Golden Son (The Red Rising Trilogy, Book 2)

by Brown, Pierce

  Moments later, a Brown cook stumbles out from the kitchen, carrying a tray of not only bacon and eggs, but pumpkin waffles, cured ham, cheeses, sausages, fruits, and a dozen other dishes. But no pheasant. His eyes turn the size of the waffles when he sees me. Apologizing for something, he sets the tray down and disappears, only to reappear a minute later with even more food.

  “How much do you think we eat?” I ask him.

  He just stares at me. “Thank you,” Mustang says. He mumbles something inaudible and backs away, bowing.

  “I think the Ash Lord was a bit different from us,” I say. Mustang pushes the fruit toward me. “Thought you didn’t like bacon,” I say.

  She shrugs. “I had it every morning on Luna.” She delicately butters her waffles. “Reminded me of you.” She avoids my eyes. “Why can’t you sleep?”

  “Not much good at it.”

  “You never were. Except when you have a hole in your stomach. You slept like a baby then.”

  I laugh. “I think comas don’t count.”

  We talk about anything but the things we should. Innocent and quiet, like two moths dancing around the same flame. “Amazing how big the beds are, even on a starship,” Mustang says. “Mine’s monstrous. Too big, really.”

  “Finally! Someone else agrees. Half the time, I sleep on the floor.”

  “You too?” She shakes her head. “Sometimes I hear noises and sleep in the closet, thinking if someone’s coming for me they won’t look there.”

  “I’ve done that. Really does help.”

  “Except when the closet is big enough to fit a family of Obsidians. Then it’s just as bad.” She frowns suddenly. “I wonder if Obsidians cuddle.”

  “They don’t.”

  Her eyebrows rise. “Have you researched it?”

  I finish a handful of strawberries, shrugging as Mustang frowns at my manners. “Obsidians believe in three types of touch. The Touch of Spring. The Touch of Summer. The Touch of Winter. After the Dark Revolt, where the Obsidians rose in arms against the iron ancestors, the Board of Quality Control debated destroying the entire Color. You know how they gave them religion, stole their technology. But what they wished to kill most of all was the incredible kinship the Obsidians then possessed. So they instructed the shaman of the tribes, bought and paid for liars, to warn against touch, saying it weakened the spirit. So now the Obsidians touch one another in sex. They touch each other to prevent death. And they touch each other to kill. No cuddling.” I notice her watching me with a small smirk. “But of course you knew all that.”

  “I did.” She smiles. “But sometimes it’s nice to remember all that’s going on inside you.”

  “Oh.” I look away as she tries to hold my gaze.

  “I forgot you can blush!” She watches me for a moment. “You probably don’t know this, but one of my dissertations on Luna concentrated on mistakes in the sociological manipulation theorems used by the Board of Quality Control.” She cuts a sausage delicately. “I deemed them shortsighted. The chemical sexual sterilization of the Pink genus, for instance, has led to a tragically high suicide rate within the Gardens.”

  Tragically. Most would have said “inefficient.”

  “The rigidity of laws maintaining the hierarchy are so strict they’ll one day break. Fifty years from now? A hundred? Who knows? There was this one case we studied where a Gold woman fell in love with an Obsidian. They had a blackmarket Carver alter their reproductive organs so his seed was compatible with her eggs. They were found out and both were executed, their Carvers killed. But things like this have happened a hundred times. A thousand. They’re just scrubbed from the record books.”

  “It’s terrible,” I say.

  “And beautiful.”

  “Beautiful?” I ask, repulsed.

  “No one knows of these people,” she says. “No one but a handful of Golds with access. The human spirit tries to break free, again and again, not in hate like the Dark Revolt. But for love. They don’t mimic each other. They aren’t inspired by others who come before them. Each is willing to take the leap, thinking they are the first. That’s bravery. And that means it’s a part of who we are as people.”

  Bravery. Would she say that if she knew one of those people sat across from her? Does she live in the world of theories Harmony spoke of? Or could she really understand …

  “So how long, I wonder,” she continues, “till a group like the Sons of Ares finds the records, broadcasts them? They did it with Persephone. The girl who sang. It’s only a matter of time.” She pauses, squinting at me as I react involuntarily to the mention of Eo. “What’s wrong?”

  I can’t tell her what I’m thinking, so I lie. “Dissertations. Sociology. You and I specialize in very different things. I always wondered what your life was like on Luna.”

  Mustang eyes me playfully. “Oh? So you thought about me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Day and night? What is Mustang wearing? What is she dreaming about? What boy is she kiss—?”

  She winces at that last part.

  “Darrow, I want to explain something.”

  “You don’t have to,” I say, waving her off.

  “With Cassius it—”

  “Mustang, you don’t owe me anything. You weren’t mine. You aren’t mine. You can do what you want when you want with whomever you want.” I pause. “Even though he is a gorydamn jackass.”

  She snorts a laugh. The humor fades as fast as it came. There’s pain in her eyes. In her half-opened mouth. Her idle knife and fork hover over her forgotten plate. She looks down and shakes her head.

  “I wanted it to be different,” she murmers. “You know that.”

  “Mustang …” I rest my hand on her wrist. Despite her strength, it’s frail in my hard hands. Frail as the other girl’s was when I held her in the deepmines. I couldn’t help that girl. And now I feel like I can’t help this woman. Would that my hands were meant to build. I would know what to say. What to do. Maybe in another life I would have been that man. In this one, my words, like my hands, are clumsy. All they can do is cut. All they can do is break. “I think I know how you feel—”

  Mustang jerks back from me. “How I feel?”

  “I didn’t mean—” I pause, hearing a noise.

  We look over and the cook stands there awkwardly with another tray. He tiptoes forward, sets it down, and then leaves the room, backing away awkwardly.

  “Darrow. Shut up and listen.” She peers fiercely up at me through the strands of hair that have fallen across her face. “You want to know how I feel? I’ll spit it out at you. All my life I’ve been taught to regard my family over all else.

  “What happened with my brother at the Institute … when I handed him over to you, that set me against everything I was raised to do. But I thought that you”—She takes a deep breath that wavers at the end—“were a person who earned my loyalty. And I thought that it would be so much more important if I gave it to you in that moment than to Adrius, who has never lifted a finger on my behalf. I knew it was the right thing to do, but it was a repudiation of my father, of all he taught me. Do you even know what that means? He has broken families as easily as other men break sticks. He wields unimaginable power. But more than that. He is the man who taught me to ride horses, to read poems and not just the military histories. The man who stood beside me, letting me raise myself up by my own strength when I fell. The man who couldn’t look at me for three years after my mother died. That is the man I rejected for you. No,” she corrects herself, “not for you. For living differently, living for more. More than pride.

  “At the Institute you and I decided to break the rules, to be decent in a place of horror. So we made an army of loyal friends instead of slaves. We chose to be better. Then you spat in the face of that by leaving to become one of my father’s killers.” She puts a finger in the air. “No. Don’t speak. It’s not your turn just because I pause.”

  She takes her time in gathering her thoughts, pushing away her plat
e.

  “Now, I’m sure you understand that I felt lost. One, because I thought I’d found someone special in you. Two, because I felt you were abandoning the idea that gave us the ability to conquer Olympus. Consider that I was vulnerable. Lonely. And that perhaps I fell into Cassius’s bed because I was hurt and needed a salve to my pain. Can you imagine that? You may answer.”

  I squirm on my cushion. “I suppose.”

  “Good. Now shove that idea up your ass.” Her lips make a hard line. “I am not some frill-wearing tramp. I am a genius. I say this because it is a fact. I am smarter than any person you’ve ever met, except perhaps my twin. My heart does not make my brain a fool. I sought out a relationship with Cassius for the same reason I let the Sovereign think she was turning me against my father: to protect my family.”

  She looks down at her food.

  “I’ve always been able to manipulate people. Men, women, it makes no difference. Cassius was a walking wound, Darrow, raw and bloody despite the fact it has been two years since you killed Julian. I saw it in him in a second, and I knew how I could make him love me. I gave him someone who would listen, someone who would fill the void.”

  The sternness in her voice fades. She looks around as if she could escape the conversation she started. If she stopped, I would be happier for it.

  “I made him think he could not live without me. I knew it was the only thing that could keep the rest of my house safe. I knew it was the best weapon I could wield in this game. Yet … I felt so cold. So horrible. Like I was the cruel witch snaring Odysseus, making him fall in love, keeping him for my own selfish aims. It seemed so logical. And when he put his arms around me, I felt like I was drowning. Like I was lost, suffocating under the weight of all I’d done, suffocating knowing there was a life ahead of me with someone I did not love.

  “Yet it was for family. It was for the people I love even if they don’t deserve it. Many have sacrificed more. I could sacrifice that.” She shakes her head, the tears that build there mirroring those that well in my own eyes. They fall when she says, “Then you walked in at the gala, and … and it was like the ground had broken open to swallow me. I felt like a fraud. A wicked girl who’d contrived a reason to do something stupid.” She tries to wipe her eyes. “Can’t you see why I did it? I didn’t want you to die. I don’t want you to die. Not like my brother, Claudius. Not like Pax. I would have done anything to stop it.”

  “I can stop it.”

  “You’re not invincible, Darrow. I know you think you are. But one day you’ll find out you aren’t as strong as you think you are, and I’ll be alone.”

  She goes silent as all that has welled up inside her breaks loose. She does not sob. But the tears come. She’s the type of woman to be embarrassed by them.

  It breaks me to see this.

  “You are not wicked,” I say as I take her hand in mine. “You are not cruel.” She shakes her head, trying to pull away. I take her jaw between the fingers of my right hand and bend her head till her eyes find a home in mine. “And what you do for the people you love cannot be judged. Do you understand?” I deepen my voice. “Do you understand?”

  She nods.

  It should not be this way. The Golds have everything, yet they demand sacrifices even from their own. This place is sick. This empire broken. It eats its kings, its queens, as hungrily as it does the paupers who mill its earth. But it cannot have this woman as it had the girl I buried. I will not let it devour her. I will not let it devour my family in Lykos. I will break it, even if it claims me in the end.

  I wipe the tears from her face with my thumb. She is different from her people. And when she tries to do as they do, it cracks her heart to the core. Looking at her, I know I was wrong. She is not a distraction. She does not compromise my mission. She is the point of it all. Yet I cannot kiss her. Not now when I must break her heart to break this empire. It would not be fair. I’ve fallen in love with her, but she’s fallen for my lies.

  “You can’t trust him,” she says quietly.

  “Who?” I ask, startled by her sudden words.

  “My twin,” she whispers as though he sits in the corner of the room. “He’s not a man like you. He’s something else. When he looks at us, when he looks at people, he sees sacks of bone and meat. We don’t really exist to him.” I frown as she clutches my hand. “Darrow, listen to me. He is the monster they don’t know how to write stories about. You cannot trust him.”

  The way she says it makes me know she understands our pact.

  “I don’t trust him,” I say. “But I need him.”

  “We can win this war without him,” she says.

  “I thought you said I wasn’t strong enough.”

  “You’re not,” she says with a smile. “Not by yourself.” She dons her lopsided grin. “You need me.”

  If only it were so simple.

  I leave Mustang for my rooms soon after. The halls are quiet, and I feel a shade drifting through some metal realm. I don’t know how to accept her help. Or how I should handle her. Seeing her with Cassius wounded me more than I’ll ever tell her, and part of me knows not all of it could have been a manipulation. He was never a monster; and if he ever becomes one, I know it will be because of me.

  The door to my suite hisses open. A hand settles over my shoulder. I turn to see Ragnar’s chest. I didn’t even hear him. “Someone breathes inside.”

  “Theodora, probably. She’s my Pink steward. You’ll like her.”

  “Gold breath.”

  I nod, not asking how he knows, and take my razor from my arm. It whispers into a sword as I step through. The lights are on, muted. I search the suite’s rooms with Ragnar to find the Jackal sitting in my lounge with a sherry. He chuckles at our weapons.

  “I do admit, I am quite threatening.”

  He’s wearing a bathrobe and slippers.

  I excuse Ragnar. With his wounds, he should be resting. Reluctantly, he trudges out.

  “Seems no one sleeps on this ship,” I say as I join the Jackal on the couch. “I imagine we have to restructure our arrangement a bit.”

  “Fond of understatements, aren’t you?” He sips the liquor and sighs. “Thought I’d drown in that damn lagoon. I always thought my death would be something grand. Launched into the sun. Beheaded by a political rival. Then when it came …” He shudders, looking so very frail and boyish. “It was just a careless coldness. Like the rocks of the Institute falling all around me again in that mine.”

  He’s right, there is no warmth in death. I cried like a child when I thought I was dying after Cassius stabbed me.

  “Obviously this changes our strategy, but I don’t believe it must change our alliance.”

  “Nor do I,” I agree. “We’ll need your spies more than ever. Pliny won’t take my ascension lightly. And you’re stuck here in your father’s court. The Politico will try to remove us both.” I make no mention of the Sons of Ares. As I guessed, they were forgotten by all as soon as I tipped that wine onto Cassius’s lap.

  “Pliny will have to go. But you and I should maintain social distance until then so he doesn’t know the threat against him is unified. Better for him to misunderstand our individual resources.”

  “And so the Telemanuses still talk with me,” I say.

  “True. They do want me dead.”

  “As they should.”

  “I don’t begrudge them it. It’s just damn inconvenient.” He hands me a holoCom from his pocket. “They’re synced. I’ll be calling my ships to meet us, and I imagine you’ll stay here with your new prize. Wouldn’t do to have shuttles going back and forth.”

  I want to ask him about Leto. Why he killed him. But why show a devil you know his strength? It just makes me a threat to him. And I’ve seen how he deals with threats. Better to play ignorant and make sure I’m always useful.

  “War presents us with more opportunities,” I say. “Depending on how far we want it to spread …”

  “I do believe I take your meaning.”r />
  “All others will try to suffocate the flames, to preserve what they have. Especially Pliny, and your sister.”

  “Well, then we must be cleverer.”

  “She doesn’t get hurt. That part of our agreement is static.”

  “If ever she’s wounded, I believe it’ll be from you, not me.” He might be right. “But I’m on your level: Fan the flames. Spread the war. Win it. Take the spoils.”

  “I think I know just how to do it. What can your network tell me about the shipyards of Ganymede?”

  PART III

  CONQUER

  When falls the Iron Rain, be brave. Be brave.

  —LORN AU ARCOS

  25

  PRAETORS

  “We are undone, that is what the ArchGovernor of Callisto has said.” ArchGovernor Nero au Augustus peers around the table to see if we understand the gravity of his words. The aquiline angles of his face catch the ship’s warroom lights, hollowing his cheeks and giving him the look of a falcon peering down its beak. “And why should he not? The Core rallies against us. Neptune is in farOrbit—Vespasian’s ships will be six months in coming to reinforce us. All this while my own bannermen hide behind their shields in their cities on Mars, sending only their second- and third-born to aid us.” He looks at the two far members of the table. “Their feebleness cripples us. And now I sit here in council with my Praetors, my men of arms, and what grand schemes do they devise?”

  Run. That’s what they say. We fled Luna a month ago. And we’ve not stopped running since, because the Sovereign was crafty and her forces beat us to Mars.

  This is not how I thought it would go. But then again, none of this is my damn fault. Cautious bloody fools surround the ArchGovernor. Golds too frightened to lose all the favor and power they’ve gained in the past to risk any of it now. Worse, they squeeze me out. Alliances form against me. You can see it in their eyes, in their shoulders. My gain is their loss. Even those who followed my lead on Luna. Even those I saved from certain death. They do the same to the Jackal, and they think it a victory he is not here in this room bickering with them. Their mistake.