Fireborne

by Rosaria Munda

  “I need to know.”

  She sounds distant, tired. “All right.”

  Annie leads me back to the house, then takes me about ten paces into what had been her front yard.

  “This was where he stood.”

  She stops me, so I’m standing in the same place. She points behind me. “He’d dismounted from the dragon—it was waiting over there. And the soldiers, they were standing there, and there. We were over by the house. And Dad was talking to him. Here.”

  She stands about three feet from me, taking the place of her father. We face each other. And then Annie takes a breath and drops to her knees.

  As a child, I watched countless people kneel before my father. But I think this is the first time I’ve ever really seen the act for what it is. A protest rises to my lips; my face begins to burn. But then Annie raises her eyes to mine, like she anticipates this, and at her look I fall silent. I asked her to show me, and this is what she wants me to see.

  She lowers her head and remains kneeling for three long, measured breaths. I think she’s counting them, just as I am. Her palms are flat against the grass as they support her weight. I stare down at her bowed head, the nape of her neck, her rigid back. It’s a long moment. I have ample time to consider that, in another life, this is how we would have known each other.

  Then Annie rises to her feet. A flush has crept into her face, matching mine. She continues her story as if there were no interruption. Her tone is relentless, as if now that she has begun, she’s determined to get through it without stopping.

  “My father must have been intimidated; he’d never spoken to one of the dragonborn before. This man, he seemed powerful, terrible and powerful. Like a god. Dad must have been frightened, too, because of the dragon. But he held his ground anyway. He was dignified. It couldn’t have been easy, to be dignified while kneeling in front of someone like that.

  “I couldn’t hear a lot of what they said, and it was hard to understand Lord Leon’s accent. But then Leon ordered the rest of us to go into the house. I knew something was wrong because Dad was crying. Leon asked Dad which was his favorite, which I didn’t understand at first. Dad said he didn’t have one. Then . . . my brother must have understood because he told me to walk toward the dragonlord, and I did, I didn’t understand, not until it was too late—”

  She sucks in a breath like she’s running out of air.

  “I wouldn’t have gone if I’d understood, I didn’t know—”

  This is the refrain she must play for herself, on bad days and after nightmares; this is her refrain, and like mine, it is never enough.

  “Annie,” I say.

  She locks her eyes on me and I know she’s using this to pull herself back. When she speaks again, her voice is shaking.

  “They made Dad go into the house with my brothers and sisters, and then the soldiers locked the door and went to guard the windows. They were quiet inside, Dad must have been keeping them calm. I still didn’t understand. And then Leon turned to his dragon and said something in a different language, and the dragon fired.”

  She traces the path of the flame across the yard with a finger, so I can imagine it.

  “I could feel the heat on my face, my arms. I watched the house catch fire and I started—asking—for him to stop it. Because the soldiers had me standing here, right next to him.”

  She takes two steps closer to me and turns so that we’re both facing the house. She’s close enough to touch, barely inches from me.

  “I started to hear—”

  But she can’t finish this sentence, and the panicked look has come back full force, like she can barely see anything but the things she’s telling me. I make myself look at her, like this, take in the sight of Annie breaking apart.

  “—I could smell—”

  Her face convulses, and for a moment she trembles, facing away from me and toward the remains of the house. When she looks back at me, her face has set.

  “I tried to look away. But he—” She reaches out and takes my hand in hers. Her eyes are fixed on mine. “He put his hand in my hair. Like this.” She lifts my hand behind her head, places it on her streaming hair, and automatically my fingers clutch a handful. Her hair is soft, downy, like a child’s. Her voice begins to lose control. “And he turned my head and made me watch until the screaming stopped.”

  I release her, abruptly, like holding her has burned me.

  But the sight of it is seared into my vision, my hand gripping her hair like the scruff of an animal, like a dog whose face a trainer might force into its own excrement. She was small and weak and helpless in my hand.

  Ruling came naturally to me, Leo.

  “By the time he let me go, I was—upset. And he, he—” Annie inhales and then her voice, finally, breaks. “He comforted me. He held me and he comforted me.”

  I take a step back from her. Annie gets herself under control again, but barely. Then she says, “That’s what happened, Lee,” in the tone of an apology. “I’d like . . . I’d like a few minutes to myself, if that’s all right.”

  “Of course,” I manage.

  I make my way up the hill, and as I start to move, I find I can’t get away fast enough.

  Which is your favorite. He comforted me. Lord Leon.

  And the question that comes with it, since the orphanage, since the beginning, the agonized protest of betrayal that has no one alive to answer it, only memories of a man who was only ever kind and caring and my father—

  How could you have done this?

  I stop when I reach the oak again, and then I grab the trunk with one hand and double over, my stomach heaving as I gasp for air.

  That’s when I notice something glinting in one of the knots of the tree, deep down. I begin to work on retrieving it, with that single-minded kind of focus you only have when you’re distracting yourself. My stomach calms, the gasps subside. I scrabble with my fingers, then prod with a twig.

  When I get it out, I realize it’s a woman’s necklace, cheap and crude and rusted, and the nausea comes back. It would have been a lot better if Annie had found this, I realize. I do not want to be the one who gives it to her.

  I look down the hill for the first time. She’s kneeling, her head in her hands.

  I busy myself with cleaning the necklace while I wait for her, not looking down the slope again. When she rejoins me fifteen minutes later, her eyes are bloodshot but she’s wiped her face dry. I feel a moment of such tenderness for her, it hurts. My Annie, who doesn’t cry in front of people.

  She sits beside me, looking tired and drained, and silently I take her hand, turn it palm up, and place the necklace in it.

  For a second she just looks at it. And then her whole body hunches, like all her muscles are tensing, like this is just one thing too much. I know from this that it must have belonged to her mother.

  I wait for her to move, but she just sits there, paralyzed by a necklace so worthless that the women in my family would have thrown it away without a thought. Before I think about whether or not I should, I shift closer to her and take it back. I unclasp it and gently gather her hair into one hand so her neck is bare. She remains hunched forward, unmoving, while I fasten the necklace around her neck. I try to touch her as little as possible, but still my fingers brush against her skin, her hair, I can’t help thinking that he too touched this neck, this hair—this beautiful hair, this delicate neck, this tiny creature, not tiny in the way women can be naturally, but tiny because when she was young, she was hungry—he touched her, and instead of recognizing her beauty he tore her apart.

  She looks up at me when she realizes I’ve finished, and her face is wet.

  “That bastard,” I tell her.

  After all these years, resisting it, avoiding it, I never thought it would feel like this. Good. Like I’ve been set free.

  She swallows, wipes her face
on her sleeve, and her fingers rise to touch the rusty chain around her neck. She tucks the pendant into her shirt.

  “Thank you,” she says simply. But she says it like she isn’t just talking about the necklace, and she looks at me to make sure I understand.

  I nod, because I cannot speak.

  * * *

  ***

  After that, we fall into silence. The wind cuts across us as we stare down at Holbin, at the skyline that holds, within it, the dragonlord’s estate that I once called home. Though we could have moved apart, we’re still sitting close together.

  When she finally speaks, it’s to ask the question I know she’s been withholding. She sounds exhausted.

  “What’s going on, Lee?”

  “They’ve . . . given me a final chance.”

  Annie processes this in silence for a moment.

  “How?” she asks.

  Meaning, now that she’s turned in Tyndale.

  “A servant I didn’t recognize passed me a note.”

  I am reaching into my pocket for it as I say this, only to realize I don’t have it. It was the first note from Julia that I didn’t destroy immediately, because it was the first note I’d ever intended to show anyone else.

  It’s fine. It’s in the office, and you always lock the door.

  I push the rising worry from my mind.

  “It said that even if I couldn’t bring myself to, you know, bring Callipolis down from the inside . . . I could still just go home.”

  Annie swallows, hard.

  I start to explain. “I’ve been telling them no for a while. Since—”

  “Since we started having class with Tyndale,” Annie realizes, her voice a murmur. “And you’ve been meeting with them, too?”

  There seems no point in telling her anything but the whole truth.

  “Just one of them. We’ve met twice. Once before the first attack. I was trying to dissuade her. And before . . . over Midsummer. I didn’t mean to, I just . . .”

  “You just missed them.”

  My throat tight, I nod. And then I struggle to explain.

  “I’ve been telling myself it’s not about that. I know it’s not. There’s so much more to it than whether Midsummer is hard, or whether Palace Day is—” I stop, because I can’t think of a word to fittingly describe the depths. Then I say, “But it’s gotten harder over these past few weeks.”

  “I know,” Annie murmurs. “It’s gotten harder for me, too.”

  I have been staring at my knees as I speak, but when she says this, I glance at her: Her profile is arrested, staring out over the glowing slopes of the highlands, her gaze unseeing.

  “The thing that strikes me, now that I’m older, is that what happened to my family was . . . routine. All of it. I’m not the only child who survived a fire; there was a name for it. I was a designated witness. When it happened, Leon wasn’t acting out of anger; he was completely calm. After all, he was just exercising his legal rights. Another day on the job, for a dragonlord.”

  Yes. Which leaves me to wonder which unremarkable night it must have been, when my father came home from one of his visits to our land holdings, smelling of the dragonfire that had just orphaned Annie.

  “As much as I’ve hated doing collections these past two weeks,” Annie goes on doggedly, “as much as I felt like a Stormscourge—I also know it was nothing close to the worst of what they did. And so long as that’s the case, this is the side you want to be on. Even if we’re a little evil, we’re still better than the evil they were, before.”

  The lesser of two evils. It’s a far cry from what I hoped we’d be. And a far cry from what Annie once hoped for, as well.

  I murmur, “Do you remember when you told me . . . that even if the people giving us dragons were bad, we wouldn’t be?”

  Annie smiles sadly.

  “All the time,” she says. “But . . . I also understand now that it’s more complicated than that. The war’s not over. When it is, maybe . . . there will be time to change the rules.”

  The sun has finally risen high enough for light to fall across us. The thinner wisps of Annie’s hair are glowing as they blow around her face. Silence has fallen again. Annie seems to take it as a cue. She reaches into the pocket of her flamesuit, pulls out a piece of paper, and unfolds it on her knee. It’s torn from the banned book about Palace Day, and the page she’s flattening is the one with my family on it.

  She folds the page in half, so that only the blurry black-and-white rendition of our portrait is visible, not the descriptions of their deaths underneath. Then she points at the youngest child in the picture.

  “This was you?”

  I nod.

  I ask, “How long have you known?”

  Annie’s lips compress. “I’ve known you were dragonborn for almost as long as I can remember. The rest of it . . . I tried not to know for a long time.”

  I take the paper from her, press it on my own knee, and look down at my family. All six of us. My father, regal and careless. My mother beside him, her expression warm with pride, my hand held in her lap as I stand beside her; Laertes and Larissa, not an inch of difference in their heights, despite the years that separated them; Penelope, smiling from ear to ear, like she always did.

  “You were with them, weren’t you?” Annie says. “On Palace Day.”

  I nod again. I flatten the knees of my flamesuit, dredging the words up. Fighting the silence that overcame me like a brick wall as I sat with Julia, because I need Annie to understand that I understand.

  “They made me watch, too.”

  As soon as I say it, I start to feel sick again.

  The tips of Annie’s fingers touch my knee, and remain there. “I’m sorry, Lee.”

  She sounds like she means it from the depths of her being. Like she really is sorry about what happened to us, no matter what my family did to hers first. I reach for something to say next and find myself still talking about it.

  “Atreus is the reason I’m . . . He came in at the end. Saved me.”

  Annie’s eyes widen. “So he knows—?”

  I shake my head. “He doesn’t. I used to hope he did, but he has no idea.”

  “But if he saw you that night, how could he not recognize . . . ?”

  “I used to wonder, too,” I say, “and now I think . . .” I grimace, knowing how this is going to sound. “That night, I think there was blood on my face.”

  Annie’s fingers tighten on the leather of my flamesuit. I hand the clipping back to her, keeping my eyes on our hands, so I don’t have to see her expression. She puts it in her pocket.

  “And this . . . relative?” she asks, tentative now. “The one who’s been contacting you?”

  I nod. “Julia. Julia Stormscourge. My cousin. The one who left that ultimatum after Starved Rock.”

  A line has formed between Annie’s brows that she smooths with her thumb. “I met her, I think. At the first tournament. She complimented my flying . . .”

  After so much else that’s passed, I feel barely surprised.

  “She’s been very persistent,” I mutter.

  “She must care about you.”

  “We were friends when we were little.”

  Annie’s eyebrows draw together. “Is she highly ranked? In their fleet?”

  She’s hit upon the salient point surprisingly quickly, and though she’s phrased it obliquely, the sense of the question is clear: Will you have to face her?

  I let out a dull laugh and am unable to hide the pain in it.

  Annie lets out a slow, half-whistled exhale. “Oh,” she says, her voice filling with sadness. “Oh, Lee.”

  It doesn’t make it any better, to know that she sees the choice for what it is, and that it fills her with sorrow to witness; but nevertheless it is, in its way, a balm to hear it marked aloud.
r />   “We should be getting back,” I murmur.

  The walk to the dragons is quiet, drained. But it’s the kind of drained that feels cleaner, cleared out. All the tension that I’m so used to feeling around Annie is gone. It was like the whine of a buzzing insect, low and continuous, the kind you forget even as it sets you on edge. Now that it’s gone, I realize I must have lived with it for years.

  Try as I might, I can’t remember locking the office door at all.

  17

  ATONEMENT

  ANNIE

  Back at the Palace, we unsaddle Aela and Pallor in their nests, and walk together up the aurelian corridor of the caves. The entrance of the Firemouth glows distantly, several bending corridors out of sight, and torches light the way along the route. Though I remain empty of words, I find myself reaching for Lee’s arm, wrapping my own inside it, and he returns the pressure.

  And then we round a corner, and find Power and Darius waiting for us in the cave corridor’s torchlight.

  “Hello, my lord,” Power says to Lee.

  He’s grinning from ear to ear, his eyes full of a cruel, frenetic energy that I associate with his spillovers.

  For an instant the four of us stand frozen. And then we move. Lee and I raise our wrists to our mouths to summon; Darius launches himself at Lee, knocking his wrist aside before it can reach his mouth. Power has me on the ground in seconds; larger and stronger than me by half, it’s easy for him to fold me over and twist my arms behind my back. I hear a soft click as he removes my wristband.

  Three feet away, Lee struggles against Darius with an animal ferocity I haven’t seen in him since Albans; Darius’s grip on his summoning arm is loosening inch by inch as Lee pummels him with his free fist. Then Power speaks.

  “Give him your wristband or I’ll break her arm.”

  I’m not prepared for the sudden pain that shoots up my arm as he twists it, and I don’t hold back the cry. Lee’s eyes fly to my face. Though he’s momentarily gotten the better of Darius, he freezes.

  “Nothing personal, Annie,” Power breathes in my ear. “For the sake of Callipolis, you understand.” He raises his voice. “It’ll be easy, Lee.”