Fireborne

by Rosaria Munda

  “It’s not like that,” Annie says, and now she’s starting to lose control of her voice. “It’s not personal, it’s—it’s objective, it has to be, it has nothing to do with who you know—”

  “And objectively, unskilled laborers don’t deserve to live as much as everybody else. I get it, Annie.”

  Cor takes a step back, so her hand falls from him, and then he turns from us and walks away. The fallen leaves crunch beneath his feet as he goes.

  Annie puts the hand up to her face and drags it angrily across her eyes.

  “Did you question it?” she asks, without looking at me.

  I shake my head. No.

  I revolted at it. But I didn’t question it.

  And that difference is enough to make me want to crawl out of my own skin in horror.

  “I didn’t either,” she whispers. “What does that make us, Lee?”

  “Realistic,” I hear myself say. “It’s the best option. For the island as a whole. Unskilled labor is easier to replace.”

  “That was my thought, too,” she says.

  But she, too, seems horrified by this fact.

  “Because it’s the truth.” My voice is hardening to shake her out of her doubt. “Most people might be too—soft or illogical—to admit it. But the truth is, we can afford to lose unskilled laborers. We can’t afford to lose warriors or farmers.”

  I watch her close her eyes, watch her let the words sink in, and though her face is twisting like she’s in pain, I know they’re hitting home. And it leaves me wondering, just as it did after my interview with Duck, at this ability I seem to have, of convincing others of things I can no longer convince myself.

  Though on some level, I think, Annie must want it. She must still be holding out hope that we’re doing good, that we’re an improvement, that Atreus is still right.

  Of these things, I realize I’m no longer sure. During the second half of the day, we discuss how we’ll hide the fact that each class metal gets different ration portions. We discuss how we’ll publicize and lie about what we’re doing, so the truth never grows to anything stronger than a rumor. And through these discussions, I sit in silence and puzzle over the same doubts I was so determined to cure Annie of.

  Because even though the logic adds up, the calculation still feels wrong.

  I think back over the last two weeks, of Rock’s ashen face, of Annie’s weeping after her first collection, of the cries of guilty farmers as flames caught and burned. I look around the room, at the stony faces of people who have taken it upon themselves to decide who deserves to live and die. Rock’s voice echoes in my head: I feel like a Stormscourge.

  I can’t shake the suspicion that he’s right. We’re coercing food out of farmers with the same threats of dragonfire. We’re about to endure another famine in which most of the people who die will be very poor. We’ll lie about it, just as the dragonlords did. After that, are there differences? Do the justifications for our choices matter to those who starve?

  For years I’ve told myself, if not always that the old regime was in the wrong, at least that Atreus is in the right. That his system is fair and good, that he has a plan worth following. Wasn’t that the point? Just as Atreus once told us: You only deserve this mantle as long as you can be more reasonable and more virtuous than what came before.

  I realize I’m no longer sure we are.

  Julia’s prediction, come full circle: Watch and see how that vision will splinter, and then we will see whether you have the stomach for more.

  * * *

  ***

  Back in the Cloister that evening, I head to the classroom I’ve been using as an office. There are memos from the ministry to process and schedules to write for riders accompanying rationing distribution. For the next few hours I’m virtually undisturbed; The only visitor is Power, who ducks his head in to ask for his patrol schedule. He never knocks.

  “I’m working on it. I’ll get it to you by tomorrow.”

  It’s quiet for another hour. And then there’s a soft knock on the door. A servant I don’t recognize approaches my desk and hands me a note.

  “A message, my lord.”

  “Thank you.”

  She’s gone before I even register the title.

  By the time I’ve risen and gone into the corridor, she’s already turned the corner and vanished.

  I lock the door with shaking fingers before returning to my desk.

  The note is sealed with unmarked wax. It is written, of course, in Dragontongue, in the hand that I recognize.

  Do you still think Atreus’s regime is worth fighting for?

  We are Firstriders for opposing fleets. If you continue down the path you’ve chosen, there will be no forgiveness between us, only fire and death.

  One more chance: I will wait for you at the Riversource of the Fer, at sunrise, on the first day of the coming month.

  Maybe you can’t betray them. But you can still come home.

  ANNIE

  It’s late after dinner when there’s a knock on the dorm room door. It’s a loud, hammering sound, like the person on the other side is slamming a fist, maybe an entire arm against the door. Crissa, who’s closest to the door, opens it to find Lee.

  He’s drenched, rainwater dripping down his face and pooling between his boots, and he’s wearing a flamesuit, as though he just got off Pallor and came here without changing. But that’s not how I know something is wrong. It’s his face: wild and lost and desperate.

  Crissa bites her lip, and I know she’s thinking he must be like this because of today’s meetings, which I’ve just finished telling her about. She thinks he’s upset about the figures, so callously calculated. But I’m certain that Lee is stronger than that, and this must be something more.

  “Lee, what’s wrong?” Crissa says, her hand still on the handle of the opened door.

  He stares at her for a moment, like he can’t even remember who she is, and then he croaks, “Annie. Annie, I need to speak to you.”

  I get to my feet. Crissa looks from him to me and says, simply and with dignity, “Of course.”

  He seems vaguely consternated as she leaves us, as though he hadn’t meant his last demand to come out as a request for her to leave so much as a summons for me. But he’s too distracted to bother correcting it, so he allows Crissa to sweep past him and then he steps into the room. Crissa closes the door behind her.

  “What is it, Lee?”

  Even as I say it, something in me already knows.

  He takes a breath. His face contorts like he’s in pain. And then he breaks the most important rule.

  LEE

  I’m on Pallor for hours. I circle the city, the outlying fields, pass over the villages whose food we’ve gathered. And then I take him south to the coast, past Harbortown, to the sea. The clouds are low and full over the Medean, but as the sun sets, it pierces through them along the horizon, doubled in the waves. And then the rain starts.

  I watch, but I don’t really see. The dam has broken again, the memories flash in a feverish, unrelenting storm: my sisters on Palace Day; my father’s voice in clumsy, panicked Callish; Tyndale’s bitter challenges. I didn’t sell out. I believe in Atreus. The sound of men screaming as I set their clothes on fire. The numbers on the board, the percentages, the predicted deaths.

  You can still come home.

  And after hours of this, it’s not so much a decision as an admission of defeat that I go to Annie.

  She waits in the center of the empty dorm room, quiet and unassuming and trusting. Her bobbed hair accentuates her slender neck, her folded arms hug her sleeping smock close to her narrow frame. Dressed for bed, she looks more like the orphan I remember than the dragonrider I train with. We stand five feet apart.

  “Your family,” I say.

  She sucks in a breath. We haven’t talked about h
er family since our fight at Albans. It’s too late now to go back, though, so I say it properly. Every word feels like another step down the plank.

  “I need to know how they died.”

  “You know how they died,” she whispers.

  “I need to hear you say it. All of it.”

  The empty room, its rows of beds and desks, is so quiet that I can hear her breathing. When she answers, I hear no surprise in her voice. Only resignation. As if, on some level, she has been waiting for this, and is ready.

  “All right.”

  The next question feels like a request for my own execution.

  “Can you show me?”

  She doesn’t seem to have expected this. Her arms unfold, then refold, over her smock, as she swallows. “Yes. When do you . . . ?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “Well, you write the schedules.”

  “Tomorrow morning?”

  “All right,” says Annie, her voice faint. “Tomorrow morning.”

  16

  HOLBIN HILL

  LEE

  It’s still dark when we suit up. Annie’s face is pale, with bruises under her eyes that she keeps rubbing, as if she slept as poorly as I did. We don’t speak. In the air, Annie flies ahead of us, hugging close to Aela’s back. It’s quiet and clean after last night’s storm, but the temperature has dropped, leaving the first bitter cold of winter in its wake. We land north of Annie’s village, in a sheltered rock alcove farther up the mountainside where Pallor and Aela can rest, hidden and undisturbed, during our visit.

  It’s a half-hour walk down the sloping pastures to Annie’s farm. As we walk, the sky turns gray, grows pink in the east, illuminating a highland skyline that I remember from my childhood—especially the distant, seaside peak on which lies the estate that once, before the Revolution, was my family’s home. Farhall, seat of the Drakarch of the Far Highlands. Though Holbin is miles inland from the manor where I was born, the biting winds, the smell of heather, the fiercely sloping fields are the same as I remember.

  And Annie remembers them, too. She picks her way through the rocks and weeds nimbly, barely slowing, mindless of the winds that buffet strands of her cropped hair across her face. I stumble after her. She stops at last beside a magnificently gnarled oak, her fingers fitting into its crevices with the familiarity of old acquaintance as she rests her hand on it.

  “It’s down there,” she says, nodding to the clearing below us. There’s a small footpath, mostly overgrown, leading down to it. I look and see nothing but clumps of bushes, gnarled trees, weeds. Farther on, smoke is rising from the chimneys of the other homes of Holbin. Annie surveys all this and inhales slowly.

  “I haven’t been back since it happened,” she says.

  I have never been so hesitant of every word I say. “We can take it slowly. Do you want to sit here for a minute or two?”

  She nods. I start to sit where I’m standing and then I feel her hand on my arm, the touch light, hesitant. “There’s a good spot over here,” she murmurs.

  She tugs me over the roots, to a place closer to the trunk where one of the oldest, most prominent roots forms a kind of ledge. It’s smoother than the other parts of the tree, like it’s been the bench of many people before.

  “It’s a good place to sit,” she says. “I used to come here with my sister.”

  “You had a sister?”

  Annie’s eyes dart to me, then back out over the sloping fields. “Two. And—three brothers.”

  I ask her for their names.

  Annie grips the knees of her flamesuit at the question. I think of what it felt like, Tyndale and Julia pulling those names out of so many years of silence, the shock and the ache of it. “Lila, Hettie,” she says carefully. “My sisters. Hettie and I were closest, we always did chores together.”

  “How old—”

  “Hettie was eight. Lila was twelve. My brothers were Rory and Garet. Rory was oldest—he was fifteen. He and Dad used to argue all the time. Garet was ten. And then the baby, he died before his naming.”

  “And your parents?” I prompt.

  Annie squints away from me. “Silas,” she says, her voice still careful. “And—”

  Then she looks stricken.

  For the first time, it occurs to me that her mother might have passed before Annie was old enough to know her given name. I hasten to backtrack, but before I can, she exhales a single word with sudden relief.

  “Anthea.”

  She adds, with determination, like she is reciting it: “I have her hair.”

  When she speaks again, her voice has regained some of its strength.

  “I can go down now.”

  She rises first and waits for me. Together we walk down the overgrown path, Annie pressing a hand against her cheek to hold her hair from her eyes. At the base, she looks around and swallows.

  “It’s here,” she says. She points around us, and in the growing light I distinguish the foundations of a building emerging from the weeds. “There’s not much left. The house—most of it burned down in the attack. And it’s been years, it’s overgrown now . . .”

  Her voice is faint again. She turns away from me, then moves slowly toward the ruins like she’s in a trance. She steps over the first row of bricks and says, “This was the front room . . .”

  I step closer so I can see the rest of it more clearly, realize then how small her house was: Its entire floor plan would have fit into my family’s vestibule.

  “How many stories—?”

  “One. And the outhouse was over there.”

  One fireplace, shared by the kitchen and the bedroom. One bedroom, which they shared. She shows me where the kitchen table used to be, where the beds were, where she slept with her sisters. It’s all unrecognizable, this many years gone, whatever was left after the fire long rotted and devoured by vines. But Annie conjures up the furniture and habits of this house as if she can still see them. I’m struck by the reverence with which she describes a world that sounds pitifully poor.

  After she’s done walking me around the foundations, she turns to face me.

  “Do you want to hear about the attack now?”

  I shake my head. “Tell me about the Famine.”

  She nods, and I sense that she’s gratified by the fact that I want to start there. “Come on,” she says, turning from me.

  About twenty yards from the remains of her house, she shows me a patch of land that looks, at first glance, like all the rest of the land around us. But then I notice the markers—wooden, not stone like those next to the Palace—planted side by side, one smaller than the other.

  “Your mother and baby brother.”

  “You remember?”

  “Of course . . .”

  She tells me about the crops failing, the blight no one had ever seen before, the way her father tried to hide his panic after the tax. Then came winter, and during that winter she learned what it was like to be hungry. They ate things that weren’t supposed to be food. She says it concisely like that, but I insist that she elaborate.

  “I think we ate our dog,” she says. “Dad said it wandered off, but I never believed that, there was meat on the table for the next week. My brothers tried dirt and got sick for a few days. I figured out how to . . .”

  “How to what?”

  “Worms,” she says simply, her whole face glowing in humiliation.

  The winter she’s talking about, the first winter of the Famine, I only vaguely remember. There were fewer feasts than usual, and crop failure was the explanation offered when anyone complained.

  “Anyway, Mum would have probably been all right, but she was pregnant again. Always, always hungry. It was horrible—so horrible—especially for Dad. When the baby finally came, it took a really, really long time, and she was just too weak. You could hear her, it went on for over a d
ay. And then she went to sleep and . . . didn’t wake up. The baby didn’t live much longer before he passed, too.”

  By then it was springtime, new crops to plant, and the family pulled themselves together, though things were different now. Less laughter, more anger. Her father began to fixate on the fact that what little usable food their crops had produced had been taken by the dragonlords’ tax. If they’d been able to keep what they had, his wife might have survived. As summer passed, the blight reared its head again. But this time, prepared by their last winter, the farmers of Holbin began to plan for the dragonlord’s next visit.

  By now, Annie’s unlikely ability to read had manifested itself, and without the moderating influence of her mother to stop him, Annie’s father began taking her to his meetings with the other villager leaders, and she listened as they planned their countermoves to the palace decrees she read to them. Thus, when Leon Stormscourge visited their house in late autumn and accused Annie’s father of conspiracy and withholding what was owed, Annie had no doubt of her father’s guilt on both counts.

  “Holbin was attacked twice,” she says. “The first time was a warning. They knew my father was one of the ringleaders. The second came after the villagers still didn’t meet quota. They set most of Holbin’s buildings on fire. Then they took everything they could find, not just enough to cover the tax. I was living with another family by then, but after the second attack, they couldn’t afford to feed me anymore, so they took me to Albans.”

  We’re still by the graves, but she’s staring down the hill at the village now. The sun has climbed over the horizon, enough so that the peaks of the mountains are glowing gold.

  “And the first attack?” I prompt her.

  Annie hesitates.

  “Lee,” she says softly, still staring out at the fields below us. “Are you sure you want to hear . . .”

  I don’t know if her hesitation to talk about it is for her sake or mine.