Red Rising(75)

“I killed their pack leader,” Sevro says when I ask why the wovles follow him. He looks me up and down and flashes me an impish grin from beneath the wolf pelt. “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t fit in your skin.”

I’ve given Sevro the dregs to command because I know they might be the only people he’ll ever like. At first he ignores them. Then slowly, I begin noticing that more unearthly howls fill the night than before. The others call them the Howlers, and after a few nights under Sevro’s tutelage, each wears a black wolfcloak. There are six: Sevro, Thistle, Screwface, Clown, Pebble, and Weed. When you look at them, it seems as though each of their passive faces stares out from the open, fanged maw of a wolf. I use them for quiet tasks. Without them, I’m not sure I would still be leader. My soldiers whisper slurs about me as I pass. The old wounds have not healed.

I need a victory, but Mustang will not meet in combat, and the thirty-meter walls of House Minerva are not as easy to pass as they were initially. In our warroom, Sevro paces back and forth and calls the game stupidly designed.

“They had to know we couldn’t gorywell get past each other’s walls. And no one is dumb enough to send out a force they can’t afford to lose. Especially not Mustang. Pax might. He’s an idiot, built like a god, but an idiot and he wants your balls. I hear you popped one of his.”

“Both.”

“Should just put Pebble or Goblin in a catapault and launch them over the wall,” Cassius suggests. “Course we’d have to find a catapault …”

I’m tired of this war with Mustang. Somewhere in the south or west, the Jackal is building his strength. Somewhere my enemy, the ArchGovernor’s son, is readying to destroy me.

“We are looking at this the wrong way,” I tell Sevro, Quinn, Roque, and Cassius. They’re alone with me in the warroom. An autumn breeze brings in the smell of dying leaves.

“Oh, do share your wisdom,” Cassius says with a laugh. He’s lying on several chairs, his head in Quinn’s lap. She plays with his hair. “We’re dying to hear.”

“This is a school that has existed for, what, more than three hundred years? So every permutation has been seen. Every problem we face has been designed to be overcome. Sevro, you say the fortresses cannot be taken? Well, the Proctors have to know that. So that means we have to change the paradigm. We need an alliance.”

“Against whom?” Sevro asks. “Hypothetically.”

“Against Minerva,” Roque answers.

“Stupid idea,” Sevro grunts, and cleans a knife and slides it into his black sleeve. “Their castle is tactically inconsequential. No value. None. The land we need is near the river.”

“Think we need Ceres’s ovens?” Quinn asks. “I could do with some bread.”

We all could. A diet of meat and berries has made us muscle and bones.

“If the game lasts till winter, yeah.” Sevro pops his knuckles. “But these fortresses don’t break. Stupid game. So we need their bread and their access to the water.”

“We have water,” Cassius reminds him.

Sevro sighs in frustration. “We have to leave the castle to get it, Sir Numbnuts. A real siege? We’d last five days without replenishing our water. Seven if we drank the animals’ blood before the salt jacks us up. We need Ceres’s fortress. Also, the harvest pricks can’t fight to save their lives, but they have something in there.”

“Harvest pricks? Hahaha,” Cassius crows.

“Stop talking, everyone,” I say. They don’t. To them this is fun. It is a game. They have no urgency, no desperate need. Every moment we waste is a moment the Jackal builds his strength. Something in the way Mustang and Fitchner talked about him scares me. Or is it the fact that he is the son of my enemy? I should want to kill him; instead, I want to run and hide at the thought of his name.

It’s a sign of my fading leadership that I have to stand up.

“Quiet!” I say, and finally they are.

“We’ve seen fires on the horizon. War consumes the South where the Jackal roams.”

Cassius chuckles at the idea of the Jackal. He thinks him a ghost I conjured up.

“Will you stop laughing at everything?” I snap at Cassius. “It’s not a gorydamn joke, unless you think your brother died for amusement.”

That shuts him up.

“Before we do anything else, “ I stress, “we must eliminate House Minerva and Mustang.”

“Mustang. Mustang. Mustang. I think you just want to snake Mustang,” Sevro sneers. Quinn makes a sound of objection.

I snatch Sevro’s collar and lift him up into the air with one hand. He tries to dart away, but he’s not as fast as me, so he dangles from my grip, two feet off the ground.

“Not again,” I say, lowering him nearer my face.

“Registers, Reap.” His beady eyes are inches from my own. “Off limits.” I set him down and he straightens his collar. “So, it’s to the Greatwoods for this alliance, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s to be a merry quest!” Cassius declares, sitting up. “We’ll be a troop!”

“No. Just me and Goblin. You aren’t going,” I say.

“I’m bored, I think I’ll come with.”