Fireborne

by Rosaria Munda

  “Because I wanted to trust you, and I was a fool for it.”

  I know my eyes must be too bright. Lee takes them in, then tilts his head back and looks up at the cirrus clouds high above us. When the silence has lengthened to the point that I’m on the verge of breaking it, he inhales slowly, pushes dark hair back from his eyes, and looks at me.

  “You weren’t.”

  “I wasn’t?”

  Lee shakes his head. And then, as his face fills with pain, I understand at last.

  The white knuckles, the silence, the bowed head: Lee isn’t planning to defect.

  He’s steeling himself to stay, as I should have known he would.

  * * *

  ***

  When he went to the closet on the third floor, to the stockpile to pack his bag for New Pythos, he realized that instead of escaping her, he had stumbled across her path. She was inside, the door closed. And she was crying. He’d heard her cry before, but he’d never heard her cry like this. Not like she was frightened or in pain: like she was in despair.

  He stood on the threshold and thought, I can come back later, when she’s gone.

  Because he knew that if he crossed the threshold now, he’d never leave. He would not get the backpack or the provisions. He wouldn’t escape. He’d sink down beside her and do the only thing left to do. He would comfort her.

  He remembered his father’s teachings and tried, now, to convince himself: She’s just a peasant. She doesn’t matter.

  But even as he told himself this, he found himself opening the door.

  She was sitting against the opposite wall, where he usually sat, her face buried in her knees, her hands gripping her hair. As if his body were acting of its own accord, he slid to the ground, placed his palms on the floor, and hung his head.

  He waited for her to say something, to demand an apology, and he thought of the words she would wring out of him: “They didn’t deserve it.” He would say it; he would hate himself and her and his father for it, but he would say it. She’d won.

  But she didn’t ask him to say anything.

  He heard floorboards creak as she shifted forward, and then he felt her hands reach out, clutch him, and pull him toward her. She buried her face against his shirt and held him like she thought he might disappear.

  Then she let out a dull sob, and he realized that he wasn’t the only one who felt defeated.

  He wrapped his arms around her and began to utter phrases he’d never said before, only heard others say to him: Don’t cry. It’s over now. I’m here. She was too thin. He could see the bruises the other children had left on her, and he felt responsible. The stockpile he’d come to pack was left unmentioned, unthought of, in the corner. He held her until she fell asleep, and when she woke, he took her to find food.

  He never spoke of the voyage to New Pythos again.

  She never asked him why he didn’t.

  Though he didn’t note it consciously, this was the first day he tried not to think of his family when they surfaced in his mind. He pushed them away, and only realized, months later, that he’d begun to forget them.

  LEE

  A day has passed since we spoke on the arena ramparts. Annie sits across from me in class with Atreus, so when the First Protector asks us to propose discussion topics and I raise my hand, I’m acutely aware of her eyes on me from across the table. And then I volunteer a topic I’ve never brought up in any class before: I ask about the old regime.

  “Why is the new regime better than the old?” My throat, closed from a long silence, has to unstick itself to speak.

  Atreus leans back in his chair, smiling mildly at the challenge.

  “Is it?” he asks.

  “Of course it is,” Cor says, as if even considering the alternative were offensive.

  “How?”

  “The new regime has fair trials,” Cor says. “A trade-based economy that supports a growing middle class. Universal education. Opportunities for advancement that don’t depend on birth. Compare that to the old regime—we’ve all heard the horror stories.”

  Atreus nods slowly. “I’m sure you have. And some of you have even lived them.” Though the reference is oblique, I feel the room’s awareness of Annie rise. I can practically see Cor making a point not to glance at her, while Power actually does. Her face reveals nothing. “These stories aside,” Atreus goes on, “what can you tell me about their failings?”

  This time, both Annie and I raise our hands.

  I’ve been conscious, since the Fourth Order tournament, of refraining from volunteering when Annie wants to participate. But today I keep my hand in the air and seek her eyes. They widen ever so slightly as they meet mine, her lips parting.

  I need this.

  She lowers her hand.

  “Lee?”

  I grip the edge of the table and speak slowly, working it through as I say it. Years’ worth of readings and homework assignments and class discussions that can be distilled into a few sentences of difficult truth.

  “Thousands died in poverty and starvation under the triarchy. The dragonborn feasted while their people starved and denied the famines they found inconvenient. They operated with almost no legal restraints, cruelly and without mercy, and then they justified the wrongs they committed by claiming it was their blood-borne right.”

  In my peripheral vision, Annie shifts in her chair.

  Atreus is nodding. “Indeed. And how could such unbridled power not ultimately lead to corruption? Can you see the flaw in it, Lee—the premise that lay rotten at the core?”

  I nod. This flaw I’ve been aware of since I first began to consider such things at all.

  “Their power was inherited.”

  “Exactly. Power did not correspond to worth. And that distance—between power and worth—is something rule under dragons has been grappling with from the beginning.” Atreus indicates, with an open hand, the Aurelian Cycle that remains on the table, ready to be referred to, in every one of our classes. “There was greatness in them. But with that greatness came arrogance, and with that arrogance corruption, and with that corruption downfall.

  “Now. How are you different?”

  Power’s answer is ready, smug. “We deserve it.”

  The irony of his answer does not seem to be lost on Atreus, whose mouth has curved into a thin smile. “Do you?”

  “Don’t we?”

  “That depends on you,” Atreus says. “You only deserve this mantle as long as you can be more reasonable and more virtuous than what came before. And that’s important to remember now, more than ever, in the face of what may come.”

  When I look up, I find that Annie’s too-bright eyes haven’t left my face.

  * * *

  ***

  Tyndale keeps office hours in the literature department of the Lyceum. I find my way there quickly; I want to give him my refusal while the resolve is still hot.

  Because I know that when the answer from New Pythos comes back, these words will be harder to say, even though their answer can’t change mine.

  I’ll swallow this cup. What remains to be seen is how bitter it will be going down. Depending on the answer Crissa and Duck bring back, it may turn out to be bitter indeed.

  “I’ve thought about it. Your offer. To join—them.”

  “Yes?”

  “No.”

  Tyndale grimaces, then motions toward the chair across from his paper-laden desk. The room is sun-soaked, the open window letting in the smell of mown grass from the courtyard.

  “Sit.”

  Aging leather upholstery creaks under my weight. Tyndale’s tone becomes avuncular. He is, as before, speaking in Dragontongue. “I worry that you haven’t fully considered your situation, Leo. Perhaps this seems like the easiest answer right now. But in the long run, in your position—it will not be easy. Sel
ling out now means paying the price later.”

  “I’m not selling out.”

  Tyndale cocks his head. Then he rests it on a propped palm.

  “Then what exactly are you doing?”

  “I’m choosing Callipolis.”

  I’ve switched to Dragontongue, too. We are, after all, behind closed doors, and for this I feel the need to use it. There is an exhilaration in speaking it again after all these years. It seems to lend the words power.

  “I believe in Atreus. I believe in what he’s doing. Even if it was born in blood.”

  Tyndale’s expression has transformed from skepticism to pity.

  “You think Palace Day was the end of the bloodshed?” he asks. “You’ve just chosen to start it all over again.”

  Three days later, Crissa and Duck return from Isca, and I watch Annie fold Duck into the kind of hug she hasn’t given me since we were children. Her smile is simple, easy, happy as she looks up at him. The kind of smile—carefree, unstained by old memories—that she’s never given me.

  I turn away, because I have no business feeling this sudden ache, and Crissa hands me the message she bears from New Pythos.

  It was waiting for us: That’s why she and Duck were able to return to Callipolis so quickly. By the time our message reached them, the Pythians’ own was already waiting for us in the embassy.

  THE RIGHTFUL TRIARCHS OF CALLIPOLIS HAVE TIRED OF THEIR EXILE.

  THEY WILL SOON BE COMING HOME.

  The message is more or less the blow I was expecting; the cup to be drunk every bit as bitter and slow-acting as Tyndale had implied. Steeled against the shock, I feel still the clear pressure of purpose, the focus of a charted course: Train; prepare; await the plunge.

  What I don’t expect is the note, two weeks later, tucked inside the homework Tyndale hands back to me, in the well-worn script of practiced Dragontongue.

  My dear cousin—

  I’d hardly dared to hope it was you in that first tournament. But now my joy is confirmed. Find me in the Drowned Dragon, Cheapside, on Midsummer, at three hours past midnight. Leave your stubbornness for the night: Midsummer is a time for family.

  Julia

  5

  MIDSUMMER

  LEE

  Julia was a nurse’s nightmare. The kind of girl who always managed to escape, to find the boys and join whatever game we were playing, who always returned covered in dirt, priceless dresses torn, knees scraped. Against all expectations, it was Julia—destined to a suitable match and the domestic confines that came with it—who controlled the orbits of our play with the magnetism of the sun. When Julia arrived, the day began to matter. The trees in the Palace gardens became karst we scaled, the ponds became seas we flew over, the lawns became fields we scorched in great duels to the death by dragonfire.

  The fight was always who would be Firstrider and who would be Alternus. It was a fight Julia usually won.

  “When I grow up, I’ll be Firstrider and Triarch, like my father,” she proclaimed. “Like Pytho the Unifier, like Uriel sur Aron.”

  “You can’t, Julia,” the older boys scoffed. My brother, Laertes, recently found in his ceremony to be a passus, forsaken by dragons; Julia’s brother Ixion, Laertes’s age; and Delo, one of the Skyfish eldest-born. “Girls don’t ride.”

  I remember hauling her away as she screamed after them, purple-faced. The most biting swears she knew were centuries-old, phrases we had learned from the Aurelian Cycle, so antiquated that our brothers, who were old enough to learn real swears from our fathers, only laughed harder.

  “My father said they’ll change it,” she told me afterward, eyes streaming with fury as we stood in the shade of a copse to regroup. “My father says he’ll change the rules for me. I’ll ride.”

  One never disagreed with Julia, but I also played pretend with her enough to know when she was pretending about herself. I knew the power of her lies, which felt so much like life that they were enough, for hours, to convince us both, though we stood squarely on the ground, that we were flying.

  “My father,” Julia told me, gray eyes wide as she confided her faith, “can do anything.”

  The last time I saw Julia was during the Red Month.

  The chronology of the period between the fall of the old regime and the rise of the new is hazy in my memory; flashes are vivid and the rest is lost. When I last saw her, the dragonborn families were under house arrest in the Great Palace. My father’s summoning whistle had been confiscated, Aletheia confined to her nest. The militia who’d taken control of the Inner Palace had sworn themselves loyal to a Revolution and then made the dragonlords they’d captured swear their loyalty as well, in a farce that was all but openly acknowledged, but whose charade remained propped up for weeks. The militia were there, by their own explanation, for our protection—for during those weeks the sounds of protests, of commoners rioting, clamoring for bread and blood outside the Outer walls, could be heard all the way inside the Inner Palace.

  During those weeks, my uncle, Crethon, the Triarch of the West, tried to flee to his highland estate with his wife and children. They were caught. When they’d been returned to the city, revolutionaries brought Crethon’s wife and children to our apartments in the Inner Palace and demanded an audience with the Drakarch of the Far Highlands and his family.

  My father received them in our parlor. Our cousins showed the signs of rough travel and recent beatings. Julia was, like me, the youngest, but she hadn’t been spared the bruises that darkened all of my cousins’ faces. It was the first time I’d ever seen evidence of violence inflicted on a dragonborn. The rage that filled me was not only at her pain but at the sheer gall of it—to strike a Stormscourge, to strike a dragonlord’s child. It was still, even that late in the Red Month, unthinkable. My aunt, being held by one of the guards, was uttering a moan so low in her throat that I hadn’t immediately realized it was a human sound.

  Our chief guard told us, in labored Dragontongue: “This is the fate that will be met by any dragonlord’s family who tries to escape this Revolution.”

  At that point I could barely distinguish him from the rest, but his pockmarked face was one I would learn, on Palace Day, to remember. He held Julia, then seven, by the shoulders and shook her, to prove his point.

  “Good citizen,” my father answered, rising to stand between us and the guard and employing the egalitarian address then fashionable for the revolutionaries, “my family has no plans to leave the Palace. But where is Lady Helena’s lord? She is distraught.”

  I remember noting how wrong it was to hear my father use a tone of deference with such a person. And I remember Julia, holding my gaze from across the room where she was confined beneath the man’s dirty hands. Her eyes were clear, defiant, full of a fury that I wouldn’t feel in its full force until Palace Day.

  The guardsman said, “The lady and her children will never see their lord again.”

  Julia’s sobbing mother was led away first, Julia after her.

  That was how I last saw Julia.

  * * *

  ***

  That was nine years ago. Now the Palace gardens that we once played in are full of city children. The children of cobblers and bakers and blacksmiths, who are free to enjoy the blossoming summer-smells that were, in my childhood, the privilege of the dragonborn alone. Though the children here today are playing in a different language, they laugh the same way we did and play the same games. They’re still pretending to fly on dragonback.

  All the same, as I watch them from the bench I’ve sunk into halfway across the grounds, I find it hard to believe that Julia and I ever acted the way they do. Without a care in the world.

  How did she survive?

  And the worse thought: What did she survive? What horrors did she witness or endure when the walls were breached—

  “Lee?”

  I look
up, and it takes a moment for me to focus. Crissa is approaching. We’re on our way back from Atreus’s address in the People’s Square across the river, where he broke the news to the public of the Pythian threat and assured them of Callipolis’s readiness to fight. Like me, Crissa is dressed in the ceremonial armor, silver under a black mantle, the Guardian’s emblem a twined circlet on her breastplate. The Guardians and their dragons stood arrayed behind Atreus during his speech as a display of Callipolan air power.

  It was the same dais where, eight years ago, Aletheia was executed. The Callipolans in the square today were roaring with the same wild fury, a sea of colors and faces that became, at Atreus’s raised arm, a thunderous single voice. I listened, and remembered Aletheia, and fought nausea.

  I shift, making room for her, and Crissa takes a seat beside me. “Hey.”

  Three days have passed since I received Julia’s letter. Midsummer, when Julia will come to look for me, is a few days away.

  Though I’ve incinerated the letter, its every word remains etched in my memory. Julia’s handwriting has matured, no longer a child’s block letters but a practiced, adult script, comfortable in an alphabet I only use for translation homework.

  My mind goes blank when I try to think of what will happen come Midsummer. And then, in that blank, I remind myself: I spend Midsummer with Annie.

  Crissa is sitting close enough for her knee to brush mine. Even sweating under layers of thin-plated ceremonial armor, this added heat becomes the most sensitive point on my body at once. The contact is surprising, but not unpleasant, and I don’t pull my knee away.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” she says. “I love the Palace gardens at this time of year.”

  The sky is blue, the air is sweet but not too warm, and a gentle breeze cools our faces. Crissa sweeps her hair free from her neck so the dark gold curls cascade down her back, radiant against the black of her mantle. When she breathes in, taking in the smell of earth, of roses and honeysuckle, her smile is so full of such simple pleasure that I feel a pang of remembrance. That is what it looks like, to be able to enjoy freely, without the constricting binds of old griefs.