No.”

Mustang snaps. “We
will
keep Titus or there are no terms.”

“You will keep no one.”

She’s not used to being told no.

“I want assurances they are safe. I want Titus to pay.”

“It doesn’t matter a flying piss what you want. Here you get what
you take. That’s part of the lesson plan.” I pull out my slingBlade and set its tip into the soil. “Titus is of House Mars. He is ours. So please, try and take him.”

“He’ll be brought to justice,” Roque says to Mustang to reassure her.

I turn to him, eyes blazing. “Shut up.”

He looks down, knowing he should not have spoken. It doesn’t matter. Mustang’s eyes don’t look to Antonia or Roque. They don’t look down the slope where Lea and Cipio have her warband on their knees in the glen, and Thistle sits on Pax’s back with Weed, taking their turn tickling him now. Her eyes don’t look at the blade. They are only for me. I lean in.

“If Titus raped a little girl who happened to be a Red, how would you feel?” I ask.

She doesn’t know how to answer. The Law does. Nothing would happen. It isn’t rape unless she wears the sigil of an elder House like Augustus. Even then, the crime is against her master.

“Now look around,” I say quietly. “There are no Golds here. I’m a Red. You’re a Red. We are all Reds till one of us gets enough power. Then we get rights. Then we make our own law.” I lean back and raise my voice. “That is the point of all this. To make you terrified of a world where you do not rule. Security and justice aren’t given. They are made by the strong.”

“You should hope that is not true,” Mustang says quietly to me.

“Why?”

“Because there is a boy here like you.” Her face takes on a gloomy aspect, as though she regrets what she must say. “My Proctor calls him the Jackal. He is smarter and crueler and stronger than you, and he will win this game and make us his slaves if the rest of us go about acting like animals.” Her eyes implore me. “So please, hurry up and evolve.”

I pretend the matches came from one of the Minervans when I light our first fire inside castle Mars. June is fetched from her makeshift prison, and soon she has prepared us a feast from the meat of goats and sheep and herbs gathered by my tribe. My tribe pretends it’s the first meal they’ve had in weeks. The others of the House are hungry enough to believe the lie. Minerva and her warband have long since slunk on home.

“What now?” I ask Roque as the others eat in the square. The keep is a place of squalor still, and the light of the fire does nothing but illuminate the filth. Cassius has gone to see Quinn, so I am alone for the moment with Roque.

Titus’s tribe sits in quiet groups. The girls will not speak to the boys because of what they’ve seen some of them do. All eat with their heads down. There’s shame there. Antonia’s people sit with mine and glare at Titus’s. Disgust fills their eyes. Betrayal too, even as they fill their bellies. Several scuffles have already escalated from minor words to thrown fists. I thought the victory might bring them together. But it did not. The division is worse than ever, only now I cannot define it and I think there is only one way to mend it.

Roque doesn’t have the answer I want to hear.

“The Proctors aren’t interfering, because they want to see how and if we handle justice, Darrow. It is the deeper trait that this situation probes. How do we manage Law?”

“Brilliant,” I say. “So what? We’re supposed to whip Titus? Kill him? That would be Law.”

“Would it? Or would it just be vengeance?”

“You’re the poet. You figure it out.” I kick a stone off the ramparts.

“He can’t stay tied up in the cellars. You know this. We will never move on from this torpor if he does, and it has to be you who decides what to do with him.”

“Not Cassius?” I ask. “I think he’s earned a say. After all, he did claim him.” I don’t want Cassius to share leadership, but I don’t want him to come out of the Institute without any prospects. I owe him.

“Claim him?” Roque coughs. “And how barbaric does
that
sound?”

“So Cassius should play no role?”

“I love him like a brother, but no.” Roque’s narrow face tenses as he sets a hand on my arm. “Cassius cannot lead this House. Not after what happened. Titus’s boys and girls might obey him, but they won’t respect him. They won’t think him stronger than them, even if he is. Darrow, they
pissed
on him. We are Golds. We do not forget.”

He’s right.

I pull my hair in frustration and glare at Roque as though he were being difficult.

“You don’t understand how much this means to Cassius. After Julian’s death … He has to succeed. He cannot be remembered solely for what happened. He can’t.”

Why do I care so much?

“Doesn’t matter a flying piss how much it means to him,” Roque echoes my words with a smile. His fingers are thin like hay on my bicep. “They’ll never fear him.”

Fear is necessary here. And Cassius knows it. Why else is he absent in victory? Antonia has not left my side. Pollux, the gate opener,
hasn’t either. They linger several meters away to associate with my power. Sevro and Thistle watch them with sly grins.

“Is that why you’re here too, you scheming weasel?” I ask Roque. “Sharing the glory?”

He shrugs and gnaws on the leg of mutton Lea brings him.

“Slag that. I’m here for the food.”

I find Titus in the cellar. The Minervans tied him and beat him bloody after they saw the slave girls in his tower. That’s their justice. He smiles as I stand over him.

“How many of House Ceres did you kill in your raids?” I ask.

“Suck my balls.” He spits bloody phlegm. I dodge.

I resist kicking him there, barely. Already got Pax for the day. Titus has the gall to ask what has happened.

“I rule House Mars now.”

“Outsourced your dirty work to the Minervans, eh? Didn’t want to face me? Typical Golden coward.”

I am afraid of him. I don’t know why. Yet I bend on a knee and stare him in the eye.

“You are a pissing fool, Titus. You never evolved. Never got past the first test. You thought this whole thing is about violence and killing. Idiot. It’s about civilization, not war. To have an army, you must first have a civilization—you went straight to violence like they wanted us to. Why do you think they gave us of Mars nothing and the other Houses have so many resources? We’re meant to fight like mad, but we’re meant to burn out like you did. But I beat that test. Now I’m the hero. Not the usurper. And you’re just the ogre in the dungeon.”

“Oh, huzzah. Huzzah!” He tries clapping his bound hands. “I don’t give a piss.”

“How many did you kill?” I ask.

“Not enough.” He tilts his large head. His hair is greasy and dark with dirt, almost as though he’s tried to black out the gold. He seems to like the dirt. It’s under his fingernails, coats his burnished
skin. “I tried to bash their heads in. Kill them before the medBots came. But they were always so fast.”

“Why did you want to kill them? I don’t understand what the point is. They are your own people.”

He smirks at this. “You could have changed things, you bastard.” His large eyes are calmer, sadder than I remember. He does not like himself, I realize. Something about him is too mournful. The pride I thought he had is not pride; it is just scorn. “You say I’m cruel, but you had matches and iodine. Don’t think I didn’t know even before I smelled you. We starved, and you used what you found to become leader. So do not lecture me on morality, you backstabbing piss-sucker.”

“Then why didn’t you do something about it?”

“Pollux and Vixus were frightened of you. So the rest were too. And they thought Goblin would kill them in their sleep. What could I do if I was the only one who wasn’t scared?”

“Why aren’t you?”

He laughs hard. “You’re just a boy with a slingBlade. First I thought you were hard. Thought we saw things similarly.” He licks a bloody lip. “Thought you were like me, only worse because of that coldness in your eyes. But you’re not cold. You care about these piss-pricks.”

My eyebrows pinch together. “How’s that?”

“Simple. You made friends. Roque. Cassius. Lea. Quinn.”

“So did you. Pollux, Cassandra, Vixus.”

Titus’s face contorts horribly.
“Friends?”
he spits. “Friends with
them
? Those Goldbrows? They are monsters, soulless bastards. Nothing but a bunch of cannibals, all of them. They did the same as I did, but … 
pfah
.”