Golden Son

by Pierce Brown

  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 wrack 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. And then the last 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.”

  “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 for 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 resurf
aces with two jelly beans, panting 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 Uranus, 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.”

  “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 amidst 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 their 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 amidst 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, shinning through her glass walls, glinting off her steel supports. Children 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 mid-sixties, 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’?”

  “I have said it myself.”

  He grunts. “I have lived it. I have lost many for my own glory. I have set my ship into the storm on purpose. Each time with women and children in tow.” He lets the waves speak for a moment. They crash on the rocks and then pull backward, slurping as they go, drawing things to the sea they call Discordia.

  “It is not right to live so long, I think. My great-granddaughter was born last night. I still have the smell of blood on my fingers.” He holds them out—like tree roots, crooked and calloused from the holding of weapons. They tremble slightly. “These took her from the darkness to the light, from warmth to the cold, and cut the cord themselves. It would be a fine world if that was the last flesh they cut.”

  He relaxes his hands and sets them on the cold stone. I wonder what Mustang would say to this man. Seeing them face-to-face would be like watching fire trying to catch on stone. She balked at my plan in public, but then again, that was all our design. Plans within plans within plans.

  “To think about what hands feel,” Lorn mutters. “Thes
e have felt the lifeblood of three strong sons as their hearts pumped it out of their bodies. They’ve felt the cold of a razor’s hilt as they stole the dreams of youth. They’ve worn the love of a girl and a woman and then felt those heartbeats fade to silence. All for my glory. All because I chose to ride the sea. All because I am strong and do not die easily as most.” He frowns. “Hands, I think, were not meant to feel so much.”

  “Mine have felt more than I’d wish,” I say. I feel the snap go through them that I felt at Eo’s hanging. The texture of her hair. I remember the warmth of Pax’s blood. The chill of Lea’s pale face in the cold morning after Antonia butchered her. The grainy red smear of haemanthus blossom. Mustang’s bare hip as we lay by the fire.

  “You are young still. When you’re white-haired, you’ll have felt even more.”

  “Some men don’t grow old.” No Helldiver does.

  “No. Some don’t.” He pokes Augustus’s lion’s badge on my dark uniform. “And lions do not live so long as griffins. We can fly away from things, you see.” He brandishes his own family ring and flaps his arms foolishly, drawing a smile from me. He wears it along with his House Mars ring. “You were a pegasus once, were you not?”

  “It was the symbol … is the symbol of Andromedus.” My false Gold family. But the symbol reminds me of Eo. She pointed out the Andromeda Galaxy to me before she died. It means so much and so little all at once.

  “There’s honor in staying what you were,” he says.

  “Sometimes we have to change. Not all of us are born rich as you.”

  “Let us go find Icarus in the forest.” He mentioned him often on Mars, but I’ve never seen Lorn’s favorite pet. “Carolina conspired with Vincent to make him a new toy. I think you’ll appreciate it.”

  “Where are your children?”

  “East wing till you leave.”

  “I’m that dangerous?”

  He does not answer.

  I follow my friend in off the balcony just as one of Europa’s clouds spits blue lightning across the dark sky. Her oceans buck and heave as great swells of water slither and seep along the white walls, as if the world of oceans conspired to swallow the man-made island. Despite all this, the castle and the raging storm still seem so small when I see how Jupiter consumes the night sky behind the clouds—a textured gas giant staring down at us like the head of some great marble god.