Fireborne

by Rosaria Munda

  I’m already walking into the lecture hall before I realize I’ve been hearing someone speaking inside it. Too late, I stop. A single person is in the room before me: Annie. Sitting in her usual seat midway up the hall. She’s staring at me, frozen. The room is silent now.

  Annie was projecting, I realize. Talking as if she were answering a question, to the empty room. Her voice was raised louder than I’ve ever heard it in class. Practicing.

  Good.

  She’s beet red. I back out of the room.

  “I’ll see you in a bit,” I say.

  “No—you can—”

  “I’ll finish my reading in the library.”

  A half hour later, I return to the lecture hall, where I take my seat beside Cor and Crissa, toward the front. Duck, stiff with bandages and still only allowed out of the infirmary for class, has taken his usual seat beside Annie in the back corner. The rest of the class is filing in, a combination of Guardians and Lyceum students, along with the occasional adult class-gold who’s dropped by for the intellectual exercise. Gold students seated in the row below us twist around to congratulate me and Cor for our performances in the tournament while Crissa looks on, smirking. With anyone but Crissa, being congratulated next to the person you bested in a match would be uncomfortable, but Crissa’s ability to laugh things off is legendary. After we’re done fielding compliments from Gold girls, she leans over.

  “Enjoying yourselves?”

  “We are doing our civic duty,” Cor says.

  We all rise as Professor Perkins enters; when we’ve resumed our seats, he asks for a volunteer to summarize our reading assignment. Fresh off finishing it in the Lyceum library, I know better than to raise my hand. The reading was about New Pythos. It falls solidly into the category of discussions I don’t volunteer to participate in.

  For the first time in my memory, Annie’s is among the hands that go up. Perkins’s eyes, clouded with age and accustomed to her region of the classroom being a dead zone for volunteers, passes right over it.

  “Lee?”

  My stomach lurches. I watch Annie’s hand droop.

  “That was some fine flying at the tournament this weekend,” Perkins adds, his light brown wrinkles doubling with a smile. A few appreciative whoops go up around the room, Cor thumps me on the shoulder, and it startles a grin out of me that lasts a half second.

  “Thank you.”

  Then I look down at the reading, take a half breath, and steel myself. “The article says there’s no way to prove the rumors about New Pythos having dragons aren’t true, and suggests re-assessing them as a threat.”

  Perkins nods and provides the counterargument: “But New Pythos has never been allowed access to dragons and lacks the hot springs that make for fertile hatching grounds. How could the ha’Aurelians have air power, Lee?”

  Ha’Aurelians—half Aurelians—are the dragonless branch of Aurelian House that colonized New Pythos generations ago. Palms sweating, I answer again. “Offshore egg stockpiles. The author suggests that the Three Families might have hidden eggs. The dragonborn who escaped to New Pythos could have taken that knowledge with them.”

  The dragonborn who escaped.

  I could practically recite the names of missing dragonborn in my sleep, and the ones I think of most often are my cousins, Ixion and Julia. Ixion was a little older than I, Julia closer to my age. After Palace Day the bodies thought to be theirs were too disfigured to be conclusively identified.

  “Very good. Thank you, Lee.” Perkins turns to the class in general. “What do we make of this theory?”

  “Rather tenuous,” says a girl with an accent of the liquid melody of the southern vassal islands.

  “An excuse for warmongering,” says another boy. Patrician, judging by the fine cut of his tunic and the clipped tones of his Palace-standard accent. “More fodder for the People’s Paper.”

  There are chuckles around the room; the People’s Paper is the paper that circulates among the lower class-metals, heavily regulated by the Ministry of Propaganda, and most Golds don’t deign to read it.

  Perkins nods. “Perhaps,” he allows. “But the real difficulty with such theories is that, given our diplomatic situation with New Pythos, there is no way to prove them right or wrong. Callipolis and New Pythos have never recognized each other’s sovereignty, and their only means of communication is through embassies of neutral third-party states. With such a lack of transparency, how can we know what they intend? Much less what they are accomplishing, shrouded by all that North Sea fog.”

  I leave class lost in memories. It’s rare that I let my thoughts linger on New Pythos these days. The escape I used to plan so eagerly in my spare time with Annie, the distraction that was so welcome amid everything else . . .

  The plans that ended up coming to nothing.

  “Hey.”

  Present-day Annie has materialized in front of me, in the middle of the Lyceum courtyard, Duck at her side. Cor and Crissa are at mine. From Annie’s purposeful expression I half expect her to bring up our encounter before class, but instead she jerks her chin sideways, toward the Lyceum Club.

  “I want to have lunch.”

  The sounds of laughter come muted through the club’s latticed windows. Neither of us has ever eaten there, though there’s nothing preventing it—the only requirement for admission is a gold wristband.

  Duck swings round to look at her, but she isn’t looking at anyone but me. I’ve stopped walking. “You won’t like it.”

  Annie has stopped, too, and her arms are folded. “We can go. Other Guardians go.”

  Certain other Guardians go. The Lyceum Club has a reputation for being more welcoming to certain Lyceum students than others—in other words, the ones from patrician families. Lotus, Power, Darius, Alexa, and Max, who grew up on Janiculum Hill and like to meet up with their grammar school friends, dine there regularly. For my part, I’ve never been interested in observing how the new aristocracy of Callipolis entertains themselves. The patricians from the Janiculum were intimately involved in Atreus’s Revolution, their betrayal of the dragonlords key to its success—and now the metals test is something they benefit from. They tend, overwhelmingly, to test Gold.

  I like the opportunities Atreus has created for the poor from neighborhoods like Cheapside. The opportunities he’s made for the patricians of the Janiculum, I care less for.

  “I want to try it,” Annie says.

  Then try it without me.

  But that doesn’t seem to be an option she’s willing to consider. She looks furiously determined and at the same time frightened—as if, more than the club itself, her own initiative scares her most of all. It hooks me against all reason. I push away my foreboding.

  “Fine,” I say.

  Duck, Cor, and Crissa are looking between us, mystified. Because, after all, why should I, Lee the slum rat, be the gatekeeper for this rite of passage Annie seems to have created for herself?

  “You coming?” I ask Crissa and Cor.

  “Got that thrill out of my system ages ago,” Crissa says, hoisting her bag higher on her shoulder. “Cloister for me. Cor?”

  Cor shifts, squinting at the club with apprehension. “Yeah, maybe some other time . . .”

  “I’ll go,” Duck says to Annie.

  The three of us mount the steps of the Lyceum Club. In the foyer, I stare down the host whose job is to check wristbands. Though we’ve never met before, he seems to recognize me and lets us in without even glancing at my wrist.

  We enter a dark, wood-paneled dining room full of arguing students, aging professors filling the room with pipe smoke, and all ages in between. Class-golds of any age are welcome to dine in the club whenever they please, regardless of whether they’re attending classes. The polished wooden tables are scattered with today’s edition of the Gold Gazette, the preferred paper of the class-golds becau
se of its greater editorial freedom. It circulates only within Palace and Lyceum walls.

  “Lee! How are you?”

  A Gold student I know from Damian Philosophy calls my name from a table in the center of the floor, where he sits with a few friends. Their meals are half finished, fluted glasses of summer wine nearly empty. They’ve turned and are smiling in my direction, beckoning.

  “Care to join us? We can pull up chairs—”

  I can almost feel Annie recoiling beside me: Sitting with barely known acquaintances seems to be more than she bargained for.

  “Thanks, Ian. Don’t trouble yourselves. Good to see you all . . .”

  I return their smiles, clasp Ian on the arm, then lead Annie and Duck past them. As we cross the floor, I note the presence of other Guardians in the room, easy to spot in their uniforms: Power and Darius, unsurprisingly, with a few girls from rhetoric class; more surprisingly, Rock, at a private table with Lotus in a far corner. I lead us to an empty booth. Annie takes the seat with its back to two walls and scans the room as though she were on dragonback surveying hostile terrain; Duck eases himself in after her, with the care of someone trying not to aggravate burns beneath his uniform.

  “Where’s the serving counter?” Annie mutters.

  “There isn’t one.”

  “So how—”

  Annie falls silent. A young woman has appeared at our table, wearing a variation on serving attire I haven’t seen since before the Revolution. Hers is the only iron wristband in sight.

  “May I take your orders, sirs and miss?”

  Duck looks at the server in fascination; Annie goes red, as she does whenever she interacts with servants.

  “What’s on the menu today?” I ask.

  The serving girl tells us; it all sounds better than anything I’ve had in years. I order, and then Duck, looking even more stunned by the choices she’s listed, asks for the dish that incorporates bacon. Annie, who does not seem to have processed any of what we’ve said, mutters that she’d like the same as me, please.

  “I’ll be back with your drinks in a moment.”

  We watch her walk away. Then Annie twitches.

  “What do you think her wages are?”

  Because I do rounds with the Labor Draft Board, I know exactly what her wages are. “Decent. More than most class-irons make in the textile houses, and loads better than mining.”

  I’m beginning to acclimate enough to listen in on conversations around us, and the number of them happening in Dragontongue is startling—in most parts of the city its triarchist associations mean that Callish is preferred. But here, with so many patricians for whom Dragontongue is their native language, it’s used freely. Heard colloquially outside language class, it sounds like a parody of the old life.

  It’s not that I’m opposed to censoring, per se, but wouldn’t you agree that he goes too far . . .

  I’d take a Damian red over a Callish any day, no question . . .

  Our food arrives. We’ve always been well-fed in the Cloister, and coming from Albans I’ve never thought to question its quality; but this is something else entirely. Greens perfectly seasoned, steak that is seared on the outside and pink within, potatoes overflowing with butter. Annie takes one look at her meal, then attacks it with her knife and fork as if determined to consume it before it disappears.

  It’s been a long time since I’ve noticed how Annie approaches food—in the earliest years, she scarfed it, and I learned to imitate her—but in this context, a glittering dining room designed for laughter and leisure, it’s hard to watch. As Duck begins to rave about his lunch, how it is the best meal ever, I slide a hand across the table and touch her wrist.

  “Slower,” I murmur.

  She looks up from her plate. Her eyes widen and blink rapidly. She nods.

  It is one of the strangest meals I’ve ever had. I’m aware of how it tastes—good, the way I remember expecting food to taste, before I learned to be grateful to eat at all—and I’m aware of Annie’s eyes tracking me, determined to learn despite her flushed face. I become conscious of every habit of polite dining as I struggle to demonstrate them slowly, clearly, without comment, so Duck doesn’t realize the lesson is taking place at all. Annie imitates how I pace myself, how I place a fork into the steak and a knife beside it to cut, how I don’t let it grind against the plate, how I use the knife to guide peas onto my fork and place the utensils alongside one another when I’ve finished. The things you’re taught to care about, when you’re not afraid of starving.

  By the end, I’m sick with shame.

  “And how was it?” says the serving girl, returning to ask if we’d like coffee or dessert.

  “It was the most amazing meal I’ve ever had,” Duck says, so solemnly that she actually laughs. As we watch her take our plates back to the kitchen, his voice lowers.

  “Do you think she finds it strange, being surrounded by people who . . .”

  Annie finishes his sentence immediately, like she’d been thinking about it, too. “Who tested better than her?”

  “Or were born into the kind of privilege that made them test better,” I mutter.

  Fresh off a meal spent demonstrating that privilege, the observation smarts particularly.

  Annie’s eyes remain on the dregs of her cider as she tilts the glass back and forth. Her reply is mild, but has a tone of finality to it.

  “I like to think that everyone had to get here on their own merits. No matter where they came from.”

  I lift my eyes to her, willing her to acknowledge me in this reprieve by looking at me, but she only glances across the floor again. “In any case, most people are speaking Callish. A lot of it’s Palace-standard, but there are Southside accents at that table over there, and Harbortown accents behind us.”

  I hadn’t noticed, focused as I had been on the sounds of my mother tongue.

  “Even if the Dragontongue representation is a little . . . more than proportionate to the Callipolan population,” Annie adds grimly.

  “I hope my sister’s metals test went all right,” Duck mutters.

  Annie’s hand slips over his on the table and squeezes it gently. She doesn’t notice the way Duck goes still at her touch.

  Then her wandering gaze catches on someone across the room and her hand drops. I twist around in my seat. Power has noticed us, and he’s beckoning Annie over to his and Darius’s booth. Some of the girls from rhetoric class are giggling behind their hands, catching each other’s eyes.

  “Don’t do it, Annie,” Duck says at once.

  Eyes on Power, Annie tilts her glass of cider back and drains it. She returns the empty glass to the table, rises, and makes her way across the floor.

  Duck watches her depart with a line between his eyes. “And she tells me to ignore him?”

  ANNIE

  In a month, Power and I will be facing each other in the air. But today, I approach his table in the Lyceum Club as if we’re facing off already. When I stand in front of it, he spreads his arms and leans back, his gesture taking in the entirety of the smoke-filled, wood-paneled room.

  “Welcome,” he says grandly, in Dragontongue, “to my domain.”

  The girls sitting with Power look avidly between us, like they’re getting a pre-tournament sampler for free. When I don’t say anything, Power adds, in Callish, “I just said—”

  “I understood you.”

  “Good for you!”

  Power turns to the table. “Antigone, having beat my mate Darius here”—Darius glowers at him—“will be my opponent in the upcoming match.” He switches to Dragontongue and lowers his voice conspiratorially. “She’s a very ambitious serf.”

  Titters go around the table. One of the girls actually lets out a suppressed shriek, scandalized. Power turns back to me, his eyes glittering.

  “Isn’t that right, Annie?” he asks
in Callish.

  I can practically hear those watching us hold their breath. I know how this scene is supposed to go: I’ve seen Crissa stand Power down in front of others, smoothly dousing his ego with a few well-placed words. The delighted guffaws of those listening, to see him burned. I know that’s what the table’s waiting for.

  But my mind draws a blank.

  You idiot, what did you think would happen if you came over here? You think just because you won a match you’d get better at this?

  “Yeah,” I tell him, bitterness filling my mouth both at my words’ inadequacy and the fact that they’re in Callish. “That’s right.”

  I turn on my heel and walk away.

  That taste of bitterness continues throughout the day. My rounds schedule has never been as extensive as Lee’s or even Duck’s, and this afternoon I have only a single session shadowing Ornby, an elderly researcher who’s vetting old Dragontongue literature for the Censorship Committee. Together in his dusty office we go over which texts should be banned, which should be translated for the general public, and which should be limited to Gold consumption.

  “Feeling lenient, are we?” Ornby says as he reviews my choices. “I’d have banned the sympathetic portrait of a dragonlord entirely. You’d make it available to the general public?”

  Still prickly from my lunch in the Lyceum Club, I shrug and offer one of Ornby’s favorite phrases back to him. “It could help the people grow in sympathy.”

  Ornby’s blue eyes crinkle as he shakes his head. “The Golds, maybe. But we can’t complicate the narrative too much for the lower class-metals, or they’ll get confused. Might even start wanting dragonlords back. You’re cleverer than most people, Annie, you’ve got to remember that! Maybe you can handle the nuance of this piece, but they wouldn’t . . .”

  Usually, Ornby’s mention of my cleverness—flattering and always slightly conspiratorial—is enough to stop me from questioning censorship practices, but today my thoughts go to Duck’s father spouting propaganda about New Pythos, and I feel a twinge of unease.