Fireborne

by Rosaria Munda

  A long, slow roast. Power’s going to draw this out.

  The two of them back out of range while Duck opens the coolant shafts on the leg of his flamesuit, a temporary pain reliever that will delay his reaction to the burn. Then they reset and advance again. By now, Duck has unmistakably spilled over; Certa is twitching at odd moments, her movements uncoordinated. Whatever emotions Duck is experiencing are now reverberating, dragon-size, between the two of them. Power scores his second penalty hit barely a minute later, this time across Duck’s arm and side. Again, avoiding a kill shot even though he had the opening; again, full heat.

  I’m beginning to feel sick to my stomach.

  Stormscourge fire. Nothing burns so bad.

  I can feel memories rising like a coming storm. Predictable. I should have seen it coming, the one way this morning could get harder. Not this, not now, of all times—

  But once it starts happening, it always keeps happening. And so I clutch the rail and will the world around me to stay in focus.

  I can feel Lee’s eyes, which should be on the match, on me instead.

  Behind us, Cor says, “Master Goran, call a foul.”

  “It’s not a foul to make a kill shot and miss, Cor.”

  Cor rounds on our drillmaster. His voice is shaking. “Power is playing with his prey before he eats it.”

  Goran’s tension with the three squadron leaders has never exactly been a secret, though none of them has ever acknowledged it: Atreus, not Goran, appointed three lowborn riders, one of them female, to leadership positions within the corps two years ago.

  “Power has done nothing illegal,” Goran says.

  Cor makes a choking sound. He turns from Goran. Crissa lays a hand on his arm.

  “I’m going to fetch the medic,” she says. “Why don’t you come with me?”

  He shrugs her off. “No.”

  I’m pretty sure my face is showing nothing, betraying nothing, but all the same Lee has stepped closer to me so our sides are touching and places his hand beside mine on the rail. A silent invitation, where no one will see it but me. For a second, I fight the urge. But the world is going in and out; the memories are closing in; the thought of Duck up there, hurting, with no way out, threatens to overwhelm. I give in. Seizing Lee’s hand and holding, focusing on his grip. I’m pretty sure my nails are digging into his skin, but he doesn’t pull away, only returns the pressure. I don’t look at him.

  Overhead, Duck seems to have abandoned—or perhaps forgotten—his original strategy of keeping distance. He and Power are circling each other, Duck’s skyfish rippling with their shared emotions. Within seconds, Power takes his third and final shot. Though it need only be a partial hit to finish the match, he makes it a kill shot anyway. Duck is engulfed in thick black smoke. When it clears, his silhouette is stiff on his dragon. They descend slowly behind Power and Eater to the Eyrie. Power dismounts. He’s smiling.

  “Hope he’s all right,” he says. “That came out a bit more forcefully than I intended—”

  Cor launches for him with a wordless cry. Lee’s hand tears free of mine to help hold him back.

  Goran and the medic cut the straps tying Duck’s boots to his stirrups and ease him from Certa’s back. Her gaze is vacant: the expression of a dragon whose rider is unconscious. I take in the sight of Duck’s limp figure, the smell of smoke, and feel the panic roll over me in cold waves.

  Nothing burns like stormscourge fire.

  Lee steps forward and then, when he realizes I am moving with him, turns and catches me across the waist, holding me back. He turns me toward him, seeking my eyes.

  “Annie.”

  “I have to—”

  I’m straining to get past him, unable to speak, barely able to see Duck for what I can no longer fight remembering. The memories of stormscourge fire engulfing my whole world while I watched and could do nothing.

  Then Lee’s blazing eyes find mine. The world stills. Everything else falls away.

  “I’ll take care of him. You need to go.”

  At first I don’t understand. And then it comes rushing back: my match. I still have a match.

  A match that I’m not supposed to win. A match that no one in my village came to see. A match that, if I win, will thrust me into the kind of spotlight that makes me ill to imagine.

  The ministry would like to remind Antigone sur Aela of the intensely public nature—

  —vows to serve the state—

  I look from Cor, as Crissa strains to hold him back, to Duck, unconscious as the medic removes his armor; to Power, watching with a satisfied smile. Then I look to the cave mouth, where Darius waits for me, wrist lifted to his mouth to summon his stormscourge as his family and friends watch from the Gold stands.

  And then all those things fade away, and all that is left is a single thought:

  Like hell am I throwing this match.

  I look up at Lee and nod. Whatever he’s searching my eyes for, he seems to find. His hands drop from my shoulders and I turn from him to walk toward the cave mouth.

  “Annie,” says a different voice.

  I stop again. Goran’s hand has taken my shoulder. I look back at him.

  “Remember what the ministry wrote you about,” Goran says.

  He towers over me, broad-shouldered in his uniform, the figure that for years I’ve associated with the sour taste of my own inadequacy. For a moment I feel a clarity that’s piercing and bright. The kind I usually only feel with Aela, except this time, I find it alone. Crystalized within it is an anger I had forgotten I possessed.

  I turn my back on him without a word.

  LEE

  There is a moment when it happens, usually somewhere between summoning and launch, where Annie transforms from the person she is on the ground to the one she becomes in the air. Where the hesitation vanishes, the awkwardness falls away, and suddenly she’s free. Unleashed.

  As many times as I’ve seen it happen, today I am struck by it as if it were the first time. As she and Darius rise into the air to take their positions, I can practically feel the surge of energy rising.

  Duck is stirring, groaning; the coolant that Master Welse applies is beginning to do its work. Keeping my eyes on Annie’s copper-toned aurelian, I rise from their sides to go and stand beside Goran.

  “Looks like it really did the trick,” I tell him.

  His eyes remained fixed on the dragons above us, and he responds with irritation.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Whatever you just said to her.”

  The bell rings. Darius and his iron-gray stormscourge charge forward, while Annie and Aela turn upward and begin to rise.

  Racing the pull of gravity, charging full speed into the cloudless sky. So fast, so sure, so beautiful that the hair on the back of my neck stands on end.

  The others might not see the difference, but I do. Annie flies like something out of the old order. She always has. The instincts that were trained, for me, by a childhood of watching dragons with their riders are, for her, instincts she was simply born with. After all, the riders of the new regime have no role models of mature riders. We do not have the luxury of being trained by our dragonriding fathers, whose own training came from their fathers before them.

  Whatever guidance my father could have given me died with him. But Annie has never needed guidance at all.

  Darius realizes what’s happening a split second later and urges his stormscourge up after her, to regain the vertical distance, but she’s already taken the lead, and in any case Aela is faster and lighter than Myra.

  There are whistles of delight around us as the other riders realize what Annie’s doing. Height is always an advantage; gravity is a weapon. But the most obvious way to use it—descending from on high with double the speed of your opponent—is the kind of maneuver very few riders have the skill to pull off.
I feel a smile breaking my face. Goran is silent, his brows scrunched up as he stares upward into the sun.

  The gap widens as they rise; slowly, as they become mere points of darkness against the sky, each begins to slow. And then Annie, a mere pinprick above us, stalls.

  For a moment everything is still.

  She dives.

  Darius, hovering below her, wavers and stalls, preparing for her attack. There are screams around us: from the other riders, from the stands. Aela’s wings are beating at full force, maximizing her speed in free fall; she is hurtling toward Darius. And then when they are in range, it happens in a blurring instant: Darius fires, she swerves, it misses, and she fires into an opening that only she can see. And then she’s hurtling past him, toward the Eyrie, and Darius is following behind. The front of his armor is blackened with a kill shot.

  Annie won her match in a little under two minutes.

  The bell is ringing as Aela skids and clatters onto the Eyrie edge. Annie slices the straps fixing her boots in their stirrups and leaps off. She takes off her helmet: her red-tinged hair, the same color as Aela’s scales, glints in the sunlight, streaked and flattened with sweat. Her expression is defiant, almost angry. But then at the sound of the screaming and cheering it changes: Slowly, haltingly, as she makes sense of it, she begins to smile.

  Darius dismounts laboriously. Annie goes to him and offers her hand. She seems surprised when he shakes it.

  Antigone sur Aela, the final member of the Fourth Order, the announcer tells the crowd.

  I have moved toward her, pulled by the magnetism of her beaming smile; as I congratulate her and our eyes meet, I see her smile change and briefly soften. As if she recognizes, in a fleeting moment, the same thing I do: The tournaments aren’t over; the bracket is narrowing; she and I are, after today’s results, set on an increasingly likely collision course.

  But that’s still a long way off and possibly not a future at all. The way the penalties from today add up, the next tournament, in a month, will place me against Cor; Annie will face Power. And then still one more tournament to determine Firstrider.

  Together, the four of us mount the stairs for the concluding ceremony. Duck has been taken to the Palace infirmary; Cor is reasonably calmed, but nevertheless, I take care to walk between him and Power. Annie’s breath is still heaving, the sweat on her face undried.

  It’s not until we enter the Palace Box that I feel the familiarity of it roll over me in a wave I’d forgotten to steel myself against.

  I have memories of this place.

  Atreus is seated on the dais that once held the seats of the three triarchs who ruled together before the Revolution. Arcturus Aurelian, Kit Skyfish, and my uncle, Crethon Stormscourge. Now there’s only the First Protector. Around him—in the seats that were once reserved for the most powerful members of the dragonborn families—now sit the members of his council and other officials of the new regime. The jewels and sumptuous gowns that I remember have been replaced by the simple uniforms of government functionaries. Instead of the triarchy’s infinite loop of the circling dragons of the Three Families, the red banners rippling above us bear the Revolution’s dragon, wings spread, breathing the four circlets of fire representing the four classes of the new regime.

  There’s an aisle down the length of the box, from the stairs we’ve mounted to the dais where Atreus waits. The last time I was in this place, I watched my father walk down it.

  Beside me, Annie inhales the faintest breath. She looks from me to the faces of the adults turned toward us—the same ones who revealed themselves, this morning, to doubt her fitness for this moment. Annie’s letter was unsigned, but the Minister of Propaganda, Miranda Hane, is standing in this audience, three feet away from Atreus, and her eyes are on Annie.

  There’s no time to exchange more than a glance, so all I can do is give Annie a smile and a nod forward as we begin our walk down the aisle. Annie’s steps are paced with mine; her gaze, like mine, set straight ahead. I can practically hear her holding her breath as she imitates me.

  This is how you do it. This is how you own a victory.

  My father’s rugged smile, his tired but triumphant gait, his sparking eye catching his older brother’s with a muted shrug as he knelt to accept his laurel, return to me as I walk. The last tournament I saw him in, I was seven years old. A melee against the Aurelians, a bit of spring entertainment that was their calm before the storm in a year of growing unrest. Unrest that would become a revolution.

  Now, ten years later, I bend a knee before the man who betrayed my father and my people. He places the laurel of the Fourth Order on my brow. Beside me, Annie takes a knee to accept her own laurel in turn.

  In a concluding speech, Atreus refers to the tournaments ahead that will move us one step closer to the title of Firstrider of Callipolis, and after that, to the naming of Atreus’s successor. One step closer to solidifying the institutions of a revolutionary regime that replaces the one held by my family for centuries.

  The revolutionary regime that struggles to undo their centuries’ worth of wrongs.

  Annie stands beside me, her expression frozen, her breathing light and rapid, as these words wash over us. I marvel, with the part of my mind not lost in memories of another life, at the fact that this girl, who can stare down a dragon twice Aela’s size, can be stricken by the sight of a few dozen functionaries’ scrutinizing faces.

  My father’s voice returns to me from another lifetime: It will come to you naturally, Leo. We were born to rule.

  No. That world is gone now, and I’m done with it.

  And then, with a surging sorrow that I thought I had outgrown: Forgive me, Father.

  ANNIE

  Rock is waiting for me at the foot of the stairs, blocking the exit with his great frame, and he’s beaming. It is not an expression I’d expect from someone who just lost his match.

  “They’re here,” he says.

  His highland accent has thickened inexplicably.

  My stomach flips. “Who?”

  “That family. From your village. Got here just before your match started; they’re sitting next to my folks. You didn’t tell me you had highlanders coming!”

  He seizes my arm, and I follow him into the Bronze section, pushing through the crowds of people who part with excited congratulations as we pass. I register, only in afterthought, that the congratulations are directed at me.

  And then I see them. A burly, graying man, a stout woman with her hair wrapped under a faded scarf, and a line of children beside them who share their parents’ sunburned faces and yellow hair. They’re older and taller, and also fatter—their bodies full and well-fed, no more jutting bones or too-taut skin.

  “Annie,” Mr. Macky croaks, with the highland accent that still brings me warmth, though it faded from my own speech long ago.

  Mrs. Macky says, “Annie, darling, you did wonderfully. We’re so proud.”

  “Thank you,” I start to say.

  But the words don’t get all the way out, because I’ve choked on them.

  And then Mr. Macky, whom I haven’t seen since I was six, who last knew me as a freshly orphaned child sleepless from nightmares of dragonfire, puts his arms around me the same way he did ten years ago, and says, “That I lived to see the day when Silas’s daughter rode a dragon. We’ve never been prouder of anything, Annie.”

  It’s not a long reunion, but every minute of it feels like water on parched earth. They tell me how Holbin has changed since last I saw it—the houses rebuilt, new herds raised, wool sold to the city textile houses as a part of Atreus’s push to grow trade and alleviate Callipolis’s dependence on subsistence farming. At first, the Holbiners had been nervous of these innovations. But now, well-fed even in winter, their memories of the old famines long faded and their children attending sporadic schooling down in Thornham, Holbin has more to hope for and little left
to fear. “Except dragons,” Macky jokes, and then hastens to add: “But that’s just people being backward. They’ll see they’ve nothing to fear with you riding one, Annie. One day.”

  The Mackys’ oldest son, whose letter reached me a week ago, hands me a bouquet of wildflowers that smell like home. When I compliment his writing—a childish script, poorly spelled and not punctuated at all, but for all that something I beheld as a miracle—he blushes. I remember him as a toddler; he’s thirteen now.

  Too soon, it’s time to bid them farewell. They mean to drive back today alongside Rock’s family, who offer to have them stay the night with them in their home in the Near Highlands at Thornham, on their way back to Holbin.

  I weave toward the Palace entrance through a lingering crowd whose congratulations I receive with dazed gratitude in passing. Thumped on the shoulder, bronze and iron wristbands flashing on wrists as craftsmen and day laborers beam at me and usher me through their midst, calling out in the hard vowels of the urban accents. I’m shorter than most of them by a head.

  “It’s the highland rider! Antigone sur Aela!”

  “How’s that for a win!”

  “Told you, Geoff, told you the girl riders could hold their own . . .”

  “You flew very well.”

  I stop at the sound of the last voice. Low and toned with an accent that sounds faintly foreign, cutting through the murmur of the crowd easily. A young woman’s voice. When I turn to look, I see that she’s barely older than me, perhaps Crissa’s age. Long, dark hair frames a narrow face and piercing gray eyes above a dark, full-length cloak.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “You are Antigone?”

  “Yes.”

  “A worthy name. Uncommon. Are you from a patrician family?”

  I shake my head, surprised that she doesn’t know. “Holbin,” I say. “The highlands.”