It was only as he considered the sheer weight of the things that had happened to him that it started to truly hit him. Just a day ago, he’d thought he was going to die. Just a day ago, he hadn’t even known that Ceres was alive. Before that, his father had been alive and telling him where to seek out the truth about himself. There were so many things pushing in on him then, and though the pressure had been there before, it was as though Thanos was only just seeing the reality of it for the first time.
“How do you deal with it?” Thanos asked. “Ceres… I betrayed her. I didn’t mean to, I thought she was dead, but when I married Stephania, it was a betrayal of everything we had.”
He saw the other man shrug. “Maybe she’ll see that in time. In the meantime, did you do anything wrong?”
Had he done anything wrong? Right then, it felt to Thanos as if he hadn’t been able to do a thing right. He’d found ways to mess up his life that he couldn’t imagine anyone else managing.
“I married Stephania,” Thanos said.
The other man sat down, leaning against a rail with his legs out. “You said yourself that you thought Ceres was dead. Can’t blame yourself for taking what comfort you could. Did you love this other girl?”
That was a complicated question. Even so, the answer turned out to be simpler than Thanos had thought it would be.
“Yes,” Thanos said, and that just brought with it more guilt.
“Well, that’s better than marrying her without loving her, isn’t it?”
Thanos guessed so, but there were more things to feel guilty about. Marrying Stephania was a long way from the only thing that pricked at his conscience right then. “I spied on my family and my friends.”
“Because they were doing evil things,” the captain pointed out. “You think the world didn’t need to know what they were about?”
He made it seem so simple when he said it like that, and at the time, it had seemed simple too. It was only afterwards that life had come to seem so complicated.
“I’ve fought and killed,” Thanos said.
Both when he’d been determined not to. He’d been determined to be a better man.
“Sometimes it’s worse to stand by and let people be hurt,” the captain said.
And yet, there had been plenty of times when Thanos hadn’t been able to help. Did it just mean he had to start feeling guilty for that too?
And of course, there was the big one.
“I’m traveling to kill my brother.”
That got another shrug. “If I could kill the man who owned me, I would. If I could kill him a hundred times, it wouldn’t be enough. And Lucious… well, if a dog is rabid, you put it down.”
Thanos knew it was good advice. Even so, it was hard. He was traveling further from the woman he loved with every stroke of the oars, while moving toward a conflict he might not survive.
“Most of the lessons I learned at the oars weren’t good ones,” the sailor said. “Keep your head down, do as you’re told, they’re just the kind of lessons an owner wants to teach a slave.” He stood up next to Thanos, leaning on his mop. “There was one good lesson though: how to deal with things that might break you apart.”
“And how do you do that?” Thanos asked.
It sounded like the kind of thing he needed to know right then. Certainly, he felt as though he were splitting in every direction at once.
“You keep rowing, and you don’t think much beyond the next stroke of the oar. You do the next thing. You put aside the past, right down to the last stroke, or you carry it with you and it crushes you. And you hope that if you last long enough, eventually, you might be free. Although not so free that I can get away with not mopping much longer. They tell me the captain on this ship is a right devil of a man.”
Thanos smiled at that.
“I can believe it.”
The captain moved off, swabbing the deck once more as if he were just another sailor. Thanos stood there. He knew the other man was right. The past was something he couldn’t change. The future felt like something too hazy and undefined to shape.
He couldn’t make things better with Ceres. Not now, not yet, at least. He couldn’t undo the things he’d done in the past. All he could do now was focus on what he was there to do. He had to go to Felldust. He had to find Lucious.
He had to kill his brother.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Ceres could have taken any room in the castle for her own, but instead she found herself standing in Thanos’s old chambers, looking at it as though it was the landscape of some strange country. None of it made sense, and all of it hurt.
Did he really love her so little? He’d taken up with Stephania almost as soon as she’d gone. He’d gotten her pregnant. Stephania! Almost anyone else… well, it would still have been bad, but it wouldn’t have been her. And it wouldn’t have suggested to Ceres that Thanos was one beautiful face away from being everything the other nobles of the Empire had been.
She barely heard the knock on the door, even though it must have been a fist thudding against it. She turned to see Akila walking into the room.
“With the way you shot through the castle, I thought I might find you here,” the rebel leader said. “There are plenty of people looking for you. The curse of being a leader.”
“I—” Ceres began, but Akila cut her off.
“Don’t say that you don’t care,” he said. “We both know that isn’t true. I might not have known you as long as some of the others, but you care as much as anyone. Just sometimes about difficult things. I take it this is about Thanos?”
The strange thing was that if it had been her father standing there, or her brother, Ceres might not have admitted it right then. Yet with this almost stranger, she found herself nodding.
“He can be infuriating,” Akila said.
“He’s not just infuriating!” Ceres snapped back. “How do I trust him when he married Stephania? How do I know that anything he’s said to me is true?”
She bristled as Akila laughed, but he waved away her anger. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just never thought I’d find myself thinking the same thoughts as someone in love with Thanos.” Ceres saw his features turn serious. “I did though. I asked myself exactly the same questions back on Haylon. Though for different reasons, you’ll be glad to know.”
“Why?” Ceres asked.
“Thanos had come to me seeking you, and seeking help against the Empire. I didn’t trust him, because I’d heard about his wedding. I thought he didn’t care about our cause.”
“We’re all lucky you changed your mind,” Ceres said.
“I know one thing he did care about,” Akila said. “You. I’d told him he wasn’t welcome on Haylon, and he went there looking for you anyway. He sailed to the Isle of Prisoners just on the hope that you might be alive there. He married Stephania, true. He came back for her. I sometimes get the feeling that he spends so long trying to do things right that he gets them wrong. But let’s not forget the part where she tried to kill him, and don’t ever doubt that you’re the one who’s first in his heart.”
It was a lot to take in, especially coming from someone like this, whom she barely knew.
“You want time to take it all in,” Akila said. “To make sense of it all.”
“Yes, please,” Ceres said.
She saw Akila shake his head. “I’m sorry, but that isn’t how leading works. Take it from someone who knows. I need to get down to my ships now, and you… you need to be the leader they all expect.”
They were hard words even if they were delivered gently, and the worst part was that they were true. Ceres knew how much there was to do in Delos, and how many people were relying on her.
So she went out to the great hall, finding people already waiting for her. Her father wasn’t there, and Ceres guessed that he would be helping to supervise the building work, but Sartes was, along with a small crowd of people from the city. They stood around the throne as if expecting her to sit on it.
> Ceres shook her head. “Everyone follow me. If you have things that need doing, I’ll listen, but I want to hear more of what’s happening in the city. I want to see it.”
Some of the others there hesitated. Ceres could see a couple of the nobles who had obviously stayed there out of fear of what might happen beyond hang back. Even some of Lord West’s men seemed perplexed by the idea. Her brother ran to her side though, waving the others to join them.
“Come on,” he said. “Ceres is right. We can’t hide away, making decisions here when the people affected are out there.”
Ceres led the way out into the city, and the people who had come to the great hall joined her. They poured out into the city together, and the crowd grew as Ceres walked. Guards joined them, obviously wanting to keep them safe, but so did plenty of others. Ordinary people who had been standing in the square before the castle joined in, then merchants flowing out from their stores, and apprentices leaving workshops.
Ceres strode in the direction of the Stade, on an all too familiar path. She entered it and stepped out onto the sands, and saw the people starting to fill the terraces, but there were plenty with her out on the floor of the Stade, too.
“From this day,” she began, raising her voice to be heard, “there will be no more Killings.”
There were cheers at that, but also some boos, and voices cried out from the crowd.
“We should throw the nobles onto the sands and make them fight!” one yelled.
“What will we watch if there’s no more Killings?” another demanded.
Ceres raised her voice again, and to her surprise, the Stade fell silent while she spoke. “There will be no more Killings. I have watched the Killings, but I have also stood here, forced to fight, forced to kill, and it is not something anyone should be made to do. The Stade will become a place of other entertainment. Players will be brought, and musicians. We will meet here too. A ruler shouldn’t sit on a throne, letting in a few people. So whoever rules the Empire will come here, to answer to those who want to speak.”
The sheer scale of what Ceres was proposing seemed to stun them into silence. She used that silence to keep going.
“The combatlords will be freed!” she declared. But that wasn’t enough. “All the slaves of the Empire will be freed.”
Again, there were cheers mixed in with sounds of surprise.
“Who will work my fields?” a man called out, although his neighbors tried to shout him down.
“No, no,” Ceres called back. “Let him speak. The answer to your question is that any men you can pay to do it will work your fields. Or maybe men will work with you because you help them work on theirs. You might find that they’ll work better when there isn’t a whip at their back, too!”
That got another cheer.
“And you think we have the money for that?” another voice called.
“You will have,” Ceres assured the crowd. “The days when the Empire took all you had are over.”
She outlined the next parts one after another. Land that had been taken would be returned to commoners. Large noble holdings where peasants were treated little better than slaves would be given to the people who actually farmed them.
“You’re going to steal land from those who own it?” a man called down.
“I say that it has already been stolen,” Ceres countered. “The Empire took and took. We will go through the records of what it took and give that back. To make up for the pain it has caused, the Empire’s treasury will be used to repay the excessive taxes it took, while its vineyards and food stores will be opened up to help those who have been left starving by its violence.”
That got a cheer that echoed around Ceres, and she turned to her brother. “Sartes, I have to ask you to do something for me.”
“Anything you need.”
“There’s no one I trust more to start putting this into practice,” Ceres said. “Can you gather together some of the former conscripts? They’ll want to go home, won’t they? So they could be the ones to take the news.”
“It sounds like a good idea,” Sartes said. “I’ll see to it. I’ll go, too. This will need someone to organize it as we go.”
“Thank you,” Ceres said, hugging him. She didn’t want him to go, not really, but she knew that she couldn’t keep him there. It couldn’t be just about her.
As she pulled away, Ceres found a young woman approaching her. She wore the expensive silks of a noblewoman, but they were torn, and Ceres could see the blossoming of bruises on her face.
“What will happen to us?” she asked. “You’re going to take everything from us, aren’t you? Where will we live? What will we do?”
If she hadn’t sounded so genuinely frightened by it, Ceres might have been harder with her. As it was, she reached out to touch the young woman’s shoulder.
“What’s your name?”
“Seylin,” she answered.
“Well, Seylin, we’re not going to take your homes from you, or leave you destitute. As for what you do, you do what anyone does: you find work, you do what you can.”
The young woman still didn’t look convinced. “When the rebels came through the castle, they said I was scum. They beat me. They tore my jewels away. They tore off my dress… oh, gods, I thought they were going to kill me.”
Ceres understood then, and that was the hardest part of being a leader. Every choice had those it hurt as well as those it helped, and something as violent as a rebellion always left behind its victims, no matter how noble its cause.
The Empire had been an evil thing, and undoing its evil meant taking back some of what it had stolen. To do anything else would only mean the same people rising to the top again and again. Yet Ceres could only feel pity for the nobles like this one, who had done nothing wrong except never look beyond the walls of their polished towers.
“It will be all right,” Ceres promised. “I won’t let anyone else hurt you. You can come back to the castle, and we’ll find something for you to do there.”
Ceres tried to find someone who would look after the noblewoman. What she saw instead was a wall of heavily armed men bearing down on her.
It would have been terrifying, if Ceres hadn’t recognized them. The combatlords stood in a half circle around her, carrying the weapons that they’d used in the Killings, and then in their rebellion.
“They tell us that you’ve declared an end to the Killings,” one said. He was a short, stocky man who wore spiked gloves. Karak the Gutter, they’d called him in the Stade, if Ceres remembered correctly.
“That’s right,” Ceres said.
“There won’t be many chances for glory, then,” Karak said.
Ceres gestured to the Stade. “If you want to fight here without weapons, you can, but there will be no more deaths.”
She saw the combatlord shake his head. “We’ve thought of a better path to glory.”
He dropped to one knee, and then, one after another, so did the other combatlords.
“You were one of us, Ceres,” the combatlord said, “so now, we will seek our glory with you. Felldust is coming, and we will stand with you against it. We will guard you with our lives, if necessary, and follow your commands above all others.”
“I’m not some new master for you,” Ceres said.
“No, and that is why we will follow you,” Karak said.
Ceres didn’t know what to say to that, but it seemed that the crowd did. It cheered once more, and this time, Ceres couldn’t even hear herself over the sound of it.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
They kept going. To Stephania, it seemed as though keeping going was the entire point of the journey, the endless sun and dust just some great test of endurance. Now, though, they knew exactly where they needed to go. By the side of the road, Stephania saw skulls, some abandoned, some left on posts. She heard bells chiming in the wind, and saw them attached to the posts. Presumably they were another warning.
Stephania didn’t care. It just meant that they were
on the right track as they headed toward the looming hills ahead. They crossed a river on a bridge that felt as though it might collapse at any moment, then left the main track, following a route down into the valley between two hills.
Finally, Stephania saw it.
The mountain rose up, and she could see why they called the range the place of the stone dead. The hills around it looked almost like figures kneeling in front of a leader, waiting to rise at their command.
The mountain itself was a twisted thing, looking as though it had been ripped apart at some point by powers Stephania couldn’t hope to match. It stood as a patch of darkness against the sky, and at the sight of it, the caravan came to a halt. Stephania knew without asking that it wouldn’t go any closer.
“It looks as though we’ll camp here,” she said to Elethe.
She didn’t bother keeping the eagerness out of her voice. They were close now. So close.
“And then?” her handmaiden asked.
“And then you and I have a mountain to climb.”
Stephania left the others to set up camp, and Elethe grabbed supplies for them. Stephania looked at her askance when her handmaiden tied a rope around her waist and then around Stephania’s.
“In case you fall,” Elethe said. “I can catch you.”
Stephania was glad then that she hadn’t sold her handmaiden to Brek. Still, there were other things to consider.
“And if you fall?” Stephania asked. “Do you think I can haul you up in this condition?”
“Cut the rope.” Elethe shook her head. “But I won’t fall.”
Neither of them did. Together, they scrambled their way up the mountain, taking trails that looked as though they would have challenged a mountain goat. Stephania felt black dust and rocks giving way under her feet with every step.
Further up, she could see a cave, an overhang above it making it look like the maw of a snake, stalactites forming the fangs. Stephania stared up at it, and for a moment, it seemed as if there was a snake there and it was coming for them and—