Our castle is taken. Firelight along its ramparts tells me this. The castle stands high above the glen on its hill, its torches making strange halos in the fog-quilted darkness. My horse’s hooves thump softly on wet grass as to my right the Metas gurgles like a sick child in the night. Cassius rides there but I cannot see him.

“Reaper!” Mustang shouts through the mist. Her voice is not playful. She’s forty meters off, near the base of the sloped road that leads to the castle. She leans forward, arms crossed over the pommel of her saddle. Six riders flank her. The rest must be garrisoning the castle. Otherwise I’d hear about it. I look at the boys behind her. Pax is so large that his pike looks like a scepter in his huge mitts.

“Lo, Mustang.”

“So, you didn’t drown. That would have been easier.” Her quick face is dark. “You are a vile breed, you know that?” She’s been inside the keep and she doesn’t have words for her anger. “Rape? Mutilation? Murder?” She spits.

“I did nothing,” I say. “And neither did the Proctors.”

“Yes. You did nothing. Yet now you have our standard and what? Handsome somewhere out there in the mist? Go ahead, pretend like you’re not their leader. Like you’re not responsible.”

“Titus is responsible.”

“The big bastard? Yes, Pax laid him low.” She gestures to the monster of a boy beside her. Pax’s hair is shorn short, his eyes small, chin like a heel with a dent in it. Beneath him, his horse looks like a dog. His bare arms are flesh stretched over boulders.

“I didn’t come to talk, Mustang.”

“Come to cut my ear off?” she sneers.

“No. Goblin did.”

Then one of her men slips screaming from his saddle.

“What the …,” a rider murmurs.

Behind them, knives already dripping, Sevro howls like a maniac. A half dozen other howls join his as Antonia and half her Phobos garrison ride from the north hills on the stolen mudblack steeds. They howl like mentals in the mist. Mustang’s soldiers wheel about. Sevro takes another one down. He doesn’t use stunpikes. MedBots scream through the sky, which is suddenly filled with Proctors. All of them have come to watch. Mercury trails behind the rest, carrying an armful of spirits, which he tosses to his fellows. Each of us peers up to watch their strange appearance; the horses continue to run. Time pauses.

“To the fray!” dark Apollo mocks from on high. His golden robes show he’s just risen from bed. “To the fray.”

Then chaos hits as Mustang shouts orders, strategy. Four more horsemen ride down the sloped road from the gate to support her troop. My turn. I slam Minerva’s standard upright into the earth and scream bloody murder. I kick my heels into my mare. She lurches forward, almost losing me. My body shudders as she pounds the moist earth with her hooves. My strong left hand grips the reins and I draw my slingBlade. I feel a Helldiver again when I howl.

The enemy scatters as they see me raging toward them. It is the rage that confuses them. It is the insanity of Sevro, the manic brutality of Mars. The horsemen scatter, except one. Pax jumps from his horse and sprints at me.

“Pax au Telemanus” he screams, a titan possessed, foaming at the mouth. I dig my heels into my horse and howl. Then Pax tackles my horse. His shoulder hits my horse’s sternum. The beast screams. My world flips. I fly out of my saddle, over my horse’s head, and crash to the ground.

Dazed, I stumble to my knee in the hoof-churned field.

Madness consumes the field. Antonia’s force crashes into Mustang’s flank. They have primitive weapons, but their horses are shock enough. Several Minervans fly from the saddle. Others kick their mounts toward their abandoned standard, but Cassius appears out of the fog at a gallop and swipes the standard away to the south. Two enemies give chase, dividing their force. The other six soldiers from Antonia’s tower garrisons are waiting to ambush them in the woods, where the horses cannot gallop.

Reflexes make me duck as a pike sweeps toward my skull. I’m up with my slingBlade. I slash it at a wrist. Too slow. I move as if in a dance, remembering the thumping pattern my uncle taught me in the abandoned mines. The Reaping Dance carries my motions into one another like flowing water. I swoop the slingBlade into a kneecap. The Aureate bone does not break, but the force knocks the rider from the saddle. I spin sideways and strike again, and again, and sweep the hoof of a horse away, breaking a fetlock. The animal falls.

A different stunpike stabs at me. I avoid the point and rip it free with my Red hands and jam the electrocuting tip into another assailant. The boy falls. A mountain pushes it aside and runs at me. Pax. In case I am an idiot, he roars his name at me. His parents bred him to lead Obsidian landing parties into hull breaches.

“Pax au Telemanus!” He beats his huge pike against his chest and hits puffy-haired Clown so hard, my friend flies back four meters. “Pax au Telemanus.”

“Is a pricklicker!” I mock.

Then a horse’s flank thumps into my back and I stumble toward the monstrous boy. I’m doomed. He could have gotten me with his pike. Instead, he hugs me. It’s like being embraced by a golden bear that keeps screaming its own damn name. My back cracks. Mother-mercy. He’s squeezing my skull. My shoulder aches. Bloodyhell. I can’t breathe. I’ve never met a force like this. Dear God. He’s a bloodydamn ogre. But someone is howling. Dozens of howls. Back popping.

Pax roars his personal victory. “I have your captain! I piss on you, Mars! Pax au Telemanus has slagged your captain! Pax au Telemanus!”

My vision flickers black and fades. But the rage in me does not.

I roar out one last bit of wrath before I faint. It’s cheap. Pax is honorable. I still mash his grapes flat with my knee. I make sure to get both as many times as I can. One. Two. Three. Four. He gawps and collapses. I faint atop him in the mud to the sound of Proctors cheering.

Sevro tells me the story as he picks through the pockets of our prisoners after the battle. After Pax and I finished one another off, Roque sallied into the glen with Lea and my tribe. Mustang, the crafty girl, escaped into the castle and manages yet to hold it with six fighters. All the prisoners of Mars she captured won’t be hers until she touches them with the tip of her standard. Fat chance. We have eleven of her men and Roque digs up our standard to make them our slaves. We could besiege our own castle—there’s no storming its high walls—but Ceres or the rest of Minerva could come at any time. If they do, Cassius is supposed to ride to give Ceres Minerva’s standard. It also keeps him away while I cement my position as leader.

Roque and Antonia come with me to negotiate with Mustang at the gate. I limp up and favor a cracked rib. It hurts to breathe. Roque takes a step back so that I am most prominent when we reach the gate itself. Antonia wrinkles her nose and eventually does the same. Mustang is bloody from the skirmish and I can’t find a smile on her pretty face.

“The Proctors have been watching all of this,” she says scathingly. “They’ve seen what happened in that … place. Everything—”

“Was done by Titus,” Antonia drawls tiredly.

“And no one else?” Mustang looks at me. “The girls won’t stop crying.”

“No one died,” Antonia says in annoyance. “Weak as they are, they will repair themselves. Despite what happened, there’s been no depletion of Golden stock.”

“The Golden stock …,” Mustang murmurs. “How can you be so cold?”

“Little girl,” Antonia sighs, “Gold is a cold metal.”

Mustang looks up at Antonia incredulously and then shakes her head. “Mars. A gruesome deity. You’re fit for this, aren’t you lot? Barbarity? Past centuries. Dark ages.”

I don’t have a mind to be lectured by an Aureate about morality.