Bonds of Brass (The Bloodright Trilogy #1) - Emily Skrutskie Page 0,1
him to play. And when Iva emp-Umber won her war and claimed her spoils, she stole his bloodright out from under him.
It’s a bit of a reach to explain why he half-asses everything, and it requires some logistical leaps to justify how he made it to the academy after the empire collapsed. But it’s probably the most interesting thing about Tatsun Seely, so I entertain the notion.
“Ettian, hey—” Seely snaps his fingers in front of my eyes, and I fix him with a glare.
“Seely,” I say coolly, “get to the tarmac.”
I try to shrug his arm off my shoulders, but he clamps down tighter, pulling our heads close together. “Yeah, I’m not taking orders from you,” Seely mutters, his voice dropping low and serious. His face contorts as he tries to maintain an amicable smile. “Doesn’t matter what fancy call sign the higher-ups give you—you’re one of us. And we need to talk about the company you keep.” His eyes track an officer as she bustles past, but in the shadow of the skipship, we’re off her radar.
“Really?” I snap. Now I get what this is about. I’ve caught the scornful looks Seely and his crew throw my way more than once. They know I was born right here on Rana. I come from the nearby city of Trost, the capital and heart of the former Archon Empire. Theoretically, I should be more pissed than any of them about the Umber conquest, but instead I’ve thrown myself headlong into the new establishment. We’ve been at the academy together for two and a half years—I’m surprised it’s taken them this long to confront me about it.
Archon is dead. It’s gone. I can’t carry it with me. The only productive thing I can do is latch on to the opportunities that rise out of the postwar reconstruction. That’s what’s kept me alive for the past seven years.
Seely’s pride doesn’t allow for that sort of thinking. It’s a miracle he’s survived this long. His lips curl up over those uncanny teeth. “Face it, Gold One, you’ve rolled right over for Umber. But we can help you fix that. There’s a chance to regain a little dignity. A little honor.”
His fingers start to fidget on my shoulder. To the untrained eye, it looks like a simple nervous tic, but every child born on Archon soil knows better. He’s tapping a rhythm against my bones, one of the ancient beats that sculpted the old empire’s culture. Some are soft and comforting, a resting pulse. Others scream of triumph in fast, emphatic strokes.
Seely’s beat is urgent. Rising. A call to arms.
It freezes my blood. Seely feels me lock up against him. He leans close, his breath in my ear. “Remember the knights?” he whispers. “Remember how it felt to see one flying over a city? A single human in a powersuit that could tear the wing off a fighter craft? We’re gonna be heroes like them.”
And just like that, I’m unstuck. I duck out of Seely’s grip, clutching the helmets uncomfortably against my hips. Sure, I remember the suited knights. The heroes of the Archon Empire, keeping the peace and fighting for justice across the systems.
They were the first thing Iva emp-Umber set her sights on when she decided to take our homeworlds and their abundance of metal-rich asteroid belts for her own. Thirty coordinated strikes destroyed every knight, their staffs, their headquarters. Not even a single powersuit remained in the aftermath. Knightfall, they called it. A declaration of war, painted in the blood of every single person we were dumb enough to call our heroes.
“I like my head where it is,” I tell Seely sharply. Guilt prickles through me as his expression drops to a stony glare. Usually the choice to fall in line with Umber rests comfortably on my shoulders—and in my well-fed gut—but when a fellow war orphan is scowling at me like I’m dirt, it’s hard not to feel it. “Look, for your sake, whatever it is you think you’re going to do…Don’t.”
“Told you he wouldn’t bite,” one of Seely’s companions says with a sniff. She glances over her shoulder. “He’s a waste of time.”