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He spits on the mossy ground and motions me to follow him up a hillside. My boots crack a water-sodden log. “Why should I care about you?”
“Because you trained me.”
“I also trained Aja au Grimmus.”
“For some reason, I think you like me more than her.”
“And why’s that?”
“I have a sense of humor.”
He laughs. “Aja can be funny.”
“Surely you’re joking.”
“You meet a man, you know him. You meet a woman, she knows you.” He laughs to himself about some memory. “Might be easier thinking her some terror in the night. But she’s flesh and blood. She has friends. She has family. And she thinks you a threat to them.”
“Yet she’s the one who killed my friend.”
“Yes. I heard. You had the child. Clever tactic.” He squints back at the razor curled around my arm. “Does everyone wear their razor like a fool now?”
“It’s the fashion.”
“It’s meant to be looped on the hip. You’ll cut your arm off by accident.” He sighs. “Your generation … So arrogant. Changing things for no reason. I wonder, arrogant boy, did you think that if you rode in here with your stolen ship that I, a man of a century, would follow you to battle? That I would put in danger all my servants, all my family, all I love, for you? Someone who rejected me when I asked him to join my house?”
I ignore his bitterness. “You left the Society for a reason, Lorn. Can you remember why?”
“To avoid loud fools.”
“I think you left because you thought the Society sick. Because it was not worth sacrificing for anymore.”
“Stop barking at me, puppy.”
“So I’m right.”
“No. You’re not right.” He wheels angrily on me. “I left the Society not because it is sick, but because it is dead. The Society was created to instill order. Men were made to sacrifice so that humanity endured. They were given Colors, lives limited and ordered so that we could destroy the timeless cycle of our race—prosperity to greed to war. Gold was meant to shepherd the other Colors, not devour them. Now we are trapped again in that cycle, the very thing we endeavored to avoid. So the Society? The beautiful sum of all human enterprise? It been dead and rotting for hundreds of years, and those who fight over it are but vultures and maggots.”
“So it wasn’t Brutus’s death.” I speak of his youngest son who was married to Octavia au Lune’s deceased daughter.
“That was an accident.”
“A convenient accident,” I say. “There are rumors that Octavia’s daughter was organizing a coup against her mother.”
“I don’t entertain rumors,” he says darkly.
“If you help me, I can give you your grandson back.”
“Lysander has been raised with poison in his ear. He is not my kin.”
“You’re not that cold. Lorn, I’ve met the boy. He’s more like you than her. He isn’t wicked. Fight for him.”
Lorn stares quietly at the rain falling against the pulseShield.
“You fight a tyrant to replace her with a tyrant,” he says wearily. “This is the same game I have seen a hundred times. Do you even know who you serve?”
“I have a feeling you’re about to tell me.”
“I’ll not stop being your teacher just because you’ve stopped listening. Sit. I don’t want Icarus to be bothered by this damn story.” He sits on a large stone and instructs me to take a place opposite him. I do. He hunches forward and plays with the thick House Mars ring on his finger.
