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“He didn’t kill Priam,” Cassius repeats. The wind moans over the hills behind us. Night comes slow today. Cassius’s cheeks sink into shadow; still, he’s handsome. “They wouldn’t have put Priam with a monster like Titus. Priam’s a leader, not a warlord. They’d put Priam with someone easy like one of our Dregs.”
I know where Cassius is going with this. It’s in the way he watches Titus; the coldness in his eyes reminds me of a pitviper’s gaze as it follows its prey. My insides turn sour as I do it, but I lead Cassius in the direction he seems to want to go, inviting him to bite. Roque tilts his head at me, noticing something strange in my interaction with Cassius.
“And they would give Titus someone else,” I say.
“Someone else,” Cassius repeats, nodding.
Julian, he is thinking. He doesn’t say it. Neither do I. Better to let it fester in his mind. Let my friend think our enemy killed his brother. This is a way out.
“Blood begets blood begets blood begets blood …” Roque’s words into the wind, which carries west toward the long plain and toward the flames that dance in th
e low horizon. Beyond, the mountains hunker cold and dark. Snow already gathers on their peaks. It’s a sight to steal one’s breath, yet Roque’s eyes never leave my face.
I find it a small pleasure that Titus’s slaves are not very effective allies for him. Far from being indoctrinated as thoroughly as a Red might be, these newly made slaves are stubborn creatures. They follow orders or risk being labeled Shamed after graduation. But they purposefully never do more or less than he demands; it is their act of rebellion. They fight where he tells them to fight, whom he tells them to fight, even when they should retreat. They gather the berries he shows them, even if they know they are poisonous, and pile stones till the pile falls over. But if there is an open gate leading to the enemy’s fortress and Titus doesn’t tell them to go into it, they’ll stand there and pick their butts.
Despite the addition of slaves and the razing of Ceres’s crops and orchards, Titus’s force, which is quite sound at violence, is pitiful when they attempt to do anything else. His men empty their bowels in shallow latrines or behind trees or in the river in an attempt to poison the students of House Ceres. One of his girls even falls in after emptying her bowels into the water. She flails around in her own waste. It’s a scene of comedy, but laughter has become seldom except from the students of Ceres. They sit behind their high walls and catch fish from the river and eat breads from their ovens and honey from their apiaries.
In response to the laughter, Titus drags one of the male slaves up in front of the gate. The slave is a tall one with a long nose and a mischievous smile meant for the ladies. He thinks this is all a game till Titus cuts off one of his ears. Then he cries for his mother like a young child. He will never command warships.
The Proctors, even House Ceres’s, do not stop the violence. They watch from the sky in twos and threes, floating about as medBots whine down from Olympus to cauterize a wound or treat severe head trauma.
On the twentieth morning of the Institute, the defenders throw a basket of bread loaves down as Titus’s men attempt to batter in the tall gate with a felled tree. The besiegers end up fighting each other for the food only to find that the bread was baked around razor blades. The screams last till the afternoon.
Titus’s reply comes just before night falls. With five newly minted slaves, including the male with the missing ear, he approaches the gate till he’s near a mile off. He parades in front of the slaves, holding four long sticks in his hand. These he gives to each of the slaves except the girl he pulled down from the ramparts with a lasso.
With a low bow to the Ceres gate, he waves a hand and orders the slaves to commence beating the girl. Like Titus, she is tall and powerful, so it is difficult to pity her. At first.
The slaves hit the girl gingerly with the initial swings. Then Titus reminds them of the shame that will forever mark their names if they do not obey; they swing harder; they aim for the girl’s golden head. They hit her and hit her till her shouts have long faded and blood mats her blonde hair. When Titus grows bored, he drags the wounded girl back to his camp by her hair. She slides limply over the earth.
We watch from our place in the highlands, and it takes Lea and Quinn both to stop Cassius from sprinting down into the plains. The girl will live, I tell him. The sticks are all show. Roque spits bitterly into the grass and reaches for Lea’s hand. It’s odd seeing her give him strength.
The next morning, we discover that Titus’s reply did not stop with the beating. After we retired to our castle, Titus snuck back in the dead of night to hide the girl directly in front of the Ceres gate underneath a thick blanket of grass, gagged and tied. Then he had one of his female followers shriek during the night to pretend she was the slave at the camp. She screamed of rape and violations.
Maybe the captured Ceres girl thought she was safe under the grass. Maybe she thought the Proctors would save her and she would go home to mother and father, home to her equestrian lessons, home to her puppies and her books. But in the early dark of morning she is trampled as riders, enraged by the fake screams, gallop from the Ceres fortress to rescue her from Titus’s makeshift camp. They only learn of their folly when they hear the medBots descending behind them to carry her broken body up to Olympus.
She never returns. Still the Proctors do not interfere. I’m not sure why they even exist.
I miss home. Lykos, of course, but also the place where I was safe with Dancer, Matteo, and Harmony.
Soon there are no more slaves to take. House Ceres does not come out after dark anymore, and their high walls are guarded. The trees outside the wall have all been cut down, but there are crops and more orchards inside their long walls. Bread still bakes and the river still flows within their ramparts. Titus can do nothing but savage their land and steal what remains of their apples. Most have been sown with needles and stingers from wasps. Titus has failed. And so, as do those of any tyrant after a failed war, his eyes turn inward.
25
TRIBAL WAR
Thirty days into the Institute and I’ve not seen evidence of another enemy House except for the smoke signs of distant fires. House Ceres’s soldiers roam the eastern fringes of our land. They ride with impunity now that Titus’s tribe has retreated into our castle. Castle. No. It has become a hovel.
I come upon it with Roque in the early morning. Fog still clings to the four spires and light struggles to penetrate the dreary sky of our highland climate. Sounds from inside the stone walls echo into the quiet morning like coins rattling about in a tin can. Titus’s voice. He’s cursing at his tribesmen to get up. Apparently few do. Someone tells him to go slag himself, and it’s little wonder. The bunk beds are the only real amenity the castle has, no doubt put there to encourage slothfulness. My tribe has no such amenities; we sleep on stone curled next to one another around our crackling fires. Oh, what I’d give for a bed again.
Cassius and I slink along the slanted dirt road that leads to the gatehouse. We can hardly even see it, the fog is so thick. More sounds from inside. It seems like the slaves are up. I hear coughs, grumbling, and a few shouts. A long creak and the clatter of chains means the gate is opening. Cassius pulls me off to the side of the road, tucking us into the mist as the slaves shuffle past. Their faces are pallid in the low light. Hollows make homes in their sunken cheeks, and their hair has been dirtied. Mud-caked skin around their Sigils. He passes near enough to me that I smell his body odor. I stiffen suddenly, worried he will again smell the smoke on me, but he doesn’t. Beside me, Cassius is quiet, yet I feel his anger.
We sneak back down the path and watch the slaves toil from the relative safety of the woods. They are not Aureates as they scrub shit and scavenge for berries in the sharp thistlebushes. One or two are missing ears. Vixus, recovered from my attack except for a huge purple bruise on his neck, walks around slapping at them with a long stick. If the test is to unite a fractious House, I am failing.
As early morning fades and appetites change with the arrival of warm sunshine, Cassius and I hear a sound that makes our skin prickle. Screams. Screams from the high tower of Mars. They are a particular sort, a kind to darken the spirits.
When I was a boy in Lykos, my mother was serving me soup at our stone family table the night of a Laureltide. It was a year after my father died. Kieran and Leanna sat with me, neither yet older than ten. A single light unit flickered on and off above the table, so Mum was shrouded in darkness except her arm from the elbow down. Then came the scream, muffled by distance and the twists of our cavern township. I still see how the broth quivered in the ladle, how my mother’s hand shook when she heard it. Screams. Not of pain, but of horror.
“What he’s doing to the girls …,” Cassius hisses to me as we slink away from the castle as night descends. “He’s a beast.”
