Red Rising(58)

I motion my head at Lea to Thistle.

“You going to cry?” Thistle asks. “Wipe your eyes in—”

Lea screams and jumps at her. The two roll around punching each other in the face. It’s not long before Thistle’s got Lea in a chokehold. Roque stirs beside me. Quinn pulls him back down. Lea’s face goes purple. Her hands slap at Thistle’s. Then she passes out. I give Thistle a nod of thanks. The darkfaced girl gives a slow nod.

But Lea’s shoulders are squarer the next morning. She even musters enough courage to hold Roque’s hand. She also claimed to be a good cook; she isn’t. Roque tries his hand but he’s hardly any better. Eating their grub is like taking down stringy, dry sponges. Even Quinn, with all her stories, can’t muster up a recipe.

We cook goat and deer meat over our camp kitchen six kilometers from the castle, and we do it at night in the gulches so the light and smoke cannot be seen. We do not kill the sheep; instead we collect and deposit them in a northern fort for safekeeping. I could bring more over to my tribe with the food, but the food is as big a danger as it is a boon. What Titus and his killers would do if he found that we had fire, food, clean water …

I am returning to the castle with Roque from a scouting trip to the south when we hear noises coming from a small grove of trees. Creeping closer, we hear grunts and hacking sounds. Expecting to see a wolfpack ravaging a goat, we peer through the brush and find four of Titus’s soldiers squatting around a corpse. Their faces are bloody, eyes dark and ravenous as they tear strips out of the dead deer with their knives. Five days without fire, five days of bad berries, and they have already turned into savages.

“We have to give them matches,” Roque tells me afterwards.

“No. If we give them matches, then Titus will have even more power.”

“Does it matter at this point? They are going to get sick if they keep eating raw meat. They already are sick!”

“So they shit their pants,” I grunt. “There are worse things.”

“Tell me, Darrow. Would it be worse to have Titus in power and have Mars strong or for Darrow to be in power with Mars weak?”

“Better for whom?” I ask petulantly.

He only shakes his head.

“Let them rot their gory bellies,” is Cassius’s opinion. “They made their beds. Now let them shit in them.”

My army agrees.

I am fond of my army, the dregs, the lowDrafts. They aren’t as entitled or wellbred as the highDrafts. Most remember to thank me when I give them food—at first they didn’t. They don’t prance off after Titus on midnight axe-raids simply because it gets their jollies off. No, they follow us because Cassius is as charismatic as the sun and, in his light, the shadow I cast looks like it knows what it’s doing. It doesn’t. It, like me, was born in a mine.

Still, it does seem like I have some strategy. I have us make maps of our territory on digislates we found in a waterlogged cellar at the bottom of a ravine, but we still have no weapons other than my slingBlade and several knives and sharpened sticks. So whatever strategy we have is based in acquiring information.

Funny thing is, only one tribe has a silvershit’s idea what is going on. And it’s not ours. It’s not Antonia’s. And it sure as hell isn’t Titus’s. It’s Sevro’s, and I’m nearly certain he’s the only member in that tribe, unless he’s adopted wolves by now. It is hard to say if he has or hasn’t. Our House does not have family dinners. Though occasionally we’ll see him running along the hillsides at night in his wolfskin, looking, as Cassius put it best, “like some sort of hairy demonchild on hallucinogens.” And once Roque even heard something, not a wolf, howling in the shrouded highlands. Some days Sevro walks around all normalish—insulting everything that moves, except for Quinn. He makes an exception for her, delivering meats and edible mushrooms instead of insults. I think he’s sweet on her even though she’s sweet on Cassius.

We ask her to tell us stories about him, but she won’t. She’s loyal, and maybe that’s why she reminds me of home. She’s always telling good stories, most all of them certainly gilded lies. A life spark is in her, just like the one that was in my wife. She is the last of us to call Goblin “Sevro.” She’s also the only one who knows where he lives. Even with all our scouting, we can’t find a trace of him. For all I know, he’s out taking scalps beyond the highlands. I know Titus has sent scouts to stalk him, but I don’t think they are successful. They can’t even follow me. I know that rubs Titus raw.

“I think he’s wanking off in the bushes,” Cassius chuckles. “Just waiting for us to all kill each other.”

It’s when Lea comes limping back to the castle that Roque seeks Cassius and me out.

“They beat her,” he says. “Not bad, but they kicked her in the stomach and took her day’s labor.”

“Who?” Cassius bristles. “Who’s the slagger?”

“Doesn’t matter. What matters is they are hungry. So stop playing at an eye for an eye. This can’t go on,” Roque says. “Titus’s boys are starving. What do you expect they’d do? Hell, the big brute is hunting Goblin because he needs fire and food. If we just give that to him, we can unite the House, maintain civility. Maybe even Antonia will bring her tribe to reason.”