House of Dragons

by Jessica Cluess

  Vespir’s eyes lit up. “Your dragon’s so dumb that he tries to migrate south for the winter with the geese.”

  Vespir kicked the table at her own joke. Even Hyperia chuckled, but it could be that she enjoyed Ajax’s humiliation more than anything.

  “Your dragon is so dumb,” Vespir whispered, “that he thinks the dragon throne is a place where he gets to take a shit.”

  Vespir fell onto her side and curled her knees to her chest, laughing with unbridled joy. Ajax looked like a grimy, closed fist.

  “Your dragon’s so dumb,” Emilia said, lifting her head with a grin, “that he mistakes the Platonic dracomachian hypothesis for Calliphon’s theorem of draconic hierarchy.” Hyperia and Ajax gazed blankly at her. “Well, I thought it was funny,” she grumbled, and slumped back against Lucian.

  “I think,” Hyperia said in low, dulcet tones, sitting regally with one hand against her cheek and her eyes closed, “that I may have to vomit soon.”

  “We need more of this.” Lucian shoved the pitcher at a servant girl. “And something to eat. Bread, grapes, rice, uh, bread? Yes. Thank you.”

  “We’re missing a good opportunity for a symposium here, you know.” Emilia poked Lucian’s side.

  “First.” Ajax held up one finger. “What’s a supposition?”

  “Symposium. Back in the empire’s infancy, it was a party where everyone would drink wine and debate philosophy and science and the meaning of the universe.” Her eyes sparkled at the thought.

  “That sounds awful,” both Hyperia and Ajax said. If they noticed their brief moment of unity, they didn’t show it.

  “No. It was wonderful if you were intelligent.” Emilia wrinkled her nose. “For a few hundred years, discourse was treated with reverance. But in the past century or so, debate and philosophy have been deemed essentially useless. Right around the time the conquering spirit infected every aspect of Etrusian life. What’s the point in expanding the base of human knowledge when you can just expand lines on a map?” She went for a drink and found her cup empty. Emilia waved it in the air while she looked for the servant. “What’s in this stuff?”

  “Wine,” Lucian whispered. She elbowed him.

  “Careful. That sounded almost treasonous.” Hyperia’s soft, chilled voice indicated that her brief moment of not being herself had ended. Damn.

  “Well, soon I’ll be dead, so it’s fine if I get a little angry,” Emilia muttered.

  “You don’t know that,” Lucian said, more roughly than he’d meant to. She blinked at him in surprise. Clearing his throat, he said, “You could win. You won the Game, after all.” Despite the full understanding that only one of them could triumph in this Trial, and despite wanting that throne for his own reasons, the idea of Emilia dying…and on his order, if he were victorious…filled him with despair.

  “If only the Truth was a debate. I know I’d win that.” Emilia sighed and Ajax snorted, chugging a new cup of wine.

  “I know how to talk to people. Trust me, the priests would be amazed by what came out of my mouth,” he said.

  “Trust me, they already are,” Emilia replied. Lucian laughed before he could stop himself.

  “Watch me. Listen to how brilliant this is.” Ajax hopped onto the sofa, wobbling a bit to keep his balance. Beside him, Vespir craned her neck to watch.

  “Should we look away?” Emilia muttered as Ajax made big, sweeping bows.

  “Would you even want to if you could?” Lucian replied.

  “This is a supposition,” Ajax cried. Emilia sighed. “A, er, talk about why I’m going to be emperor, or why I really should be. So…” He paused, screwing up his face as he organized his argument. “I should be emperor because I am all about expanding. You know? Expand the empire. Expand the boundaries. Why?” He ticked the reasons off on his fingers. “More expansion means more land. More land means more people. More people means more taxes. More taxes means more money. More money means I get richer. More richer, I mean, I get richer means I’m in a good mood. More good mood means we’re all in a good mood.”

  He paused, letting that brilliance sink in.

  Everyone did their best to be polite.

  “Also,” Ajax said, with the air of someone who knows he’s got a crushing point. “I’m going to get girls. Girls.” He threw his head back and crowed to the ceiling. “Giiiiirrrrlllllssss.”

  “That is hardly a fitting argument,” Hyperia began, but then Vespir leapt up beside the boy.

  “Girls are amazing!” Vespir shouted, grabbing Ajax’s shoulders. “But don’t be creepy, though.”

  Ajax shook his head emphatically. “No, no, I will not be creepy about it. If I walk up to a girl and say, ‘Hello, Miss Girl, would you like to come back to my golden palace?’ and she says, ‘No,’ that is totally fine. But there’s, I think, a sixty percent chance she will say yes, because I am an emperor, and I have a golden palace.”

  “Yeah, golden palace!” Vespir shouted. She looked positively delighted by the idea. “My turn!” she cried as Ajax bowed to no applause.

  Ajax threw his arms around her and hugged her tight. “Yer my bes’ fren. Boop,” he said, releasing her from the hug and collapsing into his seat.

  “That’s not how it works, but good try.” She wobbled in place, was silent a moment to compose her thoughts, and began.

  “I don’t know how to write my name,” she said. Good start. Lucian noticed—and saw Hyperia notice—that the servants appeared to be intently listening to Vespir. “I come from a small village, the kind of place you pass through to get to somewhere that’s actually worth visiting.” She wavered, but found her balance. “When you talk about ‘expanding,’ you know what I think of?” She wasn’t asking Ajax so much as the whole table of them. “I think of hundreds of soldiers camping all over my village, hogging our two wells so they can water their horses. I think of soldiers loading up on our chickens and grains and potatoes because they’re hungry. Because apparently we never get hungry,” she grumped, rubbing a hand across her face.

  “Yeah, hungry,” Ajax called through his cupped hands. It seemed like he was trying to support her more than he understood what was going on.

  “So after they take our water and our food, the soldiers plant a flag in the ground and say we’re part of the empire and then move on. But they leave behind some guy who sits at a desk and tells us that now we have to start paying more money and more chickens and grain for…I don’t know what.

  “And the guy behind the desk never gets his hands dirty, but he starts telling us how to run our land and when to hand over our children for the army or to work in their palaces or their fields. And no one cares when they take us, because why would they? We belong to them from the day we’re born.” Vespir stopped wavering; in fact, she stood frighteningly still. “They tell us how to run our lives, and then have us die for them, and then write letters saying how sorry they are that we’re dead. Only we can’t even read how sorry they are, because no one thinks it’s a good idea for us to read.”

  Vespir’s voice grew louder as the room got quieter.

  “My older brother Casca. He got pulled into the army when I was eleven. I came home one day to find a wooden box on our kitchen table and my mom crying. She had a letter with the Pentri seal on it. We knew one of my brothers and sisters was dead in the wars. They burn the body, put the ashes in a little box, and send them back to the family.” Vespir’s eyes shone with unspent tears. “Mom couldn’t read the letter to find out who’d died, so I had to run it down to the local imperial outpost to get some guy behind a desk to read it.” She sniffed, rubbed her nose. “He told me Casca was a deserter, so they’d killed him on sight. And all I could think, when my mom and dad wept and prayed at the little family altar that night with the clay figures of the Pentri family and asked for forgiveness for raising a coward…all I could think was, of course Casca ran. He was
n’t a soldier. He told jokes. He overslept and ate too much rice porridge. His trousers never fit because he grew so fast. And they squashed his whole long, skinny body into a little box on our kitchen table.

  “Y’know, before the Etrusian Empire came east, my people were horse people. Not dragon people.” Vespir blinked away her tears. “When Valeria Pentri came through to conquer us, we put up such a good fight that she married one of our nobles. Kinda like they did in Karthago, the Pentri started looking like us. But it’s still mostly Etrusian, right? So my family name, the words I speak, the clothes I wear…it all comes from Etrusia. Sometimes, I wonder what my name would’ve been in some other language. I don’t know.

  “So, what are we left with?” Vespir asked, snapping out of her self-reverie. “Not enough. They ask more of us when we have less, and why? Because someone put a flag in our village or something.”

  She mumbled this last bit to the floor. Ajax roared with applause, and quiet glances darted back and forth between the servants. Lucian saw all of them twitch or nod slightly. Ajax hugged Vespir when she sat beside him. “Mine was better, but yours was really good, too,” he said.

  Lucian poured the girl another cup of wine, trying not to let his hands tremble. What she’d said was simple truth.

  “You didn’t explain the key part, though.” Hyperia curled her lip, revealing small white teeth. “Why should you be empress?”

  “I mean. Why should I?” Vespir grumbled.

  Emilia, meanwhile, twirled a strand of hair around and around her finger, adopting that far-off look that Lucian had once known so well.

  “Lucian?” Hyperia glanced his way. “Do you have anything to add to this symposium?”

  This would’ve been a good time to say no, to drink and toast to whoever would win and keep his thoughts buried deep. But after Vespir’s speech, and all the wine, Lucian felt his tongue loosen. And even though part of him shouted to stay silent, he found himself speaking the words.

  “When I was a boy,” he said slowly, “I worshipped my father.”

  Finally, Lucian told the full story of his first battle when he was fourteen years old. He told how he had been raised to wield arms, how he had vowed at age seven to one day avenge his mother and murder the northern barbarians who’d taken her away. Lucian had trained with a sword and a spear, imagining with every hack and thrust that some Wikingar monster died beneath the blade. When Tyche hatched, he had worked to be an aerial menace worthy of the Sabel name.

  He remembered how, when he and Dido turned fourteen, their father declared that they were ready to do their duty for empire and family. Hector, who always put duty and honor before everything else, who took exceptional care to teach his twins to be proud and noble as well as fierce and strong. How Lucian had loved him.

  The first time he and Tyche had flown into battle against the northern hordes, Lucian’s new armor had fit snugly, his fur-lined cloak flapping behind him in the frigid northern air. He and Tyche had landed alongside his father in a dense forest, the Drakes nimbly alighting with ease. And Hector had explained the plan.

  Ahead of them, through the gnarled winter trees, there was no battlefield, no barbarian horde. Lucian could see only huts and the smoke from cooking fires. He heard children’s laughter.

  “But, Father,” he’d said, “this is a village.” Lucian recalled feeling like the whole day was a drawing that wasn’t turning out the way he’d imagined.

  His father told him that in real life, victories came from everyone doing their part. Wikingar soldiers were headed east to meet the imperial troops in battle. Lucian’s job, he said, was to make certain that any survivors would return to find their homes gone. No families. No shelter. They’d be cut off at the legs. So the ground troops charged the village, and Lucian took to the air on Tyche.

  Lucian recalled setting fire to those thatched roofs, the burning sap and resin smelling sickly sweet, like toffee.

  War looked so different from fifty feet in the air. The villagers mostly comprised the old, the sick, and those too young to wield a weapon. Lucian and Tyche mowed them down wherever possible, easily dodging the few arrows that were shot their way. Lucian felt sick as he moved along the village, destroying every home and building he could.

  And then, beneath him, as Tyche reared up and prepared another fireball, he saw the old man and the child.

  The man’s beard was long, his eyes sunken. He pointed at Lucian in horror. The order to fire stuck in Lucian’s throat as the old man clutched the little boy against his chest. His grandson? Probably. The child, no more than eight or nine, looked up at Lucian and the dragon and screamed in fear.

  “Tyche. Fire,” Lucian whispered, and his dragon spewed a stream of pure flame.

  Later, when Lucian had his father’s hand on his shoulder and was taking a victorious stroll through the ransacked village, they came across two bodies.

  One was a man, the other a little boy. They were both charred beyond all recognition, but Lucian knew them. The man’s arm was tucked around the boy, his body curled about him in protection. Their fat still sizzled, like something roasting slow over a fire.

  Lucian realized, in that moment, that he was not and never would be any kind of hero. While the soldiers cheered and their few prisoners wept, Lord Sabel kissed Lucian’s cheek and said, “You are my worthy son.”

  Lucian stopped his tale then and drank more wine.

  Emilia sat fully upright now, her gray eyes soft with horror. Across from him, Vespir leaned over and put her head in her hands.

  “What did you do then?” Emilia whispered.

  “I yelled that I hated him.” He wiped his lips. “That I hated this whole rotten empire.” Lucian closed his eyes. “He slapped my face. He’d never struck me before. That was the first time he put me in the brig. It wasn’t the last.”

  “You fought to expand the borders of something you hate?” Hyperia shook her head, her eyes hard. “There’s nothing worse than a hypocrite.”

  “You don’t know.” Lucian leaned closer to Hyperia, every hair on his arms and the nape of his neck standing on end. Fury sharpened his focus. “You lived your whole life in golden palaces, like Ajax was rambling about. People like you don’t understand what it is to have no choice.”

  “We all have a choice, every day,” Hyperia said.

  “No. A few of us have a choice. You. Eh, even me,” he growled, because he knew she was right. He could have flown away on Tyche at any time, even if it meant paying the price. He had slaughtered and burned for the sake of his family’s pride and in the interest of saving his own skin. “But people like Vespir don’t. Even Ajax.” He glanced at the two of them. “You can’t talk about choice when they have none.”

  “I know what it’s like to make a terrible choice.” Hyperia stared out the window.

  “Your sister wasn’t a choice. She was a victim.” He expected her to attack him over that, but Hyperia didn’t respond. “So that’s why I want the throne. I can’t accept a world that didn’t have room in it for that old man and boy.”

  Silence.

  Finally, Hyperia spoke. “Antipone wrote the only law of empire we’ll ever need.” She held up a hand, palm forward, pinkie and ring finger bent. She’d adopted the classical stance of the philosopher. Lucian could tell by Emilia’s raised eyebrow that even she was impressed. Hyperia was well educated. Lacking in imagination, yes, but not in education. “ ‘I thank the forces of order that give me a tongue to speak the truth and a mind to comprehend it,’ ” she said, quoting the first rule by heart. She continued. “ ‘Our empire is the only true and orderly and good thing in this world. How else would those civilizations condemned to chaos and primitive life be raised up with medicine, law, agriculture, and the arts? An empire provides honorable work for its soldiers. Their labor, steeped in blood for the future’s glory, is a sacrifice that lets all prosper.’�
��”

  The wine fired Lucian’s gut.

  “ ‘An emperor receives the fruits of war and gives greater meaning to the world as he conquers it. He prospers.

  “ ‘The nobles take bounty from the emperor’s outstretched hand, allowing them to breed soldiers and scientists and philosophers, who in turn bring meaning and hope to the people. They prosper.

  “ ‘The people are safe and fed, and find meaning as they work for the stability of the empire. They prosper.

  “ ‘Those who live in chaos struggle and die. The empire restores order. Free from chaos, all nations give their people and riches to the empire, a tributary feeding into a greater river. They prosper. Thus, only an empire generally, and this one specifically, is moral and right.’ ”

  Finished, Hyperia leaned back in satisfaction. Emilia cleared her throat.

  “Dragon shit,” she said cheerily, sweeping her hair back from her face.

  Lucian gave a shocked laugh.

  Hyperia’s eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”

  “Antipone wrote that in the second century AD, long before the war machine was ascendant. Also, the second rule discusses temperance, how important it is not to simply conquer for the sake of conquering. Antipone specifically said that an orderly empire could only remain healthy by creating spells of peace as well as war, like the rotation of crops. Funny how no one ever remembers the second rule when they quote her.” Emilia frowned. “Besides, didn’t you hear Vespir and Lucian? Hungry people grow hungrier. Poor people grow poorer. Innocent people are burned alive. How does tearing families apart stabilize anything?”

  “Temporary suffering is needed to make the future greater,” Hyperia answered automatically. Lucian imagined the Volscia girl’s mind as a system of cards; get a question, pull up the proper response without even considering what you’d been asked. He watched Emilia, feeling a surge of excitement. Yes. Get her.

  “You know, I read a lot,” she said conversationally. “I love statistics.”

  Hyperia groaned, but Emilia continued.