by Pierce Brown
“We’re going to ruin Apollo,” I tell him.
“But why Apollo?” he asks. “Are we merely checking off the Houses at random, or should I know something?”
The tone in his voice makes me cock my head. He’s always reminded me of some kind of giant cat. Maybe it’s the frighteningly casual way in which he lopes along. Like he’d kill something without even tensing his muscles. Or maybe it’s because I can imagine him coiling up on a couch and licking himself clean.
“I’ve seen things in the snow, Reaper,” he says quietly. “Impressions in the snow, to be specific. And these impressions are not made by feet.”
“Paws? Hooves?”
“No, dear leader.” He steps closer. “Linear impressions.” I get his meaning. “GravBoots flying very low. Do tell me, why are the Proctors following us? And why are they wearing ghostCloaks?”
All his whispers mean nothing because of our rings. Yet he doesn’t know that.
“Because they are afraid of us,” I tell him.
“Afraid of you, you mean.” He watches me. “What do you know that I don’t? What do you tell Mustang that you don’t tell us?”
“You want to know, Tactus?” I’ve not forgotten his crimes, but I take his shoulder and bring him close like he’s a brother. I know the power touch can have. “Then knock House Apollo off the gory-damned map and I will tell you.”
His lips curl into a feral smile. “A pleasure, good Reaper.”
We stay away from the open plains and cling to the river as we move farther south, listening to our scouts relay news of enemy holdings over the comms. Apollo seems to control everything. All we see of the Jackal are his small bands of scouts. There’s something strange about his soldiers, something that chills the heart. For the thousandth time, I think of my enemy. What makes the faceless boy so frightening? Is he tall? Lean? Thick? Fast? Ugly? And what gives him his reputation, his name? No one seems to know.
The Pluto scouts never come near despite the temptation we offer them. I have Pax carry the banner of Ceres high, so that every Apollo cavalryman in the surrounding miles can see it glimmer. Each realizes the chance for glory. Parties of cavalry dash into us. Scouts think they can pry our pride away and gain themselves status in their House. They come stupidly in threes, in fours, and we ruin them with the Ceres archers or Minerva’s spearmen or with buried pikes in the snow. Little by little, we gnaw at them as the wolf gnaws at the elk. Always we let them escape, though. I want them angry as hell when I arrive on their doorstep. Slaves like them would slow us down.
That night, Pax and Mustang sit with me by a small fire and tell me of their lives outside the school. Pax is a riot when you get him going—a surprisingly energetic talker with a penchant for complimenting everything in his stories, including the villains, so half the time you don’t know who is good and who is bad. He tells us of a time he broke his father’s scepter in half, and another time he was mistaken for an Obsidian and nearly shipped off to the Agoge, where they train in space combat.
“I notion you could say I always dreamt of being an Obsidian,” he rumbles.
When he was a boy, he would sneak from his family’s summer manor in New Zealand, Earth, and join the Obsidians as they performed the Nagoge, the nightly necessity of their training, in which they looted and stole in order to supplement the paltry diet they were given at the Agoge. He would scrap and fight with them for morsels of food. He says he would always win, that is until he met Helga. Mustang and I lock eyes and try not to bust out with laughs as he waxes grandiloquent on Helga’s ample proportions, her thick fists, her ample thighs.
“Theirs was a large love,” I tell Mustang.
“A love to shake the earth,” she replies.
I’m woken the next morning by Tactus. His eyes are cold as the dawn’s freeze.
“Our horses have decided to run away. All of them.” He guides us to the Ceres boys and girls who were watching the horses. “None of them saw a thing. One minute the horses were there; the next they were gone.”
“Poor horses must be confused,” Pax says sorrowfully. “It was stormy last night. Perhaps they ran for safety to the woods.”
Mustang holds up the ropes that held the horses during the night. Pulled in half.
“Stronger than they looked,” she says dubiously.
“Tactus?” I nod my head to the scene.
He looks over at Pax and Mustang before answering. “There are foot tracks …”
“But.”
“Why waste my breath?” He shrugs. “You know what I’m going to say.”
Proctors pulled the ropes apart.
I do not tell my army what happened, but rumor spreads quickly when people huddle together for warmth. Mustang does not ask questions even though she knows I’m not telling her something. After all, I did not simply find the medicine I gave her in the Northwoods.
I try to look at this newest kink as a test. When the rebellion begins, things like this will happen. How do I react? Breathe the anger out. Breathe it out and move. Easier said than done for me.
We move to the woods to the east. Without horses, we’ve no more play to make in the plains near the river. My scouts tell me the castle of Apollo is near. How will I take it without horses? Without any element of speed?
As night falls, another kink reveals itself. The soup pots we brought from Ceres to cook over our fires are cracked through. All of them. And the bread which we kept so securely wrapped in paper in our packs is full of weevils. They crunch like juicy seeds as I eat a supper of bread. To the Drafters it will look an unfortunate turn of events. But I know it is something more.
The Proctors warn me to turn back.
“Why did Cassius betray you?” Mustang asks me that night as we sleep in a hollow beneath a snowdrift. Our Diana sentries watch the camp’s perimeter from the trees. “Don’t lie to me.”
“I betrayed him, actually,” I say. “I … it was his brother that I had to kill in the Passage.”
Her eyes widen. And after a moment she nods. “I had a brother die. It’s not … it wasn’t the same thing. But … a death like that, it changes things.”
“Did it change you?”
“No,” she says, as though she just realized it. “But it changed my family. Made them into people I don’t recognize sometimes. That’s life, I suppose.” She pulls back suddenly. “Why did you tell Cassius that you killed his brother? Are you that mad, Reaper?”
“I didn’t tell him slag. The Proctors did through the Jackal. Gave him a holocube.”
“I see.” Her eyes go cold. “So they are cheating for the ArchGovernor’s son.”
I leave her and the warmth of the fire to piss in the woods. The air is cold and crisp. Owls hoot in the branches, making me feel watched in the night.
“Darrow?” Mustang says from the darkness. I wheel about.
“Mustang, did you follow me?” Darrow. Not Reaper. Something is amiss. Something in the way she says my name, that she says my name at all. It is like seeing a cat bark. But I can’t see her in the darkness.
“I thought I saw something,” she says, still in shadow, voice emanating from the deeper woods. “It’s just over here. It’ll blow your mind.”
I follow the sound of her voice. “Mustang. Don’t leave the camp. Mustang.”
“We’ve already left it, darling.”
Around me, the trees stretch ominously upward. Their branches reach for me. The woods are silent. Dark. This is a trap. It is not Mustang.
The Proctors? The Jackal? Someone watches me.
When something watches you and you don’t know where it is, there is only one sensible thing to do. Change the bloodydamn paradigm, try to even the playing field. Make it have to look for you.
I break into movement. I sprint back toward my army. Then I dash behind a tree, scramble up it and wait, watching. Knives out. Ready to throw. Cloak curled about me.
Silence.
Then the snapping of twigs. Something moves through the woods.
Something huge.
“Pax?” I call down.
No response.
Then I feel a strong hand touch my shoulder. The branch I crouch in sinks with the new weight as a man deactivates his ghostCloak and appears from thin air. I’ve seen him before. His curly blond hair is cut tight to his head and frames his dusky, godlike face. His chin is carved from marble, and his eyes twinkle evilly, bright as his armor. Proctor Apollo. The huge thing moves again below us.
“Darrow, Darrow, Darrow,” he clucks over at me in Mustang’s voice. “You were a favorite puppet, but you’re not dancing as you ought. Will you reform and go north?”
“I—”
“Refuse? No matter.” He shoves me off the branch, hard. I hit another on the way down. Fall into the snow. I smell dander. Fur. And then the beast roars.
38
THE FALL OF APOLLO
The bear is huge—bigger than a horse, big as a wagon. White as a bloodless corpse. Eyes red and yellow. Razor black teeth long as my forearm. Nothing like the bears I’ve seen on the HC. A strip of red runs along its spine. Its paws are like fingers, eight on a hand. It’s unnatural. Made by the Carvers for sport. It’s been brought to these woods to kill, to kill me in particular. Sevro and I heard it roaring months back as we went to make peace with Diana. Now I feel its spittle.
I stand there stupid for a second. Then the bear roars again and lunges.
I roll, run. I sprint faster than I ever have in my life. I fly. But the bear is faster, if less agile; the woods shudder as it crashes through brush and trees.
I run beside a massive godTree and dive through bramble. There the ground creaks beneath my feet and I realize, as leaves and snow crumble under my feet, where I stand. I put the place between myself and the bear and wait for the bear to tear through the underbrush. It bursts clear and lunges for me. I jump back. Then it is gone, shrieking as it plummets through the trap floor onto a bed of wooden spikes. My joy would have been longer lived if I didn’t dance back and step into a second trap.
The earth flips. Well, I do. My leg snaps upward and I fly into the air on the end of a rope. I dangle for hours, too frightened to call to my army for fear of Proctor Apollo. My face tingles and itches from the blood rushing to my head. Then a familiar voice cuts the night.
“Well, well, well,” it sneers from below. “Looks like we’ve two pelts to skin.”
Sevro smirks when I tell him I’ve allied with Mustang. At camp, where Mustang was preparing search parties to send out for me, his reputation precedes him amongst the northerners. The Minervans fear him. Tactus and the other DeadHorses, on the other hand, are delighted.
“Why, if it isn’t my belly buddy!” Tactus drawls. “Why the limp, my friend?”
“Your mother rode me ragged,” Sevro grunts.
“Bah, you’d have to stand on your tiptoes to even kiss her chin.”
“Wasn’t her chin I was trying to kiss.”
Tactus claps his hands together in laughter and draws Sevro in for an obnoxious hug. They are two very peculiar people. But I suppose snuggling in horse corpses gives a bond—makes twins of a morbid sort.
“Where were you?” Mustang asks me quietly to the side.
“In a second,” I say.
Sevro has only one eye now. So he is the one-eyed demon the Apollonian emissary warned me about.
“I always wondered what sort of mad little fellows you Howlers were,” Mustang says.
“Little?” Sevro asks.
“I—didn’t mean to offend.”
He grins. “I am little.”
“Well, we of Minerva thought you were ghosts.” She pats his shoulder. “You’re not. And I’m not a real mustang, if you were wondering. No tail, you see? And no,” she interrupts Tactus. “I’ve never worn a saddle, since you were going to ask.”
He was.
“She’ll do,” Sevro mutters sideways to me.
“I like them,” Mustang says of the Howlers a few moments later. “Make me feel tall.”
“Perrrfect!” Tactus picks up the bloodback pelt with a grunt. “Looky look. They found something in Pax’s size.”
Before we join the group at the large fire that Pax stokes, Sevro pulls me aside and produces a blanket. Inside is my slingBlade.
“Kept it safe for you after finding it in the mud,” he says. “And I made it sharper; time for using a dull blade is over.”
“You’re a friend. I hope you know that.” I clap him on the shoulder. “Not a game friend. A real friend now, when we’re out of here. You know that, yes?”
“I’m not an idiot.” He blushes all the same.
I learn from him around the campfire that he and the Howlers, Thistle, Screwface, Clown, Weed, and Pebble—the dregs of my old House—stayed no longer than a day after I disappeared.
“Cassius said the Jackal took you,” Sevro says through a mouthful of weevily bread. “Delicious nuts.” He eats like he hasn’t seen food in weeks.
We sit fireside in the Greatwoods, bathed in the light of crackling logs. Mustang, Milia, Tactus, and Pax join us in leaning on a fallen tree in the snow. We’re all bundled like animals. I sit close with Mustang. Her leg is entwined with mine beneath the furs. The bloodback fur stinks and crackles over the fire. Fat drips into the flames. Pax will wear it when it dries.
Sevro sought the Jackal after Cassius fed him the lie. My small friend doesn’t get into details. He hates details. He just taps his empty eye socket and says, “The Jackal owes me.”
“You saw him then?” I ask.
“It was dark. I saw his knife. Didn’t even hear his voice. I had to jump off the mountain. It was a long fall back to the rest of the pack.” He says it so plainly. Yet I did notice his limp. “We couldn’t stay in the mountains. His men … everywhere.”
“But we took some of the mountains with us,” Thistle says. She pats the scalps on her waist with a motherly smile. Mustang shudders.
It’s been chaos in the South. Apollo, Venus, Mercury, and Pluto are all that’s left, but I hear Mercury has been reduced to a force of roving vagabonds. A pity. I was fond of their Proctor. He almost chose me in the Draft, would have if he could have. Wonder how things would have gone then.
“Sevro, with that leg, how fast can you run, say, two kilometers?” I ask.
The others are puzzled by the question, but Sevro just shrugs. “Doesn’t slow me. Minute and a half in this lowGrav.”
I make a note to tell him my idea later.
“We have more important things to discuss, Reaper.” Tactus smiles. “Now, I heard you were dangling upside down in the woods from this one here’s trap.” He pats little Thistle on her thigh; she smiles as he lets his hand linger. It’s the scalp collection that draws his affection. “You didn’t think you’d sneak out of telling the tale, did you?”
It’s not so funny a thing as he might suspect.
I finger my ring. Telling them would be signing their death warrants. Apollo and Jupiter listen to me now. I look at Mustang and feel hollow. I’ll risk losing her just to win their rigged game. If I were a good person, I would keep the ring on. I would hold my tongue. But there are plans to make, gods to undo. I take my ring off and set it on the snow. “Let us for one moment pretend we are not from different Houses,” I say. “Let’s all of us talk as friends, ringless.”
Without horses, without mobility, I have no advantage over my enemy in the surrounding lands. Another lesson to be learned. I make an advantage for myself, a new strategy. I make them fear me.
My tactics are ones of fragmentation. I split my army into six pieces of ten under myself, Pax, Mustang, Tactus, Milia, and, due to a surprising recommendation from Milia, Nyla. I would have given Sevro his own unit, but he and his Howlers will not leave my side again. They blame themselves for the scar on my belly.
My army sets into Apollo’s holdings like starving wolves. We do not assail their castle, but we raid their forts. We bring fire to their supply stores. We shoot arrows at their legs. We foul their wat
er supplies and tell prisoners false news and let them escape. We murder their goats and pigs. We hack their riverboats with axes. We steal weapons. I do not allow prisoners to be taken except if they are students from Venus, Juno, or Bacchus enslaved by Apollo. All others we let escape. The fear and legend must spread. This my army understands better than anything else. They are dogmatic. They tell each other tales of me around the campfires. Pax is their ringleader; he thinks I am myth made man. Many of my soldiers begin carving my slingBlade into trees and walls. Tactus and Thistle carve sling-Blades into flesh. And the more industrious members of my army make standards of stained wolfpelts that we take into battle on the end of spears.
I split the slaves of House Ceres and the other captured slaves from one another to integrate them into the various units. I know their allegiances are shifting. Bit by bit. They begin to refer to themselves not as Ceres or Minerva or Diana, but by their unit name. I place four Ceres soldiers, the smallest, with Sevro in the Howlers. I do not know if the bakers will make for elite warriors as Mars’s dregs did, but if anyone can carve off their baby fat, it’s Sevro.
Fear gnaws at Apollo for a week. Our ranks swell. Theirs diminish. Freed slaves tell us of the terror in the castle, the worry that I will appear from the shadows with my bloody wolfcloaks to burn and maim.
I do not fear House Apollo; they are lumbering fools who cannot adjust to my tactics. What I fear is the Proctors, and the Jackal. To me, they are one and the same. After Apollo’s failed attempt on my life, I fear they will be more direct. When will I wake with a razor in my spine? This is their game. At any time, I could die. I must destroy House Apollo now, get Proctor Apollo out of the game before it is too late.
My lieutenants and I sit around our fire in the woods to discuss the tactics of the next day. We are less than two miles from House Apollo’s castle, but they dare not attack us. We are in the deep woods. They huddle in fear of us. We also don’t attack them. I know Proctor Apollo would ruin even the cleverest of night assaults.
