Fireborne

by Rosaria Munda

  “Why—?” Crissa asks.

  “I like to stay in control.”

  Crissa turns and looks at me. Her eyebrow lifts. I blush.

  Cor glances between us, searching.

  Crissa goes back to her schedule. “Well, at any rate. You should be prepared for styles of attack associated with spillovers. We can make a list of good drills for that and then we’ll just cycle through them.”

  “Don’t forget contact charges,” Cor adds, knocking his shoulder and fist against my side to demonstrate. “It’ll be a same-breed match, they’ll be fair game.”

  Crissa and Cor alternate running drills and playing opposite me. Their experience as squadron leaders means that both manage drills comfortably and well, attentive to intensity and pacing. I break a sweat almost immediately; Pallor is soon burning hot with exertion, and the hour passes before any of us know it. It’s almost possible, training under their guidance, to stop thinking about Starved Rock, and Julia, and everything I’ve done wrong. Everything I might be about to do wrong.

  After training, I finish unsaddling Pallor and go to the skyfish caves, to Phaedra’s nest. Crissa is alone, scrubbing Phaedra down, her golden hair stained with sweat and half falling from its braid.

  “I just wanted to say. I shouldn’t have—”

  The shouldn’t have on the tip of my tongue is about Annie, a confession of guilt in the face of Crissa’s muted disappointment, but then other shouldn’t haves crowd in as well.

  A shouldn’t have just for Crissa: I shouldn’t have kissed her on the Palace ramparts just to feel less alone. Even if she’s pretty and makes me laugh and is so clearly interested—

  And the worst one, that I can’t undo, can’t even confess, whose magnitude has the power to make the edges of my vision blacken: I shouldn’t have let Holmes take down the aerial guard the night of the Lycean Ball.

  Crissa pauses, looking at me, Phaedra’s brush dripping ash-dark suds down her mother-of-pearl side. And then she doesn’t ask what I mean, or even try to disagree with me.

  “No. You shouldn’t have.”

  The relief I feel to hear it said eases the breath from my lungs.

  Crissa sets the brush down, in the bucket, and approaches me. Until she is standing close. Too close. Close enough that I remember exactly what it was like to kiss those lips, to wrap my fingers in her hair. Behind her, Phaedra lets out a sigh like a purr, her back arching, wings widening—and then stands very still. As if every nerve of her arched body is alert. Like Crissa, looking at me.

  It’s the language of the dragon’s body that makes my mouth go dry, even if it’s Crissa’s murmured breath that I feel when she speaks.

  “People do that. Things they shouldn’t. Mistakes. You make them. And so do I.”

  A half hour later, I let myself into the boys’ washroom with still-hot blood to find Cor alone, scrubbing ash slowly from his neck over a basin of water. His hazel eyes find me in the reflection of the mirror.

  “I’m not an idiot.”

  I freeze on the threshold.

  “I’m going to say one thing. And then have it your way, and we won’t talk about it. I would kill anyone who ever hurt my sisters. You’re my friend, Lee, and I’d follow you into hell as my fleet commander. But I think of Crissa like a sister. And she deserves better than to be your fallback plan. Do you understand me?”

  Maybe it’s because I understand exactly what he means. Maybe it’s because, sick from so many weights of guilt I’d only just found some relief from, I’m not inclined for more. Or maybe most of all because, half an hour ago, Crissa looked me in the eye, as good as called me a mistake, and then kissed me anyway. I hear myself give the kind of answer I’ve seen Cor punch people for.

  “If you’re worried about Crissa getting hurt, maybe you should talk to her.”

  Cor snaps the towel back on the drying rack and exhales. I feel myself tensing, my fists clenching, suddenly wanting the fight. But then all he does is shake his head. His shoulders slump with defeat.

  “I did.”

  I train with Crissa and Cor almost every day. Afterward, if there’s time, while my blood is still singing from flight and exertion, Crissa and I find each other. In Phaedra’s nest or Pallor’s, their presence an edge of unreason that makes it just a little easier to forget better resolve. Because I share all Cor’s reservations until the moment that I disregard them. Then I lose myself, for a few lingering moments, in the kind of oblivion that approximates happiness. Always later, but with slowly decreasing conviction, I tell myself that Cor is right, and that it has to stop.

  And the rest of the time the world spins with uncertainty. I move from meetings with naval officials to coastal patrols to morale visits with unease that I am unable to voice. What is waiting for us after the Firstrider Tournament and Palace Day? What greater bloodshed for Callipolis that the Pythians hold over our heads?

  Every spare moment I weigh it, the price of fighting versus the price of turning. Every time the calculation comes, more or less, to the same conclusion Atreus made so unforgivingly in his office after the attack: that no compromise is possible. Not from the Pythians. And not from Atreus.

  But though the calculation comes out the same every time, I still feel doubt clouding it.

  If I have even the chance of preventing more violence and don’t pursue it—what will that be if not more blood on my hands, further Starved Rocks to regret?

  ANNIE

  I’ve begun spending every spare second in the arena, training my answer to every jittering nerve and rise of anticipation. Every other part of my life fades as I focus on the one point of my future that remains in my control. I have the feeling of being increasingly, tantalizingly close. Victory within sight. Racing the clock of my own courage and resolve to make it over the finish line before I falter.

  Power and I practice daily after class. It is as though Aela and I are unlearning everything Goran taught from the ground up. We learn to rely not on the stirrups and rein and bit to communicate, but on the wordless impulses that move between us, unfiltered. In the moment it’s exhilarating, to trust another being so completely; afterward, the exhaustion hits, with a memory of vulnerability. It becomes difficult, in the extricating, to distinguish Aela’s memories from my own.

  But the days add up, and even as our connection deepens, still we can’t initiate spillover independently. Which means I continue to rely on Power for provocation. The beginning of training becomes an increasingly excruciating kind of ritual, evolving as Power and I work our way back through memories. Though spillovers can be provoked by positive feelings, they’re not the ones readily available to our mining. At Power’s prompting, I talk about my botched morale visit to Holbin, about the memo from the Ministry of Propaganda before the Fourth Order tournament, and then we start on memories from our earliest years in the corps. The things that used to happen, before Lee reported Goran to Atreus.

  Power’s take on these memories is different from mine.

  “Do you remember,” Power recalls, “how Goran used to call off drills before any of the girls or peasants got to practice, then humiliate you for not being able to do them later? I always thought that was hilarious . . .”

  “Do you remember that time I got Duck’s own dragon to bite his leg? Probably the crowning achievement of our first year. Even if it meant Cor and Lee beating the hell out of me later. Duck was hobbling for days . . .”

  “Do you remember how Goran always put you on dragon-dung-shoveling duty? What was the reason he gave you for that one?”

  Power is grinning as sweat trickles down his forehead, as if he already knows the answer. I give it anyway, hating Power as I always do in these moments, aching for the spillover that’s just out of reach:

  “He said I cleaned better.”

  “He was right, though,” Power points out. And that’s enough to send me over.

/>   As much as I come away from these sessions furious—furious with Power, furious with the memories, furious—there’s also triumph. Because for the first time in my life, the old wounds are useful. The fury gives me Aela; and when we’re together, like this, we’re powerful. At such a price, the memories of weakness finally serve a purpose, and once used, they never hurt with the same strength again.

  Eventually there comes a day when Power asks: “Do you want to try going all the way back?”

  I’m caught off guard.

  “What?”

  “You know. Your family, what happened to them. It always works for me.”

  My look of confusion must betray me, because he adds, impatient: “Not my adopted family. My real one. When my dad left my mum pregnant to die in a poorhouse and I got taken in by the people she cleaned for.”

  “Oh.”

  It’s the first time Power has brought up the past that Dora alluded to at the Lycean Ball, but now that he does, he refers to it as if it’s something I’ve always known. He flashes a grin at me, too wide, and lifts his fingers to massage the damp stubble of his hair as the late summer sun beats down.

  “I always figured you were pissed, too,” he says.

  Aela is snorting, nuzzling my side, and I move my fingers up to scratch behind her horned jaw. I consider, searching myself for the emotions Power describes. Though I do find the memory of anger and pain, I also find that the emotions themselves have faded.

  “You’re not,” Power observes, watching me.

  I raise and lower my shoulders.

  “It happened a long time ago,” I say. “It’s just . . . over.”

  There is something liberating about that realization, even if it leaves me feeling strangely empty. Over. Time has left me with—if not peace, at least a dimmer kind of pain. Not the kind that has the power to bring Aela close.

  A strange expression is on Power’s face. His usual scorn mixed with something else: almost jealousy, or bitterness.

  “Good for you,” he says.

  But from his tone, I’m pretty sure that’s not what he’s thinking.

  An hour later, our training finished, I make my way in exhausted silence through the aurelian cave corridor back up to the Cloister and stop at the sound of disturbance. It comes from Pallor’s nest; the lanterns inside are lit. I round the corner unreflectingly, then stop dead. All at once the sounds I heard, which I should have understood immediately, make sense. A girl’s voice giggling, murmured half words, an inhaled breath. Lee and Crissa, braced against the cave wall, wrapped in an embrace.

  For a second longer than I have reason to, I find myself looking at the way he holds her, one hand moving down her hip, tightening on the leather of the flamesuit, the other winding in her hair to tilt back her head as he kisses her neck. As in his sparring, the same rough purpose guided by gentle precision, the same complete control.

  Mouth dry, face hot, I flee.

  And then alone, I learn that this is what is meant by desire, this lingering awareness of my own body, this ache to find him again, to feel rather than to see those hands and those lips—

  —the blasphemy of it, to feel it for Lee—

  And this is how it hurts, to want someone, and see them in the arms of someone else.

  I spend the next two days watching, like some gossiping Lyceum girl, and hating myself for it. Watching every interaction he and Crissa have, whenever they smile at each other or laugh at each other’s jokes or brush against each other in passing. I watch and I try to decide if I’m imagining that Lee, whose mood has darkened since the Starved Rock attack to almost unbroken silence, seems happier at least in her company.

  And I try to tell myself that it’s good if he’s found a reason to smile, and that the thought shouldn’t hurt. That the Firstrider Tournament is all that matters and that this is a shallow, superficial distraction—

  It’s Crissa who eventually stops my agonized speculating.

  “Annie. I need to tell you something.”

  She’s found me in the dorm, alone. I know from her tone at once what it will be about. She has dispensed with her squadron-leader voice, and sits on the bed across from mine, looking grave. For a moment the only sound is the gulls crying outside the open window. Then I decide to spare us both.

  “I already know.”

  Crissa tilts her head, her grave expression faltering.

  “You do?”

  I nod.

  “Well, I was going to ask if it’s . . . okay with you.”

  I think of the way it felt, like a knife twisting up into my ribs, the sight of Lee’s body pressed against someone else, his lips on another’s skin.

  “Why wouldn’t it be okay?”

  My voice is like ice. Crissa sounds tired.

  “You know why, Annie.”

  “Lee’s free to kiss whomever he likes. You’re as good a choice as any.”

  Crissa stiffens as if I’d slapped her. “That was unkind,” she says softly.

  I feel the force of her reprimand like a lash. I remember the evening after making finalist, when Crissa opened the door to my infirmary ward and brought a party with her; of the hours she spent with me on the arena ramparts, coaching my public speaking at the cost of her free time; of the care she took, in the lead-up to the Lycean Ball, to ease my discomfort.

  Crissa doesn’t deserve this anger.

  She goes on, with forced calm, “I am trying to say this. If you don’t want—if this upsets you—I will call it off.”

  If this upsets you.

  I think of a boy from another lifetime, making sure I had enough to eat, teaching me what it felt like not to be hungry. The years I spent, sparring with that boy daily, honing his abilities as I honed my own. Those few minutes in the middle of the Lycean Ball when we danced and my world stood still.

  And then I remember that it is this same boy whose face so often, when I look at it, chills me with the shadow of another’s, and that I’ve been training for the Firstrider Tournament as I’ve never trained in my life because of the burning desire, finally discovered, to step out of his shadow and into the light.

  “Lee doesn’t belong to me,” I tell Crissa. “And if this is what he wants, he should have it.”

  I wait until she’s gone before I break down.

  * * *

  ***

  Increasingly desperate headlines in both the People’s Paper and the Gold Gazette predict that our fleet’s sparking is imminent. State-sponsored editorials enthusiastically reaffirm the new regime’s superiority to the rule of the dragonlords—one half of an argument whose other side Crissa and I overheard in the streets after Atreus’s speech. The doubt implicit: What good is an aerial fleet ridden by commoners if it can’t defend us?

  The Ministry of Propaganda’s answer is made clear enough, though I learn of it not from the paper, but from our poetry professor, four days before the Firstrider Tournament.

  Dragontongue Poetry is one of the few courses to have continued into the summer months. Guardians have been expected to keep up our studies, although with our wartime obligations expanding, it’s difficult for the professors to get work of any quality out of us anymore. Tyndale hasn’t been understanding about it, and today he turns out to be in an especially foul temper.

  “No, that’s not quite right, Cor,” Tyndale says, five minutes into the lesson. “In fact that was—all wrong.”

  Power lets out a snicker that he doesn’t even bother to suppress. The sound of his voice, which I now associate with goads to the point that it makes my stomach jump, reminds me that we’ll be on the Eyrie together again to train within the hour. Cor has folded his arms, scowling at Tyndale. In his Guardian ground uniform, with ash still caked to the back of his neck from a naval drill that ran late into the morning, he has the look of someone who has no time left for poetry or poetry professo
rs.

  “Antigone, fix it.”

  I look down at Cor’s line with misgiving. Most of the time I can make sense of the Aurelian Cycle, but I haven’t had time to properly prepare a translation in weeks; what free time I’ve had hasn’t been spent on homework. I start to sight-read a translation of the line, but Tyndale stops me before I can get halfway through.

  “That will do. Is any Guardian still capable of making a passable translation these days, or are you all too busy giving speeches to frightened class-irons?”

  By now, a few Lyceum students have their hands in the air, some like Hanna Lund glancing at the Guardians anxiously, but Tyndale ignores them. “Lotus!”

  Lotus has been slumping, flushed from the summer heat, over his desk. He lurches upright and starts reading his own translation, but he barely translates two words before Tyndale cuts him off, too.

  “Lee,” he says, with finality.

  I know—because I’ve been keeping track—that this is the first time Tyndale’s ever called on Lee.

  Lee, who’s been reading along in the primer with his forehead resting on his palm, reacts slowly. He lowers his palm, raises his head, straightens up. And then he stares at Tyndale. His fingers press hard against the open primer, the tips going white, and he doesn’t reach for the notebook lying beneath it.

  Since I saw him with Crissa in the nests, I’ve stopped speaking to Lee altogether, even as I have become aware of every shadow of his body’s definition discernible through his uniform, as if a switch has been flipped in my thoughts that can’t be turned back off. But now I notice also how Tyndale’s attention has made Lee tense from head to foot. He hasn’t appeared so alarmed in Tyndale’s class since our very first day.

  “I didn’t do my homework,” Lee says. And then he adds, with contempt bordering on anger: “Like you said. I was too busy giving speeches to frightened class-irons.”

  A ripple of surprise goes around the room at his tone. When Tyndale speaks, his voice is crisp, carefully enunciated.

  “Well then, why don’t you try sight-reading?”