The Proctors? The Jackal? Someone watches me.

When something watches you and you don’t know where it is, there is only one sensible thing to do. Change the bloodydamn paradigm, try to even the playing field. Make it have to look for you.

I break into movement. I sprint back toward my army. Then I dash behind a tree, scramble up it and wait, watching. Knives out. Ready to throw. Cloak curled about me.

Silence.

Then the snapping of twigs. Something moves through the woods. Something huge.

“Pax?” I call down.

No response.

Then I feel a strong hand touch my shoulder. The branch I crouch in sinks with the new weight as a man deactivates his ghostCloak and appears from thin air. I’ve seen him before. His curly blond hair is cut tight to his head and frames his dusky, godlike face. His chin is carved from marble, and his eyes twinkle evilly, bright as his armor. Proctor Apollo. The huge thing moves again below us.

“Darrow, Darrow, Darrow,” he clucks over at me in Mustang’s voice. “You were a favorite puppet, but you’re not dancing as you ought. Will you reform and go north?”

“I—”

“Refuse? No matter.” He shoves me off the branch, hard. I hit another on the way down. Fall into the snow. I smell dander. Fur. And then the beast roars.

38

THE FALL OF APOLLO

The bear is huge—bigger than a horse, big as a wagon. White as a bloodless corpse. Eyes red and yellow. Razor black teeth long as my forearm. Nothing like the bears I’ve seen on the HC. A strip of red runs along its spine. Its paws are like fingers, eight on a hand. It’s unnatural. Made by the Carvers for sport. It’s been brought to these woods to kill, to kill me in particular. Sevro and I heard it roaring months back as we went to make peace with Diana. Now I feel its spittle.

I stand there stupid for a second. Then the bear roars again and lunges.

I roll, run. I sprint faster than I ever have in my life. I fly. But the bear is faster, if less agile; the woods shudder as it crashes through brush and trees.

I run beside a massive godTree and dive through bramble. There the ground creaks beneath my feet and I realize, as leaves and snow crumble under my feet, where I stand. I put the place between myself and the bear and wait for the bear to tear through the underbrush. It bursts clear and lunges for me. I jump back. Then it is gone, shrieking as it plummets through the trap floor onto a bed of wooden spikes. My joy would have been longer lived if I didn’t dance back and step into a second trap.

The earth flips. Well, I do. My leg snaps upward and I fly into the air on the end of a rope. I dangle for hours, too frightened to call to my army for fear of Proctor Apollo. My face tingles and itches from the blood rushing to my head. Then a familiar voice cuts the night.

“Well, well, well,” it sneers from below. “Looks like we’ve two pelts to skin.”

Sevro smirks when I tell him I’ve allied with Mustang. At camp, where Mustang was preparing search parties to send out for me, his reputation precedes him amongst the northerners. The Minervans fear him. Tactus and the other DeadHorses, on the other hand, are delighted.

“Why, if it isn’t my belly buddy!” Tactus drawls. “Why the limp, my friend?”

“Your mother rode me ragged,” Sevro grunts.

“Bah, you’d have to stand on your tiptoes to even kiss her chin.”

“Wasn’t her chin I was trying to kiss.”

Tactus claps his hands together in laughter and draws Sevro in for an obnoxious hug. They are two very peculiar people. But I suppose snuggling in horse corpses gives a bond—makes twins of a morbid sort.

“Where were you?” Mustang asks me quietly to the side.

“In a second,” I say.

Sevro has only one eye now. So he is the one-eyed demon the Apollonian emissary warned me about.

“I always wondered what sort of mad little fellows you Howlers were,” Mustang says.

“Little?” Sevro asks.

“I—didn’t mean to offend.”

He grins. “I am little.”

“Well, we of Minerva thought you were ghosts.” She pats his shoulder. “You’re not. And I’m not a real mustang, if you were wondering. No tail, you see? And no,” she interrupts Tactus. “I’ve never worn a saddle, since you were going to ask.”

He was.

“She’ll do,” Sevro mutters sideways to me.

“I like them,” Mustang says of the Howlers a few moments later. “Make me feel tall.”

“Perrrfect!” Tactus picks up the bloodback pelt with a grunt. “Looky look. They found something in Pax’s size.”

Before we join the group at the large fire that Pax stokes, Sevro pulls me aside and produces a blanket. Inside is my slingBlade.

“Kept it safe for you after finding it in the mud,” he says. “And I made it sharper; time for using a dull blade is over.”

“You’re a friend. I hope you know that.” I clap him on the shoulder. “Not a game friend. A real friend now, when we’re out of here. You know that, yes?”

“I’m not an idiot.” He blushes all the same.

I learn from him around the campfire that he and the Howlers, Thistle, Screwface, Clown, Weed, and Pebble—the dregs of my old House—stayed no longer than a day after I disappeared.

“Cassius said the Jackal took you,” Sevro says through a mouthful of weevily bread. “Delicious nuts.” He eats like he hasn’t seen food in weeks.

We sit fireside in the Greatwoods, bathed in the light of crackling logs. Mustang, Milia, Tactus, and Pax join us in leaning on a fallen tree in the snow. We’re all bundled like animals. I sit close with Mustang. Her leg is entwined with mine beneath the furs. The bloodback fur stinks and crackles over the fire. Fat drips into the flames. Pax will wear it when it dries.

Sevro sought the Jackal after Cassius fed him the lie. My small friend doesn’t get into details. He hates details. He just taps his empty eye socket and says, “The Jackal owes me.”

“You saw him then?” I ask.

“It was dark. I saw his knife. Didn’t even hear his voice. I had to jump off the mountain. It was a long fall back to the rest of the pack.” He says it so plainly. Yet I did notice his limp. “We couldn’t stay in the mountains. His men … everywhere.”

“But we took some of the mountains with us,” Thistle says. She pats the scalps on her waist with a motherly smile. Mustang shudders.

It’s been chaos in the South. Apollo, Venus, Mercury, and Pluto are all that’s left, but I hear Mercury has been reduced to a force of roving vagabonds. A pity. I was fond of their Proctor. He almost chose me in the Draft, would have if he could have. Wonder how things would have gone then.

“Sevro, with that leg, how fast can you run, say, two kilometers?” I ask.

The others are puzzled by the question, but Sevro just shrugs. “Doesn’t slow me. Minute and a half in this lowGrav.”

I make a note to tell him my idea later.

“We have more important things to discuss, Reaper.” Tactus smiles. “Now, I heard you were dangling upside down in the woods from this one here’s trap.” He pats little Thistle on her thigh; she smiles as he lets his hand linger. It’s the scalp collection that draws his affection. “You didn’t think you’d sneak out of telling the tale, did you?”

It’s not so funny a thing as he might suspect.

I finger my ring. Telling them would be signing their death warrants. Apollo and Jupiter listen to me now. I look at Mustang and feel hollow. I’ll risk losing her just to win their rigged game. If I were a good person, I would keep the ring on. I would hold my tongue. But there are plans to make, gods to undo. I take my ring off and set it on the snow. “Let us for one moment pretend we are not from different Houses,” I say. “Let’s all of us talk as friends, ringless.”