“It would have made my Pax happy,” older Kavax rumbles.
I clasp his hand and try my luck. “You’ll forgive me for my manners, but I need you now.”
Great eyebrows arch as the two behemoths share a look of surprise. “Investigate, Sophocles! Investigate,” Kavax says excitedly. The large fox at his legs slips forward warily to investigate me, sniffing my knees, peering at my shoes and hands. It weaves through my legs in its search. Then it pounces on me, putting forepaws on my hips and digging its snout into my pocket. Sophocles resurfaces with two jelly beans, panting contentedly.
“Magic!” Kavax booms, clapping me on the shoulder. “Sophocles has discovered a propitious sign of approval, by magic! What a good omen! Daxo, my son. Summon your sisters and mother. The Reaper calls, House Telemanus must answer.”
“The girls were visiting Uranus, Father. They’ll be a few months.”
“Well, then we must answer.”
“Couldn’t agree with you more, Father.”
“I’ll have instructions within the hour,” I say.
“Great anticipation!” Kavax thumps away. “We await them with great anticipation.” He roars compliments at passing Oranges, terrifying them with his wide-grinning approval. Daxo and I watch on.
“Does he really believe in magic?” I ask.
“He says gnomes steal ear wax from him at night. Mother thinks he’s been hit too many times on the head.” Daxo backs away, following his father. But he can’t hide his clever smile as he pops a jelly bean into his mouth, and I see where the ones in my pocket came from. “I say he just lives in a more entertaining world than we do. Call on us soon, Reaper. Father is eager.”
After meeting over holo with the Jackal to bring him up to speed on my plan and adjusting it according to a few of his recommendations, I have Orion set a course for Europa. It will take two weeks. Roque joins me on the bridge, watching the skeleton crew of Blues. He doesn’t speak. Yet it’s the first time he’s sought me out since we left Luna. It’s a weight hanging over my head.
“I’m sorr—” I begin.
“I don’t want to talk about Quinn,” he says quietly. “I know you wanted this war. Engineered it instead of trusting me to buy your contract and protect you. What I don’t know is why you drugged me.”
“I wanted to protect you. Because I knew I would need you after the gala, and I couldn’t risk your safety.”
“What about what I need?” he asks. “You don’t have the right to make choices for me because you’re afraid it might interrupt your plans. Friends don’t do that.”
“You’re right. It was wrong of me.”
“Wrong to stick a needle in my neck?”
“Beyond wrong. But know the intent was good, even if the idea and execution were as stupid as they come. If I have to get on my knees …”
“There’s an image.” I know he’s joking, but his face does not laugh or smile as he turns and walks away.
28
The Stormsons
“You come to me at the head of a storm,” my friend says, gray beard blowing sideways in the wind as he looks at the waves far beneath. “Did you know there are boys here on this ocean world who take skiffs into gales worse than this? Lads from the dregs of the Grays, Reds, even Browns. Their bravery is a mad, crazed sort.” He points out from the balcony with a heavy finger to the roiling black water, where waves crest ten meters high. “They call them stormsons.”
The gravity here is maddening. Everything floats. At 0.136 of Earth’s gravity, every step I take must be measured, controlled, else I’ll burst upward fifteen feet and have to wait to flutter back down. A fight here would be like a ballet underwater. I wear gravBoots just to move comfortably.
The old man watches the ocean world move around his island. He is as he always told me to be—a stone amidst the waves; wet, yet unimpressed by all that swirls about him. Saltwater spray drips from his beard. Burnished gold eyes blink against the storm’s bitter wind.
“When you are in the salt, you feel like every gale is the world ender. Every wave the greatest that has been. These boys ride the gales in rapture at their own glory. But every now and then, a true storm rises. It shatters their masts and rips their hair from their heads. They do not last long till the sea swallows them whole. But their mothers have wept their deaths long before, as I wept for yours the first day we met.”
He stares at me intensely, mouth pinched behind his thick beard.
“I never told you, but I was not raised in a palace or in a city like many of the Peerless you know. My father thought there to be two evils in the world. Technology and culture. He was a hard man. A killer, like the rest of them. But his hardness was found not in what he could do, but in what he wouldn’t do, in his restraint. In the pleasures he denied himself, and his sons. He lived to a hundred and sixty-three without the help of cell rejuvenation. Somehow he lived through eight Iron Rains. But still he never valued life, because he took it too often. He was not a man to be happy.”
I watch the former Rage Knight, Lorn au Arcos, lean over the balcony of his castle. It is a limestone fortress set amidst a sea ninety kilometers deep. Modern lines shape the place. It is not medieval, but a meld of past and present—glass and steel making hard angles with the stone island—so like the man I respect above all other Golds of his generation.
Like him, this castle is a harsh place when the storms come. But when the storms fade, sunshine will bathe this place, shinning through her glass walls, glinting off her steel supports. Children will run its ten-kilometer length, through its gardens, along its walls, down to the harbor. Wind will tickle their hair, and all that Lorn will hear from his library is the crying of gulls, the crash of the sea, and the laughter of his grandchildren and their mothers, whom he guards in place of his dead sons. The only one missing is little Lysander.
If all Golds were like him, Reds would still toil beneath the Earth, but he would have them know their purpose. It doesn’t make him good, but it makes him true.
He’s thick and broad and shorter than I. He lets his empty whiskey tumbler go and permits the wind to swoop it sideways. It falls and the sea swallows it whole. “They say you can hear the dead stormsons whooping in the wind,” he mutters. “I say it’s the crying of their mothers.”