Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga 4)

“There are some who would say I should bow to you, heir of Silenius,” he says.

“Most who’d say that are dead,” I reply. “Besides, I am a guest in your home.”

“Very true.” He motions for me to follow him and we walk a few paces away from his family. The cold wind howls around us, flinging debris into the reflective goggles I wear. The kryll warms the air as it passes through the membrane into my mouth. Romulus looks back to his family. “They wonder why I have brought you here.”

“They’re not the only ones.”

He examines me with his lone eye. “You look very much like your mother.”

“You knew her?”

“Not well.” He sees me look at Seraphina, who sits on the edge of a distant dune watching us.

“Why did you ask me to come here, my lord?”

“There is still a chance to stop this war, Lysander. Maybe not to stop it from beginning. I fear the blood has risen too high for that. Even my death will not stop it. But there is a chance to stop it from destroying us all. Our strength before the Rising did not come from our arms or our ships. It came from our unity. Long ago, Silenius au Lune, your blood, and Akari au Raa, my blood, stood together. One the scepter, one the sword. They gave birth to the Pax Solaris. They freed us from Earth’s dominion. You face a choice that will touch lives far beyond your sight. Run as you have these last years, or become the echo of those great men.” He leans forward, his voice husky and full of emotion. That lone eye seems suspended in his face, celestial and untethered from its mortal body. He sets his hand on my shoulder. “You saved my daughter. Can you now save the worlds?”

He does not wait for a response, which I am far too stunned to give. He walks back to his family to say farewell to his wife. I’m left overcome with the weight of his question. I already took the first step in ignoring Cassius’s dying wish. The second with the betrayal of Gaia. Do I have the strength to take the rest? Can I bear the burden of my blood?

I watch Romulus say his final farewells. The great man looks at Dido with so much love I know I can’t fathom it. I have never known love like theirs. Seraphina sits alone on the dune and I wonder how Romulus felt when he first saw Dido all those years ago on Venus. If he loved her so much, how could he be so brave as to choose to say farewell? Is it really true, pure honor? After having been ripped from my family, I’m at a loss, unable to understand how a man, a father, a husband, could value something more than love.

It awakens something deep inside me. A desire to be as noble as he is now. A need to honor his memory, though I barely knew the man.

“These ten years I’ve been looking for the man I married,” Dido says to her husband. I strain to hear them over the wind. “Now I see him again. The young Moon Lord who burned a city for a girl of the pearl shore. Romulus the Bold. Dido of Numidae. What a pair they were. What an end they had.”

“No,” he whispers. “This is not the end. I loved you before I ever met you. I will love you until the sun dies. And when it does, I will love you in the darkness. Goodbye, wife.”

Stepping close, he removes his kryll and, holding his breath against the toxic air, gently unfastens Dido’s to pull her into one last kiss. Steam billows from their lips as they cling at one another. Then Romulus pulls away and tosses his kryll on the ground to step backward down the dune.

Seraphina watches from her perch on the dune. It does not seem right for her to be alone now. I find myself walking toward her up the frozen sulfur. She says nothing as I sit beside her to watch her father’s last rite.

Under the watchful gaze of two Obsidian adjuncts to the White Justice, Romulus removes his boots. His cloak. His scorosuit beneath. His liner and his undergarments, till he is naked and pale there on the frozen sulfur. Across the waste he must walk for eighty steps to reach the resting place of Akari au Raa, the founder of his house. The Dragon Tomb is a giant black obelisk shaped like a winged beast at the top of a stubby crag of rock. Hunched frozen bodies litter the dune around the tomb and cling to the rock formation itself—Raa who in old age or punishment or shame came here to die and in death seek to reach their ancestor and erect a humble monument to their own strength. Only four have ever made it to the Dragon Tomb. Romulus seeks to join the honorable dead.

It is below negative one hundred degrees Celsius. Convulsing from the cold, he turns to face us, hiding nothing. His chest is scarred and pale. His stomach flat and muscled. His ribs stand out. His remaining arm is corded with stringy fibers. And as the wind ripples across the waste, his extremities begin to purple from the cold. His hair unbound behind his head whips till the moisture in it freezes.

He roars.

“I am a son of Io. A child of the Dust.” Steam clouds his words as he spends his last breath. His fist thumps his chest with each proclamation, leaving a shadow of pink over the paling skin. “I am a dragon of Raa. An Iron Gold. Akari, bear witness!” He whispers something to himself.

Then he turns and walks down the dune toward death, his hand at his side, his shoulders proud and square, head held back in defiance of the cold and poisoned air. The frozen sulfur crystals crack under his feet, wounding the skin. By the tenth step, blood smears a glittering red trail behind him. By the twentieth, his body shudders against the wind.

“Twenty-nine,” Seraphina whispers, counting her father’s steps. Romulus clutches his chest with his one arm, desperate to keep his spirit of warmth from the gnawing moon. “Thirty-two.” His spine stands out as he hunches. “Thirty-seven.” His hair is frozen and no longer whips in the wind but clumps to the back of his neck like a dead animal.

“Forty-five.” He drifts sideways, his path bending away from the monument. “Fifty.” He falls to his knees. Paleron sobs at his mother’s side. Dido watches without blinking. Frost crusts her eyelashes. Romulus wills himself up. Blood pours down his knees and freezes

to his shins as he stumbles on, his will inexorable. One foot after the other. They are black and red now. Blood frozen onto the bottom of the dead flesh to make a shoe.

“Sixty.” Seraphina’s voice grows louder, wishing her father a triumph in the end. “Sixty-four.” The man will not stop. His will is immense. All the pain of all the years has culminated into this single testament of will to prove to the moon that despite its horrors, it is under his power.

“Sixty-eight.”

I find myself wishing strength.

“Seventy…” Romulus takes another impossible step up the side of the dune. Then his legs betray him. He falls hard to the ground ten steps from the monument, striking his head on the ice before sliding back, supine. His black hand paws at the ground. Steam seeps from his mouth. But with one arm, he cannot lift himself up. He heaves himself upward one last time. The effort is in vain. He does not stand again. Soon, he does not move. Ice crusts over his white body amongst the corpses of his humbled ancestors. Ten steps from the honored Golds who reached the monument lies the greatest man of a people.

“Pulvis et umbra sumus,” Seraphina whispers, and I alone hear her. Below, the family weeps. The moon howls, the darkness quickens, and the Raa leave their father behind and, like the dust, fly away with the wind and fade into the ebbing twilight.

DIDO SITS SLUMPED IN a low chair by a window that looks out over the sulfur plain. The weather is clear. Her arms hang off the edge of the armrests. Her large, angry eyes look out into the waste but are trained on her past. She is an island of regret, bled of pride, of spirit, and swollen with the torpor of loss.