The poet, found alive — starved and scarred, he and Quinn held besieged House Mars together through winter, faithful that Darrow would return.
Roque is alive. Feared dead since Antonia's betrayal, the gentle poet in fact endured the whole long siege of House Mars, and with Quinn held the ragged, starving House together through winter — telling the defenders again and again that Darrow would return. When the Reaper descends from the sky and breaks the siege, a thin, skeletal boy Darrow barely recognizes delivers the Mars standard and seizes him in a bone-hard embrace, sobbing "My brother, my brother." Scarred in face and reduced nearly to a wet rag over Darrow's armor, he has stories of where he was and how he survived that he keeps for later, limping away on the arm of the one-eared Quinn — who has left Cassius for him.
His faith kept a hollow House from collapse.
A slender young Gold now skeletal and starved, bones sharp through his clothes, hair thin, face freshly scarred; limping and frail after a winter of siege.
House Mars's poet, survivor of the siege who kept the House alive awaiting Darrow.