Fireborne

by Rosaria Munda

  A victor’s laurel on my forehead, highland wildflowers in my arms, the words fill me with pride.

  The girl’s eyes flash in surprise.

  “Extraordinary,” she says. “And what about the other rider, the other talented one. What is his name?”

  The other talented one. I don’t need to ask whom she means, though I feel it would be inappropriate not to. “On the white aurelian?”

  The traditional description of Pallor’s color mutation, silver where most aurelians are shades of amber and gold.

  “Yes.”

  “Lee. Lee sur Pallor.”

  “Lee,” the girl repeats thoughtfully. “Where is he from?”

  She is studying me intently. My pulse accelerates, and it is suddenly difficult to provide the needed answer.

  “Cheapside,” I tell her. “A slum orphan.”

  The Guardians’ neighborhoods of origin is publicly available information. I cannot shake the impression, as I say it, that I am telling this girl something she already knows; that what she’s really interested in is my face as I say it. But that makes no sense.

  She must be from Damos. That’s why she’s asking these questions any Callipolan would know. Although she is pale, almost as pale as a Callipolan highlander . . .

  “Indeed?” the girl says, her eyes still traveling my face. “Well. Congratulations again, Antigone.”

  And then she turns and walks away, pulling her hood over her head as she does. Below the hem of her cloak I can make out riding boots.

  But then I look at the boots more closely. I take in the leather reinforced to resist heat, shafts for coolant, slits for bootknives, and slots for straps to tie in to stirrups . . .

  Those aren’t just riding boots. They’re dragonriding boots.

  I am still puzzling over her footwear as I reenter the Palace and return to the Guardians’ Cloister, whose disjointed collection of repurposed servants’ quarters and former dragonlords’ studies surround a small central courtyard in a wing of the Outer Palace. This afternoon, the Cloister is deserted. The rest of the Guardians are out in the city with their friends and families, celebrating.

  Except, of course, Lee.

  “There you are,” he says.

  He’s washed, put on his ground uniform, and taken off his laurel. But he’s still flushed with triumph, his face lit by a half smile that makes him seem younger, less guarded, less tired. The face of someone who’s glimpsed the future and found it bright.

  “I was just about to check on Duck in the infirmary,” he says, “want to come?”

  Duck. How could I have forgotten? “Yes. Let me change first.”

  In the empty girls’ dorm I pause before entering the washroom. Apart from the Guardians’ banner, an entwined circlet of silver and gold, hanging above the doorway, the room is austere. But the Guardians’ proscription from possessions doesn’t prevent us from decorating our spaces in small ways. Crissa covers the wall of her desk with her drawings and bits of shells and sea glass from her hometown on the coast; some of the others tack up assignments they’re trying to memorize or bits of their favorite Dragontongue poetry.

  I go to my bare desk and place the wildflowers in my drinking glass. Then I remove the laurel from my brow and hook it on the wall.

  I pull the ministry’s letter from my pocket and read it again.

  The ministry would like to remind Antigone sur Aela of the intensely public nature of the obligations of riders of the Fourth Order . . .

  Maybe I read it wrong from the start.

  Maybe it’s a challenge.

  And even if it’s not, I’m going to tell myself it is.

  Let everything that intimidates me about the Fourth Order be another test, another training hurdle, another set of skills to master. Even if I don’t make Firstrider, even if I’m never chosen for Protector—I’ll serve the state better by bettering myself. One step at a time.

  I can make history one step at a time.

  I tack the ministry’s note to my wall, too.

  3

  FIRST SIGHTING

  He and the girl were in an unofficial alliance. He didn’t think of it as friendship, because it mostly consisted of sitting near her at meals, in the yard, in class, and—at first—not talking. After the episode with the knife, he’d gained a reputation for being deranged and dangerous, and that reputation was useful. People left him alone, and when he was in her vicinity, they left the girl alone, too.

  He didn’t really consider why he was doing this, nor did he realize that it helped him. She was a foothold out of the months of sleepwalking. Their silence turned into conversations. Sometimes she would repeat what he said, slightly differently, as if his pronunciation bothered her. At first, he was terrified that she’d realized what the accent meant. That he was someone other people wanted dead.

  But she never seemed suspicious. Not even when he imitated her corrections, repeating them under his breath until he could say them right. When teachers called on him in class, he began to answer. The girl remained silent.

  “You can read Callish pretty well, right?” he finally asked.

  They were in the schoolyard. He handed her what he had learned, recently, was called a newspaper. It was an invention of the new regime.

  “Read this to me.”

  By then he’d learned a few things about the girl: that she taught herself to read without a teacher, because no one in her village had been literate. And that she came from the Far Highlands, from a village that had been in his father’s land holdings. He felt good about this. It justified his looking after her, because she belonged to him.

  The girl took the newspaper and said, “Which part?”

  He could think of no way to request news about the Three Families that wouldn’t seem suspicious, and instead he just said: “Everything.”

  So the girl read to him. That newspaper, and others, too, as he found them. It was a time of great change on their island, and they couldn’t help being swept up in what they read. The boy listened raptly to all news of the First Protector, the man who had saved him. And he couldn’t help being infected by how excited the girl was about it all, even the things neither of them fully understood.

  The most important event that they struggled to understand was a referendum that Atreus’s post-revolutionary People’s Assembly held concerning thirty-two dragon eggs that had survived the Red Month. Should the eggs be destroyed? Should Callipolis do as neighboring Damos had done centuries before, and become dragonless and democratic?

  Or, if their dragons were hatched, and Callipolis remained an airborne nation, how would they decide which children would be offered to the dragon hatchlings for their Choosing?

  The First Protector proposed a merit-based dragonrider selection process. Delegates from the coast supported this, arguing that air power was necessary to the island’s military defense. But delegates from the inner countryside and the city’s poorer districts argued that dragons had only ever been used to oppress and control. Still others argued that this third way would become something new, unknown since the beginning of dragonriding on the Medean: Guardians would be the dawn of a new era, of dragons in the service of justice.

  The boy and girl shuttled back and forth through these arguments, debating them in echoes of what they read. The girl tended to oppose keeping dragons; the boy tended to favor them. But each was not without their wavering moments.

  “I suppose it would be different, if the people riding dragons were good,” the girl allowed.

  The boy’s concern, meanwhile, was one he didn’t confide: Of course the dragons ought to be kept, he thought—but what would it mean, to have them ridden by commoners? The idea unsettled him deeply.

  Atreus’s proposal passed, narrowly. The Guardian program became something their teachers talked about in class, as well as something they read of in newspap
ers.

  Its purpose served, Atreus dissolved the People’s Assembly. He did not call it again.

  Instead, the newspapers began to tell of a test that would be administered to all, giving the lowest a chance to rise, the highest to prove their worth, and the children of all an opportunity to test into the dragons’ Choosing ceremony that had, historically, been reserved for the sons of the Three Families alone.

  Finally, the article the boy had been hoping for came. It said that not all members of the Three Families had been accounted for during the Red Month. Some of the dragonborn were missing. The article suggested that they had survived. That, their identities hidden, they had escaped to New Pythos and been given refuge. Though the boy’s name was not on the list of missing dragonborn, others he remembered were.

  The boy told the girl: “I have to leave.”

  “The basement?”

  “The orphanage.”

  The girl looked up at him. They were doing dishes over a basin of nearly frozen water, their fingers raw and shaking from cold. The girl had by now started doing her chores alongside him. She was teaching him how to work more efficiently, so he would be punished less often.

  “Don’t bother washing the backs of those plates, they’re not the dirty part. But why would you want to leave the orphanage? There’s food here.”

  “Yeah, but everyone here are just peasants.”

  The girl’s brow furrowed. The boy turned his plate over and began to scrub its other side. He hesitated, and then confided what the news article had given him confidence to finally share with her: “The point is, I’ve got people who’re probably waiting for me.”

  “In the city?”

  “No. Somewhere else. Another island.”

  “Can I come with you?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Maybe you could be my maidservant or something.”

  “I don’t know how to be a maidservant.”

  The boy considered: He didn’t know how to be a maid-servant either.

  “I think they just wash things,” he said. “You’re really good at that. Want to plan the trip with me?”

  It was winter, so they agreed that they mustn’t go now. Spring maybe, or summer. And then there was the question of provisions and a backpack and what you put in the backpack. Sometimes they wrote lists of things they’d need, which was exciting. Sometimes they actually acquired items on the list, which was even better. They began to build a stockpile in an unused closet on the third floor, and sometimes they would go there and make inventories, or just sit next to the pile of goods and read newspapers together.

  LEE

  It’s a relief to resume our usual routine after the weekend of the tournament. An early breakfast in the Cloister, bread and cheese tucked in my satchel for lunch later, then Cor and I head out of the Palace for a rounds session down in the Manufacturing District. Cor nods at the fourth pair of silver dragon’s wings, pinned on the shoulder of our uniforms, signifying rank of the Fourth Order.

  “Dapper, aren’t they?”

  “Yeah, I say we keep them.”

  Cor lets out a bark of laughter. I wonder if he, like me, is strategically avoiding the thought that in a month we’ll be back in the arena, facing each other.

  Early in the morning, this late in spring, the city is in full form. We leave the Palace through the gardens, opened to the public since the Revolution and overlooked by Pytho’s Keep and the Janiculum Hill, the patrician neighborhood on the Palace side of the river. Crossing the bridge over the Fer, Cor takes us along his favorite routes through his native Highmarket, quieter than the main thoroughfares where bustling shopkeepers hawk their wares to wealthier customers from across the river. But even on the quiet streets, Guardian uniforms attract attention. This soon after the public tournament, a few people actually point. A fruitmonger stops us to press cut melon into Cor’s hands, bobbing his head in a half bow. It’s an urban courtesy left over from Aurelian rule over the city, and we’ve been taught to ignore it.

  “For the two Guardians as a thank-you for their service to the city . . .”

  Cor thanks him for the melon, grinning lopsidedly. Outside the Palace, in his home neighborhood, the hard Highmarket vowels return to Cor’s speech. He begins to gnaw his slice as we continue walking.

  “We’re not supposed to accept that kind of thing,” I tell him.

  “Do you want your half or not? I’m happy to eat it if you’re too noble.”

  I wrest my melon from him.

  Thanks to regular rounds with the Ministry of Propaganda, I’m primed to notice the posters changing as we pass through the city: In Highmarket, with its high concentration of skilled laborers, the posters tacked on walls laud the virtues of citizens who’ve tested Bronze: BRONZE IS BORNE OF STRENGTH AND SKILL. But as we pass into the poorer neighborhoods, Southside and the Manufacturing District, where unskilled laborers live and work, the posters change. IRON IS THE STRENGTH OF THE CITY, they read, and in addition to praising the virtues of Iron class, they praise the metals test itself and the wisdom of Atreus for instituting it. ANYONE CAN BECOME GOLD, these posters read. SCHOOL FOR EVERYONE MAKES OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL.

  “Laying it on a little thick, don’t you think?” Cor mutters.

  “The posters aren’t wrong,” I point out.

  I saw enough, during my years at Albans Orphanage, to mark the changes that have been made in the poorer neighborhoods over the years since the Revolution. New housing has been erected, roads are now cobbled, schools have been built in neighborhoods where literacy had been unheard of. For the most part, the people we pass seem well-fed—if a little poorly dressed—and they walk with the purposeful stride of the employed. The posters might be heavy-handed, but they’re heavy-handed about changes that are real.

  Cor tsks. “All the same,” he says, “you’ll notice that they don’t bother putting up this stuff in Scholars Row or the Janiculum.”

  Scholars Row is the other Gold-heavy neighborhood besides the Janiculum. It contains the Lyceum—Atreus’s university for the Gold students—as well as the War College for the Silvers. When the Guardians aren’t on rounds sessions as a part of our government training, we split our classes between the two academies in Scholars Row. Cor’s never stopped noticing its differences from the poorer neighborhoods, including the one he’s from; my answer, that his home neighborhood is still better off than it used to be, has never been enough for him.

  I stop at the door of a hulking warehouse off a dusty, windowless street, its sign faded over an oversize door. “This is it.”

  Fullerton’s is one of the city’s most successful new textile houses, on our rounds schedule to tour today before class. Rounds have a way of filling Cor’s and my daylight hours where homework would best be done, leaving classes as something we’re perpetually treading water to keep up with, but that’s not the kind of thing you complain about. Heavy rounds are a sign of favor; and anyway, they’re the real education. They’re the part of the day you see what the city actually does, instead of hearing about it.

  The Fullerton foreman is carefully dressed, closely shaven, and begins to sweat through his outer jacket as he gives us his tour. Afterward, we shadow him as he goes about his morning routine among the workers tending looms, bent over dyeing vats, filling stockrooms with shipments bound for Damos and Bassilea. Then Cor goes into his office to occupy him with additional questions while I pull aside one of the class-iron workers. In a lowered voice, I double-check the numbers the foreman gave us: wages, hours, breaks, days off. It’s a system Cor and I devised years ago after we began to notice discrepancies. This is not, technically, part of our obligations on rounds, but it’s become our common practice.

  The girl I’ve pulled aside twists her iron wristband the whole time I talk with her, stammering her responses, eyes not traveling higher than the Guardian circlet emblazoned on the breast of my uniform, until I ask
her where she’s from. She gives me the answer I can already hear in her accent: Cheapside. I tell her I grew up there; she finally meets my eyes to answer, “I know.” And then I’m able to get more out of her. How she’s treated; if she has any complaints. She’s close to my age, but the accompanying observations—that she’s full-figured, pretty, wisps of brown hair escaping her scarf—I push away with discomfort. Power and Darius might enjoy the high of flirting with awestruck class-irons, but their vulnerability makes me want to do anything but. I pretend I haven’t noticed the flush growing along her neck as we speak.

  “Overall, how do you find your work?”

  She seems surprised by the question. “It’s honest, and I’m glad I’ve got it.”

  Sometimes, with class-irons, you can feel the resentment burning because of their test result, but most Cheapsiders are grateful for Atreus’s programs. The Manufacturing District, the public works programs, the quarries and the mines all provide wages—albeit low ones—for those who previously struggled to find work at all.

  Afterward, as Cor and I head back through the dusty streets to Scholars Row for class, we compare the notes from the worker with those of the foreman.

  “Her numbers matched his.”

  “Did she report anything?” Cor asks.

  “Nothing unusual. Her feet hurt, her back hurts. But overall, she’s fine.”

  Back on Scholars Row, we enter the gate of the porter’s lodge to the Lyceum. Coming from the barren, oversize proportions of the Manufacturing District, full of grim-faced workers hurrying down dusty streets, the serene beauty of the Lyceum is disorienting, with its intricate stone courtyards and carefully tended greens full of laughing, carefree scholars. Gold students are encouraged to pursue government work after finishing their schooling, but not obligated. Many go on to careers in academia, the arts, in trade. Cor sees a few other Guardians lounging under an oak and goes to join them; I head inside. We’ve got a spare half hour, enough time for me to finish up my reading for Diplomacy in the empty classroom before it starts.