Fireborne

by Rosaria Munda

  That is what Julia and I used to be.

  Though I would not be able to articulate the connection, it’s that thought that leads me to the question I ask her next.

  “Do you still draw?”

  When we were younger, Crissa drew all the time. Dragons, people, seascapes of her home in Harbortown. At my question she smiles, a little pained, and shakes her head. Her knee is still against mine.

  “Not since we were made squadron leaders. But I’d draw this if I had the time.”

  The laden oaks, the burbling fountain, the terraced rooftops of the Janiculum leading to the karst of Pytho’s Keep rising magnificent against the cloudless sky.

  Crissa sighs, taking it in. Then she rouses herself, produces a folded paper from her pocket, and holds it out to me. “Have you seen this yet? From Propaganda.”

  The memo notifies us of a schedule of new obligations for Guardians: morale visits, where we make appearances alongside our dragons before the people, delivering motivational speeches and showing proof of our nation’s strength to defy the Pythian threat.

  “I don’t fancy rallying mobs, to be honest,” Crissa mutters.

  I share her hesitation. Amid increased training, ramped-up patrol schedules, and back-to-back rounds sessions with the Ministry of Defense, it’s hard to stomach the idea of wasting time with propaganda. And then there’s the crudity of the campaign itself. By the wings of my dragon I will keep her, let my reason guide her to justice, we swore as children becoming Guardians. They were vows that seemed to encompass something nobler than promoting patriotism from dragonback with a bit of cheap rhetoric.

  But it’s been a long time since we were children, and if this helps allay the people’s fear, I’ve no reason to balk at it. Even if it feels vulgar.

  “We’ve trained for it. We knew this would be a part of our job eventually.”

  The lines in Crissa’s brow remain unsmoothed. “I know.”

  Implicit in the assignment is its secondary purpose: auditioning which Guardians are best received by the people. A question that will be particularly relevant for the riders of the Fourth Order.

  Although the list makes it apparent that the audition has already been under way, not all Guardians have been given an equal number of assignments. Those who routinely do well in oration practice—Cor, Power, Crissa, Rock, and I—have been assigned multiple visits. Those who do poorly have been overlooked.

  Including Annie, who despite being a member of the Fourth Order has not been assigned any visits at all.

  “She’s going to be furious.”

  I realize only after I’ve murmured this that I’ve not used her name. But Crissa doesn’t have to ask whom I mean.

  “Won’t she be relieved? Annie hates public obligations.”

  I remember Annie alone, practicing a raised voice in a Lyceum lecture hall, and shake my head. “I think that was before she made Fourth Order.”

  Crissa takes a last look at the list before rolling it back up. “Good for her.”

  Crissa was no-nonsense about the brief hell she experienced when Atreus first promoted her to squadron leader. Goran’s vitriol, his determination to make her pay for it, slid off her back like water. Or at least it did in public. In private, she hyperventilated. When Cor and I found her doing it, she made us swear not to tell anyone.

  She must know almost exactly what Annie struggles against, within and without.

  “They won’t be able to ignore her forever,” Crissa adds. “Not at this rate.”

  In other words, not if Annie beats Power for finalist. The tournament will take place ten days after Midsummer, when the city has returned from its holiday.

  I hand the paper back to her and our hands snag on it. For an instant longer than necessary, the tips of Crissa’s fingers linger on the back of my hand. Even after she removes her fingers, the memory of the touch—minute, but for its deliberateness it might as well have been words—leaves my skin burning.

  “We should get back,” she says. “Find Cor and do squadron meeting.”

  She pushes hair from her face, and I realize she’s flushed, too.

  Back inside the Cloister, half the Guardians are still in ceremonial uniform from Atreus’s speech. The other half are on their way out to air patrols, or to classes, which have resumed. Cor is in the boys’ dorm with Duck and Annie. The sight of the Sutter brothers together is enough to tell me that something’s wrong: They only confer in crisis. Then, as I take in Cor’s ashen face and the fact that Duck, sitting on his bed beside Annie, is sniffling, my first thought is that someone in their family died. The dormitory is otherwise empty, its long row of beds crisply made, its desks cleared and clean, ready for evening inspection.

  “What happened?”

  Cor looks up at me and then away, as if ashamed to be seen in such a moment. It’s Duck’s voice that bursts out in answer. A letter lies, half crumpled, in his lap.

  “Our sister’s metals test results came back. She got Iron.”

  It’s strange, with my thoughts so often now on the skies and the threat from the North Sea and Julia returned from the dead, to remember that something as banal as the metals test still has the power to upend a life.

  Eyes on the ceiling, Cor adds an explanation. “She’s always had this . . . problem where she switches letters around when she tries to read. Vocabulary like you wouldn’t believe, though. Anyway, she was hoping to get passed as Bronze for an apprenticeship as a baker, so she could work in the family shop, but apparently she . . . wasn’t good enough.”

  He sounds a little light-headed.

  I think of that girl in the Lyceum Club, calling us sirs and miss as she took our orders. The ones from the textile houses, twirling their iron wristbands, not meeting my eyes when I’m on rounds.

  “Does she have a work assignment yet, or—”

  “Fullerton’s.”

  The one we so recently examined, whose workers we were relieved to find had no causes for complaint except for aching feet. But now the memory of that relief makes me feel ashamed. Cor places a hand over his mouth, like he’s catching something. He removes his weight from the desk he’s been leaning on.

  “Excuse me.”

  The door to the dormitory slams after him, and in its echoing wake Duck sags dully against Annie’s arms.

  “I need to go home.”

  “Midsummer is in just a few days,” Annie says.

  “You’re still coming, right?” Duck asks.

  Annie looks up at me, over Duck’s head. She swallows.

  Duck feels the change in her and looks up, too. He sobers instantly.

  “You’re still welcome, Lee. I know you told Annie no, but the offer stands—”

  I cast my mind back, over conversations we might possibly have had in which Annie asked such a thing and I declined. I have to cast back far; it’s been a while since we’ve properly talked. Since before the Pythian sighting. Even since reconciling, words haven’t come easily.

  But then I realize why I’m coming up empty. Annie’s closed eyes are evidence enough.

  I hear myself say, “Thanks, Duck. But I’ll be all right here.”

  Duck looks frustrated, doubtful, but also fundamentally unsurprised; he’s tried before, and my answer has been no. But this is the first time he’s invited us home for Midsummer.

  Annie’s eyes, when they open, are bright, and now she cannot look at me.

  I spend the next two days preparing myself to spend Midsummer without her.

  It’s not that spending it with Annie was ever what either of us would describe as a good time. Unlike the national holidays celebrated in Callipolis, Midsummer and Midwinter center on the family. People go home, wherever home may be; the city—and the Cloister—clears out. The evening is spent at dinner with loved ones, under the summer’s longest sky.

  Except f
or people like Annie and me, who while away the long dusk trying not to think. Not to remember. Not to miss.

  I can’t blame her for wanting to upgrade. I certainly don’t feel justified in resenting her for wanting to do it without me. But that doesn’t make the thought of spending one of the hardest holidays of the year alone easier to contemplate.

  It also doesn’t make it any easier to contemplate Julia’s offer with a clear head.

  Because the fact of the matter is, Annie’s being gone means it would be easy—absurdly easy—to make my way to Cheapside and meet her.

  The morning of Midsummer, I head to the armory to suit up for the skeleton-crew patrol that will run today along the north coast, to find Crissa suiting up as well. Windows have been thrown open to let out the gathering heat, and the lazy trill of cicadas from the courtyard outside is the only sound in the room aside from Crissa’s boots as she stomps her feet into them on the skyfish bench.

  “You’re not going home?” I ask as I take a seat opposite her and reach for my flamesuit.

  Crissa is one of the riders who most vocally misses home—the shore, the docks, the gulls of Harbortown. She always takes leave when it’s offered.

  She shakes her head. Her fingers are twisting her hair, with mesmerizing speed, into a braid. “No one else signed up for this shift. And I wasn’t going to ask Cor to cover it, what with the business with his sister. Perks of being a squadron leader, huh?”

  She tosses the braid behind her shoulder and lets out a self-conscious laugh. I recognize it as a variation of the response I’ve been making about family holidays for years: laughing off homesickness in the hopes it’ll put a stop to the unwanted pity. I change the subject.

  “Good day to fly.”

  And that it is. A brisk summer breeze lifts the dragons’ wings; not a cloud is in sight; and visibility on the North Sea stretches for miles. It’s not the kind of skies that bring ambush. The New Pythians probably want to spend this day with their families, too.

  And Julia wants to spend it with me.

  Surely, whatever side I’ve committed to, whatever regime I’ve chosen—surely I could see her—just this once?

  The thoughts are too volatile; I push them away and let the open sky fill my thoughts. Crissa insists on taking the dragons low, the talons of her skyfish practically tickling the crests of the waves as she laughs in delight. Pallor doesn’t have a skyfish’s love of water, but he enjoys chasing Phaedra all the same, and Crissa’s high spirits have a way of catching. The hours pass quickly; before we know it, the day is done, the sun setting, and we’re able to head home.

  “Hey.”

  We’ve rejoined in the empty solarium after separating to rinse off brine. Crissa, in her ground uniform again, is toweling her glowing hair dry; a lowered sun fills the room with long shadows. I’m suddenly conscious that we’re completely alone and that we’ve both just emerged from the bath. Two facts that should not seem related but suddenly do.

  Crissa takes a seat on the opposite side of the empty room. Instead of diminishing the tension I’m feeling, her distance heightens it. As if now, the tension is a thing acknowledged.

  “So,” she says. “You told Annie you didn’t want to go to Duck’s.”

  “Yeah.” And then, for no good reason at all, I add the truth. “Apparently.”

  I regret saying it at once. But Crissa’s nodding like this is what she expected.

  “Did something . . . happen, between you two?”

  I could say yes, and it would be more than true, but not in the way I know Crissa to be asking.

  “Not like that.”

  It’s only after I say it that the feeling of emptiness hits. Annie’s absence, tonight of all nights. Perhaps Crissa sees something in my face that betrays me, because she doesn’t press the question.

  “With anyone else, then?” Crissa says, releasing her hair from the towel and looking at me from under the wet curls.

  It’s startling to find that this kind of turn in conversation, amid everything else on my mind, still has the power to make my mouth go dry. This isn’t the kind of discussion I’ve ever had in the Cloister; it’s as if in this space, the vows we took as children overshadow any such reference. No children, no family, no marriage. Not explicit on anything else, but that never seemed the point. Ten feet apart, alone, phrasing our meanings obliquely, it feels like Crissa and I are doing something forbidden.

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  To my horror, I feel myself blushing. Crissa, maddeningly, does not. She just smiles.

  “No.” Then I ask, defensive: “What about you?”

  “What about me what?”

  My consternation must be showing because suddenly, Crissa laughs. Like she’s releasing me. And then I’m laughing, too. Sheepishly.

  She asks, “Do you have plans for tonight?”

  A flashing awareness again of this whole wide-empty Cloister, its unchaperoned dorm rooms, and just the two of us. Even Mistress Mortmane has gone home. I take in Crissa’s face, pink from the bath, and her eyes, blue as the Medean, direct as they hold my gaze.

  Mouth shut tightly, I shake my head.

  “I was just asking,” Crissa goes on, watching me steadily, “because I was wondering if you’d fancy coming to a dinner party with me.”

  “Oh.”

  Crissa’s eyes twinkle with a mischief she doesn’t acknowledge as I adjust my expression.

  “My friend’s in her first year at the War College,” she explains. “She’s not going home either, because Harbortown’s too far. Anyway, she and some of the other Silver cadets are putting together a dinner. Might be fun.”

  Annie gone, Julia’s note incinerated, I feel a strange recklessness take hold of me.

  “Sure. I’ll go.”

  * * *

  ***

  The War College is where Callipolis trains its future military officers, and it lies across from the Lyceum, on Scholars Row. I’ve been inside the War College before, but tonight is my first experience of the Silvers’ austere barracks on the edge of the campus. In honor of Midsummer, a fire has been lit on the flagstones for a roast, mismatched chairs and tables have been brought from inside, and an odd assortment of personal dishes and repurposed military gear have been supplied for crockery. The evening shadows are long across the yellowed green as the sun waits out its longest day.

  Crissa and her friend Mara embrace with shrieks of delight, golden hair mixing with black, tan arms enfolding brown. I’m welcomed with enthusiasm by Mara’s classmates, who refill my and Crissa’s goblets often as we prepare dinner, and demand our insights about the situation with New Pythos, though most of the questions are ones neither Crissa nor I have answers to.

  “What did the Pythians look like? Were you able to see their dragons’ call markings?”

  “Do you think their fleet’s sparked?”

  “Is there some way to make our fleet spark?”

  “I’ve got this theory, about where they’d want to strike first—”

  The first-year’s friend elbows him. “Shut up, Lee sur Pallor doesn’t want to hear your theory—”

  When the meal is finally cooked—about two hours later than we were aiming for, and several bottles further along than planned—the conversations are uproariously loud, echoing in the courtyard, under the light of candles that have been added to the tables as the sun set. They have by now moved on to less grim topics. Among them is the upcoming Firstrider Tournaments.

  “Who are you rooting for to win Firstrider, Crissa?”

  There are guffaws around the table as Crissa and I lock eyes. Crissa smiles, seems to greatly enjoy taking her time considering her answer while the cadets snicker and look from her to me. Finally, with the air of making a narrow call, she says: “Oh, probably Lee sur Pallor.”

  The cadets cheer; I’m thu
mped on my back. Crissa is still smiling at me, teasingly; I am returning the smile against my will.

  “Don’t tell Cor.”

  “Why Lee?” someone shouts.

  “Because I think he’d do a fine job leading the fleet. I’d follow him into war.”

  My stomach skips again, though this time it is not just because of Crissa’s smile.

  Because since Julia’s note, even if the vision of making Firstrider is clearer than ever, the thought of war with New Pythos has become something I can barely imagine, let alone imagine leading.

  Three in the morning, Cheapside . . .

  More thumps on my back; a toast goes up to Lee sur Pallor, future fleet commander of Callipolis. Then to the coming war. Then to the summer, to Atreus, to the Revolution, to the Guardians; then to the cadets’ mothers, to the highlands and the lowlands and the vassal archipelagos, which some of them hail from. And then, well into their cups, the cadets start complaining about the Gold students in the Lyceum. The rivalry between the schools runs deep, and the cadets take the time to assure me and Crissa that though our wristbands contain gold, they consider us an exception to their slurs: “You ride dragons. You don’t just sit on your asses reading books all day. Plus, you’re not snobs.”

  Crissa and I raise our goblets. “To not being snobs!”

  The complaints about Golds begin with tall tales of school pranks administered and suffered, but it gradually degenerates into more serious accusations. The first stars are winking into life when Crissa’s friend Mara says:

  “The Lyceans are a bunch of Dragontongue-speaking triarchist traitors.”

  Crissa, who’s been listening to the Gold-bashing with an expression of detached amusement as she gnaws the last bits off a chicken bone, sits up at this with a noise of indignation.

  “Okay, that’s just not true.”

  There are a few wolf whistles around the table, encouraging a confrontation between the girls. Mara folds her arms and tosses her hair. She has the long vowels of Harbortown that Crissa began to clip years ago.