Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga 4)

“Yes. That. You Lunes are famous for it. The composure. I once saw your great-grandaddy bitten in the face by a Venusian manticore at his birthday gala. Took a chunk out of his cheek and he didn’t even flinch. Just bit the thing back, threw it to its handler, and ordered champagne. Terrifying man, Ovidius. Might be too hot-blooded for the mask myself, but I see through yours. Your friend died today. And so did my grandson, granddaughter, and grandniece.” She reflects on them for a solemn moment and drags from her pipe.

“I will miss them. Even that noxious scorpion, Bellerephon. But I will not say I am sorry. That is life, neh? Play with blades you get pricked. Like my kin, your Bellona made his bed long ago. But you are different. Your weapon is in there…” She pokes my head. “If you are wise and lucky and live long as me, you will learn this pain is just a drop in the sea.” She sets a hand on my heart, her eyes intense. “So feel all of it, boy, before time makes you forget.”

“Could you play something for them?” I ask.

“For them?”

“The departed. Cassius and your kin. A requiem, perhaps?”

She laughs. “Yes. Yes. I like your gray matter.” She turns to the piano and begins a song, slow, mournful, that sounds like the wind in my dreams. As her fingers drift over the keys, the song wakes something inside me besides grief—a shadow, a shadow of a shadow in the library of my mind, something I never knew forgotten. I feel a presence at my back, though there is no one there. I smell a perfume that is not in the air, and feel a heartbeat against my spine that ceased to beat so many years ago.

Gaia senses my unease. “Are you well, child?”

“Yes,” I say distantly, only now realizing that I’ve set my hands on the keys, blocking her from playing. I should take my hands back, but instead press down on a key. The note sings through my body. The memory coalesces. Warms. The shadow dripping from it like dirty snow from a statue. I find another key. My eyes close. My hands move and more notes emerge through me, taking me to another place, another time, a spirit inside guiding me, a spirit that has long been caged and hidden so I did not even know it was once there. But now it flies. The cobwebs of my mind burn away.

My hands glide along the keys and a song pours out, a requiem for Cassius and all those others I have lost. I’m swept away by its music to a far-off study where a fire crackles and a small leopard paces around my legs. She is behind me. Her hair falling around my cheeks. Her earthy scent filling my nose. Her dazzling eyes and truculent mouth. All of it, all of her in that moment rushing back on the wings of the melody. When the last mournful note hangs in the air and my hands linger on the keys, I sit there breathless, tears streaking my face.

I look over at Gaia, confused.

“I thought you couldn’t play,” she says.

“I can’t,” I murmur. “Unless I forgot.”

“How could you forget something like that? It was splendid, child.”

“I don’t know.” For a breath, for the briefest flicker, I saw her. The face of my mother. The soft skin. The small nose and strident mouth. Those eyes that burned in a face time stole from me. Or was it something else that stole it away, a lock placed upon her memory that the music unfastened?

“My mother played,” I say, remembering now.

“And she taught you.”

“Yes. I…I don’t know why I couldn’t remember.”

“Sometimes bottling pain is the only way to survive.”

“No…I don’t forget,” I say, somehow knowing there’s more beneath the shadows that I’ve yet to remember. A whole life buried in my own mind. “I never forget anything. My grandmother said it was my greatest gift….”

“Sounds more like a curse to me.” She watches sympathetically. “My mother died when I was young like you. Even though she would be a withered fossil now, I remember her as she was young. Young death is divine. It freezes the flower in time. A gift in a way, to remember her as that instead of watching age ravage and devour…” Her blue-veined hands pull absently at the loose folds of her neck. “…till she is a shadow of what she was.”

“I don’t think you’re a shadow,” I say. “I think you are rather marvelous.”

“I don’t need your pity,” she snaps, startling me. Then she smiles and taps me with her pipe again. “You’re not as good at being a rogue as the Bellona. Are you? You flatter an old fool, but I think it’s another who has stolen your heart.” Her eyes twinkle with mischief. “My granddaughter.”

“You’r

e mistaken.”

“There are easier women to fall in love with. But you know that. Don’t you?”

“Love? There are more important things than love.”

“Like?”

“Duty. Family. She let my friend be butchered. His death is on her.” I hang my head. “And it is on me. There is no love between us. Only a slight mutual curiosity—understandable and now fled.”

“She kept you from being tortured,” Gaia says. “When her mother discovered it was Cassius behind that mask, Seraphina begged her to spare your life and to let Bellona have an honorable end.”

“Before she knew who I was,” I say. “The only thing Lune and Raa share is responsibility for losing the Society. For allowing Darrow to divide us and spending precious resources and ships against one another.”