CASSIUS IS LOST IN THOUGHT, staring up at a dragon carved into the stone of the antechamber. Its snout is long. Its greedy maw open and lined with uneven teeth. The bold knight that faced down the Raa family has departed, leaving behind the tormented, reflective soul I know. The wounds where the gruesli pierced his face are swollen and red, but he’s shaved his beard and looks younger than he has in years. Only his eyes are old.
“What are you thinking?” I ask. He does not seem to hear me. The distant voices from a hundred throats whisper from behind two black doors down a set of stone stairs just beneath the dragon’s gaze. Our Gray guards give us space, allowing us to speak. “Cassius?”
“It was a flower,” he says quietly.
“A flower?”
I realize he is far from here. “A white edelweiss. That was the last thing Father gave me before he died.” He pauses, eyes still fixed on the dragon. He rarely speaks of his family. “It was a proud day,” he says slowly. He spares a look at the guards. “You were too young then. Mother kept you at Eagle Rest. But the rest of us were in Agea on the Citadel steps, where Augustus used to give the Perennial Address. The Sovereign summoned us there for a council of war. Augustus’s ships were two days from Deimos. The sun was high in the sky; you could feel the energy of a storm in the air. Wind had already come. Rain was following. I remember smelling the flowering judas trees from the steps. And…for once, our silver eagle flew from the flagpoles of the Citadel, where all my life I’d only ever seen lions. It was to be the end of a corrupt Mars and the beginning of our era.
“We had the numbers. We had the right. And once we defeated Augustus, we would have Mars—something Father never coveted, so I knew he would treat her well. But I was ashamed. After I lost the duel to Darrow, my father told me he was disappointed. Not that I had lost. He was ashamed at my selfishness.” He grimaces. “My petty pride. The carvers mended me and I put myself to one purpose: redemption in his eyes. I begged the Sovereign to let me lead the legions sent to trap Augustus at the Dockyards of Ganymede after Pliny gave us the intel. She sent Barca along to ensure I did not fail. I didn’t. I returned to Agea dragging Augustus behind us in chains. I found redemption in her eyes. But I didn’t have Father’s till we stood on those steps and he saw how I’d changed.
“He was to meet the Augustans in orbit with our cousins and sisters. I was given the rest of our family forces to defend Agea. You’ve never known pride like it, Castor. The shining faces. The laughter. The hair and pennants kicking in the wind as two full generations of Bellona strolled out from the summit in armor under the sun.
“He turned to me at the foot of the stairs and told me he loved me. He’d done it a thousand times before. But it was different. ‘The boy has fled,’ he said. ‘In his place, I see a man.’ It was the first time I felt I deserved his love, to be his son. I realized how lucky I was, how blessed I was to have a father like him. In a world of terrible men, he was patient, kind. Noble in the way the stories told us to be as boys.”
I glance to see if the guards are listening. Their faces from the bridge of the nose down are covered with duroplastic breathing units. The flinty eyes that peer out from beneath the gray hoods give nothing away.
“He took an edelweiss from a pouch in his armor and pressed it into my hands and told me to remember home. To remember the Olympus Mons. To remember why we fight. Not for family or for pride, but for life.
“The flower had grown near his favorite bench on a ridgeline there, just beyond the outbuildings of the Rest. He’d climb to that ridgeline every day before the sun set, to find peace, from us children, from work.” He smiles. “From Mother. Sometimes, if I was very lucky and quiet, he would let me walk with him, and we’d talk or just sit and watch the eagles visit their nests in the crags. It was the only time I remember being truly happy. Not craving something more.
“Julian was mother’s favorite, but Father didn’t play that game.” He smiles. “I know he was not happy with the venal creature I became in the years before the Institute, or the bitter one thereafter, but there on the steps…when he pressed the flower into my hands, I knew I’d finally become the man he always hoped I would be.”
There are tears in his eyes.
“What happened to the flower?” I ask gently, not wanting to break the spell.
“I lost it in the mud.” He looks back to me in shame. “I didn’t think it would be the last time I would ever see him.” He’s quiet, wrestling with something larger than the fear of the coming duel. “All of them are dead. All those shining faces, dimmed. Their laughter…just silence. I want to see them again….” He almost says my name before catching himself. He looks to the door. “Hear them. Feel Father’s hands on my head. But I won’t. Not even when I die. The Void is all that will greet me.”
“You won’t die today, Cassius. You can beat him,” I say, knowing that even if he wins, our lives are likely forfeit. “You are the Morning Knight. You are still that good man as…our father saw. And you are not meant to be the last Bellona.”
“My brother…” He smiles and rests a hand on my shoulder. “Sometimes I forget how young you are. I’m not afraid that I won’t beat him.” He looks up at the dragon, past her teeth and into the hungry darkness of her throat. “I’m afraid because this world is all that is. Karnus was right.” He smiles at a private joke. “But who knows, perhaps the darkness will be kinder than the light.” He looks down at the black doors and listens to the voices beyond them. “No matter what fate waits beyond those doors, do not acquiesce. If they have their evidence, they have their war. It is our duty, even if it is our last, to prevent that war. To protect the people.”
“It’s not our Republic to protect,” I say.
“That’s Octavia speaking, not you. Of course it is ours to protect.”
“Why? It’s a broken place that betrayed us. The people you want to save are being ground into the dirt. Dido is right: the Reaper has failed.” I pause. “Choices were made,” I say slowly, choosing my words with care so he does not feel assaulted. “Though I may not agree, I understand why you made them. The Sovereign let the Jackal massacre…our family. She was a tyrant. I know that. The Society was corrupt. But look what’s replaced it. The people on that ship—I see them every night and I think what I could have done better. But they didn’t die because I chose to help a Gold first. They died because of Darrow.” I hesitate. “You opened Pandora’s box. Now you’ve spent these years trying to justify the choices you made.” I lower my voice. “Guarding the orphan you created. Patrolling the trade lanes you endangered. Maybe this is your chance, our chance, to put things back together. Not by hunting pirates out in the middle of nowhere, but by restoring order.”
“You want to give them their evidence. Their war.”
“I do.”
He steps very close to me so only I can hear. “You open that safe, you’re dead too. You won’t have a chance to fix anything soon as they find out who you really are.”
“That’s a chance I’m willing to take.”
“Stop thinking with your cock. Seraphina doesn’t give half a shit about you. She’s bait that Dido is dangling like a piece of meat.”
I snort. “It’s not about her, Cassius.”
“No, it’s about revenge, isn’t it? Your revenge.”
“You took yours,” I say quietly. I watched him stand over my grandmother as she bled to death. I watched him kill Aja, the woman who was like a mother to me. “You don’t sleep. You drink. You preach and hunt pirates. We’ve never been in one place longer than a month. You think that is because you’re protecting me? You think it’s because you have a sacred duty to save merchants who chose to risk the Belt to line their own pockets? Stop lying to yourself for one gorydamn moment and admit that you made a mistake! You let the wolves through the door. Being a ‘good man’ won’t fix what you’ve done. Neither will suspending yourself in a state of constant motion. There is no atonement except killing the wolves, shutting the door, and reestablishing order. That is how we make things better than they are now. It’s how we can fix the worlds.”
Even though I know the intransigence of my friend, I hold out some boyish hope that my words will arouse some sense inside him. Instead, inexorably, his eyes harden, our world darkens, and I know our fellowship has ended.
“I had you for ten years. She’s had you for a breath. Is her spell is so complete?”
I feel pity as I see him realize he has failed. Not to protect me, but to convince me that he was right. That the pain he caused me was just. If he could convince me, me of all people, then perhaps he thought he would convince himself and know beyond all doubt that what he did was good. I’ve robbed him of that hope and any chance for his heart to be at peace.
Ten years of brotherhood evaporate in a breath.
We stare at one another and see strangers.
He snaps his fingers at the guards. “We’re done here.” They come forward and I step aside so they can lead him away down the stairs to his death.
At the bottom of the steps, he stops. “This duel isn’t for me. It’s for you. If you love me at all, you will let me die.”
Beyond the black doors, down a narrow chasm of gray rock, lies the Bleeding Place. It is a circular amphitheater carved into the stone of the mountain. Amongst sculpted lotus flowers, stone dragons, slick and pearly with condensation, hang down from the dark ceiling as if to drink the blood centuries of Raa have spilled here to satisfy quarrels. Servants finish scraping yellow and green moss from a section of tiered benches carved into the rock. The benches encircle a white marble floor. At the center of the floor, the Sigil of Gold has been emblazoned onto the pale stone. Hundreds of Golds stand to watch from the stone as the brilliant son of Mars goes to meet their pale champion. Many are Ionian, but I see a Codovan crest, a Norvo, a Felix, and scores more. A dozen moons are represented, and not just Jupiter’s. I’m guided to a bench in the third row where the Raa family sit more than thirty strong, despite the gaps in their ranks from those imprisoned along with Romulus in the Dust Cells.
The Rim obeys the old customs.
I look anywhere but at Cassius as a Chance, a young girl of the White caste carrying a white bag, leads a Justice, an old blind woman with milky eyes and translucent hair, onto the fighting floor. One day the little girl will grow old, and, if she reaches a state of transcendence, she will summon the courage to chemically blind herself and become a Justice herself. It is the ultimate honor of this hierophant race. Raised in monastic sanctuaries, they endeavor to divorce themselves from their humanity and embody the spirit of justice. Though many Whites in my grandmother’s Society aspired to more worldly and profitable heights.
The duelists bend to their knees as the frail hierophant whispers blessings to them and touches her sacerdotal iron rod and laurel branch on each of their shoulders. Cassius stares at the floor, maybe still in that day on Mars with his father. When the Justice has finished her benediction, she is led to her bone chair at the edge of the marble by White adjuncts.
Chance pulls the string from the bag and litters white sand onto the floor until a large, unbroken circle is formed around the two men. I remember seeing the blood fill the white sand when I would go to the Bleeding Place as a boy to watch young Peerless fillet one another over perceived slights. Seems just yesterday I saw Cassius, bold and young, cutting his way up through the duelists of Luna. I always thought the practice stupid. A vain exercise of pride.
I’m numb to it now, replaying my conversation with Cassius over in my head, torn between honoring him and honoring my own conscience.
Someone slides into the empty place on the stone next to me. I turn to see Seraphina. Her eyes surprise me with their sympathy. Is Cassius right? Would that sympathy vanish if the safe opened and she knew who I was? Would she let me die? Of course. Our ancestors have loathed one another for centuries.
“I’m sorry you must watch this,” she says.
“If you were, you would have stopped it,” I reply. “It wasn’t just me who saved your life. But of course, I assume you think gratitude a coward’s conceit.”
“I said I was sorry you must watch. Not that he must die.”
“He didn’t kill your sister or your grandfather, no matter how absurdly you wish to twist it. He arrived after the massacre. And he was following orders from his Sovereign.”
“He partook. Blood is on his hands.”
“And so his will be on yours.” I tire of looking at her. The slight imperfections, the heavy eyes, the sullen mouth, which I found so alluring, are now ugly and small.
She stares on at me. “The Reaper took your family when you were a boy, Bellona. Can you forget? Can you forgive?”
I remain silent because I don’t know the answer.
Dido watches Cassius on the floor from amongst her family. Farther down, ancient Gaia sits smoking her pipe, still playing the fool. And past her, separate from the family, Diomedes sits with a clutch of Olympic Knights. They wear all black. Peerless steal glances at him, each with their own judgment of his honor for not being the one to challenge Cassius. He’s the only Raa here who retains any of my respect. The knights alone have not taken a side in the coup, as ordered by Helios au Lux, ArchKnight of their order.
The Olympics sit in the gulf between a divided room. I discovered from eavesdropping that half of the powerful Golds in here were called to Sungrave from their own mountain cities or moons before the coup began, under the false auspices of an emergency summons sent out by Dido under Romulus’s warrant. They have been disarmed and held prisoner by Dido’s men since they arrived. No armed Obsidians or Grays: lowColors are not allowed in this place.
Duels are sacrosanct. Propriety and manners imperative in the audience.
We’ll see how long that lasts.
Dido stands and raises her hand for silence. Her allies quiet respectfully, but as insult, her husband’s allies speak on with one another and turn their backs to express their antipathy. It infuriates Dido. “You know the face…” Her words are drowned out. “You know the face of…” Romulus’s men speak even louder. At her side, Seraphina watches with faint amusement. Diomedes does not help his mother. Nor does the ArchKnight Helios. Bellerephon looks to Dido for instruction. She flicks her hand for him to begin and sits down with her jaw set in anger.
The knight slams his razor on the ground. Once, twice, till the room is silent.
“Cassius au Bellona, I see you.” Bellerephon stalks around the ring, his razor trailing behind. “You wretched buzzard. You spineless cur. You conspired to kill my grandfather and liege. You sought to kill my cousin in the flower of her life. You betrayed the Compact of Society and aided the Slave King of Mars. You came here in disguise, intent on mischief.” He smiles. “For these insults you shall whimper and bleed.”
Even Romulus’s men are silent and stare down at Cassius. All know how he betrayed the Sovereign, even if they did not claim her as their own. Coincidence bringing Cassius into the Rim beggars belief. So they require little to convince them that Darrow sent him here for some nefarious purpose. Cassius knows this. And so does Dido. Absent her evidence, she uses this to quell the dissent over her coup.
“I came of my own accord,” Cassius says to deaf ears. “I have no affiliation with the Republic.”
Bellerephon laughs. “Liar.”
“Bring evidence if you think me a liar and try me. No? Then you have no evidence, and you resort to bloodfeuds for justice. An absurdity in itself. But what can one expect from Rim rustics? No one ever taught you manners.” He chuckles. “As for the bloodfeud: it I do not dispute.” The Peerless meet the concession with hungry silence. “The blood of children and many more is on my hands. I expect no mercy. I ask only that if I fall, honor my bones and send them to the sun.”
Bellerephon spits boorishly on the ground. “You will have no honor. Your corpse I will feed to my hounds so they might shit Bellona. But your eyes I will put in a jar so they might watch as I feed your brother to the dust.”
Seraphina makes a disgusted sound. Amongst the Olympic Knights and much of the room, the proclamation is met with sharp disapproval. Helios makes a motion to Diomedes, who booms out an affirmation. “You will be so honored in your way, Bellona.” This maddens his cousin and Bellerephon almost flies into the crowd to strike at Diomedes to finish their earlier affair.
I feel Dido’s eyes on me, and I know Cassius was right. Again.
Of course this is all for me. They think I am the weak link. That, to spare Cassius’s life, I will give them what Cassius will not. Fools. They see my slender hands and naked face and believe me weak. Dangerous game, judging a blade by its scabbard. I stay seated, silent, watching as Bellerephon shouts at Chance and gestures to the bit of elm she holds in her hand. “Break the damn stick, girl, before I do it for you.”
Startled, Chance bends the elm, and as it snaps, the duel begins.
The men do not lash into one another, but pace in a circle, measuring. Seldom have the forms of the Core and the Rim met in duels, at least after Revus forbade any Ionians from dueling on Luna. Most of the Rim houses followed his lead.
As is old custom, neither duelist wears armor, though Cassius is allowed an aegis: a small shield generator embedded in a metal vambrace on the back of his left forearm. In his right hand, he carries a coiled razor. They could have given him their unfamiliar, longer hasta, but instead gave him a razor of the Interior.
Bellerephon’s hasta slithers on the ground behind him like an oiled snake, nearly three meters long in whip and two meters in lance. In a scabbard on his left hip he carries the short kitari thrusting sword.
Hardening his razor into its lance form, Bellerephon raises the wicked black blade. Hands above his head, the weapon pointed toward Cassius so that Bellerephon looks like some strange, pale scorpion with its long stinger wagging in the air.
It is the Shadowfall stance of the Rim’s razormasters.
“He’s a shade?” I ask Seraphina. She does not answer. Her eyes devour the scene with excitement.
Cassius observes the alien stance warily. He holds his blade rigid and at his side with one hand in the summer hold of the Willow Way. His aegis he holds tight to his chest, ready to activate the shield. I blink. And by the time my lid pulls back from my pupil, Bellerephon’s blade has spun in his hands, changed to whip form, and now slashes at Cassius’s face.
Cassius bends back. Too slow. The whip slices a chunk of scalp off the front of his forehead. Blood sheets down his face. Bellerephon uses his momentum to spin with his whip forward, lashing it into another strike toward Cassius’s leg. His attack relies on the length of the hasta and his height to send the black blade falling down in a frenzy of incredibly swift blows. It reminds me more of Darrow than Aja or Cassius.
Blinking the blood out of his eyes, Cassius falls back under the onslaught, bending and circling and deflecting as the ground sparks from the metal whip. His own whip is useless against the longer reach of Bellerephon’s, so he uses it in rigid form for defense and relies on his aegis to turn away most blows. Time and again he tries to close the distance, but while Cassius is stronger, Bellerephon is the quicker of the two, more accustomed to the gravity here. He shuffles his feet instead of lifting them. Each time Cassius attempts to close, Bellerephon slides back, calls his razor to rigid form, and nearly spears him through the stomach.
The two men part, their world tiny and furious. Their bodies tell them to flee the metal and break out of the horrible confines of the circle, but their minds tether them together and again they lash out. It has been years since Cassius has faced a man like this. I’m not sure he has ever faced Shadowfall in an actual duel.
Each is a master of their craft, using their litany of tricks hard learned over the years. Each probing, testing, then locking into a furious spate of exchanges, arms a blinding flurry, the whips nothing but blurred movement. Blood sprays across the white marble and into the stands, where it spatters the face of a young child three rows back. I can’t even tell which man is wounded until Cassius stumbles away, a flap of skin and muscle folding over a long laceration all the way to the bone of his left shoulder. Blood pours out. Bellerephon seizes the moment and presses his attack.
“You can stop this,” Dido says past Seraphina. “Give me the code and he lives.”
“He doesn’t need my help.”
Despite my words, I watch in fear as Cassius falls back before Bellerephon and the momentum tips in the Rim knight’s favor. I thought Cassius invincible. Part of a story that could never exist without him in it. They can’t see the grandness of him. They can’t see the warmth, the pain, the regret, the love. All they see is a vessel for their hate. They stare down at him pitilessly, thinking his death their right, even those adversaries who despise Dido’s coup.
In the circle, Cassius can barely see for the blood in his eyes. He has no time to wipe them clean. He’s losing too much from his shoulder and now is pressed against the edge of the circle. His heels scrape the sand. Bellerephon lashes at him, maintaining his distance, but Cassius continues to turn away the whip with his aegis. The metal cracks into the small energy shield and bounces back, sending blue sparks hissing through the air as Cassius activates it milliseconds before each blow lands to prevent the shield from overheating. Smoke already rises from the battery pack.
Bellerephon batters Cassius down, blow after blow, till Cassius is on a knee, the whip raining down on his smoking shield. Bellerephon’s whip arcs in a high overhead strike. Cassius raises his arm yet again to deflect. But then his aegis winks out. The whip slashes down onto Cassius’s raised left arm and coils tight around it. Bellerephon could rip off Cassius’s arm from the elbow down, but he’s caught in the middle of his acrobatics, expecting to meet the aegis again and for the whip to bounce back. He loses half a second.
Now, Cassius attacks. He uses the Snapping Branch gambit.
Springing forward with his thick legs just as he jerks on the whip with his arm, he pulls Bellerephon off balance toward him. With his left hand, Bellerephon desperately brings his kitari up to block Cassius. But Cassius bats the small blade to the side with his razor, and then cuts diagonally at Bellerephon’s right arm, which holds the hasta. His diamond-hard blade cleaves through the bone of the man’s arm like it’s pudding. An open artery sprays a single spurt of blood two meters long. Cassius spins with his momentum, and cuts in the other direction. The metal severs Bellerephon’s remaining arm at the forearm.
Both limbs spin to the floor. Bellerephon totters, looking at the weeping red stumps and the pale bone poking out from the meat, mouth opening and closing like a stunned dog’s.
I almost surge to my feet in a joyful shout as Cassius sets his hand on Bellerephon’s shoulder and guides him gently to his knees. He looks up at Dido. Prime show, my friend. Damn prime show.
“Do not waste a man like this,” Cassius says. “He bled for you. He doesn’t have to die. Release me and mine. Agree to our terms, and his life will be spared.”
Dido glowers down at him. Not for a moment does she entertain the idea of sparing her nephew. A cold heart beats in that chest. “Bellerephon?” she asks. “Your fate is yours.”
“Pulvis et umbra sumus.” He shivers. “Akari, bear witness.”
Honor calls him to the dark. What a waste of a man.
But there is something beautiful in it all the same.
His body shakes and I marvel at the life’s worth of discipline that goes to keeping himself erect on his knees. The pale Raa knight looks to his family, his slender Norvo wife, and up to the dragons of his ancestors on the ceiling.
Cassius hacks his head off at the spine.
Beside me, anger roils from Seraphina as her cousin dies.
“This is your fault, my son,” Dido says to Diomedes. Amidst his knights, watching his cousin die in his stead, he looks stunned and stricken with guilt almost as immense as my relief. Bleeding from his forehead and shoulder, drenched in sweat, Cassius manages to smile at me, knowing that I could have given in to Dido but did not. He raises chin and lifts his voice for all to hear. “I am Cassius au Bellona, son of Tiberius, son of Julia, Morning Knight, and my honor remains.”
It is over.
He has won. The matter is settled, though I don’t know what shape the next moments will take. And then I look over at Seraphina, readying to console her on the loss of her cousin, only to see implacable Dido’s face unchanged, her hand in the air, her fingers snapping together.
“Fabera,” she calls.
My hope sinks and Cassius’s face falls as a young hawkish woman with a bald pate hefts her razor and jumps from the second row over the heads of those sitting on the benches beneath. She lands on the edge of the white marble and paces toward Cassius, her long razor rigid. She spits on the floor and enters the circle, where she crows her challenge to Cassius, her name and her right as cousin to open his veins.
“It’s over!” I say in protest to Dido. “The feud was settled with Bellerephon!”
“His feud is with House Raa,” she replies.
There is a part of me that wants to rail against her and decry her hypocrisy, but the look she gives me is so reptilian that it activates the colder part of my own blood. The shock disappears and I work to understand. “Do you support this?” I ask Seraphina.
Though surprised at her mother’s action, Seraphina says nothing. “Don’t look to her,” Dido snarls. “I preside here. That creature murdered my daughter. He killed Revus!” The room cries for blood. Then, very softly, Dido leans toward me. “But I can forget. I can forgive. And you can end this. Open the safe.”
Dangerous woman.
I look down at Cassius and let my silence answer. Dido sighs. “A pity. Fabera, honor House Raa.”
She is not a shade, but she is fast and knows this gravity. She lunges at him with her razor, roving and probing like she’s hunting boar. Knowing he’s losing too much blood, she tries to draw out the duel, but Cassius continues to charge and close. She’s more agile than Bellerephon, but not so powerful. Cassius manages to pin her against the rim of the circle, where they exchange a dangerous series of slashing parries. She scores two cuts on his right leg, but has no time to savor the moment. I see her die two seconds before it happens. Cassius flows into the Autumn Wind movement as easily as if we were sparring together with blunted weapons on the Archi. He strikes three times at head level, locks blades, pushes against her so she counters his force, then he pivots right and slides his blade overtop hers in a leverage position so the tip enters her forehead and pushes through her brain before coming out her throat and through her jaw. She dies before she hits the ground. He slides his blade from her skull, flicks off the gray gristle coating it, and limps to turn and face Dido.
“I am Cassius au Bellona, son of Tiberius, son of Julia, Morning Knight, and my honor remains.”
Dido snaps her fingers. “Bellagra.”
Another knight jumps down.
“Seraphina, you’re going to lose another cousin,” I say, knowing that this execution wears on her.
Diomedes does not retain his composure. “Mother, enough.”
“Bellagra, honor House Raa.”
The knight surges toward Cassius. This one was not the same quality as the first two and dies quicker than Fabera. Cassius parries a weak blow and splits the man down the middle. His halves twitch on the floor and leak his life’s blood into the Gold Sigil. But something strange has happened. Despite the condemnation of the Olympic Knights, the room roils with volunteers. Each death decays their manners and resolve and reaches into the crowd with forked rootlike fingers to enrage and poison another soul—a lover there, a cousin, a friend, a drinking companion, a brother in arms. From Dido’s allies to Romulus’s, the anger boils. It dawns on me then the cruel stratagem the woman has devised. I don’t doubt that her hatred of Cassius is real. But they do not waste in the Rim. Each death is a down payment for her war. Absent her holodrop evidence, she uses my friend to boil the blood, to distract, to bind her allies and foes together in anger. And the more Raa that fall, the more her position solidifies, the more the blood of the Rim is raised against the Interior and not against her coup.
This is the depth of her conviction, a willing sacrifice of her own kin to reveal whatever truth hides within our safe.
I witness Dido at long last: the immensity of her resolve, the cruelness of her intellect, and I am terrified to think that I ever was so arrogant as to presume her Romulus’s inferior simply because I’d heard his legend more. She reminds me of the woman who taught me all I know—more passionate, less subtle. But a shade of my grandmother dwells in this woman. At her side, Seraphina sits with a weary expression that seems to say she understands all but will suffer it because she must.
But I cannot watch my brother suffer much longer.
There will be no end to it.
No mercy. Just death, and for what?
Cassius limps to his feet, again standing over the body of his foe. The floor is littered with them. “I am Cassius au Bellona.” He pants for breath, barely able to go on. “Son of Tiberius…son of Julia.” He squares his shoulders and summons his pride to lift his voice. “Morning Knight, and my honor remains.”
“Mother! Stop this madness!” Diomedes cries out. “He has won. How many of our blood will you throw away?”
“As many as honor demands,” she says. “Save your kin, Diomedes.”
He does not rise.
“A pity,” Dido replies. I feel the words coming before they leave her lips, because I saw Seraphina’s legs bouncing, her fingers tightening the laces on her boots, and I saw Dido notice the glances shared between us at dinner. Now the woman turns to me, only one card left to play and she plays it well. “Seraphina, honor House Raa.”