“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.