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I forget that Cassius, Roque, Sevro, and I are enemies. Red and Gold. I forget that one day I might have to kill them all. They call me brother, and I cannot but think of them in the same way.
The battle with House Minerva has broken down into a series of warband skirmishes, neither side gaining enough advantage over the other to ever score a decisive victory. Mustang will not risk the pitched battle that I want, nor
can they really be goaded. They are not so easily tempted as my soldiers are to bouts of glory or violence.
Still the Minervans are desperate to capture me. Pax turns into a madman when he sees me. Mustang even tried offering Antonia, or so Antonia claims, a mutual defense compact, a dozen horses, six stunpikes, and seven slaves in exchange for me. I don’t know if she is lying when she tells me this.
“You would betray me in a heartbeat if it got you to Primus,” I tell her.
“Yes,” she says irritably, as I interrupt her fastidious nail maintenance. “But since you expect it, it shan’t really be a betrayal, darling.”
“Then why didn’t you accept the offer?”
“Oh, the dregs look up to you. It would be disastrous at this point. Maybe after you have failed at something, yes, maybe then when momentum is against you.”
“Or you’re waiting for a higher price.”
“Exactly, darling.”
Neither of us mentions Sevro. I know she’s still afraid he’ll cut her throat if she touches me. He follows me now, wearing his wolfskin. Sometimes he walks. Sometimes he rides a small black mare. He does not like armor. Wolves approach him at random, as though he were one of their own pack. They come to eat deer he kills because they’ve grown hungry as we lock away the goats and sheep. Pebble always leaves them food at the walls whenever we slaughter a beast. She watches them like a child as they come in fours and threes.
“I killed their pack leader,” Sevro says when I ask why the wolves follow him. He looks me up and down and flashes me an impish grin from beneath the wolf pelt. “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t fit in your skin.”
I’ve given Sevro the dregs to command because I know they might be the only people he’ll ever like. At first he ignores them. Then slowly, I begin noticing that more unearthly howls fill the night than before. The others call them the Howlers, and after a few nights under Sevro’s tutelage, each wears a black wolfcloak. There are six: Sevro, Thistle, Screwface, Clown, Pebble, and Weed. When you look at them, it seems as though each of their passive faces stares out from the open, fanged maw of a wolf. I use them for quiet tasks. Without them, I’m not sure I would still be leader. My soldiers whisper slurs about me as I pass. The old wounds have not healed.
I need a victory, but Mustang will not meet in combat, and the thirty-meter walls of House Minerva are not as easy to pass as they were initially. In our warroom, Sevro paces back and forth and calls the game stupidly designed.
“They had to know we couldn’t gorywell get past each other’s walls. And no one is dumb enough to send out a force they can’t afford to lose. Especially not Mustang. Pax might. He’s an idiot, built like a god, but an idiot and he wants your balls. I hear you popped one of his.”
“Both.”
“Should just put Pebble or Goblin in a catapult and launch them over the wall,” Cassius suggests. “Course we’d have to find a catapult …”
I’m tired of this war with Mustang. Somewhere in the south or west, the Jackal is building his strength. Somewhere my enemy, the ArchGovernor’s son, is readying to destroy me.
“We are looking at this the wrong way,” I tell Sevro, Quinn, Roque, and Cassius. They’re alone with me in the warroom. An autumn breeze brings in the smell of dying leaves.
“Oh, do share your wisdom,” Cassius says with a laugh. He’s lying on several chairs, his head in Quinn’s lap. She plays with his hair. “We’re dying to hear.”
“This is a school that has existed for, what, more than three hundred years? So every permutation has been seen. Every problem we face has been designed to be overcome. Sevro, you say the fortresses cannot be taken? Well, the Proctors have to know that. So that means we have to change the paradigm. We need an alliance.”
“Against whom?” Sevro asks. “Hypothetically.”
“Against Minerva,” Roque answers.
“Stupid idea,” Sevro grunts, and cleans a knife and slides it into his black sleeve. “Their castle is tactically inconsequential. No value. None. The land we need is near the river.”
“Think we need Ceres’s ovens?” Quinn asks. “I could do with some bread.”
We all could. A diet of meat and berries has made us muscle and bones.
“If the game lasts through winter, yeah.” Sevro pops his knuckles. “But these fortresses don’t break. Stupid game. So we need their bread and their access to the water.”
“We have water,” Cassius reminds him.
Sevro sighs in frustration. “We have to leave the castle to get it, Sir Numbnuts. A real siege? We’d last five days without replenishing our water. Seven if we drank the animals’ blood like Morgdy. We need Ceres’s fortress. Also, the harvest pricks can’t fight to save their lives, but they have something in there.”
“Harvest pricks? Hahaha,” Cassius crows.
