Morning Star: Book III of the Red Rising Trilogy (64 page)

I’ve never seen Sevro so happy. Nor so nervous as he was the hour before the ceremony when he

combed his hair in my washroom. Not that you can do much with a Mohawk. “Is this insane? It seemed like a good idea yesterday,” he asked, staring at himself in the mirror.

“And it’s a good idea today too,” I told him.

“You’re not just saying that. Tell me the truth, man. I feel sick.”

“Before I married Eo, I threw up.”

“Bullshit.”

“Got it all over my uncle’s boots.” A twinge of pain as I remember he’s gone. “Wasn’t that I was afraid of making the wrong decision. I was afraid she was. Afraid of not living up to her expectations…But my uncle told me that it’s women who see us better than we see ourselves. That’s

why you love Victra. That’s why you fight with her. And that’s you why you deserve this.”

Sevro squinted at me in the mirror. “Yeah, but your uncle was crazy. Everyone knows that.”

“Even company then. We’re all a little manic. Especially Victra. I mean she’d have to be to marry

you?”

He grinned. “Bloodydamn right.” And I rumpled his hair, hoping beyond all hope that they can have this little moment of happiness and maybe more after that. It’s the best any of us can hope for, really. “Wish Pops was here, though.”

“I think he’s laughing his ass off somewhere that you have to stand on your tiptoes to kiss your bride,” I said.

“Always was a prick.”

Now Sevro shifts from foot to foot as I hand Victra over to him and he looks up into her eyes. I’m not even there. None of us are, not to them. The gentleness I see from the raging woman now is all it takes to know how much she loves him. It’s not something she’d ever talk about. It’s not her way. But the sharp edge she has for everything and everyone is dull tonight. Like she sees Sevro as a refuge, a place where she can be safe.

I rejoin Mustang as Mickey begins his flowery speech. It’s not half so grandiloquent as I might have expected. The way Mustang nods along to the words, I know she must have helped him edit it down. Reading my mind, she leans over. “You should have heard the first draft. It was a spectacle.”

She sniffs me. “Are you drunk?” She looks back at the flushed Howlers and teetering Telemanuses.

“Are they all drunk?”

“Shhh,” I say and hand her a flask. “You’re too sober.”

Mickey is finishing the ceremony. “…a compact that can be broken only by death. I pronounce you

Sevro and Victra Barca.”

“Julii,” Sevro corrects quickly. “Hers is the elder house.”

Victra shakes her head down at him. “He said it right.”

“But you’re a Julii,” he replies, confused.

“Yesterday I was. Today I’d rather be a Barca. Presuming you don’t have problem with that and I

don’t have to become proportionally diminutive.”

“It’d be lovely,” Sevro says, cheeks glowing as Mickey continues and Sevro and Victra turn to face their friends. “Then I present you to your fellows and the worlds as Sevro and Victra of the Martian House Barca.”

—

The ceremony may have been small, but the celebration is anything but. Fleet-spanning, even. If my people know one thing it is how to survive hardship with celebration. Life’s not just a matter of breathing, it’s a matter of being. Word of Sevro’s speech and his hanging spread through the ships, stitching the wounds back together.

But this day is the one that matters. The one that reaffirms the joy of life throughout my fleet.

Dances are held on the smallest corvettes, on the destroyers and torchShips and the
Morning Star.

Flights of ripWings buzz bridges in celebratory formation. Swill and Society liquors flow among the milling crowds, which gather in hangars to sing and dance around weapons of war. Even Kavax, so

stubborn in his fear of chaos and his prejudice against the Obsidians, dances with Mustang. Drunkenly hugging Sevro and Victra and clumsily attempting to forget the ballroom dreck of Gold dances and

learn those of my people from a full-figured Red with a laughing face and a mechanic’s grease under her nails. With them is Cyther, the awkward Orange who so impressed me a year a half ago in the garages of the
Pax.
He only just finished Mustang’s special project this morning. Now he’s drunk and turning his ungainly body around on the dance floor as Kavax roars approval.

Daxo shakes his head at his father ’s antics while sitting in reserve on the side, as always. I share a drink with him. “It’s wine,” I say.

“Thank Jove.” He replies, delicately taking the glass. “Your people keep trying to give me some kind of engine solvent.” He scans his datapad warily.

“I’ve got Holiday on security,” I say. “This isn’t a Gold party.”

He laughs. “Thank Jove for that then as well.” Finally he takes a sip from his wine. “Venusian Atolls,” he says. “Very nice.”

“Roque had good taste. Your father is a sight,” I say, nodding to the dance floor where the big man sways along with two Reds.

“He’s not the only one,” Daxo replies shrewdly, following my eyes to Mustang who’s now being

spun about by Sevro. The woman’s face is aglow with life, or maybe it’s the alcohol. Hair sweaty and plastered on her forehead. “She loves you, you know,” Daxo says. “She’s just afraid of losing you, so she holds you far away.” He smiles to himself. “Funny how we are, isn’t it?”

“Daxo why aren’t you dancing?” Victra says, striding up to him. “So proper all the time. Up! Up!”

She hauls him up and pushes him onto the dance floor then collapses into his chair. “My feet. Raided Antonia’s closet. Forgot she’s got pigeon feet.”

I laugh and Clown stumbles up to us, heavily drunk.

“Victra, Darrow. A question. Do you think Pebble is interested in that man?” he asks me, leaning against one of the tables as he chugs down another glass of wine. His teeth are already purple.

“The tall one?” Victra asks. Pebble’s dancing with a Gray captain. “She seems to fancy him.”

“He’s terribly handsome,” Clown says. “Good teeth too.”

“I suppose you could always cut in,” I say.

“Well, I wouldn’t want to seem desperate.”

“Jove forbid,” Victra says.

“I think I’ll cut in.”

“I think it’s a good idea,” she says. “But you should bow first. To be polite.”

“Oh. Then it’s settled. I’ll go right now.” He pours another glass of wine. “After another drink.”

I take the wine from him and push him on his way. Holiday appears in the doorframe to watch Clown’s awkward interruption. He’s bowing to Pebble and sweeping back his hand dramatically. “Oh,

hell. He actually did it.” Victra snorts champagne through her nose. “You should do the same with Mustang. Think she’s trying to steal my husband away.
Husband.
That’s a weird word.”

“It’s a weird world.”

“Isn’t it, though.
Wife.
Who’d have thought?”

I look her up and down. “On you, it seems to fit.” I put my arm around her. “It seems to fit perfectly.” She smiles radiantly.

“Sir,” Holiday says, coming up to us.

“Holiday, come to have a drink?” I glance over at her, smile dying when I see the expression that

marks her face. Something has happened. “What is it?”

She motions me away from Victra.

“It’s the Jackal,” she says quietly so as not to spoil the mood. “He’s on the com for you. Direct link.”

“What’s the delay?” I ask.

“Six seconds.”

On the dance floor, Sevro’s spinning with Mustang clumsily, laughing because neither knows the

dance the Reds around them perform. Her hair is dark from sweat on her temples, her eyes alight with the joy of the moment. None of them feel the sudden dread in me, in the world beyond. I don’t want them to. Not tonight.

He sits in a simple chair in the center of my circular training room wearing a coat of white with a gold lion to either side of his high collar. The stars above his glowing hologram are cold stains of light through the duroglass dome. This room was built to train for war and so it is here that I will grant my enemy an audience. I will not let him pervert this ship where Roque lived and where my friends celebrate by seeing or being anyplace else.

Even though he’s millions of kilometers away, I can nearly smell the pencil-shaving scent of him.

Hear the vast silence with which he fills rooms as I stand before his digital image. It’s so lifelike if it did not glow I would think him here. The background behind him is blurred. He watches me enter the room. No smile on his face. No false pleasantness, but I can tell he’s amused. His silver stylus spins in his one hand. The only sign of his agitation.

“Hello, Reaper. How are the festivities?” I try not to let my discomfort show. Of course he knows

of the wedding. He has spies in our fleet. How close they are to me, I cannot tell. But I don’t let the thought spread malignantly through me. If he could reach out and hurt us here, he already would have.

“What do you want?” I ask.

“You called me last time. I thought I should return the favor, particularly considering the message I sent of your uncle. Did you receive it?” I say nothing. “After all, when you arrive at Mars the cannons will speak for us. We may never see each other again. Strange, isn’t that? Did you see Roque before he died?”

“I did.”

“And did he weep for your forgiveness?”

“No.”

The Jackal frowns. “I thought he would. It’s easy to fool a romantic. To think he was right there when I took his girl. You went running by in the hall screaming Tactus’s name, and he looked up in confusion. I pushed a sliver of Quinn’s skull deeper into her brain with my scalpel. I thought about letting her live with brain damage. But the thought of her drooling everywhere made me sick. You think he still would have loved her if she drooled?”

There’s a sound at the door, out of the camera’s capture range. Mustang’s followed me from the wedding. Taking in the scene, she watches quietly. I should turn off the holo. Leave this creature to himself, but I can’t seem to part with him. The same curiosity that brought me here now anchors me to this spot.

“Roque wasn’t perfect, but he cared about Gold. He cared about humanity. He had something he would die for. And that makes him a better man than most,” I say.

“It’s easy to forgive the dead,” the Jackal replies. “I’d know.” A tiny spasm of humanity moves across his lips. He may never say it, but the very tone of his voice tells me he is not without regret. I know he wanted his father ’s approval. But could it actually be that he misses the man? That he’s forgiven his father in death and now mourns him?

He pulls a short gold baton up from his lap. With the press of a button, the baton extends to a scepter. One with the skull of a jackal overtop the pyramid of the Society. I had it commissioned for him more than a year ago. “I’ve not parted with your gift,” he says. He traces the head of the jackal.

“All my life I’ve been given lions. Nothing of my own. What does it say about me that my greatest

enemy knows me better than any friend?”

“You the scepter, I the sword,” I say, ignoring his question. “That was the plan.” I gave it to him because I wanted him to feel loved. To feel like I was his friend. And I would have been, then. I would have helped him change like Mustang did. Like Cassius might. “Is it what you thought it would be?” I ask.

“What?”

“Your father ’s seat.”

He frowns, considering which tack to take. “No,” he says eventually. “No it is not what I expected.”

“You want to be hated. Don’t you?” I ask. “That’s why you killed my uncle when you didn’t need to.

It gives you purpose. That’s why you called me. To feel important. But I don’t hate you.”

“Liar.”

“I don’t.”

“I killed Pax and your uncle and Lorn…”

“I pity you.”

He recoils. “Pity?”

“ArchGovernor of all Mars, one of the most powerful men in all the worlds. With the might to do

anything you like. And it’s not enough. Nothing has ever been enough for you, nor will it be. Adrius, you’re not trying to prove yourself to your father, to me, to Virginia, to the Sovereign. You’re trying to matter to yourself. Because you’re broken inside. Because you hate what you are. You wish you were born like Claudius. Like Virginia. You wish you were like me.”

“Like you?” he asks with a sneer. “A filthy Red?”

“I’m no Red.” I show him my hands, bare of Sigils. It disgusts him.

“Not even evolved enough to have a Color, Darrow? Just a
homo sapiens
playing in the realm of gods.”

“Gods?” I shake my head. “You’re no god. You’re not even a Gold. You’re just a man who thinks a

title will make him great. Just a man who wants to be more than he actually is. But all you really want is love. Isn’t that right?”