Morning Star (Red Rising #3) - Pierce Brown Page 0,6

off her helmet. Beneath is a young woman. Face painted white, nostrils slit open so she looks a snake.

Ritual scars forming a series of bars under both eyes. She can’t be more than eighteen. Her mouth slurs out something as she stares at the vastness of Ragnar, large even for her people. Then her wild eyes find the tattoos on his face.

“Vjrnak,” she rasps, not in terror, but fevered joy. “Tnak ruhr. Ljarfor aesir!” She closes her eyes and Ragnar cuts off her head.

“You prime?” I ask Mustang, rushing to her. She’s already on her feet. The arrow sticks out from

under her collarbone.

“What did she say?” Mustang asks past me. “Your Nagal is better than mine.”

“I didn’t understand the dialect.” It was too guttural. Ragnar knows it.

“Stained son. Kill me. I will rise Golden.” Ragnar explains. “They eat what they find.” He nods to the Golds. “But to eat the flesh of Gods is to rise immortal. More will come.”

“Even in the storm?” I ask. “Can their griffins fly in this?”

His lips curl in disgust. “The beasts do not ride griffin. But no. They will seek refuge.”

“What about the other wreck?” Mustang asks, pressing on. “Supplies? Men?”

He shakes his head. “Bodies. Ship munitions.”

I send Ragnar to fetch Holiday from her post. Mustang and I stay with plans to search the ship for gear. But I remain standing motionless in the cannibals’ charnel house even after Ragnar ’s slipped out into the snow. The Golds might have been enemies, but this horror makes life feel so cheap. There’s a cruel irony to this place. It is terrifying and wicked, but it wouldn’t exist unless Gold made it exist to create fear, to create that need for their iron rule. These poor bastards were eaten by their own pet monsters.

Mustang stands from examining one of the Obsidian, wincing from the arrow that’s still imbedded

in her shoulder. “Are you all right?” she asks, noting my silence. I gesture to the broken fingernails on one of the Golds.

“They weren’t dead when they started skinning them. Just trapped.”

She nods sadly and holds out her palm. Something she found on the Obsidian body. Six Institute class rings. Two Pluto Cyprus trees, a Minerva owl, a Jupiter lightning bolt, a Diana stag, and one which I pick from her palm, emblazoned with the Mars wolf head.

“We should look for him,” she says.

I reach up to the ceiling to examine the Golds who hang upside down from their seats. Their eyes

and tongues are gone, but I can see, mangled as they are, none are my old friend. We search the rest of the upside-down ship and find several small bedroom suites. In the dresser of one, Mustang finds an ornate leather box with several watches and a small pearl earring set in silver. “Cassius was here,”

she says.

“Are those his watches?”

“It’s my earring.”

I help Mustang remove the arrow from her shoulder in Cassius’s suite, away from the gore. She makes no sound as I break off the tip, push her against the wall, and jerk the arrow out by its tail end.

She curls in on herself, slumping down to her heels in pain. I sit on the edge of the mattress that’s fallen from the ceiling and watch her hunch there. She doesn’t like being touched when she’s wounded.

“Finish up,” she says, standing.

I use the resGun to make a shiny patch over the hole on the front and back, just under her collarbone. It stops the bleeding and will help repair the tissue, but she’ll feel the wound and it’ll slow her for days. I pull her sealSkin back up over her bare shoulder. She zips the front up for herself before patching the wound on my jaw as well. Her breath fills the air. She comes so close I can smell the dampness of the snow that’s melted in her hair. She presses the resGun to my jaw and paints a thin layer of the microorganisms onto the wound. They scramble into the pores and tighten to make a fleshlike antibacterial coating. Her hand lingers on the back of my head, fingers wrapped in the strands of my hair, like she wants to say something but doesn’t have the words. Nor does she find them by the time Holiday and Ragnar return. Hearing Holiday calling my name, I squeeze Mustang’s

good shoulder and leave her there.

Most of the ship’s gear is gone. Several sets of optics missing from their cases. The armory missing entirely, scattered across the mountains as the ship came apart and the cargo hold ripped open. The rest has been torn through by Obsidians or broken in the crash. All I get is static from the transponder and com gear.

Ragnar discerns that Cassius and the rest of his party, some fifteen men, departed several hours before we reached the vessel. They stripped it bare of supplies. The Eaters likely descended as soon as it landed, otherwise Cassius wouldn’t have left those Golds behind to be eaten. Supporting this idea, Mustang finds several Eater bodies nearer the cockpit, which means Cassius and his men were under

attack as they left. Snow’s almost covered the corpses. We stack the fresher bodies outside in the snow in case worse predators than Eaters come to visit.

After scavenging the ship for supplies, I have Mustang and Holiday seal us inside the galley. Fusing the two entrances shut with welding torches found in the ship’s maintenance closet. The weapons and cold gear might have been stripped clean, but the ship’s cistern is full, the water inside not yet frozen.

And the galley’s pantries are stocked with food.

It’s passingly cozy in our shelter. The insulation traps our heat inside. The light from two amber emergency lamps bathes the room in soft orange. Holiday uses the intermittent power to cook a feast of pasta with marinara sauce and sausage over the galley’s electric stoves as Ragnar and I plot a course to the Spires and Mustang sorts through the stacks of scavenged provisions, filling military packs she found in storage.

I burn my tongue as Holiday brings Ragnar and me heaping portions of pasta. I didn’t realize how

hungry I was. Ragnar nudges me and I follow his eyes to watch quietly as Holiday brings Mustang a

bowl too and leaves her with a small nod. Mustang smiles to herself. The four of us sit eating in silence. Listening to our forks against the bowls. The wind shrieking outside. Rivets groaning. Steel gray snow piles against the small circular windows, but not before we see strange shapes moving

through the white to drag off the corpses we set outside.

“What was it like growing up here?” Mustang asks Ragnar. She sits cross-legged with her back against the wall. I lay adjacent to her, a backpack between, on one of the mattresses Ragnar dragged inside the room to line its floor, on my third serving of pasta.

“It was home. I did not know anything else.”

“But now that you do?”

He smiles gently. “It was a playground. The world beyond is vast, but so small. Men putting themselves in boxes. Sitting at desks. Riding in cars. Ships. Here, the world is small, but without end.” He loses himself in stories. Slow to share at first, now it seems he revels in knowing that we listen. That we care. He tells us of swimming in the ice floes as a boy. How he was an awkward child.

Too slow. Bones outracing the rest of him. When he was beaten by another boy, his mother took him

to the sky for his first time on her griffin. Making him hold on to her from behind. Teaching him it is his arms that keep him from falling. His will. “She flew higher, and higher, till the air was thin and I could feel the cold in my bones. She was waiting for me to let go. To weaken. But she did not know that I tied my wrists together. That is as close to Allmother death as I have ever been.”

His mother, Alia Volarus, the Snowsparrow, is a legend among her people for her reverence for the gods. A daughter to a wanderer, she became a warrior of the Spires and rose in prominence as she raided other clans. Such is her devotion to the gods that when she rose to power, she gave four of her own children to serve them. Keeping only one for herself, Sefi.

“She sounds like my father,” Mustang says softly.

“Poor sods,” Holiday mutters. “My ma would make me cookies and teach me how to strip down a

hoverJack.”

“And what about your father?” I ask.

“He was a bad sort.” She shrugs. “But bad in a boring way. A different family in every port.

Stereotypical Legionnaire. I got his eyes. Trigg got Ma’s.”

“I never knew my first father,” Ragnar says, meaning his birth father. Obsidian women are polygamous. They might have seven children from seven fathers. Those men are then bound to protect the other children of her brood. “He went to become a slave before I was born. My mother never speaks his name. I do not even know if he lives.”

“We can find out,” Mustang says. “We’d have to search the Board of Quality Control’s registry. Not easy, but we can find him. What happened to him. If you want to know.”

He’s stunned by the idea and nods slowly. “Yes. I would like that.”

Holiday watches Mustang in a very different way than she did just hours before when we were leaving Phobos, and I’m struck by how natural this feels, our four worlds colliding together. “We all know your father.” Holiday says. “But what is your ma like? She looks frigid, from what I’ve seen, just on the HC, you know?”

“That’s my stepmother. She doesn’t care for me. Just Adrius, actually. My real mother died when I

was young. She was kind. Mischievous. And very sad.”

“Why?” Holiday presses.

“Holiday…” I say. Her mother is a subject I’ve never pushed. She’s held her back from me. A little locked box in her soul that she never shares. Except tonight, it seems.

“It’s all right,” she says. She pulls up her legs, hugging them, and continues. “When I was six, my mother was pregnant with a little girl. The doctor said there would be complications with the birth and recommended intervening medically. But my father said that if the child was not fit to survive birth, it did not deserve life. We can fly between the stars. Mold the planets, but father let my sister die in my

mother ’s womb.”

“The hell?” Holiday mutters. “Why not give her cell therapy? You got the money.”

“Purity in the product,” Mustang says.

“That’s insane.”

“That’s my family. Mother was never the same. I’d hear her crying in the middle of the day. See her staring out the window. Then one night she went for a walk at Caragmore. The estate my father gave her as a wedding present. He was in Agea working. She never came home. They found her on the rocks beneath the sea cliffs. Father said she slipped. If he was alive now, he’d still say she slipped. I don’t think he could have survived thinking anything else.”

“I’m sorry,” Holiday says.

“As am I.”

“It’s why I’m here, since that’s what you were wondering,” Mustang says. “My father was a titan.

But he was wrong. He was cruel. And if I can be something else”—her eyes meet mine—“I will be.”

By the time we wake, the storm has cleared. We bundle ourselves with insulation taken from the ship’s walls and set out into the bleakness. Not a cloud mars the marbled blue-black sky. We head toward the sun, which stains the horizon a cooling shade of molten iron. Autumn has few days left. We head for the Spires with plans of lighting fires as we go, in hopes of signaling the few Valkyrie scouts active in the area. But smoke will also bring the Eaters.

We scan the mountains as we pass, wary of the cannibal tribes and of the fact that somewhere ahead Cassius and maybe Aja trudge through the snow with a troop of special forces operators.

By midday we find evidence of their passing. Churned snow outside a rocky alcove large enough

for several dozen men. They camped there to wait out the storm. A cairn of stacked stones lies near the campsite. One of the stones has been carved with a razor and reads: per aspera ad astra.

“It’s Cassius’s handwriting,” Mustang says.

Pulling off the rocks, we find the corpses of two Blues and a Silver. Their weaker bodies froze in the night. Even here, Cassius had the decency to bury them. We replace the rocks as Ragnar lopes ahead, following the tracks at a speed we can’t match. We follow after. An hour later, manmade thunder rumbles in the distance, accompanied by the lonely shriek of distant pulseFists. Ragnar returns soon after, eyes shining with excitement.

“I followed the tracks,” he says.

“And?” Mustang asks.

“It is Aja and Cassius with a troop of Grays and three Peerless.”

“Aja is here?” I ask.

“Yes. They flee on foot through a mountain pass in the direction of Asgard. A tribe of Eaters

harries them. Bodies litter the way. Dozens. They sprang an ambush and failed. More come.”

“How much gear do they have?” Mustang asks.

“No gravBoots. ScarabSkin only. But they have packs. They left the pulseArmor behind just

two kilometers north. Out of energy.”

Holiday looks at the horizon and touches Trigg’s pistol on her hip. “Can we catch them?”

“They carry many supplies. Water. Food. Injured men now too. Yes. We can overtake them.”

“Why are we here?” Mustang interjects. “It’s not to hunt Aja and Cassius down. The only thing that matters is getting Ragnar to the Spires.”

“Aja killed my brother,” Holiday says.

Mustang’s taken aback. “Trigg? The one you mentioned? I didn’t know. But still, we can’t be pulled

to the side by vengeance. We can’t fight two dozen men.”

“What if they reach Asgard before we reach the Spires?” Holiday asks. “Then we’re cooked.”

Mustang’s not convinced.

“Can you kill Aja?” I ask Ragnar.

“Yes.”

“This is an opportunity,” I say to Mustang. “When else will they be so exposed? Without their Legions? Without the pride of Gold protecting them? These are champions. Like Sevro says, ‘When

you have the chance to waste your enemy, you do it.’ This is one time I’d agree with the mad bastard.

If we can take them off the board, the Sovereign loses two Furies in one week. And Cassius is Octavia’s link to Mars and the great families here. And if we expose her negotiations with you to him, we fracture that alliance. We sever Mars from the Society.”

“An enemy divided…” Mustang says slowly. “I like it.”

“And we owe them a debt,” Ragnar says. “For Lorn, Quinn, Trigg. They came here to hunt us.

Now we hunt them.”

—

The trail is unmistakable. Corpses litter the snow. Dozens of Eaters. Bodies still smoking from pulsefire near a narrow mountain pass where the Obsidians sprang an ambush on the Golds. They did

not understand the firepower the Golds could bring to bear. Huge craters pock the craggy slopes.

Deeper imprints in the snow mark the passing of aurochs. Huge steerlike animals with shaggy coats

that the Obsidian ride.

The pass widens into a thin alpine forest that skins an expanse of rolling hills. Gradually the craters decrease and we begin seeing discarded pulseFists and rifles and several Gray bodies with arrows or axes embedded in them. The Obsidian dead are closer to the Gold trail now and bear razor wounds.

There’s dozens with missing limbs, clean decapitations. Cassius’s band is running out of ammunition and now Olympic Knights are doing the work up close. Yet the wind still crackles with gunfire kilometers ahead.

We pass moaning Obsidian Eaters who lie dying from bullet wounds, but it’s only over a wounded

Gray that Ragnar stops. The man’s still alive, but barely. An iron axe is buried in his stomach. He wheezes up at an unfamiliar sky. Ragnar crouches over him. Recognition goes through the Gray’s eyes as he sees the Stained’s uncovered face.

“Close your eyes,” Ragnar says, pressing the man’s empty rifle back in his hands. “Think of home.” The man closes his eyes. And with a twist, Ragnar breaks his neck and sets his head gently back on the snow. A shrill horn echoes across the mountain range. “They call off the hunt,” Ragnar says. “Immortality is not worth the price today.”

We pick up our pace. Kilometers to our right, Mounted Eaters on aurochs skirt the edges of the woods, heading for their high-mountain camps. They do not see us as we move through the pine taiga. Holiday watches the hunting party disappear behind a hill through the scope of her rifle. “They carried two Golds,” she says. “Didn’t recognize them. They weren’t dead yet.”

We all feel the chill.

It’s an hour later that we spy our quarry beneath us in an uneven snowfield striped with crevasses.

Two arms of forest hug the snowfield. Aja and Cassius chose an exposed route instead of continuing through the treacherous forest where they lost so many Grays. There’s four left in the company.

Three Golds and a Gray. They wear black scarabSkin, cloaked with pelts and extra layers they stripped from the dead cannibals. They move at a breakneck pace, the rest of their party massacred in

the depths of the woods. We can’t tell which is Aja or Cassius because of the masks and the similar shapes they make under the cloaks.

Initially, I wanted to lie in wait and ambush them to take the tactical initiative, but I remember how the optics were missing from their boxes and assume Aja and Cassius are both wearing them. With

thermal vision, they’ll see us hiding under snow. Might even see us if we hide inside the bellies of dead aurochs or seals. So instead, I have Ragnar lead me on the path he found to cut them off at a pass they must travel through and block their path to draw their eyes.

I’m panting beside Ragnar, coughing the cold out of aching lungs, when the party of four arrives

on our chosen ground. They jog along the edge of a crevasse in improvised snowshoes, hunched against the weight of food and survival gear they drag behind them on little makeshift sleds. Textbook Legion survival skills, courtesy of the military schools of the Martian Fields. All four wear black optics visors with smoky glass lenses. It’s eerie as they see us. No expressions on the optics or masked faces. So it feels like they expected us to be here waiting at the edge of the snowfield, blocking the pass out.

My eyes dart back and forth between them. Cassius is easy enough to distinguish by his height. But which of the four is Aja? I’m torn between two thick Golds, each shorter than Cassius. Then I see my old razormaster ’s weapon dangling from her belt.

“Aja!” I call, removing the sealSkin balaclava.

Cassius pulls off his mask. His hair is sweaty, face flushed. He alone carries a pulseFist, but I know its charge must be running low, based on the dispersion patterns of the dead cannibals behind them.

His razor unfurls, as do the rest. They look like long red tongues, blood frozen on the blades.

“Darrow…” Cassius mutters, stunned by the sight of us. “I saw you sink…”

“I swim just as well as you. Remember?” I look past him. “Aja, you going to let Cassius do all the talking?”

Finally, she steps from the other to stand by the tall knight, removing from around her waist the rope that attaches her to her makeshift sled. She doffs her scarabSkin mask, revealing her dark face and bald head. Steam swirls. She scans the crevasses that thread their way through the snow, and the rocks and trees, the pen in the snowfield, wondering where my ambush will come from. She remembers Europa well enough, but she can’t know who my crew was or how many survived.

“An abomination and a rabid dog,” she purrs, eyes lingering on Ragnar before coming back to me.

The scarabSkin she wears is unmarked. Can she really not have taken a single wound from the Obsidian? “I see your Carver has pieced you back together, ruster.”

“Well enough to kill your sister,” I say in reply, unable to keep the poison out of my voice. “Pity it wasn’t you.” She makes no reply. How many times have I seen her kill Quinn in memory? How many

times have I seen her rob Lorn of his razor as he lay dead from the Jackal and Lilath’s blades? I gesture to the weapon. “That doesn’t belong to you.”

“You were born to serve, not speak, abomination. Do not address me.” She glances up to the sky

where Phobos glitters on the eastern horizon. Red and white lights flicker around it. It’s a space battle, which means Sevro has captured ships. But how many? Aja frowns and exchanges a worried look with Cassius.

“I have long awaited this moment, Aja.”

“Ah, my father ’s favorite pet.” Aja examines Ragnar. “Has the Stained convinced you he’s tamed? I wonder if he told you how he liked to be rewarded after a fight in the Circada. After the applause faded and he cleaned the blood from his hands, Father would send him young Pinks to satisfy his animal lusts. How greedy he was with them. How frightened they were of him.” Her voice is flat and

bored of this ice, of this conversation, of us. All she wants is what we have to give her, and that is a challenge. After all the Obsidian bodies behind her, she still is not tired of blood. “Have you ever seen an Obsidian rut?” she continues. “You’d think twice about taking off their collars, ruster. They have appetites you can’t imagine.”

Ragnar steps forward, holding his razors in either hand. He unfastens the white fur he took from

the Eaters and lets it fall behind him. It’s strange being here surrounded by wind and snow. Stripped of our armies, our navies. The only thing protecting each of our lives: little coils of metal. The hugeness of the Antarctic laughs at our size and self-importance, thinking how easily it could snuff out the heat in our little chests. But our lives mean so much more than the frail bodies that carry them.

Ragnar ’s step forward is a sign to Mustang and Holiday in the trees.

Aim true, Holiday.

“Your father bought me, Aja. Shamed me. Made me his devil. A thing. The child inside fled.

The hope vanished. I was Ragnar no more.” He touches his own chest. “But I am Ragnar today, tomorrow, forever more. I am son of the Spires, brother of Sefi the Quiet, brother of Darrow of Lykos, and Sevro au Barca. I am the Shield of Tinos. I follow my heart. And when yours beats no more, foul Knight, I will pull it from your chest and feed it to the griffin of the…”

Cassius scans the craggy rocks and stunted trees that cup the snowfield to his left. His eyes narrow when they fall upon a cluster of broken timber at the base of a rock formation. Then, without warning, he shoves Aja forward. She stumbles, and just behind her, where she stood, the head of their remaining Gray explodes. Blood splatters the snow as the crack of Holiday’s rifle echoes from the mountains. More bullets tear into the snow around Cassius and Aja. The Fury moves behind the third Gold, using his body as cover. Two bullets slam into his scarabSkin, penetrating the strong polymer.

Cassius rolls on his shoulder and uses much of the last juice from his pulseFist. The hillside erupts.

Rocks glowing. Exploding. Snow vaporizing.

And under that noise is the sound of a bowstring releasing. Aja hears it too. She moves fast.

Spinning as an arrow fired by Mustang from the woods careens toward her head. It misses by centimeters. Cassius fires on Mustang’s position on the hill, shattering trees and superheating rocks.

Can’t tell if she’s hit. Can’t spare the seconds to look because Ragnar and I use the distraction to charge, vision narrowing, slingBlade curving into form. Closing the distance over the snow. PulseFist glowing in his hand, Cassius turns just as I bear down on him. He fires the pulseFist. It’s a weak charge that I dive beneath, hitting the ground and rolling up like a Lykos tumbler. He fires again. The pulseFist is dead, battery drained from firing on the hillside. Ragnar hurls one of his razors at Aja like a huge throwing knife. It flips end over end in the air. She doesn’t move. It slams into her. She spins backward. For a moment I think he’s killed her. But then she turns back to us, holding the razor by the hilt in her right hand.

She caught it.

A dark fear sweeps through me as all of Lorn’s warnings about Aja come rushing back. “Never fight a river, and never fight Aja.”

The four of us smash together, turning into a clumsy mash of cracking whips and clattering blades.

Scrambling and twisting and bending. Our razors faster than our own eyes can track. Aja swipes diagonally at my legs as I go for hers; Ragnar and Cassius aim for each other ’s necks in quick no-look thrusts. Identical strategies, all. It’s so awkward we all almost kill one another in the first half second. Yet each gambit misses by a hair.

We separate. Stumbling backward. Humorless smiles on our faces—a bizarre kinship as we remember we all speak the same martial language. All that hateful breed of human Dancer told me about before I was Carved, the ones Lorn lived among and despised all the while.

I shatter the weird peace first. Lashing forward in a tight series of thrusts at Cassius’s right side, peeling him away from Aja so Ragnar can take her down singly. Behind Cassius, Mustang stirs from

among the rubble. Rushing across the snow, huge Obsidian bow in hand. Still fifty meters away. I sweep my razor whip twice at Cassius’s legs, retracting it into a blade as he swings diagonally at my head. The blow rattles my arm as I catch it halfway along the razor ’s curve. He’s stronger than I am.

Faster than he was the last time we fought. And he’s practiced now against the curved blade. Training with Aja, no doubt. He forces me back. I stumble, fall, between his legs I see the Fury and the Stained tearing into each other. She stabs him through his left thigh.

Another arrow whispers through the air. It slams into Cassius’s back. His scarabSkin holds. Off balance, he swings again in a tight set of eight moves. I throw myself backward just as the razor hisses through the air where my head had been. I sprawl on the snow, centimeters from the edge of a huge crevasse. Scrambling up as Cassius rushes me. I block another downward swing, teetering on the edge. I fall backward and push off the edge as hard as I can so I land and clear the other side, using my agility to avoid his onslaught. Behind him, Aja spins under Ragnar ’s blade, slicing at his hamstrings. She’s peeling him apart.

Cassius pursues me, hurdling the crevasse and swinging down at me. I block the blade. It would have opened me from shoulder to opposite hip. I throw a rock at his face. Gain my feet. He slams his blade down again in a feint, pivots his wrist, and swings to carve off my knees. I stumble to the side, barely dodging. He converts his razor to a whip, cracks it at my legs, and rips them out from under me. I fall. He kicks me in the chest. Wind gushes out of me. He stands on my wrist, pinning my razor down, and is about to plunge his razor into my heart, his face a mask of determination.

“Stop,” Mustang shouts. She’s twenty meters away, aiming her bow at Cassius. Hand quivering from the strain of the taut string. “I will put you down.”

“No,” he says. “You would…”

The bowstring snaps. He jerks his razor up to deflect the arrow. Misses, slower than Aja. The serrated iron tip punches through the front of his throat and out the back of his neck, the feather fletching scratching the underside of his dimpled chin. There’s no spray of blood. Just a meaty, wet gurgle. He flops back. Hitting the ground hard. Gagging. Hacking hideously. His feet kick as he clutches the arrow. Hissing for breath, eyes inches from my own. Mustang rushes to me. I scramble to my feet, away from Cassius, and grab my razor from the snow, pointing it at his thrashing body.

“I’m prime,” I say, tearing my eyes from my old friend as blood pools beneath him and he fights

for his life. “Help Ragnar.”

Over Cassius’s body, we see the Stained and Aja whirling at each other on the edge of a crevasse.

Blood paints the snow around them. All of it coming from Ragnar. But still he presses the woman knight back, a furious song cascading out of his throat. Beating her down. Overwhelming her with his two hundred and fifty kilograms of mass. Sparks flare from their blades. She caves before him now, unable to match the anger of the banished prince of the Spires. Heels skidding on the snow. Arm shuddering. Bending back away from Ragnar. Bending like a willow. His song roars louder. “No,” I

murmur. “Shoot her,” I tell Mustang.

“They’re too close….”

“I don’t care!”

She fires a shot. It rips inches past Aja’s head. But it does not matter. Ragnar has already fallen into the trap the woman has laid for him, Mustang doesn’t see it yet. She will. It’s one of the many Lorn taught me. The one Ragnar could not have learned because he never had a razormaster. He only ever

had his rage and years of fighting with solid weapons, not the whip. Mustang loads another arrow.

And Ragnar swings down at Aja with a blacksmith’s overhead strike, Aja raises her rigid blade to

meet his. She activates the whip function. Her blade goes limp. Expecting to meet the resistance of solid polyenne fiber, Ragnar ’s whole weight carries down on empty air. He’s athletic enough to slow the movement so his blade doesn’t smash into the ground, and against a lesser opponent he would have recovered with ease. But Aja was the greatest student of Lorn au Arcos. She’s already spinning to the side, contracting the whip back into a blade and using her momentum to hack sideways at Ragnar as she finishes her spin. The movement is simple. Laconic. Like one of the ballerinas Mustang and Roque would watch at Agea’s opera house as I studied with Lorn, pivoting through a fouetté. If I didn’t see the blood paint her blade and spray a delicate arc of red across the snow, I could be convinced that she missed.

Aja does not miss.

Ragnar tries to turn and face her, but his legs betray him. Crumpling underneath. His gaping wound a bloody smile against the white of his sealSkin. Aja cut into his lower back, through his spinal cord, and out the front of his stomach at the belly button. He flops down at the lip of a crevasse. Razor skipping across the ice. I howl in rage, in crushing disbelief, and charge Aja as Mustang fires her bow, running with me. Aja sidesteps Mustang’s arrows and stabs Ragnar twice more in the stomach as he lies grasping his wound. His body jerks. The blade slides in and out. Aja sets her feet now, preparing for me, when her eyes go wide. She steps back, marveling at something in the sky above

my head. Mustang fires twice in quick succession. Aja’s head jerks. She twists away from us, spinning backward to the edge of the crevasse. Ice caves beneath her foot, crumbling off into the crevasse. Her arms windmill, but she can’t regain her balance as her eyes meet mine and she pitches with the ice headfirst into the darkness.

Aja is gone. The crevasse deep, sides narrowing away into darkness. I rush back to Ragnar as Mustang stares up at the hillside and the clouds, bow at the ready. She only has three arrows left. “I don’t see anything,” she says.

“Reaper,” Ragnar murmurs from the ground. His chest heaves. Panting heavily. Dark lifeblood pulses out of his open stomach. Aja could have finished him quickly with the two thrusts when he was on the ground. Instead, she stabbed his lower gut so he would suffer as he died. I push on the first wound, red to my elbows, but there’s so much blood I don’t even know what to do. A resGun can’t fix what Aja has done. It can’t even hold him together. The tears sting my eyes. Can hardly see. Steam billows from the wound. My frozen fingers tingling with warmth from the blood. Ragnar blanches at

the blood, an embarrassed look on his face as he whispers apologies.

“It could be the cannibals,” Mustang says, regarding Aja’s distraction. “Can he move?”

“No,” I say weakly. She glances down at him, more stoic than I am.

“We can’t stay here,” she says.

I ignore her. I’ve watched too many friends die to let Ragnar go. I led him to fight Aja. I convinced him to come home. I will not let him slip away. I owe him that much. If it is the last thing I do, foolish or not, I will defend him. I will find some way to fix him, get him to a Yellow. Even if the cannibals come. Even if it costs me my life, I will not leave him. But thinking it doesn’t make it true. Doesn’t give me magical powers. Whatever plan I make, it seems the world is content to undo it.

“Reaper…” Ragnar manages again.

“Save your strength, my friend. It’s going to take all of it to get you out of here.”

“She was fast. So fast.”

“She’s gone now,” I say, though I can’t know for sure.

“I always dreamed of a good death.” He shudders as he realizes again that he’s dying. “This does not seem good.”

His words fishhook a sob from my chest into my throat. “It’s fine,” I say thickly. “It’ll be fine. Once we get you patched up. Mickey will fix you proper. We’ll get you to the Spires. Call in an evac.”

“Darrow…” Mustang says.

Ragnar blinks hard up at me, trying to focus his eyes. He reaches for the sky with a hand. “Sefi…”

“No. It’s me, Ragnar. It’s Darrow,” I say.

“Darrow…” Mustang presses sharply.

“What?” I snap.

“Sefi…” Ragnar points. I follow his finger to the sky above. I see nothing. Just the faint clouds shifting in the wind that comes in from the sea. I hear only the sound of Cassius’s hacking and the creak of Mustang’s bow and Holiday limping toward us over the snow. Then I see why Aja fled as three thousand kilograms of winged predator pierces the clouds. Body that of a lion. Wings, front legs, and head that of an eagle. Feathers white. Beak hooked and black. Head the size of a grown Red.

The griffin is huge, underside of its wings painted with the screaming faces of sky-blue demons. They stretch ten meters wide as the beast lands in the snow in front of me. The earth shakes. Its eyes are pale blue, glyphs and wards painted along its black beak in white. Upon its back sits a lean, terrible human, who blows mournfully on a white horn.

More horns echo from the clouds above and twelve more griffins slam down into the mountain pass, some clinging to the sharp rock walls above us, others pawing at the snow. The first griffin-rider, the one who blew the horn, is cloaked head to toe in filthy white fur and wears a bone helmet crested with a single spine of blue feathers, which trail down the back of the neck. Not a rider is under two meters tall.

“Sunborn,” one of them calls in their sluggish dialect as she rushes to the side of their silent leader.

The speaker strips her helmet to reveal a brutish face thick with scars and piercings before falling to her knee and touching her forehead with a gloved palm in a sign of respect. A blue handprint covers her face. “We saw the flame in the sky….” Her voice falters when she sees my slingBlade.

The other riders strip their helms, dismounting in a rush as they see our hair and eyes. Not a rider among them is a man. The women’s faces are painted with huge sky-blue handprints, a little eye drawn in the center of each. White hair flows in long braids down their backs. Black eyes peer from hooded lids. Iron and bone piercings bridge noses and hook lips and notch ears. Only the lead rider has yet to remove her helmet or kneel. She steps toward us, in a trance.

“Sister,” Ragnar manages. “My sister.”

“Sefi?” Mustang repeats, eying the black human tongues on the prize-hook on the Obsidian’s left

hip. She wears no gloves. The backs of her hands are tattooed with glyphs.

“Do you know me?” Ragnar rasps. A tentative smile on quivering lips as the rider approaches.

“You must.” The rider catalogues his scars from behind her mask. Eyes dark and wide. “I know you,” Ragnar continues. “I would know you if the world were dark and we were withered and old.” He shudders in pain. “If the ice was melted and the wind quiet.” She drifts forward, step by step. “I taught you the forty-nine names of the ice…the thirty-four breaths of the wind.” He smiles. “Though you could only ever remember thirty-two.”

She gives him nothing, but the other riders are already whispering his name, and looking at us as if by accompanying him and possessing a curved blade they’ve pieced together who I am. Ragnar continues, voice carrying the last of his strength.

“I carried you on my shoulders to watch five Breakings. And let you braid my hair with your

ribbons. And played with the dolls you made from seal leather and threw balls of ice at old Proudfoot. I am your brother. And when the men of the Weeping Sun took me and a harvest of

our kin to the Chained Lands, do you remember what I told you?”

Despite his wound, the man reeks of power. This is his land. This is his home. And he is as vast here as I was upon my clawDrill. The gravity of him draws Sefi closer. She collapses to her knees and strips away her bone helmet.

Sefi the Quiet, famed daughter of Alia Snowsparrow, is raw and majestic. Face severe. Angled like

a crow’s. Her eyes too small, too close together. Her lips thin, purple in the cold, and permanently pursed in thought. White hair shaved down the left side, braided and falling to the waist on the right. A wing tattoo encircled by astral runes is livid blue on the left side of her pale skull. But what makes her

unique among the Obsidians, and the object of their admiration, is that her skin is without pocks or scars. The only ornament she wears is a single iron bar through her nose. And when she blinks down at Ragnar ’s wound, the blue eyes tattooed on the back of her eyelids pierce through me.

She extends a hand to her brother, not to touch him, but to feel the breath steam before his mouth and nose. It is not enough for Ragnar. He seizes her hand and presses it fiercely to his chest so she can feel his fading heartbeat. Tears of joy gather in his eyes. And when they spill from Sefi’s down her cheeks to carve paths through her blue warpaint, his voice cracks. “I told you I would return.”

Her eyes leave him to follow Aja’s tracks into the crevasse. She clicks her tongue and four Valkyrie stake ropes into the snow and rappel down into the darkness to seek out Aja. The rest guard their warleader and watch the hills, elegant recurve bows at the ready. “We have to fly him to the Spires,” I say in their language. “To your shaman.”

Sefi does not look at me. “It is too late.” Snow gathers on Ragnar ’s white beard. “Let me die here.

On the ice. Under the wild sky.”

“No,” I mumble. “We can save you.”

The world feels very distant and unimportant. His blood continues to leave him, but there is no more sadness in my friend. Sefi has chased it away.

“It is no great thing to die,” he says to me, though I know he doesn’t mean it as deeply as he wants to. “Not when one has lived.” He smiles, trying to comfort me even now. But he wears the unjustness of his life and death upon his face. “I owe that to you. But…there is much undone. Sefi.”

He swallows, his tongue heavy and dry. “Did my men find you?” Sefi nods, staying hunched over her brother, her white hair flying about her in the wind. He looks to me. “Darrow, I know you think words will suffice,” Ragnar says in Aureate lingo so Sefi cannot understand. “They will not. Not with my mother.” This was what he did not tell me. Why he was so quiet on the shuttle, why he carried dread upon his shoulders. He was coming home to kill his mother. And now he’s giving me

permission to do just that. I glance over to Mustang. She heard too, and wears her heartbreak on her face. As much for my shattered, fool’s dream of a better world as for my dying friend. He shudders in pain and Sefi pulls a knife from her boot, unwilling to watch him suffer any longer. Ragnar shakes his head at her and nods to me. He wants me to do it. I shake my head as if I can wake up from this nightmare. Sefi stares at me fiercely, daring me to contradict her brother ’s last wishes.

“I will die with my friends,” Ragnar says.

I numbly let my razor slither into my hand and hold it over his chest. There’s peace at last in Ragnar ’s wet eyes. It’s all I can do to be strong for him.

“I will give Eo your love. I will make a house for you in the Vale of your fathers. It will be beside my own. Join me there when you die.” He grins. “But I am no builder. So take your time.

We will wait.”

I nod like I still believe in the Vale. Like I still think it waits for me and for him. “Your people will be free,” I say. “On my life, I promise this. And I will see you soon.” He smiles as he stares up at the sky. Sefi frantically puts her axe in Ragnar ’s palm so that he can die as a warrior, a weapon in hand, and secure his place in the halls of Valhalla.

“No, Sefi,” he says, dropping the axe and taking snow in his left hand, her hand with his right.

“Live for more.” He nods to me.

The wind whips.

The snow falls.

Ragnar watches the sky, where the cold lights of Phobos glitter on as I silently slide the metal into his heart. Death comes like nightfall, and I cannot tell the moment when the light leaves him, when his

heart no longer beats and his eyes no longer see. But I know he’s gone. I feel it in the chill that settles over me. In the sound of the lonely, hungry wind, and the dread silence in the black eyes of Sefi the Quiet.

My friend, my protector, Ragnar Volarus has left this world.

I’m numb with grief. Unable to think of anything but how Sevro will react when he hears Ragnar has died. How my nieces and nephews will never braid another bow into the Friendly Giant’s hair. Part of my soul has departed and will never return. He was my protector. He gave so many strength. Now, without him, I cling to the back of a Valkyrie as her griffin rises away from the bloody snow. Even as we soar through the clouds on great beating wings, even as I see the Valkyrie Spires for the first time, I feel no awe. Just numbness.

The spires are a twisting, vertiginous spine of mountain peaks so ludicrous in their abrupt rise from the arctic plains that only a maniacal Gold at the controls of a Lovelock engine with fifty years of tectonic manipulation and a solar system of resources could conspire to create them. Probably just to see if they could. Dozens of stone spires weave together like spiteful lovers. Mist shrouding them.

Griffins making nests on their peaks, crows and eagles in the lower reaches. Upon a high rock wall, seven skeletons hang from chains. The ice is stained with blood and the droppings of animals. This is the home of the only race to ever threaten Gold. And we come stained in the blood of its banished prince.

Sefi and her riders searched the crevasse in which Aja fell; they found nothing but boot prints. No body. No blood. Nothing to abate the rage that burns inside Sefi. I think she would have remained over her brother ’s body for hours more, had they not heard drums beating in the distance. Eaters who had mustered greater strength and intended to challenge the Valkyrie for possession of the fallen gods.

Wrath stained her face as she stood over Cassius, her axe in hand. He is one of the first Golds she’ll ever have seen without armor. Maybe the first aside from Mustang. And I think, stained with the blood of her brother, she would have killed him there on the snow. I know I would have let her, and so too would have Mustang. But she relented at the urging of her Valkyrie. Clicking her tongue to her riders, sheathing her axe and signaling them to mount. Now Cassius is tied to the saddle of a Valkyrie to my right. The arrow missed his jugular, but death might come for him even without a kiss from Sefi’s axe.

We land in a high alcove cut into the highest reach of a corkscrew spire. Slaves from enemy Obsidian clans, eyes branded into blindness, receive our griffins. Their faces painted yellow for cowardice. Iron doors groan shut behind, sealing us off from the wind. The riders jump from their

saddles before we land to help carry Ragnar away from us deeper into the rock city.

There’s a commotion as several dozen armed warriors push their way into the griffin stable and confront Sefi. They gesture wildly at us. Their accents thicker than the Nagal I learned with Mickey’s uploads and my studies at the Academy, but I understand enough to glean that the newer group of warriors is shouting that we should be in chains, and something about heretics. Sefi’s women are

shouting back, saying we are friends of Ragnar, and they point feverishly to the Gold of our hair.

They don’t know how to treat us, or Cassius, who several of the warriors pull away from us like dogs fighting for scrap meat. The arrow’s still in his neck. Whites of his eyes huge. He reaches for me in terror as the Obsidians drag him across the floor. His hand grasps mine, holds for a moment, and then he’s gone down a torch-lit hall, borne away by half a dozen giants. The rest cluster around us, huge iron weapons in hand, the stink of their furs thick and nauseating. Quieting only when an old stout woman with a hand-shaped tattoo on her forehead pushes through their ranks to speak with Sefi.

One of her mother ’s warchiefs. She gestures upward toward the ceiling with large hand motions.

“What is she saying?” Holiday asks.

“They’re talking about Phobos. They see the lights from the battle. They think the Gods are fighting. These ones think we should be prisoners, not guests,” Mustang says. “Let them take your weapons.”

“Like hell.” Holiday steps back with her rifle. I grab the barrel and push it down, handing them my razor. “This is bloody spectacular,” she mutters. They shackle our arms and legs with great iron manacles, taking care not to touch our skin or hair, and jerk us toward a tunnel by the Spires guards, away from Sefi’s Valkyrie. But as we go, I catch sight of Sefi watching after us, a strange, conflicted look on her white face.

—

After being dragged down several dozen dimly lit stairwells, we’re shoved into a windowless cell of carved stone and stifling, smoky air. Seal oil smolders in iron braziers stinging our eyes. I trip on a raised flagstone and fall to the floor. There, I slam my chains against the stone. Feeling the anger. The helplessness. All the things happening so fast, whipping me around, so I can’t tell which way’s up. But I can think long enough to grasp the futility of my actions, my plans. Mustang and Holiday watch me in heavy silence. One day into my grand plan and Ragnar is already dead.

Mustang speaks more softly. “Are you all right?”

“What do you think?” I ask bitterly. She says nothing in reply, not the fragile sort of person to take offense and whimper out how she’s just trying to help. She knows the pain of loss well enough. “We need to have a plan,” I say mechanically, trying to force Ragnar out my mind.

“Ragnar was our plan,” Holiday says. “He was the entire sodding plan.”

“We can salvage it.”

“And how the hell you expect to do that?” Holiday asks. “We don’t have weapons anymore. And they don’t exactly look tickled Pink to see us. They’re probably going to eat us.”

“These ones aren’t cannibals,” Mustang says.

“You’re willing to bet your leg on that, missy?”

“Alia is the key,” I say. “We can still convince her. It will be difficult without Ragnar, but that’s the only way. Convince her that he died trying to bring their people the truth.”

“Didn’t you hear him? He said words wouldn’t work.”

“They still can.”

“Darrow, give yourself a moment,” Mustang says.

“A moment? My people are dying in orbit. Sevro is at war, and he’s depending on us to bring him

an army. We don’t have the luxury of taking a bloodydamn moment.”

“Darrow…” Mustang tries to interrupt. I keep going, methodically sorting through the options, how we must hunt down Aja, rejoin with the Sons. She puts a hand on my arm. “Darrow. Stop.” I

falter. Losing track of where I was, slipping away from the comfort of logic and falling straight into the emotion of it all. Ragnar ’s blood is under my nails. All he wanted was to come home to his people and lead them out of darkness like he saw me doing with mine. I robbed him of that choice by leading the attack on Aja. I don’t cry. There isn’t time for it, but I sit there with my head in my hands. Mustang touches my shoulder.

“He smiled in the end,” she says softly. “Do you know why? Because he knew what he was doing

was right. He was fighting for love. You’ve made a family of your friends. You always have. It made Ragnar a better man to know you. So you didn’t get him killed. You helped him live. But you have to live now.” She sits next to me. “I know you want to believe the best in people. But think how long it took for you to get through to Ragnar. To win over Tactus or me. What can you do in a day? A week?

This place…it’s not our world. They don’t care about our rules or our morality. We will die here if we do not escape.”

“You don’t think Alia will listen.”

“Why would she? Obsidians only value strength. And where is ours? Ragnar even thought he would have to kill his mother. She won’t listen. Do you know the word for surrender in Nagal? Rjoga.

The word for subjugation? Rjoga. What’s the word for slavery? Rjoga. Without Ragnar to lead them, what do you think is going to happen if you release them on the Society? Alia Snowsparrow is a blackblooded tyrant. And the rest of the warchiefs are no better. She might even be expecting us. Even if we’ve hacked the Golds’ monitoring systems, the Golds know she’s his mother, then they could have told her to expect him. She could be reporting to them right now.”

When I looked up at my father as a boy, I thought being a man was having control. Being the master and commander of your own destiny. How could any boy know that freedom is lost the moment you become a man. Things start to count. To press in. Constricting slowly, inevitably, creating a cage of inconveniences and duties and deadlines and failed plans and lost friends. I’m tired of people doubting. Of people choosing to believe they know what is possible because of what has happened before.

Holiday grunts. “Escaping won’t be that easy.”

“Step one,” Mustang says as she slips free of her manacles. She used a little shard of bone to pick the lock.

“Where’d you learn that?” Holiday asks.

“You think the Institute was my first school?” she asks. “Your turn.” She reaches for my manacles.

“As I see it, we can rush them when they open the…what’s wrong?”

I’ve pulled my hands back from her. “I’m not leaving.”

“Darrow…”

“Ragnar was my friend. I told him I would help his people. I will not run to save myself. I will not let him die in vain. The only way out is through.”

“The Obsidians…”

“Are needed,” I say. “Without them, I can’t fight Gold Legions. Not even with your help.”

“All right,” Mustang says, not belaboring the point. “Then how do you intend to change Alia’s mind?”

“I think I’ll need your help with that.”

—

Hours later, we are guided to the center a cavernous throne room built for giants. It’s lit by seal oil

lamps that belch out black smoke along the walls. The iron doors slam shut behind us, and we’re left alone before a throne, upon which sits the largest human being I’ve ever seen. She watches us from the far side of the room, more statue than woman. We approach awkwardly in our chains. Boots over

the slick black floor till we come before Alia Snowsparrow, Queen of the Valkyrie.

Across her lap lies the body of her dead son.

Alia glares down at us. She is as colossal as Ragnar, but ancient and wicked, like the oldest tree of some primeval forest. The kind that drinks the soil and blocks the sun for lesser trees and watches them wither and yellow and die and does nothing but reach her branches higher and dig her roots deeper. The wind has armored her face in dead skin and calluses. Her hair is stringy and long, the color of dirty snow. She sits on a cushion of furs stacked inside the rib cage of the skeleton of what must have been the largest griffin ever Carved. The griffin’s head screams silently down at us from above her. The wings spread against the stone wall, ten meters across. On her head is a crown of black glass. At her feet is her fabled warchest which is locked in times of peace by a great iron device.

Her knotty hands are covered in blood.

This is the primal realm, and though I would know what to say to a queen who sits upon a throne, I have no bloodydamn clue what to say to a mother who sits with her own son dead in her lap and looks at me as though I am some worm that’s just slithered up from the taiga.

It seems she doesn’t much care that I’ve lost my tongue. Hers is sharp enough.

“There is a great heresy in our lands against the gods who rule the thousand stars of the Abyss.”

Her voice rumbles like that of an old crocodile. But it is not her language, it is ours. HighLingo Aureate. A sacred tongue, known by few in these lands, mostly the shaman who commune with the gods. Spies, in other words. Alia’s fluency startles Mustang. But not me. I know how the low rise under the power of the mighty, and this merely confirms what I’ve long suspected. Slaggin’ Gamma

are not the only favored slaves of the worlds.

“A heresy told by wicked prophets with wicked aims. For a summer and a winter it has slithered through us. Poisoning my people and the people of the Dragon Spine and the Blooded Tents and the

Rattling Caves. Poisoning them with lies that spit in the eye of our people.” She leans down from her throne, blackheads huge on her nose. Wrinkles deep ravines around pitch eyes.

“Lies that say a Stained son will return and he will bring a man to guide us from this land. A morning star in the darkness. I have sought these heretics out to learn of their whispers, to see if the gods spoke through them. They did not. Evil spoke through them. And so I have hunted the heretics.

Broken their bones with my own hands. Peeled their flesh and set them upon the rock of the spires to be eaten as carrion by the fowl of the ice.” The seven bodies who dangled from the chains outside.

Ragnar ’s friends.

“This I do for my people. Because I love my people. Because the children of my loins are few, and

those of my heart many. For I knew the heresy to be a lie. Ragnar, blood of my blood, would never

return. To return would mean the breaking of oaths to me, to his people, to the gods who watch over us from Asgard on high.”

She looks down at her dead son.

“And then I woke into this nightmare.” She closes her eyes. Breathes deep and opens them again.

“Who are you to bring the corpse of my best born to my spire?”

“My name is Darrow of Lykos,” I say. “This is Virginia au Augustus and Holiday ti Nakamura.”

Alia’s eyes ignore Holiday and twitch over to Mustang. Even at nearly two meters, she seems a child in this huge room. “We came with Ragnar as a diplomatic mission on behalf of the Rising.”

“The Rising.” She dislikes the taste of the foreign word. “And who are you to my son?” She eyes

my hair with more disdain than a mortal should have for a god. Something deeper is at play here.

“Are you Ragnar ’s master?”

“I am his brother,” I correct.

“His brother?” She mocks the idea.

“Your son swore an oath of servitude to me when I took him from a Gold. He offered me Stains

and I offered him his freedom. Since then he has been my brother.”

“He…” Her voice catches. “Died free?”

The way she says it intones that deeper understanding. One Mustang notes. “He did. His men, the ones you have hanging on the walls outside, would have told you that I lead a rebellion against the Golds who rule over you, who took Ragnar from you as they took your other children. And they would have told you, as well as all your people, that Ragnar was the greatest of my generals. He was a good man. He was—”

“I know my son,” she interrupts. “I swam with him in the ice floes when he was a boy. Taught him

the names of the snow, of the storms, and took him upon my griffin to show him the spine of the world. His hands clutched my hair and sang for joy as we rose through the clouds above. My son was without fear.” She remembers that day very differently than Ragnar did. “I know my son. And I do not need a stranger to tell me of his spirit.”

“Then you should ask yourself, Queen, what would make him return here.” Mustang says. “What

would make him send his men here, if he would come here himself if he knew it meant breaking his

oath to you and your people?”

Alia does not speak as she examines Mustang with those hungry eyes.

“Brother.” She mocks the word again, looking back to me. “I wonder, would you use brothers as

you have used my son? Bringing him here. As if he is the key to unlocking the giants of the ice?” She looks around the hall so I see the deeds carved into the stone that stretches the height of fifteen men above us. I’ve never met an Obsidian artisan. They send us only their warriors. “As if you could use a mother ’s love against her. This is the way of men. I can smell your ambition. Your plans. I do not know the Abyss, oh, worldly warlord, but I know the ice. I know the serpents that slither in the hearts of men.

“I questioned the heretics myself. I know what you are. I know you descend from a lower creature

than us. A Red. I have seen Reds. They are like children. Little elves who live in the bones of the world. But you stole the body of an Aesir, of a Sunborn. You call yourself a breaker of chains, but you are a maker of them. You wish to bind us to you. Using our strength to make you great. Like every man.”

She leans over my dead friend to leer at me and I see what this woman respects, why Ragnar believed he would have to kill her and take her throne, and why Mustang wanted to flee. Strength. And where is mine, she wonders.

“You know many things of him,” Mustang says. “But you know nothing of me, yet you insult me.”

Alia frowns. It’s clear she has no idea who Mustang is, and no wish to anger a true Gold, if, indeed, Mustang is one. Her confidence wavers only a fraction. “I have laid no claims against you, Sunborn.”

“But you have. By suggesting he has evil wishes in store for your people, you too suggest that I collude with him. That I, his companion, am here with the same wicked intentions.”

“Then what are your intentions? Why do you accompany this creature?”

“To see if he was worth following,” Mustang says.

“And is he?”

“I don’t know yet. What I do know is that millions will follow him. Do you know that number? Can

you even comprehend it, Alia?”

“I know the number.”

“You asked my intentions,” Mustang says. “I will put it plainly. I am a warlord and Queen like you.

My dominion is larger than you can comprehend. I have metal ships in the Abyss that carry more men than you have ever seen. That can crack the highest mountain in two. And I am here to tell you that I am not a god. Those men and women on Asgard are not gods. They are flesh and blood. Like you.

Like me.”

Alia rises slowly, bearing her huge son easily in her arms, and walks him to a stone altar and lays him upon it. She pours oil from a small urn onto a cloth and drapes it over Ragnar ’s face. Then she kisses the cloth. Looking down at him.

Mustang presses her. “This land cannot hold seed. It is ruled by wind and ice and barren rock. But you survive. Cannibals roam the hills. Enemy clans ache for your land. But you survive. You sell your sons,