Fireborne

by Rosaria Munda

  “Next we’ll have Lee and Crissa—”

  Crissa lets out a groan and presses her palms to her forehead in a theatrical gesture of dismay, then locks her eyes on mine. Crissa has the kind of face—perpetually sun-flushed, framed by dark gold curls streaked with blond—that, when you stare at it, you end up allowing your gaze to linger on too long. She lifts an eyebrow playfully.

  “Do your worst, Lee.”

  I can feel myself blushing for reasons that have nothing to do with the match. Crissa smirks. Cor rolls his eyes.

  After ours comes the final pairing, the one we all saw coming as soon as Goran paired me and Crissa.

  “Finally, we’ll have Power versus Duck.”

  Power lets out a trilling drumroll, but he’s the only one who looks pleased. Duck has sunk low in his seat; Cor’s face has tightened. Annie’s arm moves ever so slightly, as if squeezing Duck’s hand beneath the table. Duck is one of the only people I have ever seen Annie touch voluntarily, and she does so often. Now, as she takes his hand, he perceptibly swallows.

  According to Cor, they’re not together. But even if they’re not, it’s pretty clear Duck’s smitten. He has been for years and yet still Annie touches him like this, casually, as if they’re still kids—oblivious, as far as I can tell. Annie used to touch me like that, in the orphanage. She stopped when we came here.

  I realize that Duck is staring at me, staring at him. We look away from each other at once.

  “You’ve got a little over an hour till the opening ceremony,” Goran says, “so I’d recommend you get moving. How many of you have family coming today?”

  There’s a show of hands. Pretty much everybody; Annie and I are the predictable exceptions. But then I see Annie’s fingers lifted a bit off the table. She is studying them as if surprised herself.

  That doesn’t make sense. How could Annie have family coming?

  “Save the greetings for the end,” Goran says. “But feel free to take the rest of the day off. Madam Mortmane will be doing sign-outs by the Cloister entrance. Any questions?”

  When there aren’t, he catches my eye. “Lee, Annie, a word.”

  I can’t remember the last time Goran wanted to speak with Annie. We wait, seated, as the others take their leave and Goran assumes a vacant chair at the head of the table. I can almost feel the tension riddling Annie’s body at his proximity. Although years have passed since he’s outright bullied her—the extra chores, the arbitrarily low marks, the ridicule on the Eyrie—Goran has never stopped treating Annie’s presence on the corps as particularly offensive, as if her status as a former serf, compounded with her gender, were one too many of Atreus’s innovations to be tolerated in one person.

  “I’ve got notes from the ministry, one for each of you.”

  He hands me mine, then Annie hers. As usual, he avoids looking at her, like she’s a perversion to keep in his peripheral vision.

  My note is stamped with the seal of Atreus Athanatos, the First Protector.

  “Read them later,” Goran says. “You’re dismissed.”

  We stop together in the corridor outside to tear open our notes. Atreus has handwritten a single phrase. I read it, and for the first time today, the acid jolt of nerves hits my stomach.

  Good luck, Lee.

  I look up. Annie is still reading, frozen. Then her shoulders go up, and she tears her eyes away from her note.

  “We should get to the armory,” she says.

  By the time we arrive, the rest of the corps are getting ready to head underground to the dragon nests. Annie and I make our way to the aurelian squad’s cubbies amid riders shrugging on flamesuits, hooking on their last few plates of armor, and slinging tack over their shoulders to carry down to the caves. The room smells of leather, sweat, and ash: the smells of dragonriding.

  I feel something pressed into my hand; Annie has passed me her note and turned away. Inviting me to read it but unwilling to watch as I do.

  Our cubbies are side by side; in recent years I’ve trained myself to stare at anything, anything in the world, other than Annie when she’s changing uniforms. Today, I stare at her note. Her message bears the seal of the Ministry of Propaganda, not the First Protector. It says:

  THE MINISTRY WOULD LIKE TO REMIND ANTIGONE SUR AELA OF THE INTENSELY PUBLIC NATURE OF THE OBLIGATIONS OF RIDERS OF THE FOURTH ORDER, AND TO URGE HER TO CONSIDER CAREFULLY WHETHER SHE BELIEVES HER VOWS TO SERVE THE STATE WOULD BE BEST HONORED BY PURSUING SUCH A PUBLIC ROLE.

  They want her to throw the match.

  Beside me, Annie has finished putting on her flamesuit. Black leather, treated for heat and fire, hugs her slender frame from neckline to ankles, her braided hair a burst of red above the suit’s dark silhouette. She makes no attempt to discuss the note, not while others are still around us, and so we finish arming in silence, strapping plates of armor, forged out of repurposed dragons’ scales, over our flamesuits, and tightening them one by one. After the last riders have headed out and we’re alone in the armory, Annie takes back her note.

  “What did yours say?” she asks.

  Atreus’s note is the last thing I want to show her. I hesitate.

  “Please,” she says quietly.

  Without waiting for my answer, she takes my note from the cubby. After reading it, she sinks down onto the bench beside me.

  “Congratulations,” she says.

  She doesn’t sound bitter, or even jealous—just tired.

  “You’re the peasant they want,” she adds.

  Peasant was one of the words banned after the Revolution, except in historical context. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Annie say it. Not in reference to herself.

  Nor in reference to me, though it’s been my official identity for as long as she’s known me. It is an omission on her part that I’ve been conscious of since the orphanage, when I was less skilled at hiding where I came from, and that she’s only ever since acknowledged with certain silences.

  I speak through a rising discomfort. “That’s not how—Atreus would never think of it like that—”

  Annie’s head is tilted back as she studies the ceiling. “Atreus would. He needs riders in the Fourth Order who pass muster with the elites.”

  The Fourth Order will be the rank given to the four riders who win today, signaling that of the thirty-two riders in the corps, they are the four most skilled. It’s the highest ranking in the fleet below Firstrider.

  “You’re talking about—”

  “I’m talking about succession.”

  I freeze on the word; Annie sounds short of breath to utter it aloud.

  Before he ends his stewardship of the new regime, Atreus’s successor will be chosen from among the best and the brightest of the Guardians. The next Protector. All but officially, that selection pool will be made up of the Fourth Order.

  “He’s thinking about succession,” Annie repeats, “and he needs peasants who don’t still—act like it.”

  I speak through gritted teeth as I yank the straps of an arm guard tighter on my forearm. “You don’t act like it.”

  Annie lets out a faint laugh. We both know I’m lying. I can guess as well as she what the ministry probably has on file: that Annie is known for being too deferential, too reserved, for having trouble with situations that require public speaking. She’s been at the top of the class for as long as I can remember but almost never raises her hand.

  She could train past that. She could find the confidence if she tried and had the resources. But how is she supposed to look for that, to think she even should look for that, if the ministry sends her letters like this?

  Something else, then. Something that has nothing to do with the ministry.

  “You said you had family coming today?”

  I ask the question gingerly, unsure whether I should ask it at all. Annie blinks, then shakes her hea
d. “Not family. Friends . . . from my village.”

  My village are two more words Annie usually avoids saying. She enunciates them carefully, as if they’re foreign.

  “They wrote,” she goes on. “A letter. Not from the parents—they don’t read.” I risk a quick glance at her; her face begins to redden at read. “But their son’s been in school since the Revolution, so he wrote. That they’d be coming. They were the family who I was with for a bit before Albans.”

  Albans was our orphanage. She hasn’t mentioned her circumstances before it, at least in front of me, in years.

  She fiddles with her hair, pushing a few strands out of her eyes and behind her ear. “I haven’t seen them since—” She looks up and I realize I’m staring at her; I look away and she does, too, seizing her boots, jamming one foot after another into them.

  “I bet your making Fourth Order would mean a lot to them,” I tell her. “It would probably mean a lot to anyone coming in from the countryside to watch the tournament. You’d be—”

  Still bent over her boots, Annie prompts me softly.

  “I’d be what?”

  I hear myself say it. Words that would have shamed my father to hear said by anyone, let alone by me.

  “You’d be making history.”

  Annie has reached for her helmet, the other gloved hand braced on her knees, about to push to her feet. There’s a strange curve to her smile, a lift to her eyebrows, as she looks at me. When she speaks, she doesn’t counter that I would, according to the lowborn identity I’ve assumed, be making history, too.

  As if she knows I’m not. As if she knows that I am simply hoping, desperately, hungrily, to repeat it.

  “Let’s go, Lee.”

  2

  THE FOURTH ORDER

  Before he met the girl, the boy in the orphanage moved like a sleepwalker. Tasteless meals, hard beds on cold nights, the bullying and the beatings—he passed through all of it unseeing. Let them bully him. Let them beat him. They were nothing. Their language was the one he had listened to as he watched his family die.

  Instead of listening, he remembered. He remembered his family around him, his sisters’ laughter, his brother’s teasing, his mother’s voice. A world of light and warmth, great fireplaces tended by servants, ornate glass windows overlooking the Firemouth, chandeliers hanging low over tables piled high with food. He remembered the sight of his father at court, resplendent as he received his subjects. He remembered lifting aloft, the city falling below, his father’s arm steadying him as the wings of his stormscourge beat the air. Her name was Aletheia, and sometimes, his father allowed him to bring her scraps from the table.

  “One day,” his father told him, his arm around him as the highlands of Callipolis stretched below Aletheia’s wings, “this will be yours, if a dragon Chooses you. You will learn to rule, just as I did.”

  “Did your father teach you?”

  “What he could. But much of it came naturally to me, Leo. Just as it will for you. We were born to rule, just as the peasants were born to serve.”

  He found that he could live in these memories for hours. And when they ran out, he invented futures: a dragon he would be Chosen by, dragonfire he would have power over, the people who had taken everything from him helpless and awaiting punishment. He imagined making them pay.

  When he did this, it kept the real world, and the other memories, out. Nothing hurt so much as being forced back to the present.

  That was what happened when he met the girl.

  He could see through the doorway that it was one child against two larger ones. The girl struggled. It was all familiar.

  But then, for the first time since he’d come to the orphanage, he found himself walking toward the violence rather than away from it.

  He pulled a kitchen knife out of his pocket as he approached. The words in the other language came slowly, but they were there. “Go away.”

  At the sight of his knife, they fled.

  As he knelt beside the girl, he realized he recognized her: She shared courses with him at school, despite the fact that she was at least a year younger than him and his classmates. She had scrawny limbs, scraggly red-brown hair, and clothes that were well-worn even by orphanage standards. He was struck, as he looked at her, by how small she seemed.

  It was the first time he had ever found himself thinking this about someone else: In his family, he had been the smallest.

  “You shouldn’t have fought them,” he said. “They only make it harder for you when you fight them. They only hurt you more—”

  He stopped himself.

  The girl shrugged and looked up at him, her face wet with tears, and he saw a bitter ferocity and determination there that he recognized.

  “Sometimes I can’t not fight,” she said.

  ANNIE

  No amount of practice prepares you for the sight of the arena’s stands completely full, banners flapping in the wind, trumpets sounding the Anthem of the Revolution as the drums keep time. Aela and I delight together in the searing blue horizon, the sharp late-spring breeze, the city cheering below us as we perform the opening ceremony. Moments like this, it hits me like it did the first time: that the life I have begun to think of as routine is, in fact, extraordinary. Today, in the stands below, the people are watching commoners like themselves ride dragons. It’s the kind of thing that can’t help making you feel proud of your country.

  Even if it turns out that your country is not so proud of you.

  But as that thought threatens to overwhelm, I feel Aela’s body, warm through the saddle, her presence soft at the back of my mind. Hold. Be still. Not now. For as long as I can remember, Aela has been able to temper the feelings I couldn’t. Even in the very beginning, when I was still a child with lingering nightmares of dragonfire. With Aela, they fell away. A dragon’s comfort for a dragon’s crimes. What would people from my village think? What would my parents have thought, my brothers and sisters? Questions I’ve never had answered, but when I’m with Aela, they don’t matter anymore.

  Together with Lee sur Pallor, we lead the aurelian squadron over the heads of the audience while the shimmering skyfish dart back and forth across the arena above us. As we practiced this morning, Cor keeps the stormscourge squadron high, their ash safely out of range of citizens in the stands below.

  Atreus begins his speech after we’ve landed and dismissed our dragons. Even at a distance from the Palace Box, it’s impossible to miss Atreus’s presence, his close-cut steel-gray hair, his confident pose that more than makes up for his simple, muted garb. The only thing lost is the way his gaze makes you feel powerful. Important. Needed. When we first met him, as children freshly Chosen by the new regime’s hatchling dragons, a shiver went down my spine when he said my name. Bound for the first time to Aela’s, in drakonym, like a dragonlord’s. Antigone sur Aela, make your vows.

  What would it have been like, I can’t help wondering, to receive a note of good luck from him this morning, instead of one of caution from the Ministry of Propaganda? What did Lee feel as he read those words? And is that why, standing beside me, he is able to look so unabashedly confident as he regards the waiting crowd—

  But confidence has never been something Lee’s been short on, notes from Atreus or no. That’s been apparent from the beginning.

  A lot of things have been apparent from the beginning, with Lee.

  “Men and women of Callipolis,” Atreus proclaims, “welcome to the quarterfinal Firstrider Tournament. Ten years ago, you made a historic choice. You chose to test everyone equally, to choose the best among you to become dragonriders, and to train them to lead. To bring Callipolis into a new era of greatness, of air power in the service of what is right. Of virtuous leaders and just rule. For the years between the old way of dragons and the new, you have allowed me to be your steward. Now I ask you to look to your future. To your Guardians. Four of w
hom today will become semifinalists for Firstrider, and members of the Fourth Order.

  “In a few years I will say: May the most virtuous Guardian rule. But today, I say: May the best riders win.”

  The cheering goes up, resounding. It sets my blood on fire.

  I take a seat on the stone bleachers beside Duck to watch the first match: his brother, Cor, against Rock, who rides a stormscourge like Cor, and comes from a highland serf family, like me. Rock has stubbly gray-blond hair, fair skin, and a hulking frame that earned him his nickname years ago. When the announcer uses his real name, riders on the Eyrie act surprised.

  “Good luck, Richard!” they call.

  Rock takes the ribbing in good cheer, exchanging a last few shoulder pumps with Lotus and Darius before heading down the stone ramp to the cave mouth alongside Cor.

  For the first time since our conversation, the cool reassurance of Lee’s voice saying what I already knew wavers. Lee was right—I’d be making history if I made it into the Fourth Order today. But so would Rock. And who doesn’t like Rock? Boisterous, steadfast, confident? The kind of peasant even the patrician kids like . . .

  It’s not like my note said anything that isn’t true. It’s not as though I’d like public roles. Or want that much attention. I like winning, and I’m good at it, but there’s more to this than winning a match. Making the Fourth Order would put me on display. I’d hate that. I’d be bad at it. Right?

  But—

  Beside me, Duck’s leg hammers the bleacher, expelling nerves for his brother. Cor and Rock, down at the cave mouth, are blowing into the summoning whistles built into their wristbands, filling the cave with a sound that human ears cannot hear but their dragons have been trained to recognize. It is said that in the early days of dragonriding, riders could summon their dragons mind to mind—but that hasn’t been done in centuries.

  Their dragons emerge; Cor and Rock mount and take off. They stall above the arena at ten meters apart, level with the wall of the Outer Palace, the Inner Palace rising still higher, and the karst supporting Pytho’s Keep towering over them. The bell rings, Cor advances, Rock swerves, and the realization hits me.