Fireborne (THE AURELIAN CYCLE Book 1)
Fireborne: Chapter 4

A year had passed since the boy entered the orphanage. Though he and the girl continued to plan for their trip to New Pythos, the idea gradually lost its urgency. He had gotten good at school, better at chores, and the nightmares were coming less often. New Pythos was as far away in his imagination as his family was becoming in his memory.

Then, on the first anniversary of his family’s murders, there was a parade through the city. The day had been named a national holiday. “Palace Day” commemorated the turning point in the Red Month, the day the people finally breached the walls of the Palace, after the dragons had been poisoned.

Standing in the main square, the boy had a clear view of the one surviving dragon brought forth for the final spectacle, and could easily recognize it.

His father’s dragon had been one of the largest in the old fleet. Aletheia had a coloring unique among stormscourges: red-tipped wings and a red crest. The boy remembered running his hands over her hard scales, laying a hand on the bridge between her great black eyes.

Today, the mighty beast was almost unrecognizable. She had long since had the sparker cut from her throat, her wings clipped, and now she was barely more than an exceptionally large, cart-size beast with fierce jaws. These, too, had been chained shut. The boy watched the dragon being led up onto the dais, the chains cinched back so her head was forced down. Then the man who had saved him, who now called himself the First Protector, spoke about the things this dragon had done. Villages burned, innocent blood spilled, senseless and undeserved violence suffered by countless hundreds under this dragon, and countless thousands under other dragons, for centuries. He said that such times would never come again.

But the boy didn’t listen. He was watching his father’s dragon struggle to breathe.

Then he heard a sound to his right and looked down. The girl, standing next to him, was weeping. She did not take her eyes off Aletheia, and tears were streaming down her face.

He put his arm around her and pulled her close. He assumed that she was feeling the same sorrow he felt as he watched the once-great beast be humiliated.

Standing like this, holding the girl, he watched the axe cut off the head of his father’s dragon.

***

Out in the yard, later that day, the boy found the girl sitting under one of the few trees, her eyes closed. He thought she was sleeping until she opened them.

“You were crying today in the square,” he pointed out.

He felt compelled to say it, as if he needed some confirmation of the grief that they had, for that moment, shared.

He was on the brink of telling her everything. It was time, he had decided. The sight of Aletheia’s execution had galvanized him. It was time to go. And he was going to bring the girl with him.

She looked up at him from where she was sitting and seemed on the verge of speaking, as if she were trying to decide whether or not she wanted to. But slowly she gathered courage. Her face stiffened, became determined, and she spoke in a low, controlled voice.

“That dragon killed my family.”

LEE

Annie keeps Aela close beside Pallor during our flight back to Callipolis. The rest of the squadron follows close behind. In the silence that Annie leaves me, I struggle to extricate from Pallor’s mind. I’m holding him by the neck, leaning low on the saddle, fighting the desire for his closeness, and Pallor only makes it harder. He senses my distress and tries to stay close, struggling to offer me comfort. Meanwhile the thoughts are buffeting:

Tyndale was right. All this time, while I convinced myself that the blustering of their threat was nothing but cheap shots fired by the Ministry of Propaganda for the consumption of gullible class-irons—

Who were they, those riders who were almost close enough to speak to?

Were there other Palace Day survivors?

Were they kin?

When we’re within sight of the Palace, Annie speaks. Her words are muffled, her expression hidden beneath her visor. She raises her voice over the pounding rain.

“Lee. Have you extricated?”

The problem of her, of what she knows or doesn’t know, is too great a problem for my mind, still fighting free of Pallor’s, to assess. I’ve never been the kind of rider who spills over easily, much less the kind that lets it last. This was irregular, and Annie knows it, and she saw what triggered it clearly enough.

I grit my teeth. “Nearly.”

“The sighting needs to be reported to the Inner Palace directly.”

I realize what she’s getting at and balk. The thought of military counsel, of sitting down before Atreus Athanatos now—

“Are you—”

Are you going to report me?

I would, in a better state, know to swallow the question that gets halfway out before I bite my tongue. But this lost in spillover, enough of a rising note of panic escapes with it. Annie’s helmet turns briefly in my direction. She doesn’t ask me to finish my question.

“It would be irregular if you’re not there. Pull yourself together.”

When Annie tugs at Aela’s reins, breaking away from the rest of the fleet, I follow numbly. The Inner Palace lies below us, a tower of inward-facing windows encircling the Firemouth entrance to the dragons’ caves, blurred by rain. Annie stalls after entering it, looking from one Aurelian balcony to the next, uncertain which leads to the First Protector’s office. I speak for the first time, pointing.

“It’s that one.”

Atreus works from apartments that, in my childhood, belonged to the Aurelian triarch; I was taught as a child to recognize the balcony that doubled as his dragon’s perch.

Annie’s shoulders stiffen at my knowledge, but she doesn’t question it.

We land, dismount, and dismiss our dragons. For a moment, Pallor resists, the aftereffects of the spillover still linking us. I lift my helmet, pull him close, and rest my forehead against his dripping silver-ridged brow before wrenching my mind free. He lets out a whimper at the extricating that makes my fists curl.

And then he follows Aela down into the darkness of the Firemouth. As the two dragons are swallowed in the rain-lashed shadows of the cavern, a headache grows with his distance.

And then the thoughts return.

Alive. Some of them are really alive. And as Tyndale hinted, they have dragons.

They have a chance of taking Callipolis back.

I hear the pronoun in my thoughts and test its alternative, the appeal of it humming in my blood: What if not they but we . . .

I raise my head to replace Annie looking at me, her helmet tucked under her arm, her wet hair plastered on her forehead, her face twisted with an expression I cannot begin to divine.

Disappointment? Disgust? Anger?

She turns from me, steps forward, and hammers on the door built into the glass wall. A second later it opens. A very surprised assistant takes in the sight of us, two drenched teenagers in flamesuits, standing on a balcony that has no other entrance.

“We need to speak to the First Protector and General Holmes immediately,” Annie says.

The meeting passes in a haze: Annie takes one look at me, then does the talking herself. We sit in the Council Room with Atreus and General Holmes, the Minister of Defense, at the great oak table usually reserved for members of the High Council. Though I’m familiar with Holmes from rounds, I’m almost certain Annie isn’t. Where Atreus is perpetually clean-shaven and modestly dressed, Holmes wears a close, curling brown beard and keeps the many decorations of his uniform well-polished. He made a name for himself in the Revolution at Atreus’s side, an infusion of lowborn vigor in contrast to Atreus’s high-minded principles, and the reputation he gained was for ruthlessness.

I’ve always considered it best not to learn the details. Holmes likes me; I’ve worked with him for years; it’s never been relevant.

But today, as I look at him and think of dragons from New Pythos, it feels relevant.

Far from betraying intimidation in such formidable company, Annie sits up straight and describes the Pythian fleet with precision; she managed to count them while also issuing orders to the squad. In total, she accounted for five skyfish, nine aurelians, and seven stormscourges. Too distant to make out their ages.

Holmes finally asks, “And after you saw them. Did you engage?”

He is looking at me, I realize. Waiting to hear how I responded, as leader of the squadron. I feel a dull flood of panic hit: This is it. This is the end. A single spillover to undo almost ten years of pretending, and reveal me as the potential traitor that I am.

But when Annie speaks, it isn’t to say that.

“Lee told everyone to get below cloud cover and back to Callipolis.”

I swing a sideways glance at her in amazement.

Covering for me. Annie’s covering for me.

Pinpricks of pink on her pale cheeks are the only evidence of what this is costing her: After years of being underestimated, written off by the ministry of this country and, by extension, the men sitting across from us, Annie has just proved herself competent in a crisis, capable of leadership, and worthy of the kind of promotion she was recently told not to pursue. And she’s sweeping her actions under the rug, for my sake.

Shouldn’t you have turned me in instead?

Because surely the kind of visions that have been slithering through my mind are those of someone who deserves to be turned in, not sheltered. Surely these fantasies of triumph and retribution, abandoned since my childhood but now back with all their seductive force, are enough to damn me.

Annie meets my gaze and lifts an eyebrow. I clear my throat. And then, for reasons I cannot even begin to understand, I hear myself accept her gift and offer the explanation she and Holmes are waiting for.

“We had no way of knowing whether they had sparked, and we were unarmed.”

Sparked, meaning dragons mature enough to breathe fire rather than ash, as ours are still too young to do.

“Good call, Lee,” Holmes says.

His deep voice is warm, approving. Annie swallows hard. I feel sick.

Atreus drums his fingers on the table and speaks for the first time.

“It’s clear we’ve made a grave error in overlooking New Pythos,” he says. “We were content to dismiss rumors of dragon sightings off the northern coast as idle gossip, useful for our propaganda and nothing more. It appears we have misjudged.”

“We should have attacked them years ago,” Holmes murmurs. “When their dragons were weak. Stormed that godforsaken rock with the full navy and wiped the rest of those inbred little bastards out . . . Now it’s too late.”

Inbred little bastards. The kind of slur I’m usually all but numb to, but today causes my mind to burn, as if fevered, with visions of vengeful dragonfire.

What if I never had to sit stone-faced through such slurs again?

Atreus hums his dissent. “Let’s not jump to conclusions. We’ll dispatch word to our ambassadors on Isca to seek an audience at the New Pythian embassy immediately. Perhaps Rhadamanthus can be reasoned with.”

Rhadamanthus ha’Aurelian, the current scion of New Pythos. Atreus turns to an aide sitting at the end of the table. “Summon the two fastest skyfish riders, tell them they’re needed as messengers. That would be—”

He looks at me.

“Crissa, Dorian,” I answer, supplying Duck’s rarely used full name.

The aide bows and leaves. Once he’s gone, Holmes leans forward. “You think diplomacy will settle this?” he asks Atreus.

“I am bound to consider it if it might prevent a war.”

Holmes’s face is dark with skepticism. I remember the fleet approaching, the full force of their numbers spread against the sky, and can’t help but share it. Those were not the demonstrations of a nation seeking a diplomatic solution.

The corridor outside is quiet after our dismissal, its few windows letting in rain-smothered light. For a moment, after we’ve closed the door behind us, Annie and I stand side by side. The foot between us feels like a great distance, and the silence feels loud.

The past hour is reverberating within me in flashes: the sight of their fleet; the desperate longing; Annie’s voice crying my name and tearing me away. The sound of her voice describing the job I should have done, as if I had done it. And all the while my thoughts straying to dreams of revenge that would mean the betrayal not only of her but of her people.

She turns and walks away.

“Annie?”

But I have no idea what I’m about to say to her, and she doesn’t turn back.

***

“That dragon killed my family.”

For a second he stared at her, not understanding. And then he thought he must have misheard. He asked her to say it again, and she did.

“You’re lying,” he said.

She did not expect this. Her eyes widened.

“My family was killed by a dragon,” she said. “Soldiers locked them in the house and our dragonlord set fire to it.”

“How come you’re alive, then?”

She blanched. “Because he made me watch.”

He remembered the feeling of an adult’s hands on his shoulders, forcing his face toward things he didn’t want to see.

“That doesn’t make sense,” he spat.

She seemed to be struggling to replace the words to explain herself. It was clearly the last thing she’d been expecting to do. “He said one of us had to watch so they could tell the rest of the village—”

Her voice was starting to waver. He cut her off, because he didn’t want to hear her crying. “How do you know it was the dragon from the square?”

“Because it was a stormscourge with red on its wings—”

“Then they must have deserved it!”

He practically shouted at her.

Her head went back against the tree behind her as if he had struck her. For a moment, they just stared at each other, her head tilted back, looking at him with bleak disbelief, him staring down at her, feeling his chest rising and falling and something like hatred coursing through him.

She spoke first, her voice very quiet.

“They were killed because we didn’t meet a food quota during the Famine.”

“There was no Famine,” he snapped.

She blinked. “Excuse me?”

“It was a bunch of lies. Everybody knows that. Exaggerated so people could get away with not paying what they owed—”

“My mother,” she said, “died during the Famine. So did my baby brother. Because we didn’t have enough food. And we lived on a farm.”

Her eyes were bright, but she seemed so angry now that she was past crying. She pointed a thumb over her shoulder, at the children playing elsewhere in the yard. “And in case you haven’t noticed, the Famine is why most of them are here.”

She pushed from her knees up, so she slid to her feet with her back still against the tree. Even standing, she was more than a head shorter. She was looking at him as though she’d never seen him before. All the fury and disgust that she had for her tormentors was, for the first time, turned on him.

“Stay away from me,” she said.

ANNIE

My feet take me away from Lee with the force of physical repulsion. If I have to spend another moment in his presence, the emotions that have been simmering will turn to a boil. I need space to think, and I need to do it without having to look at those gray eyes and those cheekbones that are just a little too fine and high.

Stay away from me.

Should I have turned him in?

That’s the question that locks itself in my mind as I walk away.

I’d be a fool to trust him.

But all the same, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

I don’t blame Lee for spilling over, and I don’t blame him for the look of longing that transformed his face when he first saw them. It doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to understand what he must have felt. I know the ache of an orphan’s loneliness; I know what it is to crave the comfort of kin. All that was—natural.

I blame Lee for what followed. For listening to me when I told him to turn around, though it seemed to tear him apart. For sitting beside me as I reported a military threat of dragonlords on the horizon to the leaders of Callipolis and then hoarsely offering his counsel. For giving me the faintest hope that, maybe, I hadn’t just lost him.

I blame him for the fact that I still want to trust him.

I want it so hard, it hurts.

And the fact that I just forwent credit in front of Atreus Athanatos and Amon Holmes for the sake of this fool’s hope makes me sick to my stomach.

Back in the Cloister, I go to the boys’ dorm in search of Duck, who’s packing. A sealed message has been given to him and Crissa to bear to the New Pythian ambassador on Isca, the sworn neutral archipelago federation on the northwest edge of the Medean Sea. He and Crissa have been told to wait until Rhadamanthus’s answer is returned.

“Please be careful. Ride fast—”

“It’ll be fine, Annie,” Duck says. “We’re heading south, anyway . . .”

But it doesn’t seem like enough, after you realize the skies contain dragons other than your own. Two unsparked skyfish is precious little defense against a hostile sky. Somewhere during our conversation, he took my hands in his, and now, though I know I’m supposed to, I don’t want to let go.

“It’s time, Duck.”

Crissa has appeared in the doorway of the dorm, her helmet under her shoulder. Her braid is still wet from the rain; we haven’t been on the ground long enough since the first sighting for it to dry. She casts an eye on our entwined hands but makes no comment.

“I know.” Duck withdraws his hands from mine. Then he clears his throat. “I’m not sure how long we’ll be gone, but I wanted to say—Midsummer, when we get back. You’ll come?”

He’s offering more than an invitation, I realize: He’s setting a fixed point on a vanishing horizon, something for me to focus on. The realization nearly brings a lump to my throat.

“Yes. I’ll come.”

“Good. And make sure you invite Lee.”

Lee.

I think of that silent corridor, standing beside Lee in the rain-thick darkness as he said my name. When I found myself unable to look at him, much less speak to him. The lie comes out as if of its own accord.

“I already asked him. He said no.”

I haven’t asked him. I haven’t even brought up the idea. As far as he knows, we’re spending Midsummer in the Cloister together, like always.

But that’s unthinkable now.

Duck’s eyes narrow as he looks at me. Even Crissa looks a little surprised.

“Okay then,” Duck says. “Just the two of us?”

He sounds uncertain, but not displeased.

“Just the two of us.”

***

After their fight, the other children resumed the torment they had stopped in his presence. The boy watched them steal the girl’s meals, trip her, tear apart her homework before class so she’d be punished for not doing it. He did nothing.

All the while, her words gnawed at him. He tried at first to dismiss them as a child’s joke, some kind of willful lie gone too far. He told himself she was little, too little, and had not understood what had happened to her family. But this was not enough. She wasn’t much younger than him, and he knew she was smarter. She understood everything.

He struggled to comprehend the story she’d told. Even here he protested: She must have been ignorant of something. Even if there had been a famine of some sort, his father would never have punished his people without good reason—

But this was a dead end, too, because he couldn’t think of any reason good enough to make a girl watch her family burn to death.

He kept trying to reconcile his father and his dragon with a burning house, a family dying, a girl being held and made to watch. He could not think of anything that could have merited it.

How could his father have done such a thing? His father had been brave, noble. His dragon made him a leader of men—not just a good man, but a great one.

These beliefs, taken for granted before his father’s death, were one of the few comforts he had left.

Now these comforts were stained. Try as he might, he could no longer think of his father without a sickening sense of doubt. It infected all his memories. Even memories of things like dinner with his family and stories before bed were no longer safe.

He lost his appetite, stopped sleeping, was unable to focus in class. His thoughts went round and round as he tried to replace a way of preserving the father he’d remembered before he learned the girl’s story.

In the end, after their desperate circling, he arrived at a simple solution.

He could go.

He had the provisions; he had a plan. He was ready—as ready as he ever would be. New Pythos was waiting. He need not succumb to the girl at all. He need not choose. He could simply leave.

ANNIE

It’s beginning to feel like the whole world is tearing apart, and that part of what I’m losing is Lee.

Instead of dinner and homework, I sit in on meeting after meeting alongside Lee, Cor, and Power in the Inner Palace. At a debriefing Holmes holds for the entire corps, we’re given a new patrol schedule for the northern coast of Callipolis and told that our training will narrow in focus. To air combat, exclusively—and not the kind performed in tournaments. Meanwhile the tournaments themselves have taken on a sinister new significance.

“In times of peace, the titles of Firstrider and Alternus are little more than honorifics,” Holmes tells us. “But now, we need to be prepared. We need a fleet commander leading the offensive. And an Alternus at his back, defending.”

Both titles will be determined by the final tournament. Cor and Power straighten with excitement as Holmes says this, and Lee hunches in his seat, like the words press too heavily on him. In the wake of the sighting I’ve begun to notice him as if a line connected us: I hear every word he utters and, even more, I hear his silences.

Every word and every silence a tally on a ledger I despair of making but know I must.

Because time and space give me the coolness of resolve that shock did not. If it comes to a choice, I need to choose according to my conscience and my vows. Friendship will not justify treason.

If Lee is compromised, it’s my duty to report him.

That night I lie awake, imagining Duck, unsheltered and exposed as he crosses the Medean Sea on dragonback; and I think of Lee, the boy I know better than anyone and at the same time have felt, since the sighting, that I know not at all. I ache from missing them both.

The following morning our new life starts: Excused from class, we return to the Eyrie for intensive drilling of contact charges, weapons charges, the quick and dirty ways to win when winning means a kill, not a kill shot. When you might not have the benefit of sparked dragonfire to do the job for you. Though a lack of demonstrated dragonfire at the sighting suggests that the other fleet is also unsparked, we must prepare as if they are.

A steadiness settles over the Eyrie as Goran tells us: This is how you open the throat.

Not because he hasn’t given us these kinds of lessons before, but because this is the first time we’ve listened and known an imminent reason we might use them. Lee sits silent, head bowed, elbows crooked over his knees as he listens to Goran describe the ways to mutilate and kill an enemy rider.

Enemy, Goran says. Not opponent. Even the language has changed.

Lee’s fingers are clenched on his knees so hard, the knuckles have gone white.

And then we separate by squadrons, as we usually do, and the drilling begins. I rein Aela away from Lee sur Pallor. Instead, I pair with Max, one of the aurelian riders from my halfsquadron. Lee, realizing what I’ve done, pairs off with Deirdre.

It’s the first time I’ve voluntarily chosen a sparring partner other than Lee in years. Usually, Goran has to remind us to separate.

Sparring starts. Aela and I get in Max’s guard once. Then again, and again, and again. Max made it into the Sixteenth Order—the upper half of the corps’ flight ranking—but that’s not enough.

“Dragons, Annie, at least wait for the reset,” he mutters, massaging his arm where I’ve rammed him.

“You asleep, Lee?” I hear Goran shout from down on the Eyrie.

Though I tried to claim a spot over the arena far from them, I can still see Lee and Deirdre’s sparring. Goran’s criticism wouldn’t make sense for most riders: Lee is, after all, getting inside Deirdre’s guard and landing hits. But I see the difference, too. Lee isn’t trying. He’s doing the minimum—enough, in Lee’s case, to win. Because in Lee’s case, halfhearted is still good.

Watching him, I feel my despair shift to anger.

Goran seems to be sharing my short temper.

“Aurelian squadron, time out. Annie, Lee, trade partners. Wake him up, Antigone.”

It’s always while I’m in the air that Goran forgets to discount my ability.

Pallor and Aela space out, ten meters apart, above the arena, wings spread to coast on the breeze. Lee and I eye each other through the slits in our visors, gripping blunt-headed jousting pikes and fireproof shields. We’ve practiced with both before, but because they’re considered to be a complementary weapon to sparked dragonfire, they’ve never been a priority in our training. Now, with the threat of unsparked fleet engagements, they’re the next best alternative.

Aela has begun to simmer with my anger herself; she is snorting, eager. Pallor, like Lee, is just a little too calm. Like he’s not really there.

Goran calls the advance and we charge.

Our momentum surpasses theirs; the force of our contact ripples through Lee sur Pallor. As they ride out the shock, I lean over Aela’s wing and ram my pike home. Lee moves his shield to block it but not quite fast enough; it skids left and rams, not into his chest, but his shoulder.

Lee grunts in pain. He pulls Pallor out, to disengage, and as he does, I feel my anger bursting its restraints. Because I know what just happened. I have no illusions about my strength; Lee’s and my abilities are level in traditional sparring, ash against ash; but when it comes to hand-to-hand combat I’m half his size and have half his muscle. I should never have landed that penalty at all.

We slam into each other again, and this time, despite an opening that I shouldn’t have bared, Lee’s pike doesn’t make contact and mine does again.

Fight back, you bastard. Fight back, you bloody coward, don’t you leave me like this—

I feel the explosion of anger course from me into Aela, at once a relief and an escalation into greater fury. We’ve spilled over. Through the haze I hear Lee shouting.

“You are out of order.”

The world sharpens back into focus, though Aela’s and my shared anger still gives it a liquid edge. The echoes of the words I was thinking vibrate in my ears; that’s how I realize I was doing more than thinking. Lee’s ripped off his helmet, his eyes white-rimmed as he stares at me. Around us, other pairs have paused in their sparring. I can only imagine what they must be thinking if they heard what I shouted.

“There a problem?” Goran calls.

“I’ll take care of it,” Lee says. “Ground, Antigone.”

The sound of my full name at the end of his order snaps me back into my senses, even as the rage changes flavor. I yank Aela’s reins down and descend toward the deserted ramparts that gird the arena walls. We clatter onto the flagstones. I cut the straps that bind my legs to the stirrups and leap off. A moment later, Lee sur Pallor lands beside us. He dismounts, every line of his movement tense with fury, and dismisses Pallor back into the air with a flick of his wrist.

We glare at each other. Behind me, Aela, still riding my emotions, growls. Overhead, the aurelian squad resumes sparring.

“What the hell was that?”

“I should report you. I should have reported you right then—”

Lee stands perfectly still. For a moment all I can hear is the wind and Aela’s hard breathing at my back.

“Then why didn’t you?”

My eyes are stinging.

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

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

“You weren’t.”

“I wasn’t?”

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But she didn’t ask him to say anything.

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

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

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

He never spoke of the voyage to New Pythos again.

She never asked him why he didn’t.

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

LEE

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

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

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

“Is it?” he asks.

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

“How?”

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

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

This time, both Annie and I raise our hands.

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

I need this.

She lowers her hand.

“Lee?”

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

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

In my peripheral vision, Annie shifts in her chair.

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

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

“Their power was inherited.”

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

“Now. How are you different?”

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

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

“Don’t we?”

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

“Yes?”

“No.”

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

“Sit.”

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

“I’m not selling out.”

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

“Then what exactly are you doing?”

“I’m choosing Callipolis.”

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

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

Tyndale’s expression has transformed from skepticism to pity.

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

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

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

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

THE RIGHTFUL TRIARCHS OF CALLIPOLIS HAVE TIRED OF THEIR EXILE.

THEY WILL SOON BE COMING HOME.

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

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

My dear cousin—

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

Julia