Golden Son (The Red Rising Trilogy, Book 2)

by Brown, Pierce

  “The dear Politico Pliny is right, however: I would have avoided this war. In fact, I tried. Why else do you think I allowed Cassius au Bellona to court me? But war is here. And I will protect my family again from all threats, those from without and from within.”

  Augustus lets slip the smallest, barest of smiles, a twin to the first. His love is the most conditional I’ve ever seen. How quickly he can call his daughter a whore, then smile as she reclaims what power she lost in the room. Suddenly, she matters.

  “Then what do you think of my plan?” I ask.

  “I think it is dangerous. It spreads the war without ensuring our benefit. It is immoral and sets dangerous precedent. But then again, war is inherently immoral. So we must simply decide how far we want to go.”

  “You know Octavia better than I,” I say. “How far will she go?”

  Mustang is quiet for a moment. “If we have a victory and sue for peace either from a position of strength or weakness, she will accept the overture.…”

  “You see!” Pliny beams.

  Mustang isn’t finished. “She will suggest a neutral location. And on that day when we go to make peace, she will do everything in her power to kill all of us.”

  Pliny looks back and forth between us, realizing how easily he’s been played.

  “So there is no going back? Win or die?” I ask flatly.

  “Indeed, Darrow,” she says with a smile. “Win or die.”

  “It seems you’ve been outmaneuvered, Pliny. We move forward with Darrow’s plan.” Augustus stands. “Tomorrow, Praetor Licenus will take command of this vessel and its fleet and lead the Sovereign’s fleet on a chase, while I take a small strike group of corvettes and frigates to the Gas Giants. With them, I will raid the shipyards of Ganymede.”

  “I will go with you, my liege!” Kavax booms. His fox jumps off his lap at the noise to tremble under the table.

  “No.”

  Kavax’s face falls. “No? But, Nero … the defenses there—battle stations, destroyers, torchShips—they will shred any force of corvettes you bring.” His large hands gesture imploringly. “Let us do this for you.”

  “You forget who I am, my friend.”

  “Apologies, I did not mean …”

  Augustus waves the apology away and turns to Mustang. “Daughter, you will take what elements of the fleet you need to execute the second portion of Darrow’s plan.”

  Watching Pliny now is like watching a child try to hold on to a handful of sand. He doesn’t understand the course things have taken. But he’s not fool enough to make his play now. He will wait in the grass like the snake he is.

  The ArchGovernor turns to me. “Darrow, what did you say to me before you shed Cassius’s blood?”

  “I said that you should be King of Mars.”

  “My friends.” Augustus sets his thin hands down on the table, fingers rigid. “Darrow has demonstrated powers none of you possess. He predicts what I want. I want to be king. Make me so. Dismissed.”

  The room empties. I wait with Augustus. He wants a private word.

  Mustang brushes close to me as she passes, winking playfully.

  “Nice speech,” I mutter.

  “Nice plan.”

  She squeezes my hand and then she is gone.

  “In league again,” Augustus observes. He gestures me to close the door. I sit near him. The hard lines of his face deepen as he stares into my eyes. From a distance, the lines are invisible. But this close, they are the things that make his face. Loss gives a man lines like this, reminding me, This is the man you do not anger. The man you do not owe.

  “We can do away with righteous indignation before it finds a place on your tongue.” He steeples his fingers, examining the manicured cuticles. “The question is simple, and you will answer it: Are you a demokrat?”

  I had not expected this. I try not to look around nervously.

  “No, my liege. I am no demokrat.”

  “Not a Reformer? Not someone who wants to alter our Compact to create a more fair, more decent society?”

  “Man is organized properly now,” I say, pausing, “except for a few notable exceptions.”

  “Pliny?”

  “Pliny.”

  “You each have your gifts. And you would do well not to question my judgment in keeping him close.”

  “Yes, my liege. But I am no more a demokrat than you are a Lune.”

  He does not smile as I intended. Instead, he presses a button and the speech I used to win over the Pax comes on the speakers. An HC holo shows the faces of different Colors.

  “Watch their expressions.” He watches mine as he cycles through a series of video clips from different parts of the ship as the crew listens to the speech I gave before they rose against their Gold commanders. “Do you see that? That right there. The spark? Do you?”

  “I see it.”

  “That is hope.” The man who killed my wife waits for my face to give me away. Good luck with that. “Hope.”

  “Are you saying I made a mistake?” I ask.

  He recalls old words. “Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.”

  “My heart has always been laid bare.”

  “So you say.” His lips part slightly, hissing the words. “But as terrorists spread lies over the net, as bombings rack our cities, as the lowColors rumble with displeasure, as we begin a war despite the termites in our foundation, you say this.”

  “Any chaos is—”

  “Shut your mouth. Do you know what would happen if the other Governors thought us Reformers? If the other houses looked at mine as a bastion of equality and demokracy?” He points to a glass. “Our potential allies.” He brushes the glass off the table, letting it shatter. Points to another. “Our lives.” It falls and shatters too. “It is bad enough my daughter had the ear of the Reformer bloc on Luna. You cannot seem political. Stay a warrior. Stay simple. Do you understand?”

  What if the lowColors rally to us? I want to ask, but he would have his Obsidians kill me where I stand.

  “I understand.”

  “Good.” Augustus looks at his hands, twisting the ring there. Hesitancy creeps over him. “Can I trust you?”

  “In what way?”

  A scornful laugh bursts from his mouth. “Most would say yes without thinking.”

  “Most men are liars.”

  “Can I trust you with power autonomous from my own?” He scratches his jaw idly. “That is when many leave their lords. It is when hunger fills their eyes. The Romans learned this time and again. It is why they did not let generals cross the Rubicon with their armies without the permission of the Senate. Men with armies soon begin to realize how strong they are. And they always know that their particular strength is not forever. It must be used with haste, before their army leaves them. But hasty decisions can ruin empires. My son, for instance, must never be allowed such power.”

  “He has his businesses.”

  “That is a slow power. Cleverly done on his part, if unfit for my name. Slow power can grind away any stagnant enemy. But fast power, one that can travel where you go, do what you wish it to as effectively as a hammer hitting a nail, that is the power that lops off heads and steals crowns. Can I trust you with it?”

  “You must. I am the only man who can go to Lorn.”

  Surprise flashes in his eyes; he is unused to having his machinations guessed. He buries the surprise quickly, unwilling to give credit where credit is due. “You knew already.”

  “You wish me to approach Lorn, ask for his help, because he taught me the razor.”

  “And because he loves you.”

  I blink dumbly. “I’m not sure that’s the word.”

  “He had four sons. Three died in front of him. The last Lysander’s father, in an accident, as you know. I believe you remind him of them, though you’re in fact more capable and less moral, which is to your advantage. But as much as he loves you, Lorn hates me.”

&nbs
p; “He hates Octavia more, my liege.”

  “Still. It won’t be easy to convince him to join us.”

  “Then I won’t give him a choice.”

  27

  JELLY BEANS

  The Telemanuses wait for me in the hall. Kavax takes me into a hug that cracks my back. Daxo nods his head. I’m left feeling dazed between the two of them. It is the first time I’ve spoken to either without violence afoot. Truth be told, I’ve avoided them for shame of what I let happen to Pax.

  “My boy only ever lost to you,” Kavax says. “Little Pax. If he was to fall to a knee, it is no shame to have fallen in friendship. I only wish he could have taken Olympus with you. That would have been a sight.”

  “I would have liked to have seen him take Proctor Jupiter’s armor.”

  Daxo grins. “I was Jupiter House myself. Primus till I lost to Karnus au Bellona.”

  “Then I believe we have a mutual enemy.”

  “Besides the scheming little bastard that killed my baby brother?” Daxo asks softly. “We have many shared enemies, Andromedus.”

  Kavax scoops up his fox. It licks his neck and peers fiercely at me before it nuzzles into his thick red beard. It has a white chest, black legs, and dark russet fur covering the rest of its body. Thicker and hardier than a normal fox, and weighing nearly thirty-five kilograms, it really is more wolflike in size.

  “Foxes are beautiful creatures,” Kavax says, stroking the beast.

  Daxo nods. “Mischievous. Omnivorous. Resistant to poaching. Monogamous. Very special, and able to expand their hunting grounds even in the territory of wolves.” He looks up at me darkly. “But because of a damn quirk of nature, foxes fare poorly against jackals. We asked Augustus to banish Adrius. For a time, he was, yet now he returns to the fleet.”

  “A crime,” I say.

  They nod.

  Daxo sets a hand on my shoulder. “The girls—my sisters and mother, I mean—wanted you to know that we do not hold you accountable for Pax’s death. We loved that little boy, and we know you only ever mean him honors. We know you named your ship for him. And will not forget it. Once friends, always friends. That is our family’s way.”

  Kavax nods to every word his remaining son says. He tosses his fox a handful of jelly beans.

  “So if you need us,” Daxo suggests, nodding to the warroom, “you need merely ask, and the House Telemanus will lend itself to your cause.”

  “You mean that?” I ask.

  “It would have made my Pax happy,” older Kavax rumbles.

  I clasp his hand and try my luck. “You’ll forgive me my manners, but I need you now.”

  Great eyebrows arch as the two behemoths share a look of surprise. “Investigate, Sophocles! Investigate,” Kavax says excitedly. The large fox at his legs slips forward warily to investigate me, sniffing my knees, peering at my shoes and hands. It weaves through my legs in its search. Then it pounces on me, putting forepaws on my hips and digging its snout into my pocket. Sophocles resurfaces with two jelly beans, chewing contentedly.

  “Magic!” Kavax booms, clapping me on the shoulder. “Sophocles has discovered a propitious sign of approval, by magic! What a good omen! Daxo, my son. Summon your sisters and mother. The Reaper calls. House Telemanus must answer!”

  “The girls were visiting Neptune, Father. They’ll be a few months.”

  “Well, then we must answer.”

  “Couldn’t agree with you more, Father.”

  “I’ll have instructions within the hour,” I say.

  “Great anticipation!” Kavax thumps away. “We await them with great anticipation.” He roars compliments at passing Oranges, terrifying them with his wide-grinning approval. Daxo and I watch on.

  “Does he really believe in magic?” I ask.

  “He says gnomes steal ear wax from him at night. Mother thinks he’s been hit too many times on the head.” Daxo backs away, following his father. But he can’t hide his clever smile as he pops a jelly bean into his mouth, and I see where the ones in my pocket came from. “I say he just lives in a more entertaining world than we do. Call on us soon, Reaper. Father is eager.”

  After meeting over holo with the Jackal to bring him up to speed on my plan and adjusting it according to a few of his recommendations, I have Orion set a course for Europa. It will take two weeks. Roque joins me on the bridge, watching the skeleton crew of Blues. He doesn’t speak. Yet it’s the first time he’s sought me out since we left Luna. It’s a weight hanging over my head.

  “I’m sorr—” I begin.

  “I don’t want to talk about Quinn,” he says quietly. “I know you wanted this war. Engineered it instead of trusting me to buy your contract and protect you. What I don’t know is why you drugged me.”

  “I wanted to protect you. Because I knew I would need you after the gala, and I couldn’t risk your safety.”

  “What about what I need?” he asks. “You don’t have the right to make choices for me because you’re afraid it might interrupt your plans. Friends don’t do that.”

  “You’re right. It was wrong of me.” I nod slowly, meaning it.

  “Wrong to stick a needle in my neck?”

  “Beyond wrong. But know the intent was good, even if the idea and execution were as stupid as they come. If I have to get on my knees …”

  “There’s an image.” I know he’s joking, but his face does not laugh or smile as he turns and walks away.

  28

  THE STORMSONS

  “You come to me at the head of a storm,” my friend says, gray beard blowing sideways in the wind as he looks at the waves far beneath. “Did you know there are boys here on this ocean world who take skiffs into gales worse than this? Lads from the dregs of the Grays, Reds, even Browns. Their bravery is a mad, crazed sort.” He points out from the balcony with a heavy finger to the roiling black water, where waves crest ten meters high. “They call them stormsons.”

  The gravity here is maddening. Everything floats. At 0.136 of Earth’s gravity, every step I take must be measured, controlled, else I’ll burst upward fifteen feet and have to wait to flutter back down. A fight here would be like a ballet underwater. I wear gravBoots just to move comfortably.

  The old man watches the ocean world move around his island. He is as he always told me to be—a stone amid the waves; wet, yet unimpressed by all that swirls about him. Saltwater spray drips from his beard. Burnished gold eyes blink against the storm’s bitter wind.

  “When you are in the salt, you feel like every gale is the world ender. Every wave the greatest that has been. These boys ride the gales in rapture at their own glory. But every now and then, a true storm rises. It shatters their masts and rips the hair from their heads. They do not last long till the sea swallows them whole. But their mothers have wept their deaths long before, as I wept for yours the first day we met.”

  He stares at me intensely, mouth pinched behind his thick beard.

  “I never told you, but I was not raised in a palace or in a city like many of the Peerless you know. My father thought there to be two evils in the world. Technology and culture. He was a hard man. A killer, like the rest of them. But his hardness was found not in what he could do, but in what he wouldn’t do, in his restraint. In the pleasures he denied himself, and his sons. He lived to a hundred and sixty-three without the help of cell rejuvenation. Somehow he lived through eight Iron Rains. But still he never valued life, because he took it too often. He was not a man to be happy.”

  I watch the former Rage Knight, Lorn au Arcos, lean over the balcony of his castle. It is a limestone fortress set amid a sea ninety kilometers deep. Modern lines shape the place. It is not medieval, but a meld of past and present—glass and steel making hard angles with the stone island—so like the man I respect above all other Golds of his generation.

  Like him, this castle is a harsh place when the storms come. But when the storms fade, sunshine will bathe this place, shining through her glass walls, glinting off her steel supports. Child
ren will run its ten-kilometer length, through its gardens, along its walls, down to the harbor. Wind will tickle their hair, and all that Lorn will hear from his library is the crying of gulls, the crash of the sea, and the laughter of his grandchildren and their mothers, whom he guards in place of his dead sons. The only one missing is little Lysander.

  If all Golds were like him, Reds would still toil beneath the Earth, but he would have them know their purpose. It doesn’t make him good, but it makes him true.

  He’s thick and broad and shorter than I. He lets his empty whiskey tumbler go and permits the wind to swoop it sideways. It falls and the sea swallows it whole. “They say you can hear the dead stormsons whooping in the wind,” he mutters. “I say it’s the crying of their mothers.”

  “Storms of court have a way of drawing people back in,” I say.

  He laughs a derisive laugh, one that scorns the idea that I would know anything about the storms of court, anything about the winds that blow.

  I came to him in secret, flying with a single ship, my five-kilometer destroyer Pax. I told my master he would not help us. But I held on to hope he would want to help me. Yet now that I see Lorn au Arcos again in the knotted flesh, I’m reminded of the nature of the man, and I worry. He knows my captains and lieutenants are listening through the com unit in my ear. I paid him respects and showed it to him so that he would not assume our conversation to be a private one.

  “After more than a century of living, my body does not yet betray me.” One would think him to be in his midsixties, at first glance. Only his scars truly age him. The one on his neck, like a smile, was given to him four decades ago by a Stained in the Moon Kings’ Rebellion, when the Governors of Jupiter’s moons thought to make their own kingdoms after Octavia deposed her father as Sovereign. The one that claims part of his nose came from the Ash Lord, when they dueled as youths. “You’ve heard the expression ‘The duty of the son is the glory of the father’?”