Fireborne

by Rosaria Munda

  I watch them, and remember Lee’s face at our first sighting of the Pythian fleet.

  And now that boy, whose face I’ve seen fill with longing at the sight of our enemy, has ordered me to wait behind while he goes out to face them.

  He’s right. We probably will be too late. And it would have gutted me to see it.

  But that doesn’t undo the absurdity of the fact that, under threat by dragonfire from people whom Lee counts as family, he just questioned my fitness to face them.

  How often have I longed for this boy’s comfort? How often have I remembered and missed how much easier it was, in Albans, when I could still seek it from him?

  But now I know what that feels like, delivered unsolicited and unneeded.

  Because it’s one thing to be written off by Goran, by the Minister of Propaganda, by every single teacher I’ve ever had or ministry official I’ve ever done rounds with.

  It’s another thing entirely to be written off by Lee.

  And there’s more to it than just my injured pride.

  Will Lee’s determination to keep faith with Callipolis hold, if they aren’t too late and he does face family? And if it doesn’t hold, who will be able to stop him if I’m not there to do it? Who else in the corps has even a hope of matching Lee, if it comes down to that?

  I should be out there.

  On one side, Power waits quietly beside me, and I sense his anticipation for me to break the silence. On my other side, Aela, her presence like a fire in the back of my mind. When I reach my arm out and lay it on her wing joint, she turns to look at me. Her horned face fills my vision, blocking out the ramparts and the city below and the pink horizon. And as I stare into her golden eyes, the memory rises, like a vision: my father, his voice flowing in my memory from another lifetime, gruff with an accent that my own voice lost long ago.

  You see, Annie, they watch us kneel, they see the back of our heads, and they think we’ve given in. They don’t realize you can think from your knees just as well as from your feet.

  A calloused hand, large enough to cup my face, tilts my chin up to look at him as he crouches to my height. The lined eyes, the conspiring smile, of a man I once believed would always be there to protect me.

  And then the vision fades, and I finally understand.

  My father taught me the form of courage that he needed. The courage of thinking from your knees. That was what we had.

  But today, as I stood in front of Lee sur Pallor, I realized I’m done with my father’s kind of courage. I felt how those words tasted, yes, sir to a dragonlord’s son, sour and familiar, like old milk turned. And I realized that if I don’t like how those words taste, it’s up to me to do something about it.

  I’m done thinking from my knees. It’s time to think from my feet.

  All the while Power stands beside me, silent. Waiting. The dawn light renders him little more than an armored silhouette at Eater’s side. A distant part of myself is angry with him. Furious. But the rest of me recognizes that, right now, how I feel about Power is irrelevant.

  “When are you free to train?”

  Power doesn’t express surprise or triumph or make any remark at all. “Tomorrow. Before patrols. I’ve got a free block.”

  “Good. We’ll start then.”

  LEE

  The coastline has appeared, blue-gray in the early morning. For a heart-stopping instant I think the trail of beacons leads to Fort Aron and its town off Aron’s Cove, one of the few population centers along the northern coast. But then I realize the beacons continue past it. A mile from the fort off the coast, a single island is ablaze. It fills the cove with the light of its fire.

  And then nothing: gray sea to the horizon; no signs of hostile dragons, nor the streaks of fire that would show our skyfish locked in sparring matches with sparked dragonfire.

  They lit the island and left.

  And some part of me, some awful, cowardly part of me, is relieved.

  As we approach, I smell it. Sulfurous and heady. A scent I haven’t smelled in years: dragonfire.

  I kick Pallor down into a dive, leading the aurelian and stormscourge squadrons into descent. Winged black silhouettes are dipping in and out of the blaze, the skyfish already on the site; the island is tiny, sparsely populated, and the entirety of its few shacks are on fire. A fleet of rescue boats, a combination of civilian vessels and naval ships from Fort Aron, have congregated at a safe distance off the shore, and Crissa’s skyfish dart back and forth from them to the burning island, ferrying whomever they’ve been able to find to safety.

  I slice my boot straps to leap off as we descend. On the ground, flames are still licking the buildings around us, wood snapping and cracking, and other Guardians are calling frantically as they search. Even protected by a flamesuit and the filter of my visor, the heat makes me light-headed, and once I begin coughing, I can’t stop.

  “Lee—here—”

  Lotus and Duck are struggling to lift fallen beams, still partially afire, from the entryway of a burning building. As we clear it, a crash comes within: a floor falling through. Duck raises his arm over his visored face, preparing to go in, when I seize him.

  “It’s not sound. No.”

  “There are people in there, Lee—we can hear them—”

  He’s straining against me as, with another crash, the roof collapses in flames. I have to haul him backward.

  “It’s too late, Duck.”

  ANNIE

  The sun rises as I look out over the city, simmering with the feeling of my own powerlessness. Surely there is no hell like this waiting. This wondering.

  What are they facing? And who will return?

  The sun is high in the sky by the time the fleet reappears on the horizon. In the interim, my imagination has had time to work, and so when we see them, my relief spirals into unexpected exhaustion. They’re all right. They’re safe.

  I assign a lingering guard on the Keep and the rest of us descend. Once back in the caves, my feet take me, not up to the armory, but down the cave corridor. I find Duck in the skyfish nests, where he’s unsaddling Certa with shaking fingers, his pupils still dilated from spillover. He’s blackened from soot and reeks of sparked dragonfire. The smell is enough to awaken memories that bring bile to my mouth.

  “Annie . . .”

  “Are you hurt?”

  It’s difficult to believe that, mere hours ago, we were laughing together as we tried to dance, or that for a few heartbeats I looked up at him and feared that I was about to lose him over something as trivial as a kiss.

  Duck shakes his head.

  “Lee and some of the others are still there,” he manages, as if forming the words costs him. “Collecting accounts from . . . survivors—”

  And then his face, soot-blackened, crumples.

  And that’s enough for me to know what happened. They saw no combat; Lee faced no one. But what they did see was almost certainly worse.

  I’m not surprised by the memories that rise with my understanding; but I am surprised by the calmness that settles over me as they do. The sudden, rooted sense of place. This is familiar. This I know. These are the paths I’ve wandered, in and out of sleep, for a lifetime.

  LEE

  The island, called Starved Rock, is one of the handful of vassal islands on the northern coast of Callipolis, named for its barren landscape and a legendary tragedy that took place on it during the Aurelian invasion. Because of its sparse population, it wasn’t provided with additional fortification in the last month; it was assumed to be too close to the greater target of Fort Aron to be endangered.

  In the end, the casualty count is low. Seven, out of a total population of twenty-six. The accounts confirm two stormscourge dragons and one skyfish, who departed after setting fire to the buildings, rather than remaining to finish the job. Those who woke in time to escape the fires wer
e not pursued.

  Except for one, who finds me on the galley where survivors are being counted and their burns tended. The day has dawned gray and clouded, the deck of the ship rocks gently on the swells.

  “Are you Lee sur Pallor?”

  The boy, fair-haired beneath soot, has a blanket around his shoulders and a mug of tea he doesn’t drink between still-shaking hands. He’s risen from where he was sitting on the deck with his parents and sister.

  “Yes.”

  “I was given a message from—Julia Stormscourge.”

  The deck is already quiet, despite the number of people on it; but at his words, it falls completely silent. The lapping of waves and the gulls overhead are all we can hear. The sound of Julia’s name on this stranger’s tongue fills me with numb dread.

  “For—me?”

  The boy nods.

  “For the Firstrider,” he says. “For the Firstrider and the First Protector.”

  The boy’s voice is too strained for me to think of contradicting him. Beneath so much soot, his expression is indiscernible, although it makes his eyes appear white-rimmed. Crissa and Lotus, crouched nearby to go over accounts from other survivors, have risen to their feet. Crissa has lifted her hand to cover her mouth.

  “She landed, spoke to me, made me memorize it, before . . .”

  He leaves the sentence unfinished. My voice comes out hoarse.

  “Go on.”

  The boy inhales, then recites: “Consider this a taste. This was the work of three sparked dragons, but soon there will be more. We will continue until Callipolis is ours again, and the next time, we won’t be so merciful. You have until Palace Day to change your minds. Do you really want to make more—”

  But here the boy pauses, eyes scanning my face as if remembering something about me, and it makes him hesitate.

  “More?”

  “Do you really want to make more orphans of Callipolans?”

  10

  SPARRING PARTNERS

  The boy and the girl were the only children from their orphanage who scored high enough on the metals test to be invited to the Choosing Ceremony. On the awaited day, the boy was alive with excitement. Somehow, against all odds, he was back in the Inner Palace. And he was about to attend a Choosing ceremony. His birthright.

  The girl did not share his excitement. They were on the threshold of the Hall of the Triarchs, standing in the line of waiting children about to be presented to dragons, and she was shaking from head to foot. “I don’t want to go in there.”

  After a year of unease about the idea of this test, of commoners attending Choosing ceremonies, the boy’s only thought now, when he looked at the girl, was that something extraordinary was about to happen and he didn’t want her to miss it. Without pausing to consider it, he took her hand.

  “We’ll do it together.”

  Inside the hall, high above them, on the balcony, the boy could see a few adults gathered, watching the ceremony. The boy himself had stood there when his brother had been presented at a Choosing. Now, looking up at the balcony, the boy spotted the man who had saved him.

  They passed the first hatchling, a slender, purple-tinged skyfish, dog-sized. Its eyes passed over them without interest, and they continued on.

  “See? Easy,” he murmured to the girl. “They’re just babies. Can’t even breathe fire yet. Unless they Choose you, they don’t even notice you.”

  She didn’t ask how he knew this. Her eyes were fixed on the exit at the other side of the room. They passed another skyfish, then a third. He thought they were doing quite well until he felt her freeze beside him.

  They had reached the stormscourge section. For an instant, his only thought was, Finally.

  His family’s dragons. He was home.

  But then he looked at the girl and saw her face crumpling with fear. Looking at the stormscourges—his stormscourges—with such terror on her face that tears began to pour down it.

  He felt as though something inside him was breaking apart.

  “Come on,” he said.

  He wrapped his arm around her and pulled her forward, past all the great, beautiful stormscourges that he’d always dreamed of flying. Barely looking at them, because all he could focus on was the feeling of the girl’s shoulders shaking as he led her on. “They won’t hurt you, come on . . .”

  And then it was over: He hadn’t been Chosen, but it didn’t matter, suddenly it didn’t matter at all—

  “See, we’re done, it’s done—”

  He turned to her, desperate to see the look of despair gone from her face, ignoring the plummeting feeling of his own. He was surprised to see something else. Instead of staring at her feet, the girl was looking up. Past him.

  He followed her gaze and saw that she was looking at an aurelian, and that the aurelian was looking back at her.

  He’d heard it said before that a kind of magic came with a dragon Choosing you—that the dragon bound you to it, that you formed a connection that was deep and full of an old magic. His father had always told him this was simply a myth, that it was a matter of imprinting and that there was nothing mystical about it.

  But he couldn’t help thinking, as he watched the girl’s face transform, that he was seeing something unearthly. The girl who, a moment ago, had been cowering against him now released his hand as if she had forgotten it. She took one step toward the dragon, then another, never taking her eyes off the dragon’s face. When they stood nose to nose, she stretched out a hand and laid it between the dragon’s eyes.

  The boy was so entranced that he didn’t stop to wonder what was nudging him until he turned to acknowledge it. Then he looked up, into a pair of great, liquid black eyes, and everything around him stood still.

  LEE

  I sit across from Atreus while he reviews my transcription of the Pythians’ message to the boy from Starved Rock. The tomes of Dragontongue lining the shelves of his office contrast with the careful austerity of his desk, of the chairs we’re sitting in, and his simple, unadorned uniform. Lines form around his mouth and forehead as he reads. When he finishes, he laces his fingers together and looks up. It’s early afternoon the day after the Lycean Ball, but it feels like a year has passed between last night and today.

  “You handled this well, Lee.”

  The truth curdles in my stomach: I didn’t handle this well. I let it happen. I let Holmes take down the aerial guard when I knew better and he didn’t.

  “How are we going to reply?”

  Atreus’s voice is clipped with distaste. “To the Pythians? We’re not, for the time being.”

  “But our fleet hasn’t sparked yet.”

  “It will. I’m confident of that. They give us till Palace Day? A great deal can change in three weeks. I’m happy to wait them out.”

  The next objection comes to my lips before I can stop myself.

  “What if it’s not worth it?”

  Atreus tilts his chin. Untwines his fingers, lines them across his desk.

  “What if what’s not worth it?”

  That boy’s white-rimmed eyes, the smoking blazesite reached only a few minutes too late. “What if it’s just—making more orphans of Callipolans? This war. If it even comes to that, if we even spark. Wouldn’t it be better to—”

  “To capitulate?”

  “Compromise,” I say hoarsely. “What if there were a way to compromise?”

  For one mad moment it’s on the tip of my tongue. I imagine saying it, imagine telling him the whole thing—When I was a child, you saved me, and I believe in all of it, all we’re doing, and Julia will listen to me, they’ll listen to me, let me be the bridge—

  Let me have some way out of this besides facing them in the air.

  Atreus speaks first.

  “It is difficult, knowing that your choices are ones whose consequences others suffer.�
�

  His voice is soft, understanding. As if, though I’ve said nothing of how it felt to arrive on the scene on the back of a dragon and still find myself powerless, he understands exactly the weight it bore.

  “But that is the price of leadership. How exactly would you compromise with these people, Lee? They don’t want our world. They want theirs. And that’s something I will not allow. We are building something better.”

  Atreus’s next words remove the possibility of uttering the truth like a candle snuffed of its flame.

  “You are the future of this country, Lee. A leader chosen, not born. There can be no compromise on that.”

  What would you say if I told you I was both?

  But that’s not a question I dare ask. It’s remarkable how, even this many years later, even trained in rhetoric myself, Atreus’s words still have the power to make my spine tingle. Even as he damns my own people with them.

  We are building something better.

  Familiar. Calming. Atreus’s vision, something to hold on to. Sweeping aside what came before it with such persuasive confidence. Better.

  “The qualms you have expressed are not ones you alone will have,” he admits. “Particularly if our fleet remains unsparked.”

  He taps his fingers together, scans the papers lying across his desk like he’s surveying a land campaign from the air. His tone becomes brisk.

  “It will be important that the people are assured. I’ll speak to Propaganda about measures to be taken.”

  ANNIE

  Power and I begin training the day after Starved Rock, following Atreus’s speech in the People’s Square. By that time, news of the attack has reached the capital from Fort Aron. The crowd is unusually quiet as Atreus describes what happened after the beacons lit. Standing beside Lee among the onlooking Guardians, I can’t help but glance at his face as Atreus says certain words—two stormscourge and one skyfish—survivor bearing a message from Julia Stormscourge—we will not capitulate. We are certain that our fleet will spark soon.