Fireborne (THE AURELIAN CYCLE Book 1)
Fireborne: Chapter 10

The boy and the girl were the only children from their orphanage who scored high enough on the metals test to be invited to the Choosing Ceremony. On the awaited day, the boy was alive with excitement. Somehow, against all odds, he was back in the Inner Palace. And he was about to attend a Choosing ceremony. His birthright.

The girl did not share his excitement. They were on the threshold of the Hall of the Triarchs, standing in the line of waiting children about to be presented to dragons, and she was shaking from head to foot. “I don’t want to go in there.”

After a year of unease about the idea of this test, of commoners attending Choosing ceremonies, the boy’s only thought now, when he looked at the girl, was that something extraordinary was about to happen and he didn’t want her to miss it. Without pausing to consider it, he took her hand.

“We’ll do it together.”

Inside the hall, high above them, on the balcony, the boy could see a few adults gathered, watching the ceremony. The boy himself had stood there when his brother had been presented at a Choosing. Now, looking up at the balcony, the boy spotted the man who had saved him.

They passed the first hatchling, a slender, purple-tinged skyfish, dog-sized. Its eyes passed over them without interest, and they continued on.

“See? Easy,” he murmured to the girl. “They’re just babies. Can’t even breathe fire yet. Unless they Choose you, they don’t even notice you.”

She didn’t ask how he knew this. Her eyes were fixed on the exit at the other side of the room. They passed another skyfish, then a third. He thought they were doing quite well until he felt her freeze beside him.

They had reached the stormscourge section. For an instant, his only thought was, Finally.

His family’s dragons. He was home.

But then he looked at the girl and saw her face crumpling with fear. Looking at the stormscourges—his stormscourges—with such terror on her face that tears began to pour down it.

He felt as though something inside him was breaking apart.

“Come on,” he said.

He wrapped his arm around her and pulled her forward, past all the great, beautiful stormscourges that he’d always dreamed of flying. Barely looking at them, because all he could focus on was the feeling of the girl’s shoulders shaking as he led her on. “They won’t hurt you, come on . . .”

And then it was over: He hadn’t been Chosen, but it didn’t matter, suddenly it didn’t matter at all—

“See, we’re done, it’s done—”

He turned to her, desperate to see the look of despair gone from her face, ignoring the plummeting feeling of his own. He was surprised to see something else. Instead of staring at her feet, the girl was looking up. Past him.

He followed her gaze and saw that she was looking at an aurelian, and that the aurelian was looking back at her.

He’d heard it said before that a kind of magic came with a dragon Choosing you—that the dragon bound you to it, that you formed a connection that was deep and full of an old magic. His father had always told him this was simply a myth, that it was a matter of imprinting and that there was nothing mystical about it.

But he couldn’t help thinking, as he watched the girl’s face transform, that he was seeing something unearthly. The girl who, a moment ago, had been cowering against him now released his hand as if she had forgotten it. She took one step toward the dragon, then another, never taking her eyes off the dragon’s face. When they stood nose to nose, she stretched out a hand and laid it between the dragon’s eyes.

The boy was so entranced that he didn’t stop to wonder what was nudging him until he turned to acknowledge it. Then he looked up, into a pair of great, liquid black eyes, and everything around him stood still.

LEE

I sit across from Atreus while he reviews my transcription of the Pythians’ message to the boy from Starved Rock. The tomes of Dragontongue lining the shelves of his office contrast with the careful austerity of his desk, of the chairs we’re sitting in, and his simple, unadorned uniform. Lines form around his mouth and forehead as he reads. When he finishes, he laces his fingers together and looks up. It’s early afternoon the day after the Lycean Ball, but it feels like a year has passed between last night and today.

“You handled this well, Lee.”

The truth curdles in my stomach: I didn’t handle this well. I let it happen. I let Holmes take down the aerial guard when I knew better and he didn’t.

“How are we going to reply?”

Atreus’s voice is clipped with distaste. “To the Pythians? We’re not, for the time being.”

“But our fleet hasn’t sparked yet.”

“It will. I’m confident of that. They give us till Palace Day? A great deal can change in three weeks. I’m happy to wait them out.”

The next objection comes to my lips before I can stop myself.

“What if it’s not worth it?”

Atreus tilts his chin. Untwines his fingers, lines them across his desk.

“What if what’s not worth it?”

That boy’s white-rimmed eyes, the smoking blazesite reached only a few minutes too late. “What if it’s just—making more orphans of Callipolans? This war. If it even comes to that, if we even spark. Wouldn’t it be better to—”

“To capitulate?”

“Compromise,” I say hoarsely. “What if there were a way to compromise?”

For one mad moment it’s on the tip of my tongue. I imagine saying it, imagine telling him the whole thing—When I was a child, you saved me, and I believe in all of it, all we’re doing, and Julia will listen to me, they’ll listen to me, let me be the bridge—

Let me have some way out of this besides facing them in the air.

Atreus speaks first.

“It is difficult, knowing that your choices are ones whose consequences others suffer.”

His voice is soft, understanding. As if, though I’ve said nothing of how it felt to arrive on the scene on the back of a dragon and still replace myself powerless, he understands exactly the weight it bore.

“But that is the price of leadership. How exactly would you compromise with these people, Lee? They don’t want our world. They want theirs. And that’s something I will not allow. We are building something better.”

Atreus’s next words remove the possibility of uttering the truth like a candle snuffed of its flame.

“You are the future of this country, Lee. A leader chosen, not born. There can be no compromise on that.”

What would you say if I told you I was both?

But that’s not a question I dare ask. It’s remarkable how, even this many years later, even trained in rhetoric myself, Atreus’s words still have the power to make my spine tingle. Even as he damns my own people with them.

We are building something better.

Familiar. Calming. Atreus’s vision, something to hold on to. Sweeping aside what came before it with such persuasive confidence. Better.

“The qualms you have expressed are not ones you alone will have,” he admits. “Particularly if our fleet remains unsparked.”

He taps his fingers together, scans the papers lying across his desk like he’s surveying a land campaign from the air. His tone becomes brisk.

“It will be important that the people are assured. I’ll speak to Propaganda about measures to be taken.”

ANNIE

Power and I begin training the day after Starved Rock, following Atreus’s speech in the People’s Square. By that time, news of the attack has reached the capital from Fort Aron. The crowd is unusually quiet as Atreus describes what happened after the beacons lit. Standing beside Lee among the onlooking Guardians, I can’t help but glance at his face as Atreus says certain words—two stormscourge and one skyfish—survivor bearing a message from Julia Stormscourge—we will not capitulate. We are certain that our fleet will spark soon.

I wonder what’s going on behind Lee’s masked expression. What he saw, what he’s remembering, what he’s thinking. It’s from Lotus, not Lee, that I learned it was a surviving child who delivered the message. Does that name mean anything to him, Julia Stormscourge? What does he imagine, when he hears the word capitulate, other than the return of a world that surely must tug at buried desires?

And I wonder what is going on behind the eyes of the people who watch us. They’re roaring by the end, roused by Atreus’s words and voice, but even so—when Crissa and I take the footpath alleyways through Highmarket back to the Palace at the end of the address—the conversations whispered at street corners have a different tone.

“At least with the dragonlords we could defend ourselves—”

“Not to mention, with the dragonlords, my sons weren’t getting paid a pittance from the Labor Draft Board—”

“Commoners and women riding dragons, fat lot of good that does if the fleet can’t spark—”

Dora Mithrides’s pseudoscientific rumor from the Lycean Ball seems to have trickled down to the lower class-metals. When they see Crissa and me, the huddle of whispering class-bronzes unfolds to observe us, making our way down the footpath in Guardian uniform, and while some elbow each other in sudden wariness, the most daring of them gives us a flourishing bow, baring a sardonic, ragged-toothed grin.

“Long live the Revolution, lady Guardians.”

“Citizen,” Crissa answers rigidly.

We round the corner to the echoes of suppressed, bitter laughter going up behind us. I’m shaking, unnerved by their anger; Crissa’s lips are pressed tight, her fingers clenched to fists. Above us, the sign for the Pickled Boar swings over the tavern entrance: I realize with a start that the last time I visited this part of Highmarket, I was lifted on shoulders and offered free drinks. But now, when faces turn toward us, conversations slide into silence and lines form around mouths.

At the Palace gates we part ways, Crissa to the Inner Palace, and I to the Cloister and the dragon caves to begin training with Power. Aela is curled in her nest, asleep beneath a wing that encloses her like a blanket, and when I crouch down to wake her, I drop for a moment to my knees, take her head in my hands, press my forehead against hers. Her slitted eyes snap open and she lets out a rumble like a purr.

“When, when are you going to spark . . .”

But Aela has no answer. All the dragons have been subjected to test after test from their keepers and from physicians attempting to spark them, all futile; Aela’s distemper at their visits reaches me all the way from the Cloister. She yawns, revealing rows of razor-sharp teeth, and shakes herself to her feet. I throw her saddle over her back.

“Time to go spend some time with your favorite storm-scourge.”

The Eyrie is warmed with afternoon sunlight; beneath my flamesuit I begin to break a sweat. A thin blanket of cirrus clouds coat the sky high above us, washing out its blue and softening the sun’s glare. Power waits for me, Eater lounging beside him, his wings flattened on the stone to warm in the sun. Aela growls and bucks at the sight of them, giving me a reproachful look. Eater remains where he lounges, but his head spikes flatten as he growls back at her.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I mutter, seizing her by the halter. “They’re all right this time . . .”

“Hell of a speech,” Power remarks, by way of greeting. “Nothing like a good dose of propaganda to start off your morning.”

He eases himself down onto the stone next to Eater, rubbing him beneath the jaw, calming him. I sit, too. It feels strange to sit for a conversation with Power. Even with a few meters between us it seems dangerous, like laying down arms in front of an enemy. Aela gives a sniffle of incredulity and eases onto her haunches beside me, so close her side presses against mine, warming me through my flamesuit. Glaring at Eater, daring him to come closer. Her tail flicks back and forth, dragging on the flagstones. Power watches the hostile back-and-forth with lazy disinterest.

“We still heard people talking about wanting dragonlords back, afterward,” I tell him.

Power’s lip curls. “People can be stupid.”

It’s Power’s usual condescension, but it reminds me, for the first time, of Dora’s revelation about his parentage at the Lycean Ball. His anger, his defensiveness, about a fact that would have meant nothing to me if he hadn’t spent years humiliating me for a low birth that it turns out we have in common.

I can’t decide whether knowing the truth makes me like him more, or less.

He stretches, straining his arms above his head, the muscles in his shoulders rippling, like a cat arching its back. Maintaining eye contact the whole time. Then he shakes them out.

“If we’re doing this, I want us to be clear on why. So. You tell me, Annie.”

I tell him the truth. “I don’t want to be Lee’s Alterna.”

Power nods, then gazes over the empty tiers of the arena stands, rising like the sides of a bowl around us, his brow furrowed. This late in summer, the sun has turned his face a deep brown. He says, “But I’m not asking what you don’t want. I’m asking what you do want. I’m asking why you want to win.”

And that’s enough to stop me short.

Power lifts a hand between us and begins to count off on his fingers.

“Here are the facts. You’re a finalist like Lee, his equal or better in every one of his classes, his only challenger in the air, his match on every count of trauma. You’re every bit as qualified for Firstrider as he is, you’re the only real threat he’s ever had. But he doesn’t see that. And I’m not sure you do, either.”

At hearing my own abilities listed—without comment, or anger, just flat facts—my discomfort rises, unbearable.

“I do see all that, but—”

Power waits, his lip curling, for me to finish the objection. My face is burning, but I resist the urge to avert it. And then I hear myself list the weaknesses that haunt me as if compelled.

“—I’m not—I’m not as good with people, I don’t lead like he does—I’ll never be as good at charming anyone or making speeches or—”

Power drums his fingers impatiently on Eater’s scales. “Which might put you at a disadvantage for Protectorship, sure. But to be a good Firstrider, you just need a head for strategy, skill in the air, and nerves of steel.”

For a moment, the shock of the words—their simplicity—prevents me from believing them.

No. Surely it’s not so simple—surely I’ve not spent months doubting my place in the Fourth Order only to realize what I should have seen from the start—

When I say nothing, Power leans forward.

“Tell me where you came from.”

For a moment I tense, primed for the disparagement of my background that he’s usually so willing to give. But then, as Aela’s tail tightens its coil around me, I understand. Power isn’t asking about my birth, or my poverty, or my lack of polish.

He’s asking what I did in spite of them.

My answer comes in a whisper.

“I watched my family get taken by dragonfire at the age of six, and I learned to ride anyway.”

Power’s brown eyes are raking over my face. The same way they’ve always done when he asks me about stormscourge fire. But today, I experience it as something besides cruelty.

Admiration.

“Damn right you did,” he murmurs.

He leans forward, placing his palms on the sunbaked stone of the Eyrie floor. “Now tell me again why you want to make Firstrider.”

My fingers are wound tightly around Aela’s horns as I clench them. I let myself say it the way I should have said it from the start.

“Because I’d be good at it.”

***

Aela and I don’t know how to spill over intentionally. When Power learns this, he rubs at the line between his eyebrows and squints at me.

“Of course you don’t,” he mutters. “You really keep everything close to the chest, don’t you, Annie?”

“I’m going to take that as a compliment.”

Power snorts, like he didn’t mean it as one. Then he gets to his feet, dusts his hands together, and I get to my feet as well. Facing each other, standing on the Eyrie, it feels like we’re back in familiar territory. Opponents. Eater and Aela have tensed, sensing a change in the air.

“So what was it like, watching my match with Duck?”

After years of Power’s goads, I can see where this is going. I feel a ripple of closeness to Aela, who’s risen on her haunches beside me, as my anger rises.

“Don’t—”

Power presses on, relentless. “Did you feel powerless? Were you scared for him?”

Aela is so close, I can practically feel her mind tickling my own as my breathing accelerates. My repulsion beginning to do its work on us, even as this becomes a game I no longer want to play.

“Stop, Power, this isn’t—”

Power lets out a bark of laughter. “What’s the matter, Annie—did you think I was a nice person, because I said I’d train with you? Do you want me to tell you how I felt, during that match?”

His own pupils are dilating. Eater rises to his haunches, lifts his head to the sky, and roars. They’ve spilled over; Power’s smile has the frenzied energy of a dragon’s influence.

“No—”

He leans forward, lowers his voice, and it cuts across the windswept Eyrie. “I felt bloody fantastic. Because beating Duck has always hit the spot. Sometimes, you’ve just got to kick a dog.”

My fury bursts into Aela with such force it feels like a pot bursting from steam. There’s a sudden, rushing relief as my emotions flood into her; her wings burst open, her horns go flat, and she bellows ash. She and Eater are pawing the ground as they eye each other, poised to attack.

Power, abruptly clinical, searches my eyes for the same pupil dilation I can see in his.

“Good,” he says, seeing it. “Don’t let the connection close. Let’s get in the air.”

I scramble onto Aela and we kick off from the ground like it’s hateful to us.

Sparring under spillover is hyperreal in the moment but difficult to recall with clarity afterward. Power gives feedback in the air, rather than on the ground, and his words come through the fogging haze of Aela’s emotions and my own: That was sloppy. Do it again. Now again. Still, for all his corrections, Power concludes the first practice with, “I knew you’d be suited to it. Same time tomorrow?”

I am still too sick with Aela’s and my anger, dulling but still hot, to answer, and can only nod.

When I return to the Cloister, I replace Duck in the courtyard, hunched on a bench. For a moment, all I can think of, looking at him, are Power’s words, and a fierceness like fury rises up in me again. But then I remember that in the last twenty-four hours, Duck has shouldered burdens heavier and harder than Power’s bullying. Of the eight civilians the skyfish first responders helped rescue, I learned from Lotus, Duck saved five of them. His neck is bandaged beneath his uniform from burns he sustained in the extraction.

“How’re you doing?” I ask.

Duck pulls his shoulders together in a shrug and straightens. In the wake of the attack I’ve been surprised by his ability—one I never had, and from what I can tell, Lee has never had either—to talk about the things that haunt him rather than keep them shut up inside. But that doesn’t mean he takes any of what happened less hard. Duck hasn’t talked about the ones they saved: just the ones they didn’t. The burbling courtyard fountain and the trees rustling with songbirds are things he would usually point out to me, but today, he doesn’t seem to see them.

“I’m . . . okay. How was training?”

Duck’s the only person I’ve told about my decision to train with Power, and he asks in a tone that suggests he can’t imagine anything but the worst.

I consider my answer, thinking of those things Power said. A dog to kick. Even as my rage pushed me and Aela to new heights, through new boundaries, I hated him. And in that way, training with Power was the worst.

But then I think of the single sentence Power elicited from me moments before he provoked the anger that changed everything.

A head for strategy, skill in the air, and nerves of steel.

I’d be good at it.

I don’t have to like Power for him to be right.

For the first time since the tournaments began, I let myself imagine it. My name, appended by the single word that is both a title, a position, and a rank.

Antigone sur Aela, Firstrider.

I can’t help feeling as if the mere act of imagining these words together, let alone of believing I’m worthy of wanting them, is defiance. Defiance of every lingering prejudice of Callipolis, of its ministry and their notes, and maybe most of all, defiance of myself.

But the seconds lengthen, and still I dare it.

“Training was good,” I tell him.

LEE

It’s begun to feel as if the New Pythians’ ultimatum is hanging over the city like a knife. Late summer is a time of year I’ve learned to dread, associated as it has been, for as long as I can remember, with memories of Palace Day. But this year, for the first time, the city shares my unease.

I can’t shake the feeling that, however Callipolis responds to the Pythians, I’ll feel responsible. Because Atreus may not have read it that way, but Julia’s message wasn’t just intended as an ultimatum for Callipolis. It was also intended, very specifically, as a final chance for me.

A final chance to seek a solution short of war.

And with an unsparked fleet how can we in good conscience not consider—

“Lee. You need to train.”

It’s Cor who forces me to commit to a time and a place for him and Crissa to begin training me. I agree to it with a kind of disorientation: The Firstrider Tournament, to take place the weekend before Palace Day, has faded in and out of my awareness since the Starved Rock attack.

Partly because my growing anxiety about Palace Day overshadows it.

But also partly because, when I think of the tournament, Julia’s words return with all their seductive force: Do you want Firstrider so much you can taste it?

Annie will be a challenging opponent. But my real opponent, my real challenge, is Palace Day on the other end of it, and Julia, daughter of Crethon, waiting for me to change my mind.

The Firstrider Tournament isn’t what I’m worried about.

But I’d be a fool not to train. The first day we all share a free block, Crissa and I arrive at the Eyrie before Cor. It’s the first time we’ve been alone since the Lycean Ball.

“Crissa, that night . . .”

Crissa puts up both hands, like she’s holding me off, and offers a strained smile.

“Whatever you’re about to say, I’m pretty sure I already know.”

For a moment we look at each other, and then, to my surprise, Crissa ducks her head and laughs sheepishly. And then I do, too.

“It was really nice.”

She smiles tentatively. “Yeah. It was.”

I mean it as an ending, a moment of closure. But all the same when she sits down beside me, just a little bit closer than usual, my stomach skips, and the moment doesn’t feel so closed.

“Sorry I’m late.”

Cor has landed. He dismounts from Maurana, sends her back into the air to circle with Phaedra and Pallor, and takes a seat on my other side. Crissa clears her throat and produces a calendar, on which, ten days from today, is circled the date of the Firstrider Tournament. A week later, Palace Day.

“I brought a schedule,” she says. “Thought it would help us plan.”

Only ten days.

Ten days to train.

And a little over that to call the Pythians off.

And if not . . .

And if not we’ll see the full force of their wrath and we, unsparked, will have little choice but to bear it.

“Lee, what do you want to focus on? We can map out a drill schedule based on what you need.”

I rouse myself, then hesitate. With most opponents, it’s easy to home in on the best ways to beat them—but the fact is, Annie has no convenient weaknesses to exploit.

Cor speaks first.

“Spillovers. Word is, Annie’s training with Power.”

It’s the first news that has been able to surprise me since the beacons lit the night of the Lycean Ball. Annie, training with Power?

“Since when?”

“Since . . . since Starved Rock, I think.”

Cor’s hesitation before giving this information is not lost on me; nor is the way Crissa suddenly busies herself with her calendar, rubbing her forehead with the tips of her fingers. Her shoulders are drawn together with unspoken censure that I feel like a cold draft of air.

“It was that bad?” I ask them, looking between them. “In the armory.”

I’ve already felt the answer to this question, but ask in the dim hope that they’ll say otherwise. They don’t. Cor squints; Crissa lifts her shoulders. Her answer is hesitant. “I can see why you made the call. But I can also see how she might have found it . . . patronizing.”

Starved Rock has begun to feel like the name for a catalogue of all the mistakes I could make in a single night.

“Anyway,” Cor says. Abruptly, with the air of barreling out of the silence his news has created. “My point was, maybe you should give spillovers a try, too?”

Crissa is nodding. Shrugging off her disapproval, suddenly brisk, and tapping her pen on her calendar. “Cor’s right. They might work for you.”

I shake my head. “I don’t do spillovers.”

Cor hums, frustrated.

“Why—?” Crissa asks.

“I like to stay in control.”

Crissa turns and looks at me. Her eyebrow lifts. I blush.

Cor glances between us, searching.

Crissa goes back to her schedule. “Well, at any rate. You should be prepared for styles of attack associated with spillovers. We can make a list of good drills for that and then we’ll just cycle through them.”

“Don’t forget contact charges,” Cor adds, knocking his shoulder and fist against my side to demonstrate. “It’ll be a same-breed match, they’ll be fair game.”

Crissa and Cor alternate running drills and playing opposite me. Their experience as squadron leaders means that both manage drills comfortably and well, attentive to intensity and pacing. I break a sweat almost immediately; Pallor is soon burning hot with exertion, and the hour passes before any of us know it. It’s almost possible, training under their guidance, to stop thinking about Starved Rock, and Julia, and everything I’ve done wrong. Everything I might be about to do wrong.

After training, I finish unsaddling Pallor and go to the skyfish caves, to Phaedra’s nest. Crissa is alone, scrubbing Phaedra down, her golden hair stained with sweat and half falling from its braid.

“I just wanted to say. I shouldn’t have—”

The shouldn’t have on the tip of my tongue is about Annie, a confession of guilt in the face of Crissa’s muted disappointment, but then other shouldn’t haves crowd in as well.

A shouldn’t have just for Crissa: I shouldn’t have kissed her on the Palace ramparts just to feel less alone. Even if she’s pretty and makes me laugh and is so clearly interested—

And the worst one, that I can’t undo, can’t even confess, whose magnitude has the power to make the edges of my vision blacken: I shouldn’t have let Holmes take down the aerial guard the night of the Lycean Ball.

Crissa pauses, looking at me, Phaedra’s brush dripping ash-dark suds down her mother-of-pearl side. And then she doesn’t ask what I mean, or even try to disagree with me.

“No. You shouldn’t have.”

The relief I feel to hear it said eases the breath from my lungs.

Crissa sets the brush down, in the bucket, and approaches me. Until she is standing close. Too close. Close enough that I remember exactly what it was like to kiss those lips, to wrap my fingers in her hair. Behind her, Phaedra lets out a sigh like a purr, her back arching, wings widening—and then stands very still. As if every nerve of her arched body is alert. Like Crissa, looking at me.

It’s the language of the dragon’s body that makes my mouth go dry, even if it’s Crissa’s murmured breath that I feel when she speaks.

“People do that. Things they shouldn’t. Mistakes. You make them. And so do I.”

A half hour later, I let myself into the boys’ washroom with still-hot blood to replace Cor alone, scrubbing ash slowly from his neck over a basin of water. His hazel eyes replace me in the reflection of the mirror.

“I’m not an idiot.”

I freeze on the threshold.

“I’m going to say one thing. And then have it your way, and we won’t talk about it. I would kill anyone who ever hurt my sisters. You’re my friend, Lee, and I’d follow you into hell as my fleet commander. But I think of Crissa like a sister. And she deserves better than to be your fallback plan. Do you understand me?”

Maybe it’s because I understand exactly what he means. Maybe it’s because, sick from so many weights of guilt I’d only just found some relief from, I’m not inclined for more. Or maybe most of all because, half an hour ago, Crissa looked me in the eye, as good as called me a mistake, and then kissed me anyway. I hear myself give the kind of answer I’ve seen Cor punch people for.

“If you’re worried about Crissa getting hurt, maybe you should talk to her.”

Cor snaps the towel back on the drying rack and exhales. I feel myself tensing, my fists clenching, suddenly wanting the fight. But then all he does is shake his head. His shoulders slump with defeat.

“I did.”

I train with Crissa and Cor almost every day. Afterward, if there’s time, while my blood is still singing from flight and exertion, Crissa and I replace each other. In Phaedra’s nest or Pallor’s, their presence an edge of unreason that makes it just a little easier to forget better resolve. Because I share all Cor’s reservations until the moment that I disregard them. Then I lose myself, for a few lingering moments, in the kind of oblivion that approximates happiness. Always later, but with slowly decreasing conviction, I tell myself that Cor is right, and that it has to stop.

And the rest of the time the world spins with uncertainty. I move from meetings with naval officials to coastal patrols to morale visits with unease that I am unable to voice. What is waiting for us after the Firstrider Tournament and Palace Day? What greater bloodshed for Callipolis that the Pythians hold over our heads?

Every spare moment I weigh it, the price of fighting versus the price of turning. Every time the calculation comes, more or less, to the same conclusion Atreus made so unforgivingly in his office after the attack: that no compromise is possible. Not from the Pythians. And not from Atreus.

But though the calculation comes out the same every time, I still feel doubt clouding it.

If I have even the chance of preventing more violence and don’t pursue it—what will that be if not more blood on my hands, further Starved Rocks to regret?

ANNIE

I’ve begun spending every spare second in the arena, training my answer to every jittering nerve and rise of anticipation. Every other part of my life fades as I focus on the one point of my future that remains in my control. I have the feeling of being increasingly, tantalizingly close. Victory within sight. Racing the clock of my own courage and resolve to make it over the finish line before I falter.

Power and I practice daily after class. It is as though Aela and I are unlearning everything Goran taught from the ground up. We learn to rely not on the stirrups and rein and bit to communicate, but on the wordless impulses that move between us, unfiltered. In the moment it’s exhilarating, to trust another being so completely; afterward, the exhaustion hits, with a memory of vulnerability. It becomes difficult, in the extricating, to distinguish Aela’s memories from my own.

But the days add up, and even as our connection deepens, still we can’t initiate spillover independently. Which means I continue to rely on Power for provocation. The beginning of training becomes an increasingly excruciating kind of ritual, evolving as Power and I work our way back through memories. Though spillovers can be provoked by positive feelings, they’re not the ones readily available to our mining. At Power’s prompting, I talk about my botched morale visit to Holbin, about the memo from the Ministry of Propaganda before the Fourth Order tournament, and then we start on memories from our earliest years in the corps. The things that used to happen, before Lee reported Goran to Atreus.

Power’s take on these memories is different from mine.

“Do you remember,” Power recalls, “how Goran used to call off drills before any of the girls or peasants got to practice, then humiliate you for not being able to do them later? I always thought that was hilarious . . .”

“Do you remember that time I got Duck’s own dragon to bite his leg? Probably the crowning achievement of our first year. Even if it meant Cor and Lee beating the hell out of me later. Duck was hobbling for days . . .”

“Do you remember how Goran always put you on dragon-dung-shoveling duty? What was the reason he gave you for that one?”

Power is grinning as sweat trickles down his forehead, as if he already knows the answer. I give it anyway, hating Power as I always do in these moments, aching for the spillover that’s just out of reach:

“He said I cleaned better.”

“He was right, though,” Power points out. And that’s enough to send me over.

As much as I come away from these sessions furious—furious with Power, furious with the memories, furious—there’s also triumph. Because for the first time in my life, the old wounds are useful. The fury gives me Aela; and when we’re together, like this, we’re powerful. At such a price, the memories of weakness finally serve a purpose, and once used, they never hurt with the same strength again.

Eventually there comes a day when Power asks: “Do you want to try going all the way back?”

I’m caught off guard.

“What?”

“You know. Your family, what happened to them. It always works for me.”

My look of confusion must betray me, because he adds, impatient: “Not my adopted family. My real one. When my dad left my mum pregnant to die in a poorhouse and I got taken in by the people she cleaned for.”

“Oh.”

It’s the first time Power has brought up the past that Dora alluded to at the Lycean Ball, but now that he does, he refers to it as if it’s something I’ve always known. He flashes a grin at me, too wide, and lifts his fingers to massage the damp stubble of his hair as the late summer sun beats down.

“I always figured you were pissed, too,” he says.

Aela is snorting, nuzzling my side, and I move my fingers up to scratch behind her horned jaw. I consider, searching myself for the emotions Power describes. Though I do replace the memory of anger and pain, I also replace that the emotions themselves have faded.

“You’re not,” Power observes, watching me.

I raise and lower my shoulders.

“It happened a long time ago,” I say. “It’s just . . . over.”

There is something liberating about that realization, even if it leaves me feeling strangely empty. Over. Time has left me with—if not peace, at least a dimmer kind of pain. Not the kind that has the power to bring Aela close.

A strange expression is on Power’s face. His usual scorn mixed with something else: almost jealousy, or bitterness.

“Good for you,” he says.

But from his tone, I’m pretty sure that’s not what he’s thinking.

An hour later, our training finished, I make my way in exhausted silence through the aurelian cave corridor back up to the Cloister and stop at the sound of disturbance. It comes from Pallor’s nest; the lanterns inside are lit. I round the corner unreflectingly, then stop dead. All at once the sounds I heard, which I should have understood immediately, make sense. A girl’s voice giggling, murmured half words, an inhaled breath. Lee and Crissa, braced against the cave wall, wrapped in an embrace.

For a second longer than I have reason to, I replace myself looking at the way he holds her, one hand moving down her hip, tightening on the leather of the flamesuit, the other winding in her hair to tilt back her head as he kisses her neck. As in his sparring, the same rough purpose guided by gentle precision, the same complete control.

Mouth dry, face hot, I flee.

And then alone, I learn that this is what is meant by desire, this lingering awareness of my own body, this ache to replace him again, to feel rather than to see those hands and those lips—

—the blasphemy of it, to feel it for Lee—

And this is how it hurts, to want someone, and see them in the arms of someone else.

I spend the next two days watching, like some gossiping Lyceum girl, and hating myself for it. Watching every interaction he and Crissa have, whenever they smile at each other or laugh at each other’s jokes or brush against each other in passing. I watch and I try to decide if I’m imagining that Lee, whose mood has darkened since the Starved Rock attack to almost unbroken silence, seems happier at least in her company.

And I try to tell myself that it’s good if he’s found a reason to smile, and that the thought shouldn’t hurt. That the Firstrider Tournament is all that matters and that this is a shallow, superficial distraction—

It’s Crissa who eventually stops my agonized speculating.

“Annie. I need to tell you something.”

She’s found me in the dorm, alone. I know from her tone at once what it will be about. She has dispensed with her squadron-leader voice, and sits on the bed across from mine, looking grave. For a moment the only sound is the gulls crying outside the open window. Then I decide to spare us both.

“I already know.”

Crissa tilts her head, her grave expression faltering.

“You do?”

I nod.

“Well, I was going to ask if it’s . . . okay with you.”

I think of the way it felt, like a knife twisting up into my ribs, the sight of Lee’s body pressed against someone else, his lips on another’s skin.

“Why wouldn’t it be okay?”

My voice is like ice. Crissa sounds tired.

“You know why, Annie.”

“Lee’s free to kiss whomever he likes. You’re as good a choice as any.”

Crissa stiffens as if I’d slapped her. “That was unkind,” she says softly.

I feel the force of her reprimand like a lash. I remember the evening after making finalist, when Crissa opened the door to my infirmary ward and brought a party with her; of the hours she spent with me on the arena ramparts, coaching my public speaking at the cost of her free time; of the care she took, in the lead-up to the Lycean Ball, to ease my discomfort.

Crissa doesn’t deserve this anger.

She goes on, with forced calm, “I am trying to say this. If you don’t want—if this upsets you—I will call it off.”

If this upsets you.

I think of a boy from another lifetime, making sure I had enough to eat, teaching me what it felt like not to be hungry. The years I spent, sparring with that boy daily, honing his abilities as I honed my own. Those few minutes in the middle of the Lycean Ball when we danced and my world stood still.

And then I remember that it is this same boy whose face so often, when I look at it, chills me with the shadow of another’s, and that I’ve been training for the Firstrider Tournament as I’ve never trained in my life because of the burning desire, finally discovered, to step out of his shadow and into the light.

“Lee doesn’t belong to me,” I tell Crissa. “And if this is what he wants, he should have it.”

I wait until she’s gone before I break down.

***

Increasingly desperate headlines in both the People’s Paper and the Gold Gazette predict that our fleet’s sparking is imminent. State-sponsored editorials enthusiastically reaffirm the new regime’s superiority to the rule of the dragonlords—one half of an argument whose other side Crissa and I overheard in the streets after Atreus’s speech. The doubt implicit: What good is an aerial fleet ridden by commoners if it can’t defend us?

The Ministry of Propaganda’s answer is made clear enough, though I learn of it not from the paper, but from our poetry professor, four days before the Firstrider Tournament.

Dragontongue Poetry is one of the few courses to have continued into the summer months. Guardians have been expected to keep up our studies, although with our wartime obligations expanding, it’s difficult for the professors to get work of any quality out of us anymore. Tyndale hasn’t been understanding about it, and today he turns out to be in an especially foul temper.

“No, that’s not quite right, Cor,” Tyndale says, five minutes into the lesson. “In fact that was—all wrong.”

Power lets out a snicker that he doesn’t even bother to suppress. The sound of his voice, which I now associate with goads to the point that it makes my stomach jump, reminds me that we’ll be on the Eyrie together again to train within the hour. Cor has folded his arms, scowling at Tyndale. In his Guardian ground uniform, with ash still caked to the back of his neck from a naval drill that ran late into the morning, he has the look of someone who has no time left for poetry or poetry professors.

“Antigone, fix it.”

I look down at Cor’s line with misgiving. Most of the time I can make sense of the Aurelian Cycle, but I haven’t had time to properly prepare a translation in weeks; what free time I’ve had hasn’t been spent on homework. I start to sight-read a translation of the line, but Tyndale stops me before I can get halfway through.

“That will do. Is any Guardian still capable of making a passable translation these days, or are you all too busy giving speeches to frightened class-irons?”

By now, a few Lyceum students have their hands in the air, some like Hanna Lund glancing at the Guardians anxiously, but Tyndale ignores them. “Lotus!”

Lotus has been slumping, flushed from the summer heat, over his desk. He lurches upright and starts reading his own translation, but he barely translates two words before Tyndale cuts him off, too.

“Lee,” he says, with finality.

I know—because I’ve been keeping track—that this is the first time Tyndale’s ever called on Lee.

Lee, who’s been reading along in the primer with his forehead resting on his palm, reacts slowly. He lowers his palm, raises his head, straightens up. And then he stares at Tyndale. His fingers press hard against the open primer, the tips going white, and he doesn’t reach for the notebook lying beneath it.

Since I saw him with Crissa in the nests, I’ve stopped speaking to Lee altogether, even as I have become aware of every shadow of his body’s definition discernible through his uniform, as if a switch has been flipped in my thoughts that can’t be turned back off. But now I notice also how Tyndale’s attention has made Lee tense from head to foot. He hasn’t appeared so alarmed in Tyndale’s class since our very first day.

“I didn’t do my homework,” Lee says. And then he adds, with contempt bordering on anger: “Like you said. I was too busy giving speeches to frightened class-irons.”

A ripple of surprise goes around the room at his tone. When Tyndale speaks, his voice is crisp, carefully enunciated.

“Well then, why don’t you try sight-reading?”

Lee curls his hands into fists and looks down at the text beneath them. For a moment he’s silent, but then he starts listing words aloud, throwing out the Callish equivalents of each word without any effort to make sense of them:

“The enemy, has, walls, rushes, in the deep, away from, summit—”

Tyndale throws an eraser at Lee’s head.

Lee ducks, and the eraser sails past. There’s a thud as the wooden side hits the far wood-paneled wall, powdering it with chalk. Tyndale is still bearing down on him, and now he stands right in front of Lee’s desk. Neither of them is pretending anything but fury now.

Despite all the reasons I’ve stopped speaking to Lee, at the moment, as I watch Tyndale approach him, it’s Tyndale I feel hatred for. Knee-jerk, fierce, protective. As if a poetry professor’s triumphant sneer were danger enough to wipe every other grudge from my mind.

Stay away from him.

“No,” Tyndale says.

Lee seems to be paralyzed, wide-eyed, waiting to see what Tyndale will say next, and Tyndale himself seems to be struggling to decide.

And then, as I watch them, as I hold my breath, the case of a single elusive noun becomes clear in my mind. And just like that, I realize I have it.

My voice is clear.

Alas, flee, dragonborn, you and your family. Flee from the flames. The enemy has your walls, the City falls in ruin from its height.

For a moment, the room is strangely still. The sound of my own voice, so unusually loud in my ears, lingers in the air. The tragedy of the line washes over me, beautiful and heartbreaking.

Then the moment passes. Lee closes his eyes and sinks back in his seat. A strange expression fills his face, tightening it. Tyndale seems to deflate. He turns from Lee, disoriented, and looks down at the books spread across his desk, gathering his thoughts.

“Yes,” he says, distantly, moving away from Lee. “Yes, yes. Very good, Antigone.”

Behind his back, people are glancing at each other, exchanging confused looks. Lee lowers his face into his palms and exhales.

“I should tell you,” Tyndale says, turning back to us abruptly. He holds up his own copy of the poem, an old leather-bound version that looks like he’s had it since his own school days. “The Aurelian Cycle was officially banned today, by the Censorship Committee.”

I feel the pulse of the line in my ears again, the terrible beauty of it. Lee lowers his hands from his face and straightens slowly.

Lotus speaks up hesitantly. “You mean, banned for the lower class-metals? Restricted to the Lyceum library?”

“No. It was already restricted. Now it’s being purged.”

“Why?” Lotus asks.

Tyndale grimaces. “It was . . . decided . . . that the poem promotes values that are contrary to the national interest.”

I remember rounds with Ornby in the censorship office, over a month ago, telling me, Don’t want to give the lower class-metals these kinds of ideas, they’ll start wanting the dragonlords back. They can’t handle nuance like you can . . .

Wasn’t he right? I’ve heard the murmured discontent in the streets, I’ve seen the editorials in the People’s Paper urging reason . . .

But even as a newcomer to Dragontongue literature, even as someone who hasn’t grown up hearing the Aurelian Cycle quoted as readily as speech, the idea of banning it is unthinkable. It’s taken too much of my heart already, in this class alone.

Even if some fools are misinterpreting it—how could Atreus allow such a thing? He enrolled the Fourth Order riders in this course. He quotes the Aurelian Cycle in class with us, effortlessly. Clearly he shares my love for its beauty, its tradition—

But that’s not the same as prioritizing it.

I remind myself: Atreus led a coup against his own masters that resulted in their massacre. The same dragonborn that the Aurelian Cycle portrays as hubristic and godlike, Atreus brought to their knees. He doesn’t have a history of standing on tradition. Even if he does have a taste for Dragontongue poetry.

“The official announcement will be in the Gold Gazette tomorrow,” Tyndale says. “Raids will be conducted throughout the summer, and confiscated copies will be destroyed. Needless to say, the status of this class has become . . . uncertain.”

Cor mouths Thank the dragon at Lee, whose face is slack, and doesn’t return his grin.

Tyndale has us read a little more, but after hearing a few more lines of poor translations, he dismisses us. As we get up to leave, he goes over and stands next to Lee’s desk, silent, but his meaning clear. Lee remains seated, his arms folded, as the rest of the students leave.

Power catches up with me in the corridor, breaking away from a group of Gold girls, and we exit into the Lyceum courtyard together. This late in the summer, the green would usually be full of students lounging on the grass and pretending to read, but in the wake of Starved Rock it’s unnaturally empty. As if leisure under an open sky is no longer possible.

“That was fishy as hell,” he comments.

I stop dead and round on him.

“What?”

Power pauses, too. Lifts an eyebrow. “You tell me, Annie.”

For a moment we stand completely still as we stare at each other, and my heart begins to race as I take in his muted, sneaking smile as he regards my alarm and plays stupid. What has he guessed? What does he know?

This is dangerous. Power’s made no secret of hating Lee, not since they were children, not since Lee put himself in opposition to every single one of Power’s moves of assertion within the corps. I remember the sound of Power coughing while Lee held him and Cor punched.

Lee’s identity in the hands of Power would be a disaster.

Power says, with a half glance at his own bare shoulder: “Oh, dragons. I forgot my bag. I guess I’ll have to double back—”

His tone is unmistakable. He’s toying with me.

But all I can think of, in this moment, is to make the move he’s prompting.

“I’ll get it for you.”

Power just studies me, his smile widening. “Whatever you like, Annie. See you on the Eyrie?”

“Right,” I answer, barely hearing myself.

I walk back into the classroom building, and though I should feel nothing, I’m sick with dread.

No, I think, as I approach. No, no, no, I don’t want this. I’ve never wanted this. It was enough for him to say, You’re not a fool for trusting me; it was enough for Tyndale to slip that name once, Leo, and never say it again. It’s enough for me to want Firstrider, and for that to have nothing to do with who he was once or where he came from. I don’t need this now.

And the fear that is less rational, that is worse than any of that, that was, perhaps, the point of Power’s game from the start: What if I don’t like what I’m about to hear?

LEE

Julia’s words, from our last meeting: Watch and see when we exert pressure how this vision will splinter. Then we will revisit whether you replace it noble.

Is this the beginning of that splintering, this edict banning the words that have guided our people for centuries?

“It’s been a while since we talked,” Tyndale says, after he closes the door behind him. Dragontongue, again.

For the first time, I replace myself glad Tyndale seeks a confrontation. My guilt has found a target and transformed to anger. I answer in Callish.

“Yes. It has. Was it you who told them that the Guardians would be in full attendance at the Lycean Ball?”

Tyndale, standing, leans his palms on his desk. The room is so warm, the heat in it so stuffy from the summer, that drops of sweat darken his white shirt beneath the arms. He tugs at the neck of his collar, loosening it.

“My dear boy. It’s not as if the Lycean Ball or its guest list was a secret. And I’m not the only member of the Gold estate sympathetic to the Pythian cause.” Tyndale nods to the Aurelian Cycle, lying dog-eared on the desk beside him. “After this, I imagine you can see why.”

An image in my mind: smoke rising from a lonely island off the northern coast. If this is the vision splintering, it’s still better than what the Pythians did to Starved Rock.

“There’s more to civilization than poetry.”

Tyndale sneers. He lifts a hand and flicks it, dismissing.

“Don’t tell me a few dead fishermen were enough to turn your stomach.”

“Unarmed civilians—”

“Casualties of war. An unfortunate price.”

I stare at him, hatred coiling in my stomach. How dare he, this academic, this scholar who spends his days scanning verse and picking apart figures of speech, refer to what we saw on Starved Rock as a price, as if the loss of lives can be set on a numeric scale quantifiable like currency—

“But,” Tyndale goes on, “if it’s a price that makes you squeamish, now is your time to reconsider.”

I’m shaking my head, as if with my body I can force out the thoughts that have already been plaguing my mind.

“I should report you,” I tell him.

“I should report you.”

For a moment we stare at each other, neither of us so much as blinking.

I get to my feet. Reach for my bag, sling it over my shoulder. Fingers shaking, though I will myself to calm. But as I turn to leave, Tyndale speaks again.

“Have you thought about what will happen if you refuse her? Not to the civilians. To you.”

When I don’t answer, Tyndale does for me. I’ve paused, half turned from him, my hand gripping my shoulder strap so tightly, the leather bites my fingers.

“You’ll be in combat against your own relatives, your cousins. You’d be killing your own family.”

Tyndale drives the words home hard, like he’s determined to jolt me with them.

“She’s Firstrider, Lee. Their champion, their fleet commander. It won’t just be them you’ll have to go against. It will be her.”

He must replace what he’s looking for in my expression, because his own has become triumphant. “We await your next letter.”

I have the feeling of ground slipping, and it’s against this feeling that I growl my answer, with all the conviction that I wish I felt.

“I have nothing more to say to them.”

I turn on my heel, wrench open the door onto the hallway, to replace Annie standing on the other side of it. White-faced and round-eyed.

What did she hear?

What language were we speaking in?

Dragontongue.

Which she must have realized, but is also less likely to have been able to understand when muffled through the crack of a door—

“What are you doing here?”

“I forgot something,” she says acidly.

“Shouldn’t you be off playing spillover with Power?”

Her face colors. “Shouldn’t you be off sparring with Crissa?”

I’d meant to pass her, but we’ve both stopped, and there’s only about a foot between us. I feel like shaking her.

“You’re in my way,” I say, through gritted teeth.

Annie’s eyes are bright. She lets out a soft laugh, full of anger.

“What are you going to do,” she whispers, “order me to move?”

It’s enough for me to jerk sideways, and for her to pass without a word.

ANNIE

We await your next letter.

Tyndale’s words, Lee’s low-voiced answer, the Dragontongue too fast for me to understand, the door bursting open and Lee’s furious face draining as he sees me—

What was Lee’s answer to Tyndale?

Out on the Eyrie, Power says, “Well?”

Our dragons wait for us, clawing the ground with impatience. Standing this close to Aela, I can feel the spillover a breath away. For the first time since we’ve begun training together, I realize the pathway is within my control.

At the same time, as close as I am to spillover, the part of me considering Power is completely calm.

“I got your bag, if that’s what you’re asking. Can we start? Call me a peasant, like you did last time. Let’s see if that works.”

Power scowls at me. Disappointed.

And then, as he starts hurling insults at me—first in Callish, then Dragontongue—I tune him out.

I let myself think everything that I’ve been holding in.

In contact with them. Lee’s in contact with Pythians. Through our bloody poetry professor. How long has this been happening? Has it been happening all along?

After the sighting, he told me I wasn’t a fool to trust him, and I believed him.

Aela’s mind close to me, the barriers breaking, my fingers stretching up to press between her eyes at the ridge of her amber-scaled temple—

Should I have?

I believe the words Lee said were ones he meant. But in the wake of a disaster like Starved Rock, and New Pythos’s threat hanging over us like a storm about to drop—

In the face of almost certain violence and death against family—

If they’re in contact—

Surely even Lee has limits for his stomach to hold fast.

The barriers breaking, Aela’s mind sliding into mine, her slitted eyes the only thing I see . . .

In the last few weeks I’ve let myself want to win Firstrider. Let myself think I deserved to want it.

But what if there’s more to it than that? What if I’ve got to make Firstrider?

Is Lee compromised?

Aela and I become one and we are ready to spar.

***

Afterward, head clear, ash scrubbed from my face, I take stock of the situation.

Tyndale is compromised. Lee is possibly compromised. And I’ve no idea what Power knows or guesses.

In almost certain threat of war, with such knowledge at my fingertips, what is my obligation?

I go to the Inner Palace, make my gamble, and file a single report.