“Wake your mistress.”
I’m prepared to add an official mandate, but the valet obeys without waiting for it. I don’t know if it’s because of my uniform or my tone.
When Mithrides emerges shortly afterward, she has dressed, though her graying hair is not arranged. Her lined face is alert and intrigued.
“By the dragon, girl,” she says in Dragontongue when she sees me, and her eyes travel past me, to Lotus waiting on the gravel with his skyfish, Iustus, and my Aela.
In Callish, I ask, “Do you remember who I am?”
“Of course I do. You’re the highland rider.”
“And you remember Lee sur Pallor?”
“The Guardian from Cheapside with such an unusual grasp of Dragontongue poetry, and now our Firstrider? Of course. But I fail to understand why such questions merit a call at this hour—”
“Please come with me. There’s something that you should see.”
As Mithrides follows me down the stairs to the dragons, she remarks: “It’s been a long time since I’ve taken a ride on one of these.”
* * *
***
In early morning, Pytho’s Keep is the first part of the city to clear the fog and catch the light of the rising sun. As Lotus and I approach, Mithrides clinging to my back with trembling arms, we’re joined by the rest of the fleet, all who were present at my meeting in the oration room. From the air we are able to distinguish figures waiting on the plinth of the ancient Sky Court: Atreus, accompanied by the entirety of the Protector’s Guard, a sea of crimson uniforms, who must have mounted the single winding stair carved into the karst on foot. Standing in the great, flat width of the open court, under the fullness of the dawn sky and lifted to such a height from the ground, Atreus and his guard look like toy figures.
“There’s Lee,” Cor calls to me, raising an arm toward the northwest.
A white aurelian approaches on the western horizon, returning from the highlands.
Relief fills me in equal parts with dread.
He’s done it.
My Lee, what hell have you been through, to make it back to us?
“Let’s descend.”
Mithrides, astride Aela behind me, grips my sides with a sucked-in breath as we dive; all around us, dragons are gathering their wings for descent.
We land on the windswept flagstones before the Protector’s Guard. Crissa lends her arm to Hane, Cor helps down General Holmes, and Lotus and I help Dora. The rest of the fleet have landed in a semicircle around us and the Guard. Today, with clouds hanging low against the karst, the dawn is diffused by pink mist. Old trees, hobbled by years of wind into little more than shrubs, border the ancient court and mark the edge of the karst’s plateau. Three marble arches rise above the plinth on which the triarchs of another age sat, and the stone citadel rises behind them.
Deafened by the unrelenting wind, I summon up my courage to look at Atreus. He stands on the plinth, framed by the arches, his short gray hair whipping flat against his forehead. It is light enough, on the Keep, to see his face clearly.
For the moment, his eyes travel from face to face, lingering on Holmes’s and Hane’s and Mithrides’s, and then to the array of riders, on dragonback, behind us. Like he’s searching. But then I force myself to speak, and he looks at me. I have to raise my voice over the wind.
“As requested, Protector. Your witnesses.”
It’s like being drilled through to the center, holding Atreus’s gaze. I think of my uniform, of the dragonrider’s cloak flowing behind me, of the dragon that answers to me alone standing to my right.
“Thank you, Antigone.”
“What is the meaning of this, Atreus?” Dora Mithrides asks.
General Holmes looks around the crumbling Sky Court in bewilderment, and then his eyes find the Protector’s Guard behind Atreus, and he frowns. As if he’s noted the presence of an armed force and the remoteness of our location, and begins to wonder at the combination. Hane merely looks with long, slow glances from me to the Protector, understanding what hasn’t been said.
Atreus does not have the opportunity to answer Dora’s question. On the edge of the court, silhouetted against the glowing sky, a final dragon has landed. Pallor no longer gleams silver-white; he’s blackened with ash, each breath a hoarse gasp. When Lee slides stiffly to the ground, I realize that much of what darkens his armor is dragonsblood. His back is turned to us, his shoulders hunched, one hand gripping the ridge of Pallor’s back for support.
“What on earth?” Dora breathes from behind me.
“Atreus,” says Holmes, with mounting intensity but through barely moving lips, his words clearly intended for none but Atreus to hear, “why is your Guard waiting on the Keep for our Firstrider?”
I don’t wait for Atreus’s answer. Instead, I turn from them and go to Lee. I can feel the eyes of those watching on my back. I join Lee at the court’s edge. Beyond it, the karst falls away below glowing mist and the Palace, the city, and the river still lie in shadow.
Pallor has begun to let out keening cries as Lee spills over. Lee, his face averted, doesn’t notice my approach until I say his name. I wrap my arms around him, pull him close, breathe in the smell of dragonfire and blood. When he lowers his head onto my shoulder, he is for a moment completely silent—as if his distress, so uncontrollably demonstrated by Pallor, is still something he seeks to contain within himself. Then the moment breaks. A single cry of grief escapes him, muffled and defeated, as if it has been torn from him against his will. I feel answering sorrow surging up within me.
But I force it down. The time for grief must be later. I let him go.
“They’re waiting, Lee.”
He doesn’t ask for what, just nods and straightens. He drags one arm across his eyes, and for the first time looks past me, at our audience. The sight of them seems to clear his head. Beside him, Pallor’s thrashing begins to slow, his cries to lessen. With sudden decisiveness Lee turns from me and yanks open a massive satchel tied to Pallor’s flank, dark with the outline of a human body. He pulls from it a stained, blackened helmet on which the Stormscourge symbol of highland heather is still barely visible.
With a final touch to Pallor’s still-shuddering side and a nod to me, he walks toward the waiting onlookers: Atreus, the Protector’s Guard, Holmes, Hane, and the other Guardians and their dragons. There is a moment of silence in which all we hear is the deafening wind.
Then Lee stops, two yards from Atreus, and flings the helmet to the ground between them. Before Atreus can say anything, Lee begins to speak.
“I was born Leo, son of Leon, of House Stormscourge. I hereby renounce that name.”
Hane draws a sharp breath. Holmes’s eyes widen. Lee’s voice is clear against the wind. He is speaking in Dragontongue, in meter, according to the traditions of high oaths in the old courts.
“In the name of Callipolis, I have forfeited all ties of blood. In the name of Callipolis, I have forsaken both the traditions of my people and the laws of their long-dead gods. In the name of Callipolis”—Lee inhales, his voice breaks—“I have slain my kin.”
He slides to his knees on the flagstone, lowers his head, and extends his hands, palms up.
“Let the blood on my hands be my offering; let the spoils of my battle stand as proof of my loyalty.”
And then he places his palms flat on the ground.
“All that I have, I offer to Callipolis. I am at your mercy, to be kept or cast out, according to your wish.”
Lee, head bowed as he waits, does not witness the silent interchanges of his audience: how Holmes levels a gaze at Atreus with a long, deliberate exhale, eyebrows raised in a challenge; how Hane has raised her hands to the sides of her face and seeks Atreus’s eyes with her own wide ones, bright and horrified; how Dora Mithrides has folded her arms as she glares at Atreus, her lips pursed. The Protector’s Guard
are gripping their spears slackly, uncertainly, looking to Atreus for further instruction. Atreus looks past all of them, at me.
Then, to my utter surprise, he smiles.
It is not a smile with any warmth: It is a lip curled, a lifted brow, as if, instead of feeling thwarted by my maneuvers, he is laughing at them. In that moment, his malice is palpable.
The triumph that has been rising within me falters. A coldness blossoms in my stomach. For one heart-stopped instant, as he steps forward, I think, He’s going to do it anyway.
Then he looks down at Lee and speaks.
“Rise, son of Callipolis.”
Breath returns to me in a slow exhale.
Lee gets slowly to his feet. Atreus steps down from the plinth and places a palm on Lee’s forehead. Lee raises his head fractionally at the touch. He closes streaming eyes. When Atreus continues, his voice is soft, emotionless. Almost lazy.
“Do you swear to honor, serve, and protect the City, as long as you have breath?”
“I swear it.”
“Then be Stormscourge no longer. You are Lee, of no father and no house.”
Atreus’s hand falls. Lee opens his eyes, blinking as if the dawn light blinds him.
Cor steps forward, producing from the pocket of his uniform Lee’s silver-and-gold wristband, retrieved from Goran’s office before our departure. He holds it out to offer to Atreus, but Holmes steps forward and takes it instead.
“Affirm your vows,” Holmes directs Lee gruffly, in Callish.
Lee inhales. Then he recites, without faltering, the words that we first said as children, seven years ago.
“I vow to serve as Guardian, from this day forward, till death release me. I forswear all worldly possessions and riches, that I be not corrupted. I forswear all family and the comforts of hearth and progeny, that I be not torn from my purpose. All that I am belongs to Callipolis. By the wings of my dragon I will keep her. Let my will be her protection. Let my reason guide her to justice.”
Holmes holds out the band to Lee’s extended wrist and snaps the wristband in place. The fingers of Lee’s dominant hand reach for it automatically, confirming its presence.
When the wristband is secured, I unclasp the medal of the Firstrider and fleet commander from my shoulder and hold it out to him.
Lee reaches for it, looks at me, and his eyes focus. Then, instead of taking it, he closes my fingers over it.
“Keep it.”
I stand frozen, my closed fist smeared with the blood and ash of Lee’s hand. For a moment, I don’t understand.
Then Lee turns from me to address those watching, lifting his voice over the wind.
“I have sworn my loyalty to Callipolis. I have shown myself willing to wage war for it. But it is not a war I can or should lead. I recuse myself.”
His voice thick with a different emotion, he unfolds an arm, gesturing to me with the whole of it. “Instead, I will follow the one who should. Antigone sur Aela is next in rank to take my place. She has demonstrated herself more than my equal in the air and on the ground. I will follow her.”
Pressure on the edge of my eyes is growing as Lee’s meaning hits home. For a moment, all I can think is no. No, I don’t want this, I can’t do this—
But then I remember that I did want this. That I can do this. And Lee needs it.
And when I look past him, to those watching, to see if they raise the objections that are half swirling in my head, I find they are not. Instead, for the first time since Lee arrived on the Keep, Atreus’s face shows surprise. His hand has moved, seemingly unconsciously, to cover his mouth, twisted with whatever realizations he has left to make as he regards Lee’s arm proffered in abdication.
Then Lee turns to me. “Antigone, will you accept the mantle of Firstrider and Fleet Commander?”
The eyes of the corps, of Atreus and Miranda Hane and General Holmes are on me, but now my eyes are only on Lee. Covered in blood and ash, gray eyes blazing as he stands tall, dark hair rippling in the wind of the Sky Court. Every bit a dragonlord’s son.
Waiting on my word, though it costs him all that’s left of his resolve to do so.
My throat tight, I nod. And then I force my answer to be loud, and carry over the wind.
“I will.”
Lee steps closer, takes the medal from me, and affixes it again to my shoulder. I am aware, while his fingers clasp the pin against my uniform, of my own light breathing as I look up at him, as we pass through this moment. A few heartbeats that take us from one order to another.
The medal again on my shoulder, Lee steps back from me and bends before me, full-backed, into a bow. Though his voice is strained, it does not break.
“I salute you as my commander and offer you my dragon’s service as your Alternus.”
19
REVOLUTION’S CHILDREN
The soldier went on after the Revolution to live a quiet life, retired from military office, and in the great scheme of his changing city, amounting to little.
He would never tell anyone about the time he disobeyed his commander’s orders. The time when he carried a boy into a hallway and kept walking. Looking back on that moment, he tried to tell himself it had been a choice. A choice, for better or for worse, that had defined him.
The truth was, it hadn’t felt like a choice at all. He had simply looked at the boy and seen, not a dragonlord’s son, but a child like any other.
He tended the boy’s wounds, took him to the orphanage, and left him with a new name: Lee.
ANNIE
Back on the ground I escort Lee to the infirmary and make sure he is given a private room. Lee doesn’t question or confirm the choice; in the time it’s taken to descend Pytho’s Keep he seems to have moved past the point of speaking. He remains quiet throughout the nurse’s tending, during which I wash what ash and dragonsblood I’ve been stained with off in a basin to the side of the room. Only after the nurse has left, the door closed behind her, and I have taken him into my arms does he finally speak.
“Atreus asked, but I couldn’t—we’ll have to return the body—”
“I’ll make sure that happens.”
But he barely hears me, because he has realized the word he has used—body—and it’s enough to make him lose it. As I tighten my arms around him, as my heart aches at the sound of his anguish, another part of me, another part that woke when he pinned the fleet commander’s medal on my shoulder, remains calm as still water and hard as steel. That part of me thinks only: You are safe.
I hold him until he’s spent, and then I help him drink the sleeping draft the nurse left us.
“You need to sleep. I’ll be back when you wake up.”
Back in the Cloister I find Power, lounging in the leaf-swept courtyard, the winter wind rippling through his hair.
“Commander,” he says, and his tone, though sardonic as usual, contains what I suspect is satisfaction.
One person, at least, who likes the idea of my promotion.
He smiles, salutes with his characteristic flourish, and leaves me alone among the leaves.
Inside the fleet commander’s office, I stand for a moment and test the thought: my office. Then I sit and begin going through the list of meetings that I’ll need to attend in addition to those already scheduled. I’ll meet with Holmes, to discuss the matter of the body of Julia Stormscourge and Lee’s request that it be returned to New Pythos; and I’ll meet with Miranda Hane, to discuss what kind of propaganda will be needed to ensure Lee’s safe reinstatement in the corps. But before all these, I find a message from Dora Mithrides, inviting me to tea.
For the second time today and in my life, I make my way up the Janiculum.
It’s a quiet walk through the Palace gardens and up the winding streets to Dora’s house, through the riots of fall colors and the blowing leaves, along streets lined with ornate fences and iv
y-clad mansions and the occasional trotting carriage. Dora’s porter lets me inside the gate, the valet into her home. Soaring ceilings, great chandeliers, a grand staircase winding upward greet me: It occurs to me that these are all the things I am usually intimidated by. But today they don’t have the same power over me.
“Antigone. Welcome. We’ll take our tea on the veranda.”
Dora Mithrides has dressed properly, applied her rouge, and arranged her hair. Her neck is weighted once again with thick-beaded necklaces. She leads the way through the spacious house to a veranda, sheltered from the wind, that looks out over a private garden and the city. The concentric walls of the Inner and Outer Palace spread below, the arena leaning out over the winding River Fer, which encircles the Palace gardens and the lower Janiculum. Across the river lies Highmarket, bustling and bright; Cheapside and Southside, low-roofed and dirty; and in the distance the Manufacturing District, bleak and hazy with smoke. Beyond that the lowland plains, stretching out to meet the sea and a blue sky.
“Cream or sugar?”
We sit at a glass table, the china arrayed before us so thin light shines through it. There’s enough of a chill in the air that Dora has wrapped herself in a shawl; the leather of my uniform is sufficient to hold my heat. Dora has spoken in Dragontongue, and I sense, this time, that it matters which language I reply in. So, careful of each word, I answer in Dragontongue as well.
“Neither, thank you.”
There are rules to this process, and Lee would know all of them, but Lee is not here.
Even when you don’t feel confident, you fake it.
I smile at the serving girl and thank her for my tea.
When we are alone on the veranda, Dora takes a long drink from her cup, returns it to her saucer, and tells me:
“That was quite an operation you just pulled off, my dear.”
I sip my own tea and find my wrist steady.
“I am curious why you did it. Are you in love with the boy?”
Fireborne Page 37