“So you need me to aid you in your treason?”

“Is it treason for a dog to bite its master’s hand when the master tries to kill it?” I ask.

“Terrible metaphor.” He stops, peers around the forest, searching. “Ah.” We set off again.

“The point is: I need your help.”

He spits on the mossy ground and motions me to follow him up a hillside. My boots crack a water-sodden log. “Why should I care about you?”

“Because you trained me.”

“I also trained Aja au Grimmus.”

“For some reason, I think you like me more than her.”

“And why’s that?”

“I have a sense of humor.”

He laughs. “Aja can be funny.”

“Surely you’re joking.”

“You meet a man, you know him. You meet a woman, she knows you.” He laughs to himself about some memory. “Might be easier thinking her some terror in the night. But she’s flesh and blood. She has friends. She has family. And she thinks you a threat to them.”

“Yet she’s the one who killed my friend.”

“Yes. I heard. You had the child. Clever tactic.” He squints back at the razor curled around my arm. “Does everyone wear their razor like a fool now?”

“It’s the fashion.”

“It’s meant to be looped on the hip. You’ll cut your arm off by accident.” He sighs. “Your generation … So arrogant. Changing things for no reason. I wonder, arrogant boy, did you think that if you rode in here with your stolen ship that I, a man of a century, would follow you to battle? That I would put in danger all my servants, all my family, all I love, for you? Someone who rejected me when I asked him to join my house?”

I ignore his bitterness. “You left the Society for a reason, Lorn. Can you remember why?”

“To avoid loud fools.”

“I think you left because you thought the Society sick. Because it was not worth sacrificing for anymore.”

“Stop barking at me, puppy.”

“So I’m right.”

“No. You’re not right.” He wheels angrily on me. “I left the Society not because it is sick, but because it is dead. The Society was created to instill order. Men were made to sacrifice so that humanity endured. They were given Colors, lives limited and ordered so that we could destroy the timeless cycle of our race—prosperity to greed to war. Gold was meant to shepherd the other Colors, not devour them. Now we are trapped again in that cycle, the very thing we endeavored to avoid. So the Society? The beautiful sum of all human enterprise? It been dead and rotting for hundreds of years, and those who fight over it are but vultures and maggots.”

“So it wasn’t Brutus’s death.” I speak of his youngest son who was married to Octavia au Lune’s deceased daughter.

“That was an accident.”

“A convenient accident,” I say. “There are rumors that Octavia’s daughter was organizing a coup against her mother.”

“I don’t entertain rumors,” he says darkly.

“If you help me, I can give you your grandson back.”

“Lysander has been raised with poison in his ear. He is not my kin.”

“You’re not that cold. Lorn, I’ve met the boy. He’s more like you than her. He isn’t wicked. Fight for him.”

Lorn stares quietly at the rain falling against the pulseShield.

“You fight a tyrant to replace her with a tyrant,” he says wearily. “This is the same game I have seen a hundred times. Do you even know who you serve?”

“I have a feeling you’re about to tell me.”

“I’ll not stop being your teacher just because you’ve stopped listening. Sit. I don’t want Icarus to be bothered by this damn story.” He sits on a large stone and instructs me to take a place opposite him. I do. He hunches forward and plays with the thick House Mars ring on his finger.

“House Augustus was always strong, I’m sure you know that. Even when Mars was little more than a mine for helium-3. They bribed or killed their way into owning most of the governmental contracts. And as their pockets swelled, so did their influence. They became, along with several other families—including the Bellona and my own—the lords of Mars. There was one family of greater power, however, named Cylus. They controlled the ArchGovernorship and were favored by the Senate and the sitting Sovereigns.

“When your master, then simply called Nero, was seven, his father found himself in dispute with Julius au Bellona. Nero’s father attempted to have the Browns who served the Bellona poison the entire family at supper. The plan failed. A housewar began.

“Nero’s father summoned his bannermen and led them against the Bellona and the ArchGovernor Cylus, who had declared his forces for Julius au Bellona. The sitting Sovereign did not intervene, and instead allowed the two families to go to war. Eventually, Nero’s father found himself besieged in Agea when his fleet was destroyed and captured around Phobos.

“Cylus put Nero’s father to death. Only young Nero was spared from the punishment visited on House Augustus. He was spared so that an aged family that had partaken in the Conquering did not disappear from history. It is said that ArchGovernor Cylus even gave young Nero grapes to quench his thirst because there was no water as the city burned around them. After that, he raised him in his own court.

“Twenty years later, Nero, who had always been considered an honorable and honest man, much unlike his wicked father, asked for Iona au Bellona’s hand in marriage. She was the youngest and favorite daughter of old Julius.”

He stares up at water droplets falling from the needles of overhanging evergreens. “I knew her well. My sons were her playmates. And I knew Nero too. I liked him, even if he was a little cold as a child.

“With hopes of mending the lingering wounds of past generations and making Mars strong and unified, ArchGovernor Cylus agreed. Bellona married Augustus.

“It was a beautiful wedding. I was there representing the Sovereign as the Rage Knight. And I had a wonderful time of it. I’d never seen Iona so happy as she was in that stern young man’s arms. But that night, when the Bellona family returned to their estate with the rest of their family, a package arrived. Inside, old Julius found his daughter’s head. Grapes stuffed in Iona’s mouth along with two wedding rings.