9. Feritas

feritās ~ātis, f.

1. (of animals) wildness

2. (of men) brutality

I stare out the window from my new bed. An entire room to myself. The sunrise over Dravik’s manse is artificial—pink-gold-green projected on the noble spire’s shallow horizon—but it’s beautiful all the same. I understand now why Mother wanted me to see it.

I open my vis and set the timer for one minute. I wrap my arms around myself, a phantom memory of a hug. Squeeze, then squeeze harder. She will never get to see this—Father made sure of that.

He tried to make sure I’d never see this, either.

Ten. Nine. Eight…

Did he hate me that much?

Seven. Six. Five…

My collarbone scar throbs. No.

Four. Three. Two…

If he hated us, if he loved us…if he felt anything for us at all, he would’ve come and killed us himself.

One.

Tears wiped. Feet on cold marble floor.

The manse halls are quiet and empty, dust swirling in the watery sun. Nothing moves but me. Nothing breathes, even as the grand family paintings and statues and gilded furniture shout about a gorgeous life. The stillness is rank and eerie as I stare up at a portrait of a green-eyed boy faintly smiling down at the nothingness around him, at nothing but bones. Moonlight’s End isn’t a tomb—it’s a carcass, long hollowed out by a much bigger beast. My footsteps freeze at a sudden scent drifting down the hall: the warm mull of an oven. The kitchens must be nearby. If I close my eyes, I can almost taste it—bread and laughter and softness.

Not until it’s over.

My contractual demands are as follows:

One—within twenty-four hours of me winning a match, one of the seven will die, and Dravik will vis me the evidence of their involvement in Mother’s murder. Two—he will never require me to do anything but ride. And three—when the Supernova Cup ends, he will ensure my painless death.

Dravik has only one demand: when I’m asked who I am by anyone, I must give my full name—Synali von Hauteclare.

Because that is my name now.

Dravik’s vis projects my birth certificate over the polished breakfast table. SYNALI EMILIA WOSTER has been replaced with SYNALI VON HAUTECLARE. My father’s name and mine—connected. Like an uncontrollable twitch, I chuck the nearest glass of water at the holograph, and it shorts out in a shower of blue pixels. Dravik doesn’t even look up from his eggs and toast, his sandy hair carefully combed over and his cravat a stark bleach white. The water pools in the center of the table as I take a seat opposite him.

“How did you get the bloodline registrar to change it?” I ask.

“How did you manage to kill your father?” Dravik retorts coolly, and the answer lingers on my lips: threats and blackmail, bleeding and bruising and drugs—anything. I shut up if I had to. I begged if I had to. I took the beatings and did the beatings and watched the beatings from outside my own body looking down on the bed, but I say none of that.

Dravik smiles brightly over his teacup. “Mmm. I suppose we all have our own ways of getting results, don’t we?”

Through the grand breakfast room windows, that dying garden lingers, yellow grasses and sickly white trees. The smell of fresh coffee in the air is dizzying. Quilliam steps in and wipes the water off the table slowly. Why bother changing my name to Hauteclare at all? The Lithroi name would be so much simpler, draw so much less attention. Unless…

“You want the court to know a bastard is riding for you,” I say. Dravik summarily ignores my conjecture.

“Judging by the cake’s appearance this morning, you destroyed more of it than you ate. You’ll need energy for training—do try to eat your breakfast.”

“Will the nobles even let a bastard like me ride?” I press.

“They won’t have a say in the matter. Did you like Rax?”

“Like?”

“I saw a little video of your pre-match confrontation two months ago. It’s fortunate you wore your helmet, or he would have become a problem. He still may.”

I scoff. “I doubt that. He seemed about as clever as a bag of metal shavings.”

“One does not need to be routinely intelligent to achieve victory, Synali—one merely needs to strike when their opponent blunders. And he certainly seemed to rile you.”

I don’t like what he’s insinuating. “I can control myself.”

Dravik hums lightly. The robot-dog sits at his feet. I aim a tentative grin at it, but it puts its head on its paws and ignores me. With the table dry again, Quilliam delivers my breakfast plate piled high with eggs and meat, though I’m less concerned with the contents and more with the constant sniffing he seems to make.

“Is Quilliam sick?” I ask.

“Allergies, I believe.”

“All the dust, probably. It’s a lot for one old man to clean.” There’s a beat. Dravik didn’t bake that cake—Quilliam did. “I could help him.”

Dravik smiles thinly. “If you have any energy left after your full day of training, feel free.”

I frown and push my eggs around on my plate. The dog cocks its head at me. Oh, so now I have your attention? When Dravik gets up to refill his tea from the samovar, I drop a clump of egg to the floor. The dog instantly trots over, sniffing the dust around the bit before inhaling it whole.

“Can you even taste that?” At my whisper, the dog starts to growl, but another dangled piece of egg and it’s back to cocking its head curiously. I snicker. “You’re so fickle.”

Dravik returns, the dog skittering under his chair once more. “Quilliam will be in charge of your diet for the next two months. Our priority is to build the minimum amount of muscle required to operate a steed as quickly and safely as possible.”

Rax comes to mind in all his marble-carved vainglory. The way his body waited beneath mine, tense and blistering hot… I curl my lip.

“I’m sure riding isn’t entirely about bulging muscles.”

“No,” Dravik agrees. “But you’ve already proven mental compatibility with steeds—it’s everything else I’m worried about. Shall we get started?”

I shovel what’s left of my food into my face. Fresh meat carved from a real animal, the sort I wanted to buy Mother when she stopped getting out of bed. Meat I thought would make her strong again. I swallow at lightning speed, refusing to taste it. Wash it down with water—no tea, no sugar, no cream, no niceties.

I’m not here to be nice.

I’m here to win the Supernova Cup.

A cold steel door and a cutting-edge bio-lock guard the entrance to the manse’s bunker. The long journey down the shadowed flight of stairs is interrupted only by Quilliam’s sniffing, Dravik’s tapping cane, and the metallic clank of the robot-dog’s feet. Buried farther down than I can calculate is a room with no floor—a great crevasse bridged only by a railed walkway.

“Welcome to the bunker.” Dravik motions to the featureless steel walls. There’s no hungry “visitor” like Quilliam mentioned, but there is a steed: a dilapidated giant forty times my size hanging from the wall by its arms. Chunks of its colorless armor have fallen off, revealing the fiber machinations beneath like rusted threads of muscle. Rax’s steed looked nothing like this—this is an old model, ancient, utterly ravaged to pieces by time.

I whirl on Dravik.

“Am I a joke to you? This is my steed? This scrap heap belongs in the War museum!”

He leans on the railing casually. “Ah, you’ve a sharp eye. This is one of the original A-prototype steeds—the third batch humanity ever created in their bid to win the War.”

“You want me to ride something four hundred years old? I won’t win anything in this fucking rust pile! I’ll be killed in the first—”

“362 years old, actually,” he corrects, waving his cane up and down the steed’s broken chassis like a school pointer. “Yet it has all its component parts still intact. It might not be as sturdy as the modern models, but it’s certainly quicker. And—if I may be frank—far more charming.”

I crumple my fist in Dravik’s cravat faster than I can think. The robot-dog starts barking frantically, invisible metal hackles rising as it snaps pearl teeth at my ankles. A waste of time—that’s all this noble’s ever been. I wrench us against the railing. The bunker’s bottom gapes hollowly a hundred feet below, more, the steed’s monolithic hanging legs disappearing into darkness.

“Should I tip us over the edge?” I hiss in his face. “End it now as it’ll no doubt end later—in both our deaths? It’d be faster than this farce you’ve forced me into.”

I feel a sharp nip in my heel through my boot, but I refuse to let go, refuse to look away from the noble who I let trick me. The dog tries to rip my tendon, my new leather boots pierced through, and Dravik says a single clear word:

“Astrix.”

The teeth in my heel go slack instantly, and I hear the telltale whir of a solar cell powering down. Why shut the robot-dog down with a command? I’m going to throw us both over the edge. Dravik should fight back. The soft body beneath his embroidered vest should shift and brace and try, but he doesn’t so much as resist. He’s a calm reed in a storm; the affable smile on his face sends me spiraling deeper.

“It seems you are quite used to violence,” he says.

“Did you expect anything different when you picked up a useless Low Ward girl off the streets?”

His voice goes hard. “You are in no way useless.”

“Please,” Quilliam pleads from the console at the other end of the walkway. “Please, miss, let us not fight—”

“Be quiet!” I snap over my shoulder. “Don’t you get it?” I say to Dravik. “The nobles’ steeds are leagues better than this one—they’ll rip me apart in a blink. This has all been for nothing!”

Dravik laughs softly. “And it seems you’re quick to despair, too.”

I clench my teeth. What does his gilded ass know about despair? He gave me hope and stole it back ruthlessly with this junkheap of a steed. From afar, Quilliam murmurs something unintelligible under his breath.

“He has a point,” Dravik admits.

“And what would that be?” I tilt us so far over the railing that it creaks. Not a single bead of sweat glistens on him, not a single flicker of the eyes. He’s impenetrable, and I despise it. Being this close, I see it for the first time—faintly jagged pixel-shapes on the edges of his gray gaze as it cuts up to the steed. Iris surgery scars. Expensive. Painful. Loyal nobles get it to better “represent” their House and its sigil colors. He’s had his eye color changed—from something else to gray.

“We won the War with these, didn’t we?”

I go still, then crawl my eyes up at the steed.

This is the story the priests tell you: Satan sent the enemy to destroy us.

This is the story history tells you: We don’t know why the enemy attacked, only that they did. Moving through the plentiful oceans—the closest analogue to the zero gravity of space they were used to—they wiped out three-fourths of the human population in just two decades. But then we made the seven Stations—great metal arks protected by hard-light honeycomb shields that hovered high above the razed ground. And then we made the humanoid steeds. The Stations saved us, preserved us, but the steeds are what turned the tide of the War from us barely clinging on to victory. The enemy was destroyed by thousands of steeds just like this one, by their valiant riders who killed and died in turn—the knights of the War.

This is the story of old Earth: Once, there were many wars. But when the enemy came, there was only one. Once, a knight must have ridden this steed.

This is the story I tell myself: Once upon a time, this steed wore the enemy’s blood like warpaint.

Its gray hands droop, spindly legs fractured and twisted in their hip sockets. A crescent-shaped helmet lolls forward uselessly onto a battered breastplate. It looks wrong, broken, empty. From the depths of its gaping armor, metal catches my haggard reflection; empty, broken, wrong. Two of a kind. Seven of a kind must pay the price. There is no time to be kind.

My hand drops from Dravik. “Where’s the pit crew for it, then? Surely this isn’t the best your engineers could do.”

The noble brushes his cravat off lightly. “They’ll be here in the morning, but they require you to imprint the steed before they can work on it.”

“Imprint.”

“Alight in the saddle at least once,” he clarifies. “Your neural handshake will be established, and the steed’s system will be rebooted, as it hasn’t been for 362 years.”

“Where did you even find something this old?”

He gives that no-answer smile again. “As I said, your only concern is riding.”

Quilliam hits a button on the console, and the hanging steed gives a shuddering screech, its breastplate parting in creaky halves and revealing total darkness within. The walkway grows a gangplank, and with a few metallic clicks, it attaches to the lip of the steed’s open chest. Something chirps deep within the steed, the sound of a million volts muffled in another room. From the dark chest cavity, light rises—an all-too-familiar pale purple-blue gel shot with slowly writhing silver and contained in a cylinder as big as a coffin made for three.

The saddle.

Dravik makes an irritatingly lavish bow. “After you, Synali. That is, if you still wish to honor our contract.”

The steed is huge. I’m small. It’s old, but I’m young. I’m new, and the other riders will not be. I take one wary step onto the gangplank, then another—on either side of me, the bunker’s abyss; in front of me, purple-blue light; and behind me, nothing but pain. I should know better than to hope. But now, framed by this strange light, its shadow struggles to breathe in me. He’s given me a steed. We could. I could. Together, we might rip House Hauteclare from the world.

I slice a look back at Dravik. “There will be no honor in any of this.”

He smiles brighter. “I know, brave one. But that’s half the fun.”

The breastplate doors slam behind me with a shuddering thud.