Maybe because Cassius is with me, I find its dereliction less tragic than I expected. Time marches on. Nothing we build lasts forever, not without others to keep it. That was one of the many reasons I did not take the throne of the Volk for myself. Fá’s words haunt me. Ouroboros. It reminded me of what Lorn once told me: Death begets death begets death.
Crabs skitter from our boots as we walk along the bridge from the landing pads to the keep. I am sore, and not just from my fight with Fá. Even with Diomedes and the Daughters, Sevro needed help taking the Pandora back from the Ascomanni who wanted to keep it. This time Cassius and I guarded Sevro’s flank as he led the fight to free his wife’s ship wearing his father’s helmet.
I have broken ribs, three punctures in my right thigh, a wound on my upper chest from a spear that went through me, and countless bruises, sprains, and superficial lacerations. Not to mention, Fá’s poison lingers in my system, still giving me boughts of nausea. Lorn would laugh and say I walk like him now.
The fight on the Pandora turned when we freed the enslaved crew—many of Julii’s old sailors, techs, janitors even. They helped us use the ship’s systems against the holdouts and flushed them into the sea to feed the gathering leviathans. The lowColors cried and kissed Sevro afterward, and he fell to his knees with them when they heard they were going home. Not yet, though. There’s still more to do.
Cassius pauses before we enter the keep between the stone hippogriffs that guard the doors. He looks out to sea. “You’d almost think the moon is sleeping,” he says.
“It does seem eerie,” I say. “Not a ship in the sky.”
The surface of Europa is quiet. Its cities dim. But its people are not gone. They are safe in the Deep with Athena protecting them, waiting to hear if they will get their moon back and can emerge like spring flowers from the winter snow. The Ascomanni may have fled the stronger Volk ships in droves—streaming back to the Garter to seek strength in numbers with their own people—so the Volk remain the only power on Europa.
“If the wrong person wins your election, will the Europans get their moon back?” Cassius asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I really don’t.”
So much rests on the Volk vote that I had to leave to resist the temptation to interfere any more than I already have. Athena begged and Diomedes demanded for me to pick a ruler, but I can’t just think about their moons, their people. I have to think of us all.
“You promised Diomedes we’d help free the Garter,” Cassius says, watching a gull coast past. “If the wrong person wins, how are we doing that without the Volk? If Atlas didn’t go back to the Core, then—”
“Cassius.”
“Sorry. Anxiety spiral. Yes, yes. But also, what if Athena does actually take your head, or doesn’t take you to the ships once Europa is free of the Volk like she promised?”
I leave him to worry without me.
“Darrow!” He rushes after me through the doors. “No need to be rude.”
“Can we just walk?” I ask and put an arm over his shoulders. “Please?” He smiles grandly and wraps his arm back behind my waist, ready to saunter. “Stop it.”
“Fine. A dour trudge down memory lane it is.”
The keep is as cold inside as it is outside. The place was abandoned when Lorn’s household followed him into the war I sparked between House Augustus and House Bellona almost a decade and a half ago. Its hundreds of lamps lie dark. Its halls, once filled with summer midnight dances and the laughter of his many grandchildren, lie mute. I pass room after room, each as unfamiliar as the next. I have no memories of this place except for the ones I made on that day I brought Lorn out of his retirement and into my war. He fell before he could return.
We descend the stairs to where Tactus died on the edge of Lorn’s knife, and stand in that room to honor my dead friend. Tactus hinted he might have lived for more than himself just before he died. I remember it as one of the sadder moments of my life.
Cassius lets me go into Lorn’s room alone. It is emptier than I imagined it would be. There are no trophies, no razors, no mementos from his wars. Only pictures of his family, books, and rings by the bedside. One for each of his sons, and one for his wife. He left them here. He did not bring them to war. The Kalibar said they kept the place exactly as he left it, and protected it from looters.
I believe them now.
I catch myself in one of the room’s mirrors. I look like his ghost. But I’m not. In his bathroom I search for a razor. Then I laugh, because I remember one of the old stories about him. When he was a lancer, his Praetor told him to go shave because Peerless are beardless, boy. Lorn pulled out his razor and did it right there. I shave my beard with Bad Lass in his bathroom mirror. In this way I say goodbye to him and Ragnar both. I do a sloppy job and cut myself a few times.
“Wait. Who are you and what did you do with the ancient mariner?” Cassius says when I exit without a beard.
I scratch my bare chin. “Remembered an old story.”
“Oh yes. The ‘Peerless Beardless.’ Love that one. Think it’s true?” he asks.
“Definitely. Why do we even buy laser trimmers anyway?”
He scoffs at the knicks on my chin, and begins to shave his beard right in front of me. “Social conditioning,” he says and continues both chattering and shaving as we descend to the training grotto. “Pervasive marketing. It’s the companies really. They get you when you’re young.”
I tune him out and eventually he runs out of opinions on the topic. Unlike me, he doesn’t cut himself shaving once.
The seawall that once sheltered the grotto lies only a few paces above the waterline now. The statues of the gods that surrounded the grotto were too weak to face the ocean’s storms, and many of the gods who watched Lorn practice the Willow Way lie broken. I clear barnacles and seaweed from the training floor with Pyrphoros to reveal the willow tree inlaid into the stone. It is identical to the one in his old estate on Mars. I feel another deep pang of nostalgia.
Several disembodied fingers from one of the statues lie on the training floor. Setting my knee on the outsized digits, I kneel, about to say a silent prayer to Lorn. I feel Cassius watching me. “You know, when Lorn left Mars for Europa, he wanted me to withdraw from my position as Nero’s lancer and come with him to finish my training,” I say.
“You regret not going?” Cassius asks.
“No. But I always wonder what if I had.”
“Well, you’d have missed the gala.” I look up at him and he’s pointing at me like I said it. I laugh. “I think you’ve finished your training at this point. So why are we here?” he asks.
I look around. “I came to say I was sorry to him. About Alexandar.”
Cassius looks down. “Ah.” He hesitates.
“What?”
“Well, do you think that’s right?” he asks.
“What? Praying to a dead atheist?”
“Well, yes. That. But also apologizing?”
“Alexandar died as my lancer,” I say. “Lorn lost all his sons to war. He didn’t want their daughters or sons to go the same way.”