There’s a sound from him. A snort of laughter if I had to guess. Cyar Hajari’s the only one who skims the surface of my discontent, but he’ll never get any further. The truth of my charades would hurt him most. They bunked us together when we first arrived here six years ago, both of us wide-eyed and far from home. He showed up at my door, brown-skinned, black-haired—exactly the opposite of me—and was from Rahmet, the last region to join Savient. A place of lizards and lemon trees. I only knew about it from campaign reports on the wireless radio and from black-and-white newsreels, and since most boys my age were too scared to talk to me, being the General’s son, I expected the same from him.
And I was right.
He hid in his bunk that first night, silent, but I caught him crying over his photographs of home. It was the deep hiccupping sort of grief my father would have cuffed me for, and I’d never seen a boy cry. At least I wasn’t the only one feeling alone.
I knew, then, he’d be my friend.
“Just follow me, would you?” Cyar says now, his plane fading through the layers of smoky cloud.
“If you insist.”
We’re far enough from Academy airspace that no one’s listening to our conversation. Cyar always tries to cover for me up here, and I try to do the same for him on the ground, fixing his math calculations when he isn’t looking. He’s the only person who knows I’m more than my last name, who understands that, but still expects my best in the sky. He believes in me. Which is actually a lot more terrifying than the cold and simple expectation of my father. Expectations can be worked around. Negotiated, if you’re clever. But loyalty—and I know this better than most—is what you die for.
Loyalty is deeper than blood.
We emerge into the brightened world below, motorcars winding down roads, locomotives hissing steam. Cyar quickly finds the tracks and final objective, an old army depot buried beneath a crop of trees. I jot down the time in my flightbook. A perfect twenty-five minutes behind schedule. I can forget being an officer in Top Flight, or even an enlisted pilot, for that matter. Which puts me right on target. I’m aiming to fly in transport. Then I can be stationed at home, and fade from Father’s radar, and then—mountains.
I’m still trying to figure out how to talk Cyar into it, too. His noble soul isn’t built for deception.
“Start studying your maps better,” he instructs. “We’ve only got five weeks left, and I can’t help you on test day.”
“I know.” I fly above him.
“And we’re both making Top Flight. I’m not going to the squadrons without you.”
“I’ll be there,” I say, hating how easy the lie’s become.
“Just have to follow the river south.” Must be checking his map. “Fifty miles back.”
“As long as you know where you’re going.”
“What are you saying, Dakar?”
I make a tight spin to the left, wings dropping, gaining airspeed so fast my stomach leaps to my throat. Cyar tries to keep up with the wild spiral, but it’s too late. I’ve already swung around behind him. He’s in my gunsight.
I grin. “When I’m an ace, I’ll need a wingman who knows how to get me home.”
Cyar groans. “You’re not half-bad when you focus.”
“Be sure to write your girlfriend about this one,” I say. “Tell her how splendid my flick-rolls are and how I nearly shot you down.”
“Sorry, she doesn’t like blonds.”
That’s how it goes, the whole fifty miles back.
Tall lights appear eventually, guiding us to the wide hangars and brick barracks of the Academy. Flags flicker in the dawn breeze, bearing the Safire ensign—a fox between two swords—and runways crisscross along the western side.
Control directs us back onto the circuit and gives clearance to land. Cyar goes first, a perfect show. Wheels kiss the tarmac lightly, then a gradual deceleration. I follow behind and make sure to come down at a ridiculous speed, jolting the plane against the runway with a rookie’s charm. That’ll earn some frowns from the flight instructors.
At rest by the hangars, the propeller spins to a stop and I look at my crumpled map again. It’s a damn mess. Lines here and there and everywhere. No one’s going to believe I found the proper objectives based on this.
I jump down from the wing to begin post-flight checks. Cyar settles his plane, then jogs over. “Let’s see the nightmare,” he says, gesturing for my flightbook.
“I lost it.”
“Right. That will go over—” He freezes, looking past me, eyes wide.
Alarm grazes my pulse.
Let it be Torhan. Let it be only Torhan. Let it be—
I turn. Oh, God. It’s Major Torhan indeed, standing by the airfield fence, arms crossed. And next to him?
The ruler of Savient.
General Dakar.
My father.
They’re discussing something intently, waiting in the silver light, eyes trained on us. No, on me. Who am I kidding? I move to climb into the cockpit. “Well, I’m off to get lost again. Mountains, hopefully.”
Cyar shoves his map and flight plan at me, hidden by the shadow of the plane. “Take them.”
“No.”
“Take them!”
He’s going to make a scene. There’s no other choice but to accept his selfless offer. And just in time, too. Torhan waves, motioning me to them.
I draw a breath and square my shoulders. Here goes. There’s no sense fabricating answers in advance. Father’s stare tangles them up somewhere between the brain and the mouth, and I can’t afford that. Not at this point. If he figures out my mistakes are not from lack of talent, but deliberate self-sabotage, it’ll be the end of me. And he’s very good at figuring out lies. Just ask any man who dared betray him during ten years of revolution—I’m sure they were wishing for better answers as the ropes tightened on their wiggling necks.
But I walk towards Father as if it’s perfectly normal he’s decided to drop by and check on me. Like I have nothing to hide. I haven’t seen him in at least three months. He’s got a war in bordering Karkev to worry about, a land thick with corruption that’s also conveniently a chance to demonstrate his military might to every royal kingdom in the North.
When you’re the youngest son, you tend to end up lower on the priority list.
And that’s fine with me.
Major Torhan wears a formal smile as I approach. I return it. Father offers nothing, dressed in his grey Safire uniform, green eyes examining close enough I feel them hit my bones. If I wasn’t so well practiced with it—his stare—I’d be sweating a hell of a lot more right now.
“A rather rough landing today,” Torhan observes.
“Came in too fast, sir. Tailwind.”
“You completed the course?”
I nod and hand over Cyar’s pages, guilt threatening to swallow me whole. But I don’t let it show. I can’t let it show. Father watches with brow raised, glancing at the runway. Skeptical?
I rub at my neck. Then stop.
Torhan studies the map. “We’ve finished our third quarter reviews, Athan, and I’m pleased to say that in academics you have the highest grade here. Nearly a perfect hundred in every subject.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Mathematics has always come easily to me, since I was a child. For a long time, my mother was the only one who knew about my gift. She said it was our secret. She’d kneel before me, begging me not to tell anyone else the truth. She said he’d take me away.
I knew who He was.
But I didn’t know where he’d take me.
She wept when, of course, he did find out, when he finally saw me as more than a useless third son and lured me into the Academy testing with a promise of airplanes. I was too young to understand their war over me. Now I know, and I’m doing my best to honour her plea, to not let him take me any further from her, into those graves that certainly already have my brothers’ names on them.
The way I have it, they all think I’m quite
clever on the ground, brilliant with numbers and angles, but a lousy pilot in the air.
Tragic.
Torhan clears his throat. “Your flying, however…”
Here it comes. I don’t dare look at Father.
“Your flying needs a bit more work, and that landing today was proof of it. Careless. You won’t make Top Flight with lazy maneuvers.”
“I know, sir, but it’s difficult to remember everything at once.”
“Not a good trait for a fighter pilot.” Torhan frowns. “A shame.”
“Who’s in highest standing for Top Flight?” Father asks, as if he doesn’t already know.
“Cyar Hajari,” Torhan replies.
“And when Hajari makes Top Flight?”
“He’ll be training with the officer corps, of course. We have high hopes for him in the Karkev campaign.”
“Very good.” Father’s gaze returns to me, cool, pointed. “It’s unfortunate you won’t be joining him on the frontlines. He’ll have to find someone else to watch his back.”
I nod and shrink a few inches on the inside.
I hate the very idea of it.
A transport plane flies in low, halting our conversation. It glides onto the tarmac, flaps raised, smoke hissing from the wheels.
“Athan might yet pull it together,” Torhan suggests once the noise fades. “I’ve seen it happen. Some pilots take more time before everything clicks in the air.” Apparently he’s covering for me now. I’d like to be grateful, but it also feels a bit like unasked for pity, which annoys me.
“Then it had better click soon,” Father observes, sharp, and I barely stop my hand from rubbing my neck again.
Torhan gives me a thin smile. “I’d best get back to the office.”
A convenient excuse, and he departs. We stand in silence. I know Father hoped for a better report. He’s been waiting years for one. But he refuses to pull strings for me or my two older brothers. As he likes to say, we’re not princes, we’re entitled to nothing, and therefore we can very easily lose it all if we don’t play our cards right. Which I’ve been doing an excellent job at.
Father adjusts his cap to block the rising sun, the silver fox emblem on it catching light. “You have leave the rest of the week to join us in Valon,” he says. “We’re launching the Impressive for her first sea trial this afternoon, to coincide with the Victory Week celebrations.”
“You want me there, sir?”
“Your mother requested it.”
He stresses “mother” to be sure it wounds, but it isn’t necessary. Of course he doesn’t want me there. He probably thinks I should stay here and practice hard until my piloting skills magically click.
He meets my eye, his steel gaze slightly shadowed by the peak of his cap, and I see the detachment there. It’s louder than any spoken word. It holds the weight of continual disappointment, perhaps an edge of bitterness, cutting me raw in a clean, precise line. I wait for him to say more—what, I don’t know—but I wait. There’s always something like desperation when I’m standing a foot from him. Like maybe he’ll finally say the thing I need to hear and life will make sense. Like maybe I’ll finally feel like his son.
Like maybe he’ll just pull out a gun and shoot me and get it over with.
But all he says is, “The flight leaves at nine. Bring Hajari if you’d like.”
Another cruel reminder that I only have my best friend until the day we graduate, and unless things change soon, and drastically, it will be goodbye to the one person in the world who’s my true ally.
And Father knows it.
With a curt nod, he turns and strides for the office building beyond.
I walk back for the round hangar, where early morning mechanics are muttering to each other, tools striking metal and ringing off walls, the air smelling like leftover kerosene from night lamps. Cyar waits patiently, pretending not to notice whatever’s taken place outside. He’s good at that.
I shed my gear—gloves, boots, charcoal-toned flight suit—and place them inside my locker, next to my notebooks about strategy and tactics, beside pencil sketches of birds and airplanes and mountain huts I’d like to construct by hand someday. And in the middle of it, taped to the door, a photograph of me and my two older brothers balancing on a rock by the sea—young and scrawny and somehow smiling all at once. Father gave it to me when he left me here. “Nothing’s gained without sacrifice” it says on the back.
It’s what he said to us during the teeth-rattling nights spent hiding from shells. What he said to us when our encampments gave way to mud like soup in the summer, flies crawling into your nose and into your mouth while you slept. It’s what he said to his men before they came back split apart and soaked with blood, skin flayed like fish, bones scattered and buried in graves from one end of Savient to the other.
For a long time, I convinced myself this picture was proof of his love. Some bit of regret when he realized he was leaving his eleven-year-old son alone, five hundred miles away from home in a grey-walled dormitory room with nothing warm or familiar. I wanted to believe he’d miss me. I wanted to believe it meant something else.
But now I’m seventeen and I know it’s only ever meant exactly what it says.
Nothing’s gained without sacrifice.
That’s it. That’s all it is, and worse than that, I’m beginning to suspect it’s the goddamn truth.
I slam the door shut with a fist.
2
AURELIA ISENDARE
Etania
It’s a day for escape, and I’m determined.
My mare, Ivory, is my sole friend in the early morning plot, galloping us hard through royal Northern forest without a flicker of protest. Most horses might balk to be alone, but I’m certain she enjoys our madcap rides as much as I do. She’s all curious energy and pricked ears as we veer off onto a forgotten path, her fur warm beneath me since I didn’t bother with a saddle. Fallen trees from winter winds litter the trail, their stark branches broken and skeletal, much larger than I should be jumping without proper tack. But I count my strides—one, two, three!—and Ivory, the most darling mare in all the world, forgives when I get it a hair wrong, sailing us over with perfect ease. I wish the jumps were even higher. I’m wild for a thrill, and my heart matches Ivory’s eager hoofbeats, sweat soon sticking beneath my braided hair.
Once far enough, I half-halt on the reins and Ivory shifts to an easy trot. A clearing opens ahead, nestled at the foot of the brown peaks, the field thick with winter-yellowed grass trampled by snow and rain, insects flitting between dry stalks of thistle. I dismount and tie Ivory to the narrow trunk of a young chestnut tree.
There.
We’re wonderfully alone, just two little specks beneath the towering cliffs.
I’m sure the poor stable boy has gone and paced himself into a grave by now. He’s mostly freckles and bits of hay, steady with the horses yet skittish with me, and I talked him into my escape. He knows my mother, his Queen, doesn’t much like me adventuring out here alone—riding bareback, no less. And I might have promised her I’d keep to the short, circular trails close to the palace. I promised, yes, but today’s a day for broken promises since it’s sunny and lovely and also the anniversary of my father’s death.
I need to be out in the woods with him.
Setting down my leather bag, I sit on a wide rock and retrieve my paints and paper. The cold seeps through my pale breeches as I mix swirls of yellow and brown together on my palette, then set to work creating the scene before me. A few drops of red are for the new buds gathering in the branches above. Father never liked to paint things as they were, always adding colours where there were none, and today I’ll do the same. For him.
In my mother’s homeland, Resya, the dead are not to be mourned. It dishonours their memory and disrupts their sleep, and so tonight she’ll hold a party instead to celebrate a colonel in our air force, something to pretend today’s any other day, but how can I do the same? Father loved her with a bright, burning
devotion. He loved her at first glance even though he shouldn’t have—a raven-haired noble lady visiting his court, from a kingdom across the sea. Though Resya might be ruled by a king with Northern blood, its people are perched on the edge of violent revolt, the last royal stronghold in the stormy South. She wasn’t made for these wet forests of Etania. She was born of a windswept, desert sky, in love with sun.
And yet he adored her.
And he adored me the same, bringing me into the woods, to the mountains, teaching me to believe in this small and simple kingdom that belongs to us. He said my dark eyes and sandy skin matched the colours of the swirling autumn river. He taught me to read, to paint, to listen to the birds, and I cling to those precious memories of him even as they slip from my fingers with every year that passes.
Ten years gone feels like a lifetime.
Above me, swallows flutter in branches of black pine sheltering the meadow, an aeroplane spinning between thin clouds. A lone fawn slips through the brush, and I keep silent, adding her to my scene.
She waits patiently. No fear, no hurry, nibbling at dry grass.
Father would have loved this place. He’d be here now, and I’m certain he is, made of stars and light and whatever else the soul becomes in the infinite dark.
The fawn twitches, raising her slender head. She looks right at me, and I hold my paintbrush still, waiting.
The little ears swivel.
From the tops of the pine, a dozen birds stir to flight. In the far distance, a faint yelp.
Something unwelcome leaks into our peaceful place, tension rising in Ivory, her head high and still, and I see it in the fawn, who’s now entirely uncertain, looking between the woods and me. And since I know what’s coming, I have to break our moment of trust.
I leap up, splattering paint, ruining everything, and run towards the fawn with arms flailing like a wild turkey.
It bolts from the clearing—from me—just as a crack shatters the silence.
Ivory trembles on her lead, and a dog yelps again, louder now. Voices call back and forth. I sit down on the rock, feeling miserably evil for chasing the fawn. But I saw Uncle Tanek’s hunting dog chew on a baby deer once. I never want to see it again.
Dark of the West (Glass Alliance) Page 2