“I’m counting, Pax. Not you,” Niobe au Telemanus says. Kavax’s wife is a serene woman with a bird’s nest of untamable graying hair and skin the color of cherrywood. The tribal tattoos of her Pacific Islander ancestors cover her arms. “Three to two, for Pax.”
“Mind your balance, and stop overextending, Electra,” says Thraxa. “You’ll lose your footing if you’re on an unstable surface, like a ship deck or ice.” She sits on the edge of a fountain, miraculously already having found a bottle of beer.
Brow furrowed in anger, Electra rushes Pax again. They move fast for children, but since they’re still shy of puberty, their movements are not yet graceful. Electra feints high, then twists her wrist to slash savagely down, hitting Pax’s shoulder. “Point for Electra,” Niobe says. Sevro has to stop himself from clapping. Pax tries to recover, but Electra is on him. Three more quick blows knock his razor from his hand. He falls down and Electra lifts her razor to smash him hard on the head.
Thraxa slips forward and catches the blade mid-swing with her metal hand. “Temper, temper, little lady.” She pours a little beer on her head.
Electra glares up at her.
Sevro can’t contain himself any longer. “My little harpy!” He lunges up off the bench and I follow through to the grotto. “Daddy’s home!” A smile slashes across Electra’s dour face as she turns to see her father. She runs to him and lets him scoop her up off the ground. Looks rather like he’s hugging a limp fish. Some of the children flinch back when they see Sevro. And when they see me emerge from behind the vines, they stiffen and bow with perfect manners. Not one born since the fall of House Lune has the sigils implanted on their hands.
We raise them in packs of nine now, setting children of disparate Colors together early in their schooling with hopes of creating the bonds that I found at the Institute, but without the murder and starvation. Pax’s best friend, Baldur, a quiet gap-toothed Obsidian boy who is already nearly as tall as Sevro, helps Pax up. He tries to dust Pax off before Pax shoos him away and looks over at us.
I expected him to rush to me like Electra, but he doesn’t. And in that moment, a very sharp spasm of pain goes through the deeper part of me. When I left him, he was a boy, brimming with reckless life, but the hesitation, the coldness in him now, is from the world of men. Minding his pack, he walks forward very calmly and bows at the waist, no deeper than manners require. “Hello, Father.”
“My boy,” I say with a smile. “You’ve grown like a weed.”
“That’s what happens when you age,” he says, an edge to his words. I always thought when I became a man, I’d feel more confident, but towering over this boy, I feel so very small. I lost my own father to a cause; have I doomed Pax to the same fate?
—
“He’s not generally such a snot,” Niobe says later as we stand to the side after the children are dismissed from the day’s practice. Pax leaves quickly and in a mood. Baldur rushes to keep up.
“Take the angst as a compliment, Darrow,” Thraxa mumbles. “He just misses his father. I felt the same way anytime the old man was away on one of Augustus’s errands.” She pulls a slim burner from her pocket and lights it in the coals of one of the copper braziers that line the crumbling walls of the grotto. Niobe plucks it from her fingers and puts it out on her daughter’s metal arm.
“Was Daxo ever like that?” I ask.
“Daxo?” Niobe laughs. “Daxo was born stoic as a stone.”
“Plotting in the womb from conception,” Thraxa mutters, and sips her beer. “We used to make owl hoots at him. Always watching the rest of us out the window. Big brother never wanted to play our games. Only his own.”
“And you were such a paragon?” Niobe asks. “You used to eat cow pies.”
Thraxa shrugs. “Better than your cooking.” She steps out of range of her mother’s reach and lights a replacement burner. “Thank Jove we had Browns.”
Niobe rolls her eyes and touches my arm. “The miscreant is right, Darrow. Pax just missed you. You’ve time to make up.”
I smile at her but watch Sevro walking away toward the water with Electra. “You know you’re Daddy’s favorite, don’t you?” he’s saying to her. I fight back my jealousy. He always seems able to pick right back up where he left off with his family. I wish I had that same gift.
—
I seek my mother out in the garden that runs along the side of one of the stone storage sheds. She’s hunched in the black dirt with two other Red servant women and a Red man, her bare feet sticking out behind her as she plants bulbs in the ground in tidy rows. I pause a moment at the edge of the garden to watch her, just as I used to watch from the stairwell in our little home in Lykos as she made her night tea. I was afraid of her after Father died. She was always quick with a swat or a barbed word. I thought I deserved the treatment. How much easier the love between us would have been if I’d known as a child that her anger and my fear came from a pain neither one of us deserved. The love in me wells up for her as I remember what she’s endured, and for a brief flicker, I ache to see my father again. For him to see my mother free.
“Are you just going to watch like a wastrel or are you going to help us plant?” she asks without looking up.
“I’m not sure I’d be a good farmer,” I say.
She stands with the help of one of her companions, dusts the dirt from her pants, and takes her time setting her tools away before coming to say hello. She’s only eighteen years older than I am, but she wears the years hard. Still, she is stronger by leagues than when she lived below. Her joints are worn from years in the mines. But her cheeks are ruddy with life now. Our physicians have helped relieve most of the symptoms of the stroke and heart condition that ravaged her. I know she feels guilty for this life. This luxury, when my father and so many others wait for us in the Vale. Her work in the garden and on the grounds is a penance for surviving.
My mother gives me a hard hug. “My son.” She breathes me in before pulling back to look all the way up to my face. “You put the death in me when I heard of that damn Iron Rain. You put the death in all of us.”
“I’m sorry. They shouldn’t have told you before that I was unaccounted for.”
She nods and says nothing, and I realize how deep her worry went. How they must have huddled in the living room here or in the Citadel and listened to the holoNews just like everyone else. The Red man shuffles to join us, his bad leg dragging behind.
“?’Lo, Dancer,” I say past my mother. My old mentor wears laborer’s garments instead of his senatorial robes. His hair is gray, his face fatherly and creased from hard years. But there’s still mischief in his rebel eyes. “Given up the Senate for gardening, have you?”
“I’m a man of the people,” he says with a shrug. “Good to have dirt under the nails again. The gardeners in that museum the Senate gave me won’t let me touch a damn weed. ’Lo, Sevro.”
“Politician,” Sevro says, joining me from behind. Heedless of the mood, he pretends like he’s going to scoop my mother up into the air, but she scowls at him and he turns the scoop into a gentle hug.