Fireborne

by Rosaria Munda

By the end of the day I’ve lost the good mood left over from the tournament entirely. Afternoon training begins with Goran spending a good half hour on the Eyrie praising Lee’s, Cor’s, and Power’s tournament performances and not mentioning mine at all. It feels like evidence that life, far from changing since gaining the Fourth Order, is going to proceed with exactly the same frustrations as before.

  After dinner, in another resumption of routine, I help Rock through his aerial-tactics homework in the Cloister solarium before study hall, where Guardians are getting a start on homework at shared tables and easy chairs. I’m more impatient than usual today, and it’s setting us both on edge.

  “You’ve got to keep the third dimension in mind. It’s not a field, Rock.”

  Rock’s problem set is spread between us, a web of diagrams I’m correcting as I talk him through them; at the other end of the table, Crissa sits doodling on her history reading and Duck applies aloe to his burns, sleeves rolled up to his forearms. The fading sunlight glows on potted plants lining wall-size windows and creeping along a glass ceiling, opened to let in the breeze. The solarium is the only part of the Cloister set aside for recreation.

  Rock’s hair is on end, his eyes bloodshot from squinting at my scribbles. “I get it in theory, all right? You’re worse than Goran sometimes.”

  “You don’t like how I explain things, go find Lee.”

  “I tried,” Rock says. “He was busy.”

  Lee’s busy schedule is the last thing I want to hear about. I glare at Rock. He folds his arms and glares back. A voice behind us interrupts.

  “Annie! There you are.”

  I turn in my chair. The formidable, iron-haired Mistress Mortmane, directress of the Cloister, is on her way to our mailboxes. She hands me a memo that bears the ministry’s seal of the four-tiered city, concentric rings of iron, bronze, silver, and gold.

  “I’ll just give you this personally, shall I?”

  Her eye flickers in what might just be a wink before she moves on.

  The memo, addressed “ATTN: Fourth Order Riders,” contains a list of schedule changes for me, Lee, Power, and Cor, effective immediately. The sight of my name next to the words Fourth Order sends a jolt down my spine.

  BEGIN ATTENDING:

  ADVANCED DRAGONTONGUE POETRY

  WEEKLY HIGH COUNCIL MEETINGS (IF NOT ALREADY ATTENDING)

  ADVANCED ETIQUETTE AND DANCE LESSONS (TO BEGIN TWO WEEKS BEFORE LYCEAN BALL)

  PRIVATE CLASS WEEKLY WITH THE FIRST PROTECTOR

  I feel a smile spreading of its own accord across my face.

  It’s happening. Whatever Goran or Power might say or not say, however scanty my rounds schedule might still be, the ship has pushed off from the shore and I’m on it.

  I arrive at Dragontongue Poetry the next day a few minutes early; the classroom door is still shut. Of all the changes from the memo, this is the one I’m most certain I’ll like—and do well in. Our study of languages of the Medean has been purely conversational classes until now, but I’ve always been interested in Dragontongue poetry, which is renowned for its beauty. The dragonborn—and Aurelians particularly, whose language it was first, before they came to Callipolis—are known to have lived and breathed their poetry, speaking as often in quotations as not, and began learning it by heart as children.

  As far as the Inner Palace is concerned, knowledge of Dragontongue poetry is a form of literacy patrician families of Callipolis still value—and will expect of its rulers.

  Lee is waiting outside the classroom, too. Far from sharing my excitement, he’s fuming.

  “I don’t believe this. Of all the ways to waste our time—”

  There are circles under his eyes; since his promotion to squadron leader he often looks tired during the school week. Cor appears at the end of the hallway, looking similarly sleep-deprived and similarly indignant.

  “Is this a joke? This is our reward for making Fourth Order?”

  Gold students have begun to arrive, giving us curious glances as they make their way inside the classroom; the Guardians are so outnumbered by Gold students at the Lyceum that our presence in new classes tends to be treated as a novelty. Neither Cor nor Lee moves to follow them; they seem to be agreed on lingering in the hallway for as long as possible.

  “It’s a cultural literacy thing,” I tell Cor.

  Cor lowers his voice, eyes tracking the arriving Gold students. “Maybe for you. I haven’t got your knack for Dragontongue. I’ll just be embarrassing myself in front of a bunch of patrician kids...ah.”

  Power is sidling down the hall, already looking amused.

  “Such long faces.”

  Cor scowls at him. “Piss off.”

  Power drops his bag with a thud between Lee and Cor. Two passing Gold girls glance our way, and Power rakes a hand over his close-cut hair, catching their eyes with a lifted eyebrow. They disappear into the classroom, giggling. “Word is, this class is pretty easy. If you’ve already got the Aurelian Cycle memorized, that is—”

  Lee is leaning against the wall, arms folded. His lip curls. “Didn’t know you were such a Dragontongue scholar, Power.”

  “I had tutors.”

  Lee tosses his head back and laughs. Then he smiles at Power. “Good for you.”

  The force of Lee’s disdain makes Power flinch. He recovers with a startled shiver, gives Lee a strange look, and regains some of his confidence to share more Lyceum gossip: “I’ve heard the class is taught by a former court tutor, anyway. Got his start teaching Stormscourge brats before the Revolution. Guess he wasn’t so loyal in the end—”

  Cor snorts in spite of himself. Lee’s smile hitches. For the instant before he fixes it, his whole body stills. As far as I can tell, I’m the only one who notices.

  “We’re going to be late,” I tell them.

  Inside the classroom, the four of us take empty desks at the back; the only other Guardian already enrolled in this class is Lotus, whom I recognize even before he turns and waves by his curly head of hair. His connection to Dragontongue poetry through his father probably means he’s here by choice.

  The girl whose desk is next to mine leans in my direction. “Are you Antigone? Antigone sur Aela?”

  The way she says it, I feel like she’s talking about someone neither of us has met. I nod and she beams.

  “Your flying this weekend was amazing,” she says.

  I return her smile with surprise, and the girl extends her hand. Her brown dress, a muted color against her tawny complexion and spiraling black hair, shows the signs of a comfortable patrician life: cut to knee length with the precision of a Janiculum dressmaker, and carefully pressed. “Hanna,” she says. “Hanna Lund. Though I guess there’s no reason you’d want to know who I am!”

  I shake her hand, too startled to think of a polite way to disagree with such an unexpected remark.

  “Our new students. Welcome.”

  The professor, a pale, balding, bespectacled man in his mid-thirties, has entered the room last and notes our presence with a gracious smile as he takes his place at the front of the room. “My name is Richard Tyndale, and I am absolutely delighted to have the four of you in my class. Let’s see”—he consults a list, then looks at me—“you must be Antigone sur Aela?”

  “Yes, but I go by Annie.”

  “We will use the full Dragontongue in this class, I think, Antigone. Very unusual name, for a highlander. And then we have Power sur Eater—”

  Power lifts his fingers to indicate his presence. Tyndale smiles. “Welcome. I’ll be glad to tell your father that I’ve finally got you as my student. Cor sur Maurana—?”

  Cor nods. Tyndale’s eyes slide to the only remaining new student and he stills.

  “Leo?”

  Dragon’s bloody sparkfire.

  Lee’s eyes widen for a fraction of an instant. “Lee
,” he says. “Lee sur Pallor.”

  Tyndale twitches. He hastens to correct himself. “Of course—my mistake—”

  Leo. The unfamiliar name reverberates in my ears with the shock of an unexpected obscenity.

  I want to hide it away and never hear it again.

  As Tyndale turns from us, a few students glance at one another, exchanging looks of perturbed amusement. As if they’re wondering how Tyndale could forget the name of a Guardian in the Fourth Order. Lee has sunk low in his seat beside me.

  “I trust the four of you received the assignment I sent along with your primers? Good. Then let’s get started. Volunteers to read the Dragontongue?”

  The class is midway through translating the Aurelian Cycle, the epic poem considered the foundational text of Dragon-tongue literature. Hanna volunteers and begins to read. Her Dragontongue is without accent—the mark of a native speaker. I register in surprise that someone with such a background would ever think of me as amazing.

  But then, as she begins to read about Uriel sur Aron, leading his people into exile from the destruction of the sun-bright island of old Aureos, Lee closes his eyes and grips the sides of his desk. It’s hard to know whether the sight of his face or the sound of the words I’m listening to provokes my rising sorrow. Even if some of the words escape me, the tragedy of the line is clear enough, and still piercing.

  “Antigone, why don’t you translate first.”

  I practically jump. Tyndale is smiling in a way that makes me wonder whether I’m imagining the tone of challenge in his voice. I flip open my notebook, conscious of being watched by a classroom of strangers, and look down at my homework. The sight of my translation calms me at once: I’ve triple-checked it. I begin to read, and then, as Lee clears his throat loudly beside me, I remember to raise my voice. The way I’ve been practicing, in empty classrooms, at every spare moment since the Fourth Order tournament. When I’m finished, I look up to find Tyndale staring at me.

  “Good,” he says. But he doesn’t sound pleased so much as surprised. “Did you notice anything interesting about that last line? Any figures of speech that caught your eye?”

  Hands are going up around the room. Tyndale glances on them, then back at me. Giving me a chance.

  Figures of speech aren’t something you learn in conversational Dragontongue classes, but they were listed in the glossary at the back of the primer, and I read that glossary last night. I look down, twisting my hands together beneath my desk. “Ascending tricolon. Chiasmus with the nouns and adjectives. And an enjambment to the next line.”

  The hands are going down. Tyndale is nodding.

  “Good,” he says again. “What about the form of the verb. Anything interesting there?”

  “A historical infinitive.”

  “Well spotted. And its paradigm?”

  I recite it.

  Tyndale catches Lotus’s eye. “Looks like our poet’s son has competition.”

  For the remainder of the class, Tyndale calls on me several more times and on Power and Cor enough to determine that Power’s translations are from memory and that Cor’s grasp of the grammar is rudimentary at best. He doesn’t call on Lee.

  At the end of class, when he dismisses us, he adds:

  “If you have a minute, Lee.”

  Lee remains hunched, face downturned, while the rest of us exit the classroom.

  In the hallway, I hesitate, foreboding coiling in my stomach. Should I wait for Lee? Make sure he’s all right after whatever conversation Tyndale wants to have with him?

  Would he even want that?

  Would I want that?

  No. I’m pretty sure—actually I’m absolutely certain—I wouldn’t.

  “Hey . . . Antigone?” Hanna Lund stands in front of me, bent to one side to counterweigh her book bag, tucking a stray curl behind her ear. A few of the other girls from class wait for her a little apart from us, watching. “Some of us go do homework in the library together, after class? If you want to join?”

  It takes me a second to understand what she’s asking.

  A Gold student—an almost certainly patrician Gold student—is inviting me to do something with her friends? And nervous to do so, as if she fears my rejecting her? I shift my own book bag higher on my shoulder. She’s taller than me—they’re all taller than me—consistently, patrician kids are. I have to look up to meet her uncertain eyes.

  “Yeah . . . I’d love to.”

  Hanna grins.

  Lee will have to figure out the business with Tyndale on his own.

  I don’t begin to worry about him until he starts missing meals. Absent from dinner that evening, absent from breakfast the morning afterward. The first time I see him again is in class later in the morning, and the bruises under his eyes have grown so dark that he looks haggard.

  What did Tyndale say to him?

  The Fourth Order riders attend our first High Council meeting that afternoon—or at least, it’s a first for some of us. I’m pretty sure Lee’s been going for over a year already. We listen, take notes, and are told to ask questions later, at class with the First Protector.

  His class is held in a conference room off his office. Like so many rooms in the Inner Palace, it overlooks the Firemouth, the cavernous central opening to the dragons’ caves that, for the old regime, connected the Three Families’ apartments directly to their dragons, a mere summoning whistle’s blow away. On the other side of a wall of rippling glass, a stone balcony that once doubled as a lord’s dragon perch looks out over the encircling windows of the Inner Palace. In other parts of the Palace, especially the halls repurposed to public use, the original dragonborn heraldry has been effaced, but here the stained glass edging the windows in red roses remains, a traditional symbol of Aurelian House. Atreus’s own additions to the room are austere: simple wooden furniture, unadorned but well-made, and hard-backed chairs.

  We rise when he enters.

  “Please. Be seated,” Atreus says. “We will not waste time with formalities in this setting.”

  We resume our seats, and Atreus takes his own, straightening the collar of a simple tunic that emphasizes his severe, hawklike features and a gray face weathered by experience. Atreus’s monastic lifestyle is almost as legendary as his career: an orphaned patrician; a scholar in Damos; an advisor to the triarchy; and finally, the leader of the Revolution that brought it down. He’s been known to say that Callipolis is his wife, the Revolution his child. That the Guardians will be his legacy.

  “I have heard nothing but praise of the four of you,” Atreus tells us, “and consider it a privilege to take part in the final stages of your training. I intend for our class to cover subjects ranging from the philosophical to the poetic. Both will serve a purpose to you as future statesmen: theory for the mind, beauty for the soul.”

  He sets two books on the table in front of him: his own Revolutionary Manifesto, written the year before the Revolution, and the Aurelian Cycle, in the original Dragontongue.

  “But practical matters to start us off. Do you have questions about the High Council meeting?”

  I raise my hand, all the way up.

  This time, unlike with Perkins, Atreus’s eyes do not pass over me.

  “Antigone?”

  LEE

  There’s a certain irony, after years of going unrecognized, to being noticed by your family’s old poetry tutor.

  After the other students are gone, Tyndale walks to the door, looks out in the hall in both directions, and closes it. His footfalls echo in the empty, stone-walled classroom.

  I’m racking my memory for anything about him that points to what he’ll want to do with me now, but there’s nothing. I was only six or seven the last time I saw him, and he mainly taught my older sisters.

  “You’re alive.”

  He says it with unmistakable relief. He stands in front of me,
his palms braced on the desk at the front of the row I’m sitting in, and looks at me like I’m some sort of apparition.

  So he doesn’t mean to turn me in. I realize I’ve been holding my breath for the last minute, and exhale.

  “How did you survive?”

  He’s switched to Dragontongue. Even as my breathing returns to normal, I feel a twinge of irritation. If he’s so happy to see me, so happy to see I survived, why is he risking my safety for a language preference? Anyone could be listening outside the door. They would be more than surprised to hear a Cheapside orphan speaking native-level Dragontongue.

  “Atreus intervened,” I say in Callish.

  Tyndale’s eyes widen. “He saved you?”

  I nod.

  “And your family—did he save any of the others?”

  He’s still speaking in Dragontongue, and this question has an urgency to it that surprises me.

  “No.”

  He’s still waiting, staring at me, but for a moment I can’t think of anything more to say that I can put into words. “It was too late for the others.”

  I try to say the words without thinking about them, but images flash across my mind and empty it, and for one moment the whole classroom fades away.

  Tyndale has turned away, as if swept by a similar emotion. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t usually say—but I suppose there’s no reason not to, now. I was”—he gives a little half-lost laugh—“I was in love with your sister.”

  My sister. Which sister? I wonder for a second, then realize who it must have been. As if hearing my thoughts, he adds, “Penelope.”

  Her name, her face, everything about her comes flooding back. It’s strange to hear her name on another’s tongue—as if, after years of not speaking about my family to anybody, some part of me had stopped believing that anybody else could have known them.

  He keeps talking, not like he wants to but like he can’t bring himself to stop. “It obviously wasn’t something that—had a future. I was lowborn, even if I was a scholar, and she was on her way to being betrothed to some Aurelian, I don’t remember his name . . . but I loved her. Dragons, I loved her. Even though I knew she would never love me or be able to have me. I’ve never loved anyone like I loved her.”