Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga 4)

Both limbs spin to the floor. Bellerephon totters, looking at the weeping red stumps and the pale bone poking out from the meat, mouth opening and closing like a stunned dog’s.

I almost surge to my feet in a joyful shout as Cassius sets his hand on Bellerephon’s shoulder and guides him gently to his knees. He looks up at Dido. Prime show, my friend. Damn prime show.

“Do not waste a man like this,” Cassius says. “He bled for you. He doesn’t have to die. Release me and mine. Agree to our terms, and his life will be spared.”

Dido glowers down at him. Not for a moment does she entertain the idea of sparing her nephew. A cold heart beats in that chest. “Bellerephon?” she asks. “Your fate is yours.”

“Pulvis et umbra sumus.” He shivers. “Akari, bear witness.”

Honor calls him to the dark. What a waste of a man.

But there is something beautiful in it all the same.

His body shakes and I marvel at the life’s worth of discipline that goes to keeping himself erect on his knees. The pale Raa knight looks to his family, his slender Norvo wife, and up to the dragons of his ancestors on the ceiling.

Cassius hacks his head off at the spine.

Beside me, anger roils from Seraphina as her cousin dies.

“This is your fault, my son,” Dido says to Diomedes. Amidst his knights, watching his cousin die in his stead, he looks stunned and stricken with guilt almost as immense as my relief. Bleeding from his forehead and shoulder, drenched in sweat, Cassius manages to smile at me, knowing that I could have given in to Dido but did not. He raises chin and lifts his voice for all to hear. “I am Cassius au Bellona, son of Tiberius, son of Julia, Morning Knight, and my honor remains.”

It is over.

He has won. The matter is settled, though I don’t know what shape the next moments will take. And then I look over at Seraphina, readying to console her on the loss of her cousin, only to see implacable Dido’s face unchanged, her hand in the air, her fingers snapping together.

“Fabera,” she calls.

My hope sinks and Cassius’s face falls as a young hawkish woman with a bald pate hefts her razor and jumps from the second row over the heads of those sitting on the benches beneath. She lands on the edge of the white marble and paces toward Cassius, her long razor rigid. She spits on the floor and enters the circle, where she crows her challenge to Cassius, her name and her right as cousin to open his veins.

“It’s over!” I say in protest to Dido. “The feud was settled with Bellerephon!”

“His feud is with House Raa,” she replies.

There is a part of me that wants to rail against her and decry her hypocrisy, but the look she gives me is so reptilian that it activates the colder part of my own blood. The shock disappears and I work to understand. “Do you support this?” I ask Seraphina.

Though surprised at her mother’s action, Seraphina says nothing. “Don’t look to her,” Dido snarls. “I preside here. That creature murdered my daughter. He killed Revus!” The room cries for blood. Then, very softly, Dido leans toward me. “But I can forget. I can forgive. And you can end this. Open the safe.”

Dangerous woman.

I look down at Cassius and let my silence answer. Dido sighs. “A pity. Fabera, honor House Raa.”

She is not a shade, but she is fast and knows this gravity. She lunges at him with her razor, roving and probing like she’s hunting boar. Knowing he’s losing too much blood, she tries to draw out the duel, but Cassius continues to charge and close. She’s more agile than Bellerephon, but not so powerful. Cassius manages to pin her against the rim of the circle, where they exchange a dangerous series of slashing parries. She scores two cuts on his right leg, but has no time to savor the moment. I see her die two seconds before it happens. Cassius flows into the Autumn Wind movement as easily as if we were sparring together with blunted weapons on the Archi. He strikes three times at head level, locks blades, pushes against her so she counters his force, then he pivots right and slides his blade overtop hers in a leverage position so the tip enters her forehead and pushes through her brain before coming out her throat and through her jaw. She dies before she hits the ground. He slides his blade from her skull, flicks off the gray gristle coating it, and limps to turn and face Dido.

“I am Cassius au Bellona, son of Tiberius, son of Julia, Morning Knight, and my honor remains.”

Dido snaps her fingers. “Bellagra.”

Another knight jumps down.

“Seraphina, you’re going to lose another cousin,” I say, knowing that this execution wears on her.

Diomedes does not retain his composure. “Mother, enough.”

“Bellagra, honor House Raa.”

The knight surges toward Cassius. This one was not the same quality as the first two and dies quicker than Fabera. Cassius parries a weak blow and splits the man down the middle. His halves twitch on the floor and leak his life’s blood into the Gold Sigil. But something strange has happened. Despite the condemnation of the Olympic Knights, the room roils with volunteers. Each death decays their manners and resolve and reaches into the crowd with forked rootlike fingers to enrage and poison another soul—a lover there, a cousin, a friend, a drinking companion, a brother in arms. From Dido’s allies to Romulus’s, the anger boils. It dawns on me then the cruel stratagem the woman has devised. I don’t doubt that her hatred of Cassius is real. But they do not waste in the Rim. Each death is a down payment for her war. Absent her holodrop evidence, she uses my friend to boil the blood, to distract, to bind her allies and foes together in anger. And the more Raa that fall, the more her position solidifies, the more the blood of the Rim is raised against the Interior and not against her coup.

This is the depth of her conviction, a willing sacrifice of her own kin to reveal whatever truth hides within our safe.