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“Daxo?” Niobe laughs. “Daxo was born stoic as a stone.”

“Plotting in the womb from conception,” Thraxa mutters, and sips her beer. “We used to make owl hoots at him. Always watching the rest of us out the window. Big brother never wanted to play our games. Only his own.”

“And you were such a paragon?” Niobe asks. “You used to eat cow pies.”

Thraxa shrugs. “Better than your cooking.” She steps out of range of her mother’s reach and lights a replacement burner. “Thank Jove we had Browns.”

Niobe rolls her eyes and touches my arm. “The miscreant is right, Darrow. Pax just missed you. You’ve time to make up.”

I smile at her but watch Sevro walking away toward the water with Electra. “You know you’re Daddy’s favorite, don’t you?” he’s saying to her. I fight back my jealousy. He always seems able to pick right back up where he left off with his family. I wish I had that same gift.

—

I seek my mother out in the garden that runs along the side of one of the stone storage sheds. She’s hunched in the black dirt with two other Red servant women and a Red man, her bare feet sticking out behind her as she plants bulbs in the ground in tidy rows. I pause a moment at the edge of the garden to watch her, just as I used to watch from the stairwell in our little home in Lykos as she made her night tea. I was afraid of her after Father died. She was always quick with a swat or a barbed word. I thought I deserved the treatment. How much easier the love between us would have been if I’d known as a child that her anger and my fear came from a pain neither one of us deserved. The love in me wells up for her as I remember what she’s endured, and for a brief flicker, I ache to see my father again. For him to see my mother free.

“Are you just going to watch like a wastrel or are you going to help us plant?” she asks without looking up.

“I’m not sure I’d be a good farmer,” I say.

She stands with the help of one of her companions, dusts the dirt from her pants, and takes her time setting her tools away before coming to say hello. She’s only eighteen years older than I am, but she wears the years hard. Still, she is stronger by leagues than when she lived below. Her joints are worn from years in the mines. But her cheeks are ruddy with life now. Our physicians have helped relieve most of the symptoms of the stroke and heart condition that ravaged her. I know she feels guilty for this life. This luxury, when my father and so many others wait for us in the Vale. Her work in the garden and on the grounds is a penance for surviving.

My mother gives me a hard hug. “My son.” She breathes me in before pulling back to look all the way up to my face. “You put the death in me when I heard of that damn Iron Rain. You put the death in all of us.”

“I’m sorry. They shouldn’t have told you before that I was unaccounted for.”

She nods and says nothing, and I realize how deep her worry went. How they must have huddled in the living room here or in the Citadel and listened to the holoNews just like everyone else. The Red man shuffles to join us, his bad leg dragging behind.

“?’Lo, Dancer,” I say past my mother. My old mentor wears laborer’s garments instead of his senatorial robes. His hair is gray, his face fatherly and creased from hard years. But there’s still mischief in his rebel eyes. “Given up the Senate for gardening, have you?”

“I’m a man of the people,” he says with a shrug. “Good to have dirt under the nails again. The gardeners in that museum the Senate gave me won’t let me touch a damn weed. ’Lo, Sevro.”

“Politician,” Sevro says, joining me from behind. Heedless of the mood, he pretends like he’s going to scoop my mother up into the air, but she scowls at him and he turns the scoop into a gentle hug.

“Better,” she says. “You nearly broke my hip the last time.”

“Oh, don’t be such a Pixie,” he mutters.

“Say that again?”

He steps back. “Nothing, ma’am.”

“What word from Leanna?” I ask.

“They’re well. Was hoping to visit them soon. Maybe take Pax along to Icaria in the winter. This place gets too cold for these old bones.”

“All the way to Mars?” I ask.

“It’s his home,” she says sharply. “You want him to forget where he came from? Red’s as deep in his blood as Gold. Not that he’s ever reminded it, ’cept by me.”

Dancer looks away, as if to give us privacy.

“He’ll go to Mars,” I say. “We all will when it’s safe.”

We might control Mars, but that’s a far cry from it being a world of harmony. The Sirenian continent is still infested by a Gold army of iron-skinned veterans, just like the battleground of South Pacifica on Earth. The Ash Lord hasn’t risked putting a major fleet in orbit in years, but ground wars are decidedly more stubborn than their astral counterparts.

“And when will it be safe, according to you?” my mother asks.

“Soon.”