“When you are in the salt, you feel like every gale is the world ender. Every wave the greatest that has been. These boys ride the gales in rapture at their own glory. But every now and then, a true storm rises. It shatters their masts and rips their hair from their heads. They do not last long till the sea swallows them whole. But their mothers have wept their deaths long before, as I wept for yours the first day we met.”
He stares at me intensely, mouth pinched behind his thick beard.
“I never told you, but I was not raised in a palace or in a city like many of the Peerless you know. My father thought there to be two evils in the world. Technology and culture. He was a hard man. A killer, like the rest of them. But his hardness was found not in what he could do, but in what he wouldn’t do, in his restraint. In the pleasures he denied himself, and his sons. He lived to a hundred and sixty-three without the help of cell rejuvenation. Somehow he lived through eight Iron Rains. But still he never valued life, because he took it too often. He was not a man to be happy.”
I watch the former Rage Knight, Lorn au Arcos, lean over the balcony of his castle. It is a limestone fortress set amidst a sea ninety kilometers deep. Modern lines shape the place. It is not medieval, but a meld of past and present—glass and steel making hard angles with the stone island—so like the man I respect above all other Golds of his generation.
Like him, this castle is a harsh place when the storms come. But when the storms fade, sunshine will bathe this place, shinning through her glass walls, glinting off her steel supports. Children will run its ten-kilometer length, through its gardens, along its walls, down to the harbor. Wind will tickle their hair, and all that Lorn will hear from his library is the crying of gulls, the crash of the sea, and the laughter of his grandchildren and their mothers, whom he guards in place of his dead sons. The only one missing is little Lysander.
If all Golds were like him, Reds would still toil beneath the Earth, but he would have them know their purpose. It doesn’t make him good, but it makes him true.
He’s thick and broad and shorter than I. He lets his empty whiskey tumbler go and permits the wind to swoop it sideways. It falls and the sea swallows it whole. “They say you can hear the dead stormsons whooping in the wind,” he mutters. “I say it’s the crying of their mothers.”
“Storms of court have a way of drawing people back in,” I say.
He laughs a derisive laugh, one that scorns the idea that I would know anything about the storms of court, anything about the winds that blow.
I came to him in secret, flying with a single ship, my five-kilometer destroyer Pax. I told my master he would not help us. But I held on to hope he would want to help me. Yet now that I see Lorn au Arcos again in the knotted flesh, I’m reminded of the nature of the man and I worry. He knows my captains and lieutenants are listening through the com unit in my ear. I paid him respects and showed it to him so that he would not assume our conversation to be a private one.
“After more than a century of living, my body does not yet betray me.” One would think him to be in his mid-sixties, at first glance. Only his scars truly age him. The one on his neck, like a smile, was given to him four decades ago by a Stained in the Moon Kings’ Rebellion, when the Governors of Jupiter’s moons thought to make their own kingdoms after Octavia deposed her father as Sovereign. The one that claims part of his nose came from the Ash Lord, when they dueled as youths. “You’ve heard the expression ‘The duty of the son is the glory of the father’?”
“I have said it myself.”
He grunts. “I have lived it. I have lost many for my own glory. I have set my ship into the storm on purpose. Each time with women and children in tow.” He lets the waves speak for a moment. They crash on the rocks and then pull backward, slurping as they go, drawing things to the sea they call Discordia.
“It is not right to live so long, I think. My great-granddaughter was born last night. I still have the smell of blood on my fingers.” He holds them out—like tree roots, crooked and calloused from the holding of weapons. They tremble slightly. “These took her from the darkness to the light, from warmth to the cold, and cut the cord themselves. It would be a fine world if that was the last flesh they cut.”
He relaxes his hands and sets them on the cold stone. I wonder what Mustang would say to this man. Seeing them face-to-face would be like watching fire trying to catch on stone. She balked at my plan in public, but then again, that was all our design. Plans within plans within plans.
“To think about what hands feel,” Lorn mutters. “These have felt the lifeblood of three strong sons as their hearts pumped it out of their bodies. They’ve felt the cold of a razor’s hilt as they stole the dreams of youth. They’ve worn the love of a girl and a woman and then felt those heartbeats fade to silence. All for my glory. All because I chose to ride the sea. All because I am strong and do not die easily as most.” He frowns. “Hands, I think, were not meant to feel so much.”
“Mine have felt more than I’d wish,” I say. I feel the snap go through them that I felt at Eo’s hanging. The texture of her hair. I remember the warmth of Pax’s blood. The chill of Lea’s pale face in the cold morning after Antonia butchered her. The grainy red smear of haemanthus blossom. Mustang’s bare hip as we lay by the fire.
“You are young still. When you’re white-haired, you’ll have felt even more.”
“Some men don’t grow old.” No Helldiver does.
“No. Some don’t.” He pokes Augustus’s lion’s badge on my dark uniform. “And lions do not live so long as griffins. We can fly away from things, you see.” He brandishes his own family ring and flaps his arms foolishly, drawing a smile from me. He wears it along with his House Mars ring. “You were a pegasus once, were you not?”
“It was the symbol … is the symbol of Andromedus.” My false Gold family. But the symbol reminds me of Eo. She pointed out the Andromeda Galaxy to me before she died. It means so much and so little all at once.
“There’s honor in staying what you were,” he says.
“Sometimes we have to change. Not all of us are born rich as you.”
“Let us go find Icarus in the forest.” He mentioned him often on Mars, but I’ve never seen Lorn’s favorite pet. “Carolina conspired with Vincent to make him a new toy. I think you’ll appreciate it.”
“Where are your children?”
“East wing till you leave.”
“I’m that dangerous?”
He does not answer.
I follow my friend in off the balcony just as one of Europa’s clouds spits blue lightning across the dark sky. Her oceans buck and heave as great swells of water slither and seep along the white walls, as if the world of oceans conspired to swallow the man-made island. Despite all this, the castle and the raging storm still seem so small when I see how Jupiter consumes the night sky behind the clouds—a textured gas giant staring down at us like the head of some great marble god.
As we walk through the stone villa, Lorn happily greets every servant we pass. He sees people, not Colors. Most have been with him for years. I should have studied with him. But then I would have ended up here, a better man, but unable to change anything so far removed from the center of the system.
Children’s toys litter the halls. His family is here—dozens of loved ones he brought together after he left public life. Most live scattered in the southern archipelagos in the warmer waters near the equator. Hurricanes forced them north this month to take refuge with Grandfather Lorn. Seems like the storm followed them.
He pushes open a grand glass gate, leading me into the center of his citadel. Here, he keeps himself a forest, one several acres large and open to the air. The walls stretch around the forest, closing it off from the vicious waves. Lorn’s standards whip high in the air—a roaring purple griffin on a field of snow white. Rain falls on the trees, hissing into their needles until he activates a pulseBubble. Then the rain sizzles on its roof and folds up in thick clouds of vapor. He walks ahead of me, and I linger back, taking small black spikes no longer than my fingernails from a hidden pouch in my sleeve. I scatter them through the moss just outside the door.