I feel something else. Relief.
I’m not the only one to have chosen this kind of path. Once, long ago, Atreus did the same.
Atreus says: “I will live with the burden of Arcturus’s death, and the death of his family, for the rest of my life.”
Then he raises his eyes, and a hardness enters his tone as he adds, “That does not mean I regret them.”
Atreus gives our silence a moment before making his final point.
“Much of what you’ll be doing, as Guardians, will be deciding which is the lesser evil. Who lives, who dies. It will be—it should be—a terrible burden.
“Times may come when you question yourself. On those occasions, remember that these decisions are better made by you than someone else. If everything goes to plan, you’ll be the most rational, the most well-trained, the most fit to rule. It will be your duty to make these decisions, to bear the guilt of them for others’ sakes.”
* * *
***
It’s still a little strange to seek Crissa’s company privately now that the Firstrider Tournament has passed and training for it no longer provides the excuse or the justification. But the desire to continue outweighs the reasons to call it off.
“Thought you wouldn’t come,” she says, when I find her in her dorm room.
The room is golden in the afternoon light. Crissa is seated at her desk, where homework and stolen refectory mugs are piled across the surface, folded into her chair as she leans over her reading. The other girls have obligations right now, and we have the dorm to ourselves.
“I had to . . . I went for a walk.”
I throw my book bag on the floor next to her bed and sink onto it, leaning back against the mound of pillows and closing my eyes. The bed smells of the sea breeze and something just a little sweeter, a fragrance I’ve come to associate with Crissa.
“Is everything . . . okay, Lee?”
It’s a checking-in tone, the kind I use with others but can’t remember anyone ever having used with me. I’m so unprepared for it that I don’t know how to answer.
“I just . . . I thought maybe it was because you were worried about Annie, after the Firstrider Tournament, but now she’s better and you’re still . . .”
She trails off. I have opened my eyes and am lying very still, looking at her, but she keeps her gaze on her reading.
“Still what?” I prompt softly.
“Sad,” she says.
She does look at me, then.
“I know”—her words are careful, like delicate steps across ice—“that maybe there are things that happened to you that you can’t—that are too hard to talk about. And I know that I know nothing—nothing—of what it must have been. But if there’s anything you want to tell me, any way I could help you . . .”
The public bio, the one she knows, is that I lost my family during the Red Month. The triarchy created so many slum orphans in its last throes that the story has always gone unquestioned.
I imagine telling her: that the worst day I’ve ever lived is commemorated annually as a national festival and celebrated with a parade; that rather than taking comfort with what family remains to me, I’ve chosen to throw in my lot with their usurper.
When I say nothing, she rises and climbs onto the bed beside me. Although I make no move to turn to her—my body feels like it is weighted to the bed, like something apart from myself—she curls closer, fits her body against mine, and lays her head against my shoulder. She stretches her arm across my chest, spreads her fingers across my far shoulder. She is, I realize, holding me.
“One day,” she murmurs into my shoulder, “when we’re at peace again, I want to take a few days’ leave and bring you with me. Home. To Harbortown, to see the beaches.”
She’s phrased it like this, I realize, so that it’s not a question, so I’m not given the opportunity to say no. It sounds so nice that I hear myself answer before considering the words.
“I’ve been there, once.”
“Really?” She sounds surprised. It takes me a moment to remember why.
“Orphanage field trip,” I add numbly.
It wasn’t an orphanage field trip. It was a family vacation. Sand in our hair, fiddler crabs under our feet, the smell of fresh fish roasting over a fire as servants turned the spit. My sisters buried me.
“You liked it?”
“Yes,” I tell her. “Very much.”
ANNIE
The day I’m discharged from the infirmary, a parade-planning meeting is held with Miranda Hane, General Holmes, Lee, Cor, Power, and myself, and concerns the question of national security during the parade. At the sight of Hane, my stomach does an odd flip, remembering her note. I’m still stiff from the many bandages beneath my uniform, sitting still is uncomfortable, and the feeling of my absent braid is disorienting.
“Did you know,” Hane says, before the meeting starts, “that the title Alterna bears a feminine ending for the first time since our earliest poetry, because of you?”
Alterna is a Dragontongue loanword, and Dragontongue, unlike Callish, is a gendered language. Even though I did know it, I also appreciate Hane’s bit of trivia, delivered softly and with a smile, for what it is: something between congratulations and condolence.
“Thank you,” I tell her, and hope she knows I mean her note, too.
Hane begins the meeting by requesting as many dragons as possible in the cavalcade going down the Triumphal Way. General Holmes, though he maintains the need for air patrols during the event, is inclined to allow it. “The security of the city’s my main concern for this event at any rate. Keeping the bulk of the riders armed and central will only strengthen its defense.”
Lee has been staring with an arrested expression out the window at the Firemouth. The light is gray: a low layer of stratus has settled over the city, leaving those concerned with its air defense full of unease. Cloud cover like this is a defending dragonrider’s nightmare. Lee never looks particularly well-rested even at his best, but at this time of year the bruises under his eyes are always especially dark, the lines around his mouth deepened, as if sleep is something he has forgotten.
“And the coast?” he asks Holmes, turning from the window.
Holmes nods, appreciative, and throws a grin at Hane. “Circumspect, our new Firstrider. I like that.”
Lee responds with a twisted smile.
Hane and Holmes begin to argue over the breakdown of the coastal patrols. Lee doesn’t interrupt them again. It is determined that two air patrols, one over the city and one along the northern coast, will be deployed simultaneously with the parade, each led by a sparked dragon.
“I’ll lead one of the patrols,” Cor says. “Don’t much like parades, anyway.”
The dragons who have sparked so far are in our highest ranks, Cor’s, Power’s, and Crissa’s among them.
Lee says, “I’d like to take an air patrol as well.”
Hane looks at Holmes and says, “That’s not necessary, is it? I was assuming Lee would lead. Along with the Alterna.”
“I’d lead what?” Lee asks.
“The parade,” Holmes says. “That’s fine, Miranda. Seems appropriate, for the Firstrider. All right, Lee?”
Lee’s face has gone perfectly blank.
“Yes, sir,” he says.
* * *
***
Palace Day dawns blue-skied. The fog cleared, the Guardians are approved to participate in the parade.
The booklet from Atreus’s class has remained in my backpack, untouched, until the morning of Palace Day. Then at last I give in. The day is too incongruous: the excitement of the rest of the corps in anticipation of the upcoming parade; the feeling of festivity in the air; and the quiet composure with which Lee eats breakfast. He goes off on his own after that, as he always does on this day. As usual, I’m the only one who notices.
And I think, I’ve had enough. It’s time. Today might be a day when the whole city pretends, but I, for one, am ready for something else. Lee has leapt from one dragon’s back to another for my sake, is preparing to endure celebrations that have gutted him every year since we were children, and after this, his path will likely get harder. I owe him an end of pretense and acknowledgment of the truth.
The whole truth.
I go to an empty classroom, shut the door, and open the booklet for the first time since class. I turn to the page I’ve been purposely skipping every time I leafed through. At the top is a picture of the Drakarch of the Far Highlands and his family. My eyes are drawn immediately to the father, and I find myself staring, for the first time since it happened, at him. Even though the quality of the image isn’t particularly good, I still feel the same mingled terror and hatred. He stands next to a woman and they’re surrounded by children. They look happy and beautiful and proud. Pictured among his family, loving and fatherly, it’s difficult to imagine him doing what I once saw him do.
I look at the text below the picture and search for the name of the youngest child. There: five years old at the time of the portrait, a boy named Leo. I stare at the name and for a moment I forget to breathe.
Then my breath returns in a rush; I search for him and see him there, grainy and unclear, but recognizable. The description may say that this boy is dead, but I know that he’s very much alive.
Even though it seems like I’ve always known, it still hits me like a physical blow, seeing him there at last, pictured three feet from the other man. For a moment, the page blurs.
Then I blink my vision clear and force myself to read. I read about what happened to his mother, to his brother, to his sisters, finally to his father. I match every single face in the picture to the descriptions below. I slowly, meticulously imagine the scene that must have happened, on this day, ten years ago.
Then I look again at the picture, at the little boy whose face is just a few smudges of ink. Even with these limitations it’s plain to see that he’s smiling. Most of the rest of the family aren’t—their expressions are solemn, dignified, befitting a formal portrait of a dragonlord’s family. But it seems the artist made an exception for the boy; for an older sister, too, who sits beside him; they’re both smiling merrily, as though they’re about to break into laughter. I realize that, in all my time knowing him, I’ve never seen Lee smile like this.
It comes to me, then, a vision of what he must have been, once: a youngest child in a family full of laughter, at the center of their joy and attention. Affectionate, because he received affection; talkative, because if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be heard; probably prone to mischief, because he could get away with it. It is easy to imagine him this way, though I only have a picture to base it on. After all, I was once the youngest child, too.
Then I imagine this smiling little boy losing everyone he loved in the span of a few heartbreaking hours. I don’t need to imagine what the pain must have been like, because I remember it. In that moment, it doesn’t matter to me who his father was or what he did to me. All I want is to find the little boy I knew in Albans and hold him.
“Annie?”
I look up. For a moment I think it must be him, and I realize the book is out, open, and it’s too late to hide. But it’s Duck.
“Hane’s waiting,” he says. “The pre-parade briefing, remember?”
“Right,” I say.
He doesn’t ask what I’m doing, though I see him glance at the book in front of me. Bewilderment crosses his face as he recognizes it. I close the book, put it in my bag, and get up. Side by side, we make our way to the oration room.
Hane is waiting to brief us at the sunken rostrum in the center of the floor. When Duck and I enter, I realize we must be late; everyone else is already in the elevated, rickety wooden seats that rise in concentric semicircles. Or, almost everyone is. Lee is missing, too.
“You didn’t find him?” Hane asks Duck.
Oh, Lee, I think, don’t lose courage now. Not over a stupid parade.
“No,” says Duck, “do you want me to go—”
But before he can finish his offer, the door opens again and Lee comes in.
One look at him is enough to know that my fear was needless. If I notice that he’s a little pale, a little tight-lipped, it’s only because I’m searching for it. I’m struck instead by his marshalled self-possession: He’s standing especially erect, his expression full of calm confidence. He’s dressed in full ceremonial regalia, and he wears his cloak and armor as though he was born in them, the wings of the Fourth Order on his shoulder, the Firstrider’s ceremonial bugle slung across his back. Instead of taking a seat like the rest of us, he goes to stand beside Hane. He doesn’t apologize for being late; instead, he nods to Hane as if to indicate that the meeting may begin.
I look at him, quiet and dignified and in complete control, and I realize that the hurt, lost boy I remember is just as gone as the smiling one I never met. He’s put both aside today, and he needs none of the comforting that I’d like to give him. The thought fills me with fierce pride.
Hane looks at him, once, measuring, and I can tell that she’s noticed, as I have, the way he assumed power in the room as he entered it, and she’s startled, though not exactly displeased. Then she clears her throat and begins to outline our route.
As she speaks, and I continue to regard Lee, I allow myself to see it. The resemblance that’s haunted me, that I’ve resisted, for as long as I can remember, but that today I have confirmed past ignorance or denial.
I look at Lee and see Leon Stormscourge’s son.
* * *
***
Atreus, mounted on a slate-gray warhorse, leads the way along the Triumphal Way, followed by the cavalcade of the crimson-clad Protector’s Guard. Pallor and Aela come next, leading the rest of the aerial fleet not on patrol. Flashes of what I just read keep returning to my mind, and I find myself sickened by the festivity around me. The Callipolan flags waving, the banners and fanfare, the cheering crowds—all seems like more and more hypocrisy.
The crowds press close to us as we move forward, leaning against barriers constructed and maintained by the city guards, and we move so slowly that we have ample time to study the faces of the people cheering us on. Where once, I used to number myself among them, now I find myself looking upon them with the same aversion with which I once looked on the dragonlords. I watch them cheering themselves hoarse over a massacre and remember how, years ago, they hurled insults at a helpless dragon, even after it had been bound and mutilated, for the sheer pleasure of humiliating an animal that had only followed its master’s orders. I remember being lifted on the shoulders of people in the same tavern outside which, a month later, my service to the city was mocked. I remember how it felt, the wet, cold splatter of a villager’s spit on my face. Atreus’s words, afterward: The anger of the people can be often cruel and ill-placed.
These are not my people; I am not one of them. Not anymore. These people understand justice only as revenge. They are undeserving, ignorant, and cruel.
It goes on, these thoughts, this mounting anger, until it crystallizes into one overriding feeling: disgust.
Then with a jolt I wonder: Was this how the dragonlords thought of us?
Next to me, Lee guides Pallor with agonizingly slow, careful steps, setting the pace for the whole parade. I glance at him periodically, every time seeing his still, calm face, masklike and hard. Only in his posture does any sign of strain show. He sits straighter and straighter as time wears on, stiffening a bit more every time the cheering swells with his name. By the end, he is rigidly upright. Others might perceive this as a sign of pride, but I know the truth. It is the posture of someone receiving a beating and determined to get through it on their feet.
The parade finishes in the People’s Square, separated from the Palace by the ri
ver and a wide stone bridge. By now, it’s dusk; the parade was timed so it would end with the kind of light best suited to demonstrations of fire. Lee and I mount the dais where, years ago, Leon Stormscourge’s dragon was beheaded.
Our dragons fire upward, into the deepening blue sky, then launch into the air; behind us, two by two, the other riders follow. We circle each other, the sparked dragons firing in formation, the others weaving round us; we can see the city stretched below, the masses in the main square, in the streets, gathered to watch us, cheering as one. Then at last it is over, and we depart for the caves.
* * *
***
Back in her nest, I take my time scrubbing down Aela, feeding her from a bucket of meat the caretakers left waiting for our return. Since sparking, she’s developed a taste for charred meat, though half the time she overcooks it. When she ends up turning a leg of mutton into a big block of cinder, she attempts to eat it, gags, and then looks at me reproachfully.
“It’s not my fault you can’t figure out your own cook time,” I tell her.
It’s a relief, after the parade, to do something as familiar as having a staring contest with Aela.
“Hey, Annie?”
It’s Duck’s voice, from the cave corridor outside. The coastal patrols must be back.
“How’d it go?” I ask.
Duck shrugs. “Not so much as a sighting,” he says.
He waits on the threshold of Aela’s nest, a black silhouette against the tunnel’s lantern light. “Some of the others are going in to town to see the celebrations,” he says. “Do you want to go with them?”
No. The last thing I need is more celebrating.
“Or we could go for a walk,” he adds, seeming to sense my reaction.
This, I favor: There’s nothing like a walk around the Palace gardens with Duck to make everything a little bit better. “Okay. Let me just finish up here.”
Fireborne Page 27
