The Steel Remains

“Ging! Ringil!”

At the sound of their father’s voice, both brothers stopped, arm’s reach apart in the center of the lounge, gazes locked. Ringil watched his brother’s furious face, distantly aware that there was nothing in his own expression to match, nothing there at all but a faint smile and the blank promise of violence.

“Well?” he asked gently.

Ging looked away. “She never asked me.”

“I wonder why.”

“Hey—fuck you.” Ging doubled his lowered fists, unconscious echo of his father’s anger. Ringil remembered Ging picking it up, back in their shared youth. “I came here to see if I could help.”

“You can’t help me, Ging, you never could. You were always soooooo fucking obedient.”

A long corridor . . .

A LONG CORRIDOR IN THE ACADEMY DORMITORY WING, AND COLD winter-afternoon light slanting down through the row of side windows. Dark reek of the waxed wood floor he was pi

He remembered his brother, stopped dead in the corridor coming the other way and staring, just staring.

Most of all, he remembered the look on Ging’s face, queasy and weak, as if he’d just eaten something that was going to make him sick. Ringil knew, looking at that expression, that he’d get no help.

The seniors knew it, too.

“Fuck are you doing here, Gingren?” Mershist, the pledge guardian and ringleader, breathing heavily, climbing up off Ringil’s neck and squaring up in the corridor. He got his breath back, seemed almost amused. “This isn’t your affair. Get the fuck back to drill where you belong. Before I put you on report.”

Gingren said nothing, didn’t move. He had no weapon—outside of the training yards and salons, the Academy didn’t permit the cadets to go armed—but he had some of his father’s build about him, was bulkier than Ringil would ever be, and three years into the Academy program was getting a reputation as a ca

The moment hovered for heartbeats, like a crow on beating wings the instant before it lands. Even Ringil paused in his attempts to thrash free, eyes suddenly on Gingren’s face. Hope quavered up in him like small, newly kindled flames.

Then another of the seniors came and stood at Mershist’s shoulder, and something indefinable changed about the setting. Even with his face pressed hard to the floor, Ringil felt it. Perhaps Ging might have faced Mershist down alone. But not this. The balance tipped, the moment sideslipped, skidded, and landed on its black-feathered arse. Mershist glanced sideways at his supporting companion, then back to Gingren and gri

“Look, mate. Little Gil here’s getting initiated, whether he fancies it or not. What did you think, your little brother’d get a pass for some reason? You know that’s not going to happen. You know how this place works.”

Ging’s mouth twitched. He was going to try for talk. “It doesn’t—”

“I’m doing him a fucking favor, Ging.” Mershist let a tinge of exasperated warning seep into his voice. “Gil hasn’t exactly made a lot of friends since he matriculated. There’s seniors over in Dolmen House want to do him with a fucking mace head. And to be honest with you, I can see their point. He took Kerril’s eye right fucking out, you know.”

Ging swallowed. It made an audible click. “Kerril shouldn’t have—”

“Kerril was doing what needed to be done.” Now the reasonable tone was shredding thin and through. Playtime was coming to an end. Mershist stabbed a finger at Ringil where he lay on the floor. “Your little brother here thinks he’s something special, and he fucking isn’t. We all go through this, Ging, and we’re all stronger for it. You know that. It binds us together, it makes us what we are. Hoiran’s fucking balls, it’s not like you didn’t have old man Reshin’s prick up your arse three years ago, just like the rest of us.”

Something shifted in Gingren’s face then, and the last hope in Ringil guttered out for good. His elder brother’s eyes flickered to meet his, skittered away again. He’d flushed with shame. When he spoke again, his voice was almost pleading.

“Mershist, he’s only—”

Mershist trod down the words. His voice rasped like steel coming out of the scabbard.

“He’s a little fucking pansy, is what he is, Ging. You know it, and so do I. So now he’s going to get what he probably secretly wanted all along, from all of us. And you will not fucking stop us. So unless you want to join in or watch, I suggest you fuck off back to practice.”

And Gingren went.

Just once, as he faltered and turned away, he looked at Ringil, and Ringil thought, later or at that moment, he could not recall which, that it was like meeting someone’s eyes across jail cell bars. Ging’s mouth worked again, but nothing came out.

Ringil stared back at him. He would not beg.

And Gingren went away, down the dark wood corridor, slowly, like a man carrying an injury, and the declining afternoon lit him coldly at each window he passed.

Ringil closed his eyes.

They dragged him back in.

NOW, IN THE RIVERSIDE LOUNGE, HE LOOKED AT GING OUT OF THE welter of memories, and he saw that his brother was pi

Those memories, and all that came after.

The pain, and the bleeding that he kept thinking had stopped but then found hadn’t. He didn’t need the infirmary the way some initiates did; Mershist and his crew had known what they were about to that extent at least. He supposed he had that much to thank them for. But he had to bite back screams at his toilet for a week.

Then there was the sniggering. The whispered stories about the way Ringil’s body had reacted to the rape. No big surprise, it was a fairly common occurrence and cadets at the Academy were used to seeing it. But coupled with the gossip about Ringil’s preferences, it provoked an entirely predictable set of minor myths. Should have seen him, they would mutter as Ringil limped past on the other side of a courtyard. Came like a fucking fountain, man, all over everything. You could fucking see he was loving it, every minute of it. Didn’t even scream once.

That much was true. He hadn’t given up a single cry.

As they crammed brutally inside him, one after the other, as he was at first just scraped, and then torn, and then for what seemed like a long time, far too long, searingly raw at each stroke, and then finally just increasingly numb to it all, as they dragged clawed hands through his long dark hair and caught it up in savage fistfuls, as they grunted into their own climaxes and spat on him and whispered excited filth in his ears—through it all he gritted his teeth and ground his tongue against the tiny serrated gaps where they met, he fixed his eyes on the weave of the blanket under his face, and he remembered Jelim, and somehow he kept silent.

“I came to help,” Ging repeated. His voice sounded hollow, used up. Ringil just looked at him.

“Don’t underestimate Kaad,” Gingren rumbled. “That’d be a big mistake. Ringil, he may look like a fop on his father’s sinecure, but he took a silver medal at the Tervinala salons last year. They let imperial bodyguards compete in that one. It means something when you take a medal there.”