Fireborne

by Rosaria Munda

  I see all of this in the half instant before Eater slams into us from behind.

  Aela shrieks and twists while Eater’s talons sink into the pauldron protecting my shoulder, puncturing the armor and flamesuit, sinking into my skin. The talons of his other forearm are sinking into Aela’s back. She screams and I feel it, her pain bursting in a haze through my own. And then I feel her fury.

  Fine. You want to play dirty? We’ll play dirty.

  I reach with burn-clumsy fingers for my bootknife and slash, over and over, against the inside of Eater’s forearms, and he shrieks and pulls his talons out of us.

  Aela twists us round and then, though she’s gained the leverage to break free of Eater, she doesn’t. She claws her way up his torso, scrabbling with him arm and leg. Both dragons’ wings are beating madly, keeping us aloft and stalling, blocking each rider’s sight of the other as they lock in their embrace.

  Then Aela sinks her talons into the membrane of Eater’s inner wing. He shrieks, Power cries out, and Eater curls the wing into his side—and then, finally, as we begin to free-fall with only three wings holding two dragons aloft, Eater’s folded wing gives us an opening straight onto Power’s crouched form.

  Aela fires, full heat. Power disappears in the smoke. Then she kicks off from Eater and Power with a shriek of disgust.

  The smoke clears. Power’s armor is blackened; he sits dazed, lost in the shock of a full-heat blast. Numbly, automatically, he begins to open his torso coolant shafts.

  “Do you yield?”

  We’re poised, at firing distance, to hit him again, and Eater’s still empty. Power’s voice comes out in a low gasp.

  “Yeah.”

  “Helmet,” I demand.

  Proof and guarantee of a match won, in the absence of a referee.

  Power lets out a hoarse laugh but doesn’t question my precaution. With shaking hands, he lifts his helmet from his head. His hair is glistening with sweat, his face scudded with tracks of ash. For one inscrutable moment, he stares at me, eyes so dilated from spillover that they look black. Then he tosses his soot-covered helmet through the open air.

  I catch it.

  We descend together through the stratus. When we burst back into sight of the arena, there’s an explosion of noise. It takes me a moment to realize: It is cheering, and it’s for me.

  Like someone else has possessed my body, I lift Power’s helmet above my head and shake it for the world to see.

  There’s a confusion of shouting once we land on the Eyrie. Duck is jumping up and down, Crissa is screaming in delight, and Lee is there, helping me cut my boots free of their straps, guiding me off the saddle, and taking stock of my injuries with careful fingers. I can no longer move my fingers or my left leg, and my shoulder, which is dripping blood, is stiff with pain. I can still feel Aela’s pulsing heartbeat and searing wound like my own. Lee’s arm grips me below the shoulder, steadying me.

  “Annie, are you all right?” Goran’s voice seems to come from a great distance. He sounds concerned. It’s so surprising that I laugh out loud. Power is nowhere to be seen, so it’s into Goran’s hands that I push Power’s helmet.

  “I’m great.”

  Lee’s grip on my arm tightens as he turns me toward him. “Annie, we’ve got to do the concluding ceremony. Can you make it through?”

  The concluding ceremony.

  For the finalists.

  “You and me,” I realize.

  Lee is holding me upright, one arm around me, the other steadying me, his face just inches from mine. His gray eyes are piercing and proud and just a little pained. The sweat and ash have dried in tracks down his face.

  “You and me,” he repeats quietly.

  All of a sudden, I feel like crying.

  I waver again. The coolant is definitely wearing off, as is the adrenaline. The Eyrie is starting to fade in and out.

  “Can she fly up?” Goran asks.

  “Not with Aela being tended. I’ll walk her, that’ll be easier . . .”

  Lee’s arm against my back, firm and purposeful. Down to the arena stands, then up the stairs to the Palace Box. People are cheering, screaming when they see us, but the sound feels muffled.

  “I could have killed you when you went into the stratus after him,” Lee says as we mount the stairs, admiration battling with exasperation in his voice. “That sneak, pulling a contact charge . . .”

  When we reach the Palace Box, he releases my side so none of the waiting ministers can see that he’d been supporting me. The last time I stood in this place, I was numb with terror; today, I have no thoughts for that. Let the ministry think what it thinks; let Propaganda write me another memo. I’ve done it. I’ve beaten Power. For the moment, I have to focus all my attention on walking. One step after another, with Lee beside me, down the aisle to where the First Protector stands, smiling.

  “My two finalists,” he says, with warmth in his voice. It does not seem to be a scripted line.

  There are more ceremonial words, then the weight of the laurel placed over my head. And then Aela’s presence, close, as I slip a laurel down her long neck and she rumbles with pride.

  “A week before Palace Day, we will gather for our last, and most important, tournament,” Atreus tells the audience. “One of these finalists will become Alternus, lieutenant and defender of the people, and one will become Firstrider, their champion.

  “Lee and Antigone, we wish you luck in your final months of training.”

  * * *

  ***

  Later that evening I lie half awake in the darkened Palace infirmary. Master Welse has already headed home for the night; the infirmary is deserted when the door to my ward creaks open. Hushed voices, giggling, a few silhouetted heads peering in. Crissa’s voice comes out low and playful.

  “Aaaannie . . .”

  I sit up from my pillows, my burns twinging. “What are you doing?”

  Crissa flings open the door, and light from the corridor spills in. Behind her stand the other girls: Deirdre and Alexa, inseparable for as long as we’ve been in the program, and also Orla, who usually avoids group activities in favor of her books. Her presence particularly signifies that something unusual is afoot.

  “We’re here to take you to your party,” Crissa announces.

  I’m so startled that my first thought is why she isn’t at Lee’s party. She is, after all, his friend. “What about Lee?”

  “The aurelian squadron’s taking care of him. We’re taking care of you.”

  We, the female Guardians. A few of the boys, too, behind them, though I can’t make out their faces. My heart constricts, touched and surprised that they’re here at all. I hadn’t thought of celebrations, and if I had, I’d have assumed they’d be for Lee. But then I remember my burns.

  “I can’t really . . .”

  Walk. For a day at least. Physician’s orders.

  “Not a problem,” Crissa says, unperturbed. And then, with the air of summoning a dragon, she bellows: “Richard!”

  A tall, sturdy figure makes his way through the girls and crouches by my bed. Rock. And then he deploys the brogue he usually pretends not to have. The brogue of home.

  “Up you get, finalist.”

  I burst out laughing. “You can’t be serious—”

  But they are serious indeed. Deirdre and Alexa hoist me onto Rock’s shoulders, and Crissa hurls what looks like a blanket over my back, but it turns out to be a Callipolan flag, its wingspread dragon breathing four circlets of fire against red. Orla seizes the laurel lying on the bedside table and reaches up on tiptoe to mash it on my head. Duck, standing in the doorway, holds one of Goran’s training horns to his lips and blows. The silence of the infirmary breaks like an explosion.

  “To the Pickled Boar!”

  The Pickled Boar is a tavern on the other side of the river in Highmarket,
popular among the lowborn Guardians. I’ve never been before.

  Duck’s shout is taken up by the other girls, and I’m marched out of the infirmary. The passage through the Palace gardens, across the river, and into Highmarket passes in a blur: the moonlit gardens crossed with loping speed that I mark from Rock’s great height as I cling to the Callipolan flag around my shoulders; the silhouettes of Deirdre and Alexa and Orla streaking around us, shrieking and screaming and giggling in the darkness as Crissa cries onward! like she’s leading a charge, and Duck blowing the horn like he’s determined to destroy the Palace’s usual peaceful silence.

  Highmarket is awash with noise: We’re not the only ones who took the tournament as an excuse to celebrate, and it seems that in the wake of the threat from New Pythos it has a lot of steam to blow off. Callipolan flags everywhere, horns everywhere, being sold by enterprising street merchants and blown from the streets and the balconies, amid a cacophony of shrieking and choruses of drunken singing and even the occasional low throb of a street drum. Ale sloshes in toasts and forms sticky puddles on the cobblestones; sheets have been painted with messages and hung from second-story windows: LOWBORN TAKES THE LAUREL; LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION; DOWN WITH NEW PYTHOS.

  At the door of the Pickled Boar, when Crissa helps me to the ground, I protest the flaw I’ve just realized in her plan.

  “Crissa, we’ve all sworn vows of poverty, how’re we supposed to buy ourselves drinks—”

  Crissa and Rock let out thunderous laughs.

  “Trust me,” Crissa says, throwing her arm around my flag-draped shoulders and not noticing as I wince, “you’re not going to have to buy yourself a drink tonight.”

  And then she ushers me into the tavern. Candles and sconces light a room full of laughter, faces painted with the Callipolan colors, a group of musicians in the corner hammering on drums and plucking at fiddles that send not so much music as rhythm into my blood. As soon as we’re inside, Crissa leaps onto the closest empty chair and summons up the voice she usually reserves for commanding her squadron from dragonback, spreading an arm wide in my direction.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of Callipolis, I give you your highland finalist!”

  Amid roars of applause that deafen, Rock seizes my fist and thrusts it into the air. And then I am surrounded, my shoulders—still tender with burns and a talon’s piercing—thumped by complete strangers. It hurts, but even so I’m beaming.

  “Whiskey for the highlander!”

  I’m passed a drink whose fumes alone makes my eyes water, and as I set my lips to it, I begin to splutter. But the bristle-bearded man who’s handed it to me only cheers the more, those around us laughing with delight as they applaud.

  “Antigone sur Aela’s first whiskey!”

  “Drink up, lassie! Drink to the Revolution!”

  “Another!”

  And then the musicians begin playing the Anthem of the Revolution, and it’s hard to say whether the strength of the whiskey or the shivers of the melody down my spine makes my eyes fill, and I raise my glass and sing with the rest the song of my country.

  We rise, we rise, for the glory of Callipolis . . .

  7

  MORALE VISITS

  LEE

  The first class with Tyndale after the tournament, I find a note tucked into the homework he returns to me.

  Cousin—

  I gave him two letters; this is the one for if you made it.

  Do you remember how the dreams of glory sang in our blood as we were children, when we pretended to wage war? They were the dreams that I remembered when I made Firstrider of New Pythos.

  We have so many things to discuss, you and I. But before we do, I want you to know this: that I, your cousin, your blood, hope you make Firstrider as much as I hoped I would myself. Perhaps it’s madness to wish such a thing, with the future looming over us as it does. But the truth is that however it ends, I want you to taste it. My kin, my first friend—I want you to know what it’s like to feel the might of the world at your feet. Not in pretend: in earnest.

  And then I hope you let yourself imagine how it could go from there. You and I, retaking what’s ours. Making those bastards pay for what they’ve done. Setting things right.

  Our fathers may be dead, but their blood runs in our veins. We were born to this.

  Give me the time and place for ]our next meeting.

  The day I receive Julia’s letter, the Firstrider Tournament is a month away, set for a week before the Palace Day anniversary and two weeks after the Lycean Ball. I reread it even as I appreciate it for what it is: a temptation. Julia’s words awaken the old hunger and trace it to its starting point. To wanting Firstrider, for as long as I can remember, as any dragonlord’s son would, as my birthright. It’s easy to slip into such thinking.

  It’s easy to yearn after thoughts of revenge.

  We were born to this.

  I can’t think of any answer that wouldn’t be a lie in its denial, so I don’t acknowledge the temptation at all. I propose a meeting at Wayfarer’s Arch, a dragon perch built on an island arch that’s midway between the karst pillars of New Pythos and the Callipolan northern shore. Midnight, on the next full moon, a week before the Lycean Ball.

  I tell myself that I do it in Callipolis’s name, even if it’s without Callipolis’s knowledge. I tell myself that the more information I can gather about the Pythian fleet, the better.

  And I tell myself that I will make Firstrider with a different set of principles.

  ANNIE

  The burns from the semifinal tournament have begun to itch, and the dressings still require changing and ointment several times a day. On the first patrol I run with Power after the tournament, I expect him to be taciturn and possibly even in the mood for retribution. I have my pike—sharpened for real combat rather than the blunt kind we train with—gripped loose and ready under my arm, Power sur Eater on the outside of it. But as we leave the city behind and steer the dragons toward the northern coast, Power reins Eater to chatting distance and pulls his helmet off his head.

  “So what’s your plan?” he calls.

  I raise my visor, too.

  “What?”

  The fields of the lowland plains roll out below us, emerald green from summer crops freshly burst from the earth; here and there, the spires of dragon perches, mounted with bells and unlit beacons, tower over toy-size villages.

  “For beating Lee. In the final tournament. I could be your training partner.”

  I laugh aloud. The last time we were in the air together, Eater’s talons pierced my shoulder and Aela’s side in an illegal charge that we’re still recovering from. The burns that they gave me itch badly enough that sitting still—in class, in the saddle—takes concentration.

  “You think I’d train with you?”

  Power slings his reins into one hand, twists a shoulder back to face me, and cocks an eyebrow. “I think you’d better. If you want to beat him. I could teach you spillovers; you’d be suited to them. We can start after the Lycean Ball. Our schedules will be clearer then.”

  For graduating Gold students, the Lycean Ball marks their transition to contributing members of the elite; for the Guardians this year, it will serve as our debut to Gold society. Between now and then, many professors have been setting end-of-year assignments and final exams that the Guardians—expanded military and public obligations notwithstanding—are still expected to complete.

  “You’re going to have to train for this tournament . . . He’s pretty good,” Power adds. An understatement, but the closest thing to a compliment he’s ever said about Lee. “You should have some sort of plan.”

  Some sort of plan.

  The problem is, I don’t. Making finalist and finding myself opposite Lee was like breaking the gray-white nothingness of stratus clouds and bursting into the sunlight above them: blinding. And I’m still daze
d by it.

  It’s strange how you can fight your way to a door, even through it, without thinking about what lies on the other side.

  Fourth Order, finalist—titles I’ve clawed my way into and have found, upon seizing them, that I like how they settle. But Firstrider? Commander of the Callipolan Aerial Fleet?

  Firstrider and Fleet Commander instead of Lee?

  “You must really want Lee to lose,” I observe.

  The North Sea approaches, a gray swath on the horizon, punctuated by cliffs. But Power is watching me, not the ground below, and flashes a sudden grin. “Maybe I want you to win. Because I think you’d do a better job than that self-satisfied ass. Because I think you’ve got the head and the guts for it and that you’d do a good job, period. That too hard to imagine, Annie? That somebody wants you to win?”

  Even though he seems to intend it as a compliment, in tone it feels more like an insult. When he realizes I’m not going to answer, he keeps going. The disgust in his voice is apparent even when he’s lifting it over the wind.

  “You probably don’t even want you to win. You’d rather be his Alterna than go for commandership—”

  “You don’t know anything about me, Power.”

  “Yeah? I know what they say about you.”

  “About me?”

  “They say serfs are always happiest when they have a lord.”

  I haul Aela to a halt midair so hard that I rock forward in the saddle and she hawks against the bit. Power has to circle round to face us. The northern coastline, Fort Aron and its harbor, stretch below, and the rising cliffs of the highlands spread west, green grass and violet heather both bleached silver under the cumulus-laden sky.