Morning Star: Book III of the Red Rising Trilogy (35 page)

We separate. Stumbling backward. Humorless smiles on our faces—a bizarre kinship as we remember we all speak the same martial language. All that hateful breed of human Dancer told me about before I was Carved, the ones Lorn lived among and despised all the while.

I shatter the weird peace first. Lashing forward in a tight series of thrusts at Cassius’s right side, peeling him away from Aja so Ragnar can take her down singly. Behind Cassius, Mustang stirs from

among the rubble. Rushing across the snow, huge Obsidian bow in hand. Still fifty meters away. I sweep my razor whip twice at Cassius’s legs, retracting it into a blade as he swings diagonally at my head. The blow rattles my arm as I catch it halfway along the razor ’s curve. He’s stronger than I am.

Faster than he was the last time we fought. And he’s practiced now against the curved blade. Training with Aja, no doubt. He forces me back. I stumble, fall, between his legs I see the Fury and the Stained tearing into each other. She stabs him through his left thigh.

Another arrow whispers through the air. It slams into Cassius’s back. His scarabSkin holds. Off balance, he swings again in a tight set of eight moves. I throw myself backward just as the razor hisses through the air where my head had been. I sprawl on the snow, centimeters from the edge of a huge crevasse. Scrambling up as Cassius rushes me. I block another downward swing, teetering on the edge. I fall backward and push off the edge as hard as I can so I land and clear the other side, using my agility to avoid his onslaught. Behind him, Aja spins under Ragnar ’s blade, slicing at his hamstrings. She’s peeling him apart.

Cassius pursues me, hurdling the crevasse and swinging down at me. I block the blade. It would have opened me from shoulder to opposite hip. I throw a rock at his face. Gain my feet. He slams his blade down again in a feint, pivots his wrist, and swings to carve off my knees. I stumble to the side, barely dodging. He converts his razor to a whip, cracks it at my legs, and rips them out from under me. I fall. He kicks me in the chest. Wind gushes out of me. He stands on my wrist, pinning my razor down, and is about to plunge his razor into my heart, his face a mask of determination.

“Stop,”
Mustang shouts. She’s twenty meters away, aiming her bow at Cassius. Hand quivering from the strain of the taut string. “I will put you down.”

“No,” he says. “You would…”

The bowstring snaps. He jerks his razor up to deflect the arrow. Misses, slower than Aja. The serrated iron tip punches through the front of his throat and out the back of his neck, the feather fletching scratching the underside of his dimpled chin. There’s no spray of blood. Just a meaty, wet gurgle. He flops back. Hitting the ground hard. Gagging. Hacking hideously. His feet kick as he clutches the arrow. Hissing for breath, eyes inches from my own. Mustang rushes to me. I scramble to my feet, away from Cassius, and grab my razor from the snow, pointing it at his thrashing body.

“I’m prime,” I say, tearing my eyes from my old friend as blood pools beneath him and he fights

for his life. “Help Ragnar.”

Over Cassius’s body, we see the Stained and Aja whirling at each other on the edge of a crevasse.

Blood paints the snow around them. All of it coming from Ragnar. But still he presses the woman knight back, a furious song cascading out of his throat. Beating her down. Overwhelming her with his two hundred and fifty kilograms of mass. Sparks flare from their blades. She caves before him now, unable to match the anger of the banished prince of the Spires. Heels skidding on the snow. Arm shuddering. Bending back away from Ragnar. Bending like a willow. His song roars louder. “No,” I

murmur. “Shoot her,” I tell Mustang.

“They’re too close….”

“I don’t care!”

She fires a shot. It rips inches past Aja’s head. But it does not matter. Ragnar has already fallen into the trap the woman has laid for him, Mustang doesn’t see it yet. She will. It’s one of the many Lorn taught me. The one Ragnar could not have learned because he never had a razormaster. He only ever

had his rage and years of fighting with solid weapons, not the whip. Mustang loads another arrow.

And Ragnar swings down at Aja with a blacksmith’s overhead strike, Aja raises her rigid blade to

meet his. She activates the whip function. Her blade goes limp. Expecting to meet the resistance of solid polyenne fiber, Ragnar ’s whole weight carries down on empty air. He’s athletic enough to slow the movement so his blade doesn’t smash into the ground, and against a lesser opponent he would have recovered with ease. But Aja was the greatest student of Lorn au Arcos. She’s already spinning to the side, contracting the whip back into a blade and using her momentum to hack sideways at Ragnar as she finishes her spin. The movement is simple. Laconic. Like one of the ballerinas Mustang and Roque would watch at Agea’s opera house as I studied with Lorn, pivoting through a
fouetté.
If I didn’t see the blood paint her blade and spray a delicate arc of red across the snow, I could be convinced that she missed.

Aja does not miss.

Ragnar tries to turn and face her, but his legs betray him. Crumpling underneath. His gaping wound a bloody smile against the white of his sealSkin. Aja cut into his lower back, through his spinal cord, and out the front of his stomach at the belly button. He flops down at the lip of a crevasse. Razor skipping across the ice. I howl in rage, in crushing disbelief, and charge Aja as Mustang fires her bow, running with me. Aja sidesteps Mustang’s arrows and stabs Ragnar twice more in the stomach as he lies grasping his wound. His body jerks. The blade slides in and out. Aja sets her feet now, preparing for me, when her eyes go wide. She steps back, marveling at something in the sky above

my head. Mustang fires twice in quick succession. Aja’s head jerks. She twists away from us, spinning backward to the edge of the crevasse. Ice caves beneath her foot, crumbling off into the crevasse. Her arms windmill, but she can’t regain her balance as her eyes meet mine and she pitches with the ice headfirst into the darkness.

Aja is gone. The crevasse deep, sides narrowing away into darkness. I rush back to Ragnar as Mustang stares up at the hillside and the clouds, bow at the ready. She only has three arrows left. “I don’t see anything,” she says.

“Reaper,”
Ragnar murmurs from the ground. His chest heaves. Panting heavily. Dark lifeblood pulses out of his open stomach. Aja could have finished him quickly with the two thrusts when he was on the ground. Instead, she stabbed his lower gut so he would suffer as he died. I push on the first wound, red to my elbows, but there’s so much blood I don’t even know what to do. A resGun can’t fix what Aja has done. It can’t even hold him together. The tears sting my eyes. Can hardly see. Steam billows from the wound. My frozen fingers tingling with warmth from the blood. Ragnar blanches at

the blood, an embarrassed look on his face as he whispers apologies.

“It could be the cannibals,” Mustang says, regarding Aja’s distraction. “Can he move?”

“No,” I say weakly. She glances down at him, more stoic than I am.

“We can’t stay here,” she says.

I ignore her. I’ve watched too many friends die to let Ragnar go. I led him to fight Aja. I convinced him to come home. I will not let him slip away. I owe him that much. If it is the last thing I do, foolish or not, I will defend him. I will find some way to fix him, get him to a Yellow. Even if the cannibals come. Even if it costs me my life, I will not leave him. But thinking it doesn’t make it true. Doesn’t give me magical powers. Whatever plan I make, it seems the world is content to undo it.

“Reaper…”
Ragnar manages again.

“Save your strength, my friend. It’s going to take all of it to get you out of here.”

“She was fast. So fast.”

“She’s gone now,” I say, though I can’t know for sure.

“I always dreamed of a good death.”
He shudders as he realizes again that he’s dying.
“This does
not seem good.”

His words fishhook a sob from my chest into my throat. “It’s fine,” I say thickly. “It’ll be fine. Once we get you patched up. Mickey will fix you proper. We’ll get you to the Spires. Call in an evac.”

“Darrow…” Mustang says.

Ragnar blinks hard up at me, trying to focus his eyes. He reaches for the sky with a hand.
“Sefi…”

“No. It’s me, Ragnar. It’s Darrow,” I say.

“Darrow…” Mustang presses sharply.

“What?” I snap.

“Sefi…”
Ragnar points. I follow his finger to the sky above. I see nothing. Just the faint clouds shifting in the wind that comes in from the sea. I hear only the sound of Cassius’s hacking and the creak of Mustang’s bow and Holiday limping toward us over the snow. Then I see why Aja fled as three thousand kilograms of winged predator pierces the clouds. Body that of a lion. Wings, front legs, and head that of an eagle. Feathers white. Beak hooked and black. Head the size of a grown Red.

The griffin is huge, underside of its wings painted with the screaming faces of sky-blue demons. They stretch ten meters wide as the beast lands in the snow in front of me. The earth shakes. Its eyes are pale blue, glyphs and wards painted along its black beak in white. Upon its back sits a lean, terrible human, who blows mournfully on a white horn.

More horns echo from the clouds above and twelve more griffins slam down into the mountain pass, some clinging to the sharp rock walls above us, others pawing at the snow. The first griffin-rider, the one who blew the horn, is cloaked head to toe in filthy white fur and wears a bone helmet crested with a single spine of blue feathers, which trail down the back of the neck. Not a rider is under two meters tall.

“Sunborn,” one of them calls in their sluggish dialect as she rushes to the side of their silent leader.

The speaker strips her helmet to reveal a brutish face thick with scars and piercings before falling to her knee and touching her forehead with a gloved palm in a sign of respect. A blue handprint covers her face. “We saw the flame in the sky….” Her voice falters when she sees my slingBlade.

The other riders strip their helms, dismounting in a rush as they see our hair and eyes. Not a rider among them is a man. The women’s faces are painted with huge sky-blue handprints, a little eye drawn in the center of each. White hair flows in long braids down their backs. Black eyes peer from hooded lids. Iron and bone piercings bridge noses and hook lips and notch ears. Only the lead rider has yet to remove her helmet or kneel. She steps toward us, in a trance.

“Sister,”
Ragnar manages.
“My sister.”

“Sefi?” Mustang repeats, eying the black human tongues on the prize-hook on the Obsidian’s left

hip. She wears no gloves. The backs of her hands are tattooed with glyphs.

“Do you know me?”
Ragnar rasps. A tentative smile on quivering lips as the rider approaches.

“You must.”
The rider catalogues his scars from behind her mask. Eyes dark and wide.
“I know
you,”
Ragnar continues.
“I would know you if the world were dark and we were withered and
old.”
He shudders in pain.
“If the ice was melted and the wind quiet.”
She drifts forward, step by step.
“I taught you the forty-nine names of the ice…the thirty-four breaths of the wind.”
He smiles.
“Though you could only ever remember thirty-two.”

She gives him nothing, but the other riders are already whispering his name, and looking at us as if by accompanying him and possessing a curved blade they’ve pieced together who I am. Ragnar continues, voice carrying the last of his strength.

“I carried you on my shoulders to watch five Breakings. And let you braid my hair with your

ribbons. And played with the dolls you made from seal leather and threw balls of ice at old
Proudfoot. I am your brother. And when the men of the Weeping Sun took me and a harvest of

our kin to the Chained Lands, do you remember what I told you?”

Despite his wound, the man reeks of power. This is his land. This is his home. And he is as vast here as I was upon my clawDrill. The gravity of him draws Sefi closer. She collapses to her knees and strips away her bone helmet.

Sefi the Quiet, famed daughter of Alia Snowsparrow, is raw and majestic. Face severe. Angled like

a crow’s. Her eyes too small, too close together. Her lips thin, purple in the cold, and permanently pursed in thought. White hair shaved down the left side, braided and falling to the waist on the right. A wing tattoo encircled by astral runes is livid blue on the left side of her pale skull. But what makes her