DINNER IS SERVED SHORTLY AFTER Daxo and Mustang arrive from Hyperion with my brother Kieran and niece, Rhonna. We eat at a long wooden table covered with candles and hearty provincial Martian dishes spiced with curry and cardamom. Sevro, swarmed by his daughters, makes faces at them as they eat. But when the air cracks with a sonic boom, he bolts upright, looks at the sky, and runs off into the house, urging his children to stay put. He returns a whole half an hour later arm in arm with his wife, hair a mess, two jacket buttons missing, touching a white napkin to a bloodied, split lip. My old friend Victra, immaculate in a high-collared green jacket threaded with gemstones, beams devilishly across the patio at me. She’s seven months pregnant with their fourth daughter. “Well, if it isn’t the Reaper in the leathery flesh. Apologies, my goodman. I’m dreadfully late.”
Her long legs cover the distance in three strides.
I greet her with a hug. She squeezes my butt hard enough to make me jump. She kisses Mustang on the head and slides into a chair, dominating the table. “Hello, gloomy one,” she says to Electra. She looks at young Pax and Baldur, who’ve been huddled conspiratorially at the far end of the table. Both boys blush furiously. “Will one of you handsome lads pour Aunty Victra some juice? She’s had a hellish day.” They scramble over one another to be the first to grab the pitcher. Baldur wins, and, pleased as a peacock, the quiet Obsidian lad solemnly pours Victra a towering glass. “Damnable mechanics union is on strike again. I’ve got docks full of freight that’s ready to move, but the little bastards got all spiced up by a Vox Populi mouthpiece and took the power couplings out of more than half the ships in my Luna food haulers and hid them.”
“What do they want?” Mustang asks.
“Aside from the moon to starve? Higher wages, better living conditions…the usual tripe. They say it’s too expensive to live on Luna with their wages. Well, there’s plenty of room on Earth!”
“How ungrateful of the unwashed peasants,” my mother says.
“I detect your sarcasm, Deanna, and I’m choosing to ignore it in honor of our recently returned heroes. There will be enough debate later in the week. Anyway, I’m practically a saint. Mother would have sent Grays in to crack their ungrateful skulls. Thank Jove the tinmen still bloody any Vox they see.”
“It’s their right to bargain collectively,” Mustang says, reaching down to wipe a bit of hummus off the face of Sevro’s youngest, Diana. “Written in ink in the New Compact.”
“Yes, of course it is. Unions are the heart of fair labor,” Victra mutters. “It’s the only thing Quicksilver and I agree upon.”
Mustang smiles. “Better. You’re a paragon of the Republic once again.”
“You only just missed Dancer,” Sevro says.
“I thought it reeked of self-righteousness.” Victra goes to sip her juice and jumps in surprise. Baldur still stands at her side, smiling a bit too earnestly. “Oh, you’re still here. Begone, creature.” She kisses her fingers and then presses them to Baldur’s cheek, pushing him away. He goes, drifting on air back to my envious son.
Afterwards, as the children go off into the vineyard to play, we retire to the back grotto. My family, those by blood and by choice, surround me. For the first time in over a year, I feel peace settling into me. My wife puts her feet in my lap and instructs me to rub them.
“I think Pax is in love with you, Victra,” Mustang laughs as Daxo pours her a glass of wine. His hands dwarf the bottle. A taller man than I am, he has difficulty sitting in his chair and keeps accidentally kicking my shins under the table. Kieran and his wife, Dio, hold hands on a bench by the fire. When I was younger, I remember thinking how much she looked like Eo. But now, as time passes, the shadow of my wife’s face fades and I see only the woman who is the center of my brother’s being. She lurches forward suddenly, away from a shower of embers as Niobe dumps another log on the flames. Thraxa sits off in the corner, furtively lighting a burner.
“Well, Pax could have worse an idol than his godmother,” Victra says, eyeing her husband, who is picking his teeth with a splinter of wood he’s pried from the outdoor table. She pushes him with her foot. “That’s grotesque. Stop.”
“Sorry.”
“Yet you’re not stopping.”
“Bit of gristle, my love.” He turns like he’s throwing the splinter away, but keeps picking. “Got it,” he says gloomily. Instead of throwing the salvaged gristle to the side, he chews on it and swallows. “Beef.”
“Beef?” Mustang looks back at the table. “We had chicken and lamb.”
Sevro frowns. “Odd. Kieran, when did we last have beef?”
“At the Howler dinner, three days ago.” Noses wrinkle around the table.
Sevro chuckles to himself. “Then it was well aged.”
Daxo shakes his head and continues sketching angels for Diana, who sits on his lap admiring the man’s work. He’s no fool with a razor, but his true art is made with a stylus. Victra looks helplessly at Mustang over her juice, despairing of her husband. “Proof, my dear, that love is blind.”
“Mickey can fix that face if you’re tired of looking at it,” I say.
“Good luck. You’d have to pry the decadent sprite away from his laboratory,” Daxo says. The bald man considers Diana’s addition of a cruelly barbed trident to the angel he’s drawn. “Not to mention his admirers. He brought quite the menagerie to the Opera last September. It was a bit like a Hieronymus Bosch painting come alive. One of them was even an actress. Can you imagine?” he asks Mustang. “Your father would have chewed through his cheek to see lowColors sitting in the Elorian.”
“He’s not the only one,” Victra says. “Too much new money these days. Quicksilver’s friends.” She shivers.
“Well, money doesn’t buy culture, does it?” Daxo replies.
“Not at all, my goodman. Not at all.”
As the night deepens, the orange fingers of the slow sunset thread their way through the trees. I let go of the strain in my shoulders and sink deeper into my cup, listening to my friends chatter and joke while little blue bugs flicker and stab violent light into the late summer twilight. The trees rustle beyond the terrace; the shouts of children come from the grounds as they play night games. The blistering sand seas of Mercury seem so far away now. The stench of war so remote in my mind they are little more than shards of half-forgotten dreams.
This is how life should be.
This peace. This laughter.
But even now I feel it slipping through my fingers like that faraway sand. I sense the House Augustus Lionguards out in the darkness of the forest, watching the sky, the shadows, helping us stay inside the fantasy a moment longer. Mustang catches my eye and nods toward the door.
Forcing myself to part ways from my friends as the Telemanuses give a rousing, drunken rendition of their family’s song, “The Fox of Summerfall,” I follow several minutes after Mustang disappears into the main house. The manor halls here are older even than those of the Citadel of Light. History is the mortar of the place. Relics from older ages adorn walls, festoon shelves. Octavia called this place home as a child. Her essence lingers in the rafters and the attic and the gardens, as do those of her ancestors and child. It is where Lysander would have played long before his path crossed mine. I feel the imprint the Lunes have left on the home. At first I thought it strange living in the house of my greatest enemy, but in all humanity, who knew the burdens Mustang and I face as well as Octavia? In life, I loathed her. In death, I understand her.
The scent of my wife reaches me before the sight of her. Our room is warm and the door shudders shut behind me on a rusted metal latch. A bottle of wine is open on the table beside the fireplace, where eagles and crescent moons of House Lune are carved into the stone corbels. Mustang’s slippers lie discarded on the floor. The ring of her father and my House Mars ring rest on the table beside her datapad, which flashes away with new messages.
She’s spooled herself into a chair on our veranda like a bit of golden yarn, reading the dog-eared book of Shelley’s poetry Roque gave her years ago during their summer of opera and art in Agea, after the Institute. She doesn’t look up as I approach. I stand behind her, considering better of speaking, and slide a hand through her hair. I knead my thumbs into the muscles of her neck and back. Her proud shoulders relent against my fingers and she turns her book over in her lap. Sharing a life threads more than flesh and blood together. It weaves her memories in and around and through mine.
The more I know of her, the more I share of her, the more I love her in a way the boy I used to be never knew how to love. Eo was a flame, dancing against the wind. I tried to catch her. Tried to hold her. But she was never meant to be held.
My wife is not as fickle as a flame. She is an ocean. I knew from the first that I cannot own her, cannot tame her, but I am the only storm that moves her depths and stirs her tides. And that is more than enough.
I lower my lips to her neck and taste the alcohol and sandalwood of her perfume. I breathe slow and easy, feeling the lightness of love and the wordless unspooling of the sea of space that kept us apart. Impossible, it seems, that we were ever so distant. That there was ever a time where she existed and I was not with her. Everything that she is, every scent, taste, touch, makes me know I am home. She reaches up, dragging her slender fingers through my hair. “I missed you,” I say.
“What’s not to miss?” she asks, giving me a sly smile. I move to sit with her on the chaise, but she clucks her tongue. “You’re not done yet. Keep rubbing, Imperator. Your Sovereign commands it.”
“I think power’s gone to your head.” She glances up at me. “Yes, ma’am.” I continue massaging her neck.
“I’m drunk,” she mutters. “I can already feel the hangover.”
“Thraxa’s good at making it feel like a moral obligation to keep pace.”
“Ten credits says we have to scrape Sevro off the patio tomorrow.”
“Poor Goblin. All spirit, no body mass.”
She laughs. “I put him and Victra in the west wing so we can actually get some sleep. Last time, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking a coyote was caught in the air recycler. I swear, at the pace they’re going they’ll be able to single-handedly populate Pluto in a few years.”
She pats the cushion beside her. I join her on the chaise and wrap my arms around her. The lake breeze sighs through the trees. In the silence we share, I feel her heartbeat and wonder what her eyes see as they look out over the tops of the trees to the orange sky.
“Dancer was here,” I say.
She makes a small noise of acknowledgment, to let me know she resents my reminder of the world beyond our balcony. “He’s not happy with you.”
“Half the Senate looked like they wanted to poison my wine.”
“I warned you. Luna’s changed since you were gone. The Vox Populi can’t be ignored any longer.”
“I noticed.”
“Yet when they passed a resolution, you spat in their eye.”
“And now they’ll spit in mine.”
“Seems that’s the bed you made.”
“Do they have the votes to block my request?”
“They might.”
“Even if you apply pressure?”
“You mean even if I clean up your mess.” It wasn’t a question.
“I made the right decision,” I say. “I know I did. You know I did. They don’t know war. They were afraid of being held responsible for failure. What was I supposed to do? Comb my hair while they protected their reputations?”
“Maybe you should learn from them.”
“I’m not going to hold a poll in the middle of a war. You could have vetoed them.”
“I could have. But then they’d cry that I was protecting my husband, and the Vox would gain more even supporters.”
“Copper and Obsidian are still in play?”
“No. Caraval says the Coppers will back you. As goes Sefi, so goes Obsidian. What will she choose? You’d know better than I.”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “She was against the Rain, but she came with me.”
She’s silent at that.
“You think I’ve shot us in the foot, don’t you?”
“Does Dancer have anything else he can use against you?”
“No,” I say. I know she doesn’t believe me. And she knows I know, but she can’t ask any more. Though I want to tell her about the emissaries, it would incriminate her as well. Sevro and I agreed it was a secret that must stay within the Howlers. She would be bound by oath to tell the Senate. And she tried so hard to honor her new oaths.
“Dancer’s not the only one angry with me,” I say. “Pax would hardly look at me at dinner.”
“I saw.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“I think you do.” She goes quiet. “We’re missing this,” she says eventually. “Life. The dinner tonight, I’ll remember forever. The lightning bugs. The children in the yard. The smell of rain on its way.” She looks over at me. “Just seeing you laughing. I shouldn’t remember it. It should be one of thousands.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that when my term of office ends in two years, maybe I won’t run again. Maybe I let the torch pass to someone else. You hand the reins to Orion or Harnassus. Maybe the rest of this isn’t our responsibility.” A tiny, hopeful smile crosses her lips. “We will go back to Mars and live in my estate. We’ll raise our children with your brother and sister’s and put our lives into helping our family, our planet. And each night we’d have a dinner like this one. Friends could come and go in our house whenever they passed through. The door would always be open….”
And an army would always have to guard it.
Her words carry away into the night, into the arms of the swaying trees, along with the current of the wind, up and up into the sky, where it seems all fantasies go. But I sit cold as a stone beside her, because I know she doesn’t believe any of this. We’ve played the game far too long to walk away. I take her hand. And as my wife is quiet and the fantasy drifts away, our familiar friend, dread, creeps onto the balcony with us, because deep inside, in the shadowy chasms of ourselves, we know Lorn was right. For those who dine with war and empire, the bill always comes at the end.
And almost as if the world was listening to my thoughts, a knock comes at the door. Mustang answers it, and when she returns her face belongs to the Sovereign, not my wife. “It was Daxo. Dancer’s called an emergency session of the Senate. They’ve moved your hearing up to tomorrow night.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing good.”