“Either you think I am stupid, or you want to wound me. Do you want to wound me, Lysander?” She slaps me again. “Do you want to wound me?”
“No,” I whisper.
She searches my eyes. “Then why send Apollonius’s men, you little rat? Why build yourself an army with a man who has sworn to kill me?”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“What? Louder.”
“I’m sorry,” I say and go to my knees. “Forgive me. I was…jealous. Ajax has been gaining one glory after the next. I play governor when others are fighting, dying. When this war is done, all will remember those who fought and those who did not. My reputation is hollow if I’m known for little more than a cavalry charge. I knew you wouldn’t let me in on the glory. So, I thought…if I had the Dockyards of Venus, if I had the Minotaur, I could attack Mars. Gain glory. Respect. I’m sorry.”
Her eyes narrow as she tries to decide if my tears are true. “Are you a Red? Then stand on your feet when you apologize to me.”
I stand, slumped with shame. “I apologize for my duplicity.”
She searches my eyes. She’s a master of the Dancing Mask and the emotional sciences of interrogators, so it is like having an Oracle on my arm. If she sees the hate, if she smells the loathing, if she so much as senses I know she killed my mother and my father, I’ll die right here. I embrace the Mind’s Eye more quickly than I ever have in my life. I feel only what I want to feel. I hold nothing inside but the false truth.
I pass her examination. Her tone softens. “Shhh,” she says, and kisses the pink flesh on my cheek. “Shh.” She embraces me, rubbing my back like a mother. “I know. I understand, dear heart. Better than anyone. It was always Aja and Moira that Octavia and my father saw. You feel unseen. It’s prime. You’ve had your tantrum. I hear you. I see you. I will bathe you in glory beyond your wildest dreams. But I need to know I can rely on you.”
“You can.”
“Can I? I know you value unity. This ongoing flirtation with the Rim. It’s beneath you. It is not the Core and Rim that must be united. It is you and me. We are the future.
“So tomorrow at the summit I will need a demonstration of fidelity. The Two Hundred chafe at my ascendancy. Their jealousy knows no bounds. They will look to you to oppose me. And what will you do?” She lifts my chin. “You will sit amongst my supporters, silent and stoic in your support. If you make a scene, if you contradict me, if you sow doubt, if you so much as frown, I will skin your Master Maker and make you a pair of Glirastes leather boots.” Locusts cackle in the distance. “Now, tell Glirastes you will protect him.”
Approaching Glirastes, my artifice cracks. Pity wells in me. He is a miserable sight. His horror-stricken face turns up to me in relief, as if I’ve already saved him.
“I will protect you,” I say, hollow.
A pathetic sob wracks him and he lunges up to embrace me, grateful. I hold his shaking body until Atlas pulls him away and Atalantia takes my hand and steers me to my bike. I watch Glirastes until he disappears back into the cage. Atalantia’s boots stand on my heart.
“What House do you think you would have been?” Atalantia asks. “At the Institute? Atlas was Pluto, which is apt. I was Apollo, like a glove.” She nudges me with her shoulder. “I hope it would have been Minerva, and you would have been wise. Because if it had been Jupiter, as you seem to want everyone to think, then I’d know to be wary of you. After all, what’s more dangerous than a man who believes his cause is just?”
“A woman who believes she is untouchable,” I reply.
She smiles, condescending. “Listen, Lysander. I know you. You are too gentle for this game. This game is meant for people like me. I will win it, not because I can do everything, but because I will do anything. It’s easy for me. Natural. I don’t want to win alone. Alone is a bore, and boredom…well that is where my demons find me. I want you to share my dominion. I want your life to be a beautiful thing. I do. I want them to call you Lysander the Peacemaker. A man to live for two hundred years, and be worshipped for a thousand more. Fair. Noble. Loved. That would be my heart’s delight. We can even go beyond this pale little star and found new worlds. Yes, I remember your dreams of childhood. But it is Lysander the Peacemaker I desire. Not Lysander the Conqueror. I am the Conqueror.”
She backs off, beats her chest twice with her right fist like an Obsidian gladiator, winks, and saunters away to her party.
* * *
—
I am not invited to Atalantia’s moonlit gathering on the plateau. The songs of her hired musicians drift over the lands once held by Carthage, and are lost in the wind as my gravBike takes me back to New Sparta.
The air cools when the sun resigns behind the western mountains. Soon, warBastions appear in the distance, then the broken battlewalls of New Sparta. The walls rise into the purpling sky like fractured smoker’s teeth. Next to them, like gleaming incisors, stand newly built skyscrapers from which flutter the banners of House Grimmus. Atalantia’s construction teams will soon have repaired the damage done to the city by her own assault. She is said to have led that assault in person before dragging the Republic governor out and crucifying him along with his family.
Eight years after Darrow chased the Grimmuses from their ancestral city, they have returned more powerful than when they left.
The citadel my betrothed gave me for the summit is a fantasy. Songbirds sing in rows of freshly planted cherry trees. Marvelous lizards crawl through terraformed lawns and warm themselves in pools. Crimson stags with flowers growing from their antlers flit behind trees sculpted painstakingly by cohorts of Brown botanists and Red gardeners to make the forms of dancers with their boughs and trunks.
It would all be so lovely if I could ignore the sound the wind carries—the piston thump-thump thump-thump of boots on the Field of Mars; the groaning, almost whale-like sound of warships passing over the sea; and the screams from the purges down by the wharf.
No friends or Praetorians wait for me at the villa. The numerous servants are Atalantia’s, as are the Violet performers who practice in the lawn, and the oiled Pinks who lounge in the harem provided, ironically, for my amusement. They tilt their mouths toward one another’s as I pass, willful and coy.
Lavish gifts from my betrothed fill my villa. Carvelings—a pegasus, a leographon that terrifies all but the Obsidian beastmaster holding his chain—wait for me in the yard. There are artifacts too, and weapons, and white and silver armor fit for Silenius himself.
More than ever, I miss the humble asceticism of the Raa and the excited industry of the Votum. I cannot stand to think of how badly I miss my dinners with Glirastes.
When night falls, I sit alone at the dining table set with my untouched dinner. Birds flit around the columns of the grotto and a light rain falls over the sea. A valet appears to announce a visitor. “Dominus, the Storm Knight is at the door and requests to join you for dinner, and that the cook prepare more food.”
“Tell au Grimmus I’m sleeping,” I say. I can’t take mockery now.
The valet bows and disappears. There’s a bang and a laugh. Ajax enters, stinking of battle and wet fur. So large and rough, in a house so clean and genteel, he seems from another dimension. Tossing his leopard cloak on a chair, he crashes into a seat.