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Sevro sought the Jackal after Cassius fed him the lie. My small friend doesn’t get into details. He hates details. He just taps his empty eye socket and says, “The Jackal owes me.”
“You saw him then?” I ask.
“It was dark. I saw his knife. Didn’t even hear his voice. I had to jump off the mountain. It was a long fall back to the rest of the pack.” He says it so plainly. Yet I did notice his limp. “We couldn’t stay in the mountains. His men … everywhere.”
“But we took some of the mountains with us,” Thistle says. She pats the scalps on her waist with a motherly smile. Mustang shudders.
It’s been chaos in the South. Apollo, Venus, Mercury, and Pluto are all that’s left, but I hear Mercury has been reduced to a force of roving vagabonds. A pity. I was fond of their Proctor. He almost chose me in the Draft, would have if he could have. Wonder how things would have gone then.
“Sevro, with that leg, how fast can you run, say, two kilometers?” I ask.
The others are puzzled by the question, but Sevro just shrugs. “Doesn’t slow me. Minute and a half in this lowGrav.”
I make a note to tell him my idea later.
“We have more important things to discuss, Reaper.” Tactus smiles. “Now, I heard you were dangling upside down in the woods from this one here’s trap.” He pats little Thistle on her thigh; she smiles as he lets his hand linger. It’s the scalp collection that draws his affection. “You didn’t think you’d sneak out of telling the tale, did you?”
It’s not so funny a thing as he might suspect.
I finger my ring. Telling them would be signing their death warrants. Apollo and Jupiter listen to me now. I look at Mustang and feel hollow. I’ll risk losing her just to win their rigged game. If I were a good person, I would keep the ring on. I would hold my tongue. But there are plans to make, gods to undo. I take my ring off and set it on the snow. “Let us for one moment pretend we are not from different Houses,” I say. “Let’s all of us talk as friends, ringless.”
Without horses, without mobility, I have no advantage over my enemy in the surrounding lands. Another lesson to be learned. I make an advantage for myself, a new strategy. I make them fear me.
My tactics are ones of fragmentation. I split my army into six pieces of ten under myself, Pax, Mustang, Tactus, Milia, and, due to a surprising recommendation from Milia, Nyla. I would have given Sevro his own unit, but he and his Howlers will not leave my side again. They blame themselves for the scar on my belly.
My army sets into Apollo’s holdings like starving wolves. We do not assail their castle, but we raid their forts. We bring fire to their supply stores. We shoot arrows at their legs. We foul their wat
er supplies and tell prisoners false news and let them escape. We murder their goats and pigs. We hack their riverboats with axes. We steal weapons. I do not allow prisoners to be taken except if they are students from Venus, Juno, or Bacchus enslaved by Apollo. All others we let escape. The fear and legend must spread. This my army understands better than anything else. They are dogmatic. They tell each other tales of me around the campfires. Pax is their ringleader; he thinks I am myth made man. Many of my soldiers begin carving my slingBlade into trees and walls. Tactus and Thistle carve sling-Blades into flesh. And the more industrious members of my army make standards of stained wolfpelts that we take into battle on the end of spears.
I split the slaves of House Ceres and the other captured slaves from one another to integrate them into the various units. I know their allegiances are shifting. Bit by bit. They begin to refer to themselves not as Ceres or Minerva or Diana, but by their unit name. I place four Ceres soldiers, the smallest, with Sevro in the Howlers. I do not know if the bakers will make for elite warriors as Mars’s dregs did, but if anyone can carve off their baby fat, it’s Sevro.
Fear gnaws at Apollo for a week. Our ranks swell. Theirs diminish. Freed slaves tell us of the terror in the castle, the worry that I will appear from the shadows with my bloody wolfcloaks to burn and maim.
I do not fear House Apollo; they are lumbering fools who cannot adjust to my tactics. What I fear is the Proctors, and the Jackal. To me, they are one and the same. After Apollo’s failed attempt on my life, I fear they will be more direct. When will I wake with a razor in my spine? This is their game. At any time, I could die. I must destroy House Apollo now, get Proctor Apollo out of the game before it is too late.
My lieutenants and I sit around our fire in the woods to discuss the tactics of the next day. We are less than two miles from House Apollo’s castle, but they dare not attack us. We are in the deep woods. They huddle in fear of us. We also don’t attack them. I know Proctor Apollo would ruin even the cleverest of night assaults.
Before we can begin, Nyla asks about the Jackal. Sevro’s voice is quiet as he tells what he learned in the mountains. It grows louder as he realizes we are all listening.
“His castle is somewhere in the low mountains. Subterranean, not in the high peaks. Just near Vulcan. Vulcan got off to a prime start. Fastlike. They blitzed Pluto on the third day. Efficient turds. Pluto wasn’t ready. So the Jackal took control, had them retreat into their deep tunnels. Vulcan came howling in with advanced weapons from their forges. It was all going to be over. The Jackal would have been a slave from the first week on. So he collapsed the tunnel—no plan, no way out—in order to preserve his chance to win the game. Killed ten of his own House, tons of highDrafts. MedBots couldn’t save anyone. Stranded forty of the rest in the dark caves. Plenty of water, no food. They were there for nearly a month before they dug their way out.” He smiles and I remember why Fitchner called him Goblin. “Guess what they ate?”
If a Jackal is caught in a trap, it will chew off its own leg. Who told me that?
The fire crackles between us. I would have expected Mustang to shift uncomfortably, but instead what I see from her is anger as the details are relayed. Pure anger. Her jaw flexes and her face loses a shade. I grip her hand beneath the blanket, but it does not grip back.
“How did you find all that out?” Pax rumbles.
Sevro taps one of his curved knives with a fingernail, allowing a soft ding into the night air. It echoes into the woods, bouncing off trees and returning to our ears like a lost phrase. Then I can hear nothing from the woods, nothing beyond the fire. My heart leaps into my throat and I catch Sevro’s eye. He’ll have to find Tactus.
A jamField envelopes us.
“Hello, children,” a voice says from the darkness. “Such a bright fire is dangerous at night. And you’re like little puppies, all snuggled together; no, don’t get up.” This voice is melodious. Frivolous. Eerie to hear after so many months of hardship. No one’s voice sounds like that. He strolls in lightly and plops down beside Pax. Apollo. This time he brought no bear, only a grand spear that drips purple sparks along its business end.
“Proctor Apollo, welcome,” I say. Sentinels perch above us in the trees, their arrows pointed at the Proctor. I wave the trap away and ask the Proctor why he is here, as if we’ve never met. His presence sends a very simple message: my friends are in danger.
“To tell you to return home, my dear nomads.” He opens up a flagon of wine and passes it around. No one drinks, except Sevro. He holds on to the flagon.
“Proctors aren’t supposed to interfere with things. It is in the rules,” Pax says in confusion. “By what right do you come here? This is dirty play.”
