SWNOVELS Fireborne: Chapter 12
LEE
Annie is discharged from the infirmary a few days before Palace Day. Because I’ve been promoted to fleet commander, she’s promoted to aurelian squadron leader in my place, and I hand her the badge for her uniform myself; the fleet commander’s medal has already replaced mine. A bugle within the silver-and-gold-entwined circlets for the Firstrider; an aurelian dragon, wings spread, for the squadron leader. She accepts it with a gracious smile that doesn’t hide her shuttered disappointment or undo my own clenching guilt.
Since the tournament, three more dragons have sparked. Though it’s not enough to begin to consider offensive measures—particularly against New Pythos, so naturally well-fortified—it’s still enough to change the mood of the city. Callipolis can defend herself again. The turn of sentiment, timed as it is with the arrival of Palace Day, means that the parade and its celebrations take on new significance for the Ministry of Propaganda: a chance to harness the hope of the people and cement it into readiness for war. But the parade is also the focal point of the Defense Ministry’s security concerns.
Tyndale has vanished into the bowels of the prison that the Reeducation Committee shares with the Ministry of Information, indicted for sharing sentiments contrary to the national interest. Despite the fleet’s sparking, the purge of the Aurelian Cycle remains in effect. Copies of the poem are confiscated across the city. Lotus’s father’s library is among those raided.
The Guardians’ library is the only collection besides the Protector’s exempted from the purge, but we still have to attend the bonfire. As I watch the flames turn pages into leaflike fragments rising on the breeze, the words of the Cycle itself return to me, bitter as smoke tasted on the wind:
To you, ashes and final flames of my own, I stand witness
I who have escaped neither peril nor pain in your destruction
If it is our fate to die, then by my own hand let me earn it.
Three days before Palace Day, I’m shaken awake by Cor. Such was the nature of my dreams that I’ve lunged half out of bed, halfway to my feet with legs still tangled in blankets, before Cor pushes me back down.
“It’s all right. You were just—”
Just waking people up, I realize. That doesn’t happen much anymore, but around Palace Day, all bets are off. The dorm is unnaturally quiet, the usual snoring gone silent. The nightmares I’ve woken from are fresh enough that screaming is still echoing in my ears. The blankets are sweat-drenched; my face is wet.
“Thanks. Sorry. Was I—”
It’s pressured speech; I have hardly any idea what I’m saying, but at Cor’s whispered answer I sober instantly. His face and expression are impossible to make out in the darkness. “You were . . . you kept saying no.”
I realize then that his hand is still on my shoulder.
“Thanks,” I say again, shrugging it off.
In his class with the Fourth Order later that morning, Atreus passes out identical, battered booklets that all have the red stamp of banned material across the fronts. I read the title and feel myself break into a cold sweat.
A True Account of Palace Day and the Red Month, by R. T.
“Palace Day is an opportunity for great patriotism in our country,” Atreus says. “A time for the people to unite around a narrative of a beginning that erases the past and starts again. But it is also a time for the four of you to consider the burdens that will be asked of you as rulers. While we encourage the rest of the city to enjoy the story of Palace Day, I would like you to consider the facts. The booklets in front of you, published not long after the Revolution and banned for the sake of political stability, provide a more than adequate summary. Please take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the contents before we begin discussion.”
There aren’t enough booklets to go around. Cor and I are sharing. When I don’t move, Cor takes the book and begins to flip through it. I’m determined not to look at Annie, or Power, or at the book at all, so I keep my eyes on Cor’s face, watching his eyebrows knit together as his eyes travel down the page. His breathing hitches. He continues reading with his hand gripping his mouth.
By now, I’ve had years of practice sitting through classes about the Revolution and the Red Month. I’ve learned how to keep my face impassive and count the seconds. Anything can be survived for an hour.
But few teachers have spent any time talking about Palace Day itself, and when they have, it’s never been with the facts laid out so explicitly.
When Cor finally looks up, his face has gone green. He starts pushing the book toward me, in case I want to take a turn reading. I close it and push it back at him.
Atreus breaks the silence. “Cor, would you read from the top of fourteen, please?”
Cor flips to the page, and the others follow suit. He begins to read, hoarsely, about the fate of the Aurelian Triarch and his family. I feel the classroom fade in and out.
By time he gets to the second child, Cor’s voice trails off.
Atreus doesn’t ask him to go on.
Cor looks up. “Did you know? Did you know it would be like this?”
Atreus’s smile is all steel.
“One never knows,” he says. “But the course of popular uprisings are fairly predictable. We knew that the people would be difficult to control once they were allowed inside the Palace walls.”
Atreus pauses, allowing the confession to sink in. Then he goes on.
“It went further than we wanted. I admit that. But even so, it was a risk I knew we were taking from the start. It was a hard decision, but it had to be made. Better these deaths, once”—Atreus drums his fingers on the booklet in front of him—“brutal as they were, than countless more undeserved deaths in the future. Do you agree?”
Silence. The pulse of blood in my ears, the sound of a room of people saying nothing.
Power speaks first. “I don’t think it would have been a hard decision.”
Atreus’s response is cool. “You don’t?”
“None of this is worse than what they did to us,” Power says. “Blood for blood.”
The words echo oddly in my ears. I can feel Cor glancing at me, and it is only after a moment of paranoia that I realize why. This is the sort of thinking that I usually push back against.
Then I hear her speak.
“You think they deserved this?”
I know Annie too well not to recognize the sound of her anger.
Power says, “Yeah, I do. After what they did to us, they deserved it.”
Annie snorts. “After what they did to whom, the Janiculum?”
Power hears the incredulity in her voice. His eyes narrow, his face suddenly contorting as he leans forward, his voice lowering. “My mother was from Cheapside. I’m a Cheapsider. The highlands weren’t the only part of Callipolis that suffered, Annie. As far as Cheapside is concerned, the dragonborn got what they deserved.”
It’s the first time Power has ever outright admitted to being anything other than patrician, much less a Cheapsider. Cor’s eyebrows have shot up as he studies Power’s screwed-up face.
Annie’s voice is shaking. “What they got wasn’t justice. It was a massacre.”
I raise my eyes from the stained oak table and finally look at her. Her hair is cropped now, the burned braid cut off after the match; it hangs in jagged chin-length spikes, like an urchin boy’s. She’s glaring at Power and has begun to flush.
I hear myself speak.
“You of all people should think it was justified.”
Annie’s eyes move to mine. Peripherally, I note the others shifting, uncomfortable, catching the reference as well as Annie has. Atreus clears his throat to intervene, but before he can, Annie speaks. Her voice is unexpectedly thick.
“What kind of person do you think I am, Lee?”
My throat closes.
Atreus breaks the silence, his tone impatient.
“Antigone displays—admirable—compassion for her enemies that Lee and Power would do well to imitate,” he says. “It should never be easy to decide who dies. Even if, as in this case, they were guilty of terrible things.
“As you may know, before the Revolution, I was chief advisor to Arcturus Aurelian. The fates that Cor just read to us were those that met his family.”
Annie inhales deeply and slowly as she understands. Atreus goes on with tranquil calm.
“Some wonder, knowing that connection, if I precipitated such violence against Arcturus and his people for personal reasons. If he had wronged me in some way, if it was an act of vengeance. After all, many revolutionaries were so motivated.” Here Atreus nods, graciously, in Power’s direction. Power twitches and eases back in his chair. Atreus’s voice remains distant.
“In my case, it was not. In my case, in fact, I had every personal reason to support Arcturus. He had been good to me when I needed help, sponsored my education, and seen to my advancement. But in the end, what he did for me personally was not enough to undo the wrongs he committed as a ruler. And on those grounds, I made my choice. The good of my people over the pull of my emotions.”
Cor’s fingers are drumming nervously on the table; Annie’s eyes have widened; Power’s lip is curling, his arms folded, as he looks at Atreus with what might be disgust. But the commonality between their reactions is horror. As if what Atreus describes—a cool reckoning unmotivated by personal vendetta—is the most unsettling of all histories.
I feel something else. Relief.
I’m not the only one to have chosen this kind of path. Once, long ago, Atreus did the same.
Atreus says: “I will live with the burden of Arcturus’s death, and the death of his family, for the rest of my life.”
Then he raises his eyes, and a hardness enters his tone as he adds, “That does not mean I regret them.”
Atreus gives our silence a moment before making his final point.
“Much of what you’ll be doing, as Guardians, will be deciding which is the lesser evil. Who lives, who dies. It will be—it should be—a terrible burden.
“Times may come when you question yourself. On those occasions, remember that these decisions are better made by you than someone else. If everything goes to plan, you’ll be the most rational, the most well-trained, the most fit to rule. It will be your duty to make these decisions, to bear the guilt of them for others’ sakes.”
It’s still a little strange to seek Crissa’s company privately now that the Firstrider Tournament has passed and training for it no longer provides the excuse or the justification. But the desire to continue outweighs the reasons to call it off.
“Thought you wouldn’t come,” she says, when I find her in her dorm room.
The room is golden in the afternoon light. Crissa is seated at her desk, where homework and stolen refectory mugs are piled across the surface, folded into her chair as she leans over her reading. The other girls have obligations right now, and we have the dorm to ourselves.
“I had to . . . I went for a walk.”
I throw my book bag on the floor next to her bed and sink onto it, leaning back against the mound of pillows and closing my eyes. The bed smells of the sea breeze and something just a little sweeter, a fragrance I’ve come to associate with Crissa.
“Is everything . . . okay, Lee?”
It’s a checking-in tone, the kind I use with others but can’t remember anyone ever having used with me. I’m so unprepared for it that I don’t know how to answer.
“I just . . . I thought maybe it was because you were worried about Annie, after the Firstrider Tournament, but now she’s better and you’re still . . .”
She trails off. I have opened my eyes and am lying very still, looking at her, but she keeps her gaze on her reading.
“Still what?” I prompt softly.
“Sad,” she says.
She does look at me, then.
“I know”—her words are careful, like delicate steps across ice—“that maybe there are things that happened to you that you can’t—that are too hard to talk about. And I know that I know nothing—nothing—of what it must have been. But if there’s anything you want to tell me, any way I could help you . . .”
The public bio, the one she knows, is that I lost my family during the Red Month. The triarchy created so many slum orphans in its last throes that the story has always gone unquestioned.
I imagine telling her: that the worst day I’ve ever lived is commemorated annually as a national festival and celebrated with a parade; that rather than taking comfort with what family remains to me, I’ve chosen to throw in my lot with their usurper.
When I say nothing, she rises and climbs onto the bed beside me. Although I make no move to turn to her—my body feels like it is weighted to the bed, like something apart from myself—she curls closer, fits her body against mine, and lays her head against my shoulder. She stretches her arm across my chest, spreads her fingers across my far shoulder. She is, I realize, holding me.
“One day,” she murmurs into my shoulder, “when we’re at peace again, I want to take a few days’ leave and bring you with me. Home. To Harbortown, to see the beaches.”
She’s phrased it like this, I realize, so that it’s not a question, so I’m not given the opportunity to say no. It sounds so nice that I hear myself answer before considering the words.
“I’ve been there, once.”
“Really?” She sounds surprised. It takes me a moment to remember why.
“Orphanage field trip,” I add numbly.
It wasn’t an orphanage field trip. It was a family vacation. Sand in our hair, fiddler crabs under our feet, the smell of fresh fish roasting over a fire as servants turned the spit. My sisters buried me.
“You liked it?”
“Yes,” I tell her. “Very much.”
ANNIE
The day I’m discharged from the infirmary, a parade-planning meeting is held with Miranda Hane, General Holmes, Lee, Cor, Power, and myself, and concerns the question of national security during the parade. At the sight of Hane, my stomach does an odd flip, remembering her note. I’m still stiff from the many bandages beneath my uniform, sitting still is uncomfortable, and the feeling of my absent braid is disorienting.
“Did you know,” Hane says, before the meeting starts, “that the title Alterna bears a feminine ending for the first time since our earliest poetry, because of you?”
Alterna is a Dragontongue loanword, and Dragontongue, unlike Callish, is a gendered language. Even though I did know it, I also appreciate Hane’s bit of trivia, delivered softly and with a smile, for what it is: something between congratulations and condolence.
“Thank you,” I tell her, and hope she knows I mean her note, too.
Hane begins the meeting by requesting as many dragons as possible in the cavalcade going down the Triumphal Way. General Holmes, though he maintains the need for air patrols during the event, is inclined to allow it. “The security of the city’s my main concern for this event at any rate. Keeping the bulk of the riders armed and central will only strengthen its defense.”
Lee has been staring with an arrested expression out the window at the Firemouth. The light is gray: a low layer of stratus has settled over the city, leaving those concerned with its air defense full of unease. Cloud cover like this is a defending dragonrider’s nightmare. Lee never looks particularly well-rested even at his best, but at this time of year the bruises under his eyes are always especially dark, the lines around his mouth deepened, as if sleep is something he has forgotten.
“And the coast?” he asks Holmes, turning from the window.
Holmes nods, appreciative, and throws a grin at Hane. “Circumspect, our new Firstrider. I like that.”
Lee responds with a twisted smile.
Hane and Holmes begin to argue over the breakdown of the coastal patrols. Lee doesn’t interrupt them again. It is determined that two air patrols, one over the city and one along the northern coast, will be deployed simultaneously with the parade, each led by a sparked dragon.
“I’ll lead one of the patrols,” Cor says. “Don’t much like parades, anyway.”
The dragons who have sparked so far are in our highest ranks, Cor’s, Power’s, and Crissa’s among them.
Lee says, “I’d like to take an air patrol as well.”
Hane looks at Holmes and says, “That’s not necessary, is it? I was assuming Lee would lead. Along with the Alterna.”
“I’d lead what?” Lee asks.
“The parade,” Holmes says. “That’s fine, Miranda. Seems appropriate, for the Firstrider. All right, Lee?”
Lee’s face has gone perfectly blank.
“Yes, sir,” he says.
Palace Day dawns blue-skied. The fog cleared, the Guardians are approved to participate in the parade.
The booklet from Atreus’s class has remained in my backpack, untouched, until the morning of Palace Day. Then at last I give in. The day is too incongruous: the excitement of the rest of the corps in anticipation of the upcoming parade; the feeling of festivity in the air; and the quiet composure with which Lee eats breakfast. He goes off on his own after that, as he always does on this day. As usual, I’m the only one who notices.
And I think, I’ve had enough. It’s time. Today might be a day when the whole city pretends, but I, for one, am ready for something else. Lee has leapt from one dragon’s back to another for my sake, is preparing to endure celebrations that have gutted him every year since we were children, and after this, his path will likely get harder. I owe him an end of pretense and acknowledgment of the truth.
The whole truth.
I go to an empty classroom, shut the door, and open the booklet for the first time since class. I turn to the page I’ve been purposely skipping every time I leafed through. At the top is a picture of the Drakarch of the Far Highlands and his family. My eyes are drawn immediately to the father, and I find myself staring, for the first time since it happened, at him. Even though the quality of the image isn’t particularly good, I still feel the same mingled terror and hatred. He stands next to a woman and they’re surrounded by children. They look happy and beautiful and proud. Pictured among his family, loving and fatherly, it’s difficult to imagine him doing what I once saw him do.
I look at the text below the picture and search for the name of the youngest child. There: five years old at the time of the portrait, a boy named Leo. I stare at the name and for a moment I forget to breathe.
Then my breath returns in a rush; I search for him and see him there, grainy and unclear, but recognizable. The description may say that this boy is dead, but I know that he’s very much alive.
Even though it seems like I’ve always known, it still hits me like a physical blow, seeing him there at last, pictured three feet from the other man. For a moment, the page blurs.
Then I blink my vision clear and force myself to read. I read about what happened to his mother, to his brother, to his sisters, finally to his father. I match every single face in the picture to the descriptions below. I slowly, meticulously imagine the scene that must have happened, on this day, ten years ago.
Then I look again at the picture, at the little boy whose face is just a few smudges of ink. Even with these limitations it’s plain to see that he’s smiling. Most of the rest of the family aren’t—their expressions are solemn, dignified, befitting a formal portrait of a dragonlord’s family. But it seems the artist made an exception for the boy; for an older sister, too, who sits beside him; they’re both smiling merrily, as though they’re about to break into laughter. I realize that, in all my time knowing him, I’ve never seen Lee smile like this.
It comes to me, then, a vision of what he must have been, once: a youngest child in a family full of laughter, at the center of their joy and attention. Affectionate, because he received affection; talkative, because if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be heard; probably prone to mischief, because he could get away with it. It is easy to imagine him this way, though I only have a picture to base it on. After all, I was once the youngest child, too.
Then I imagine this smiling little boy losing everyone he loved in the span of a few heartbreaking hours. I don’t need to imagine what the pain must have been like, because I remember it. In that moment, it doesn’t matter to me who his father was or what he did to me. All I want is to find the little boy I knew in Albans and hold him.
“Annie?”
I look up. For a moment I think it must be him, and I realize the book is out, open, and it’s too late to hide. But it’s Duck.
“Hane’s waiting,” he says. “The pre-parade briefing, remember?”
“Right,” I say.
He doesn’t ask what I’m doing, though I see him glance at the book in front of me. Bewilderment crosses his face as he recognizes it. I close the book, put it in my bag, and get up. Side by side, we make our way to the oration room.
Hane is waiting to brief us at the sunken rostrum in the center of the floor. When Duck and I enter, I realize we must be late; everyone else is already in the elevated, rickety wooden seats that rise in concentric semicircles. Or, almost everyone is. Lee is missing, too.
“You didn’t find him?” Hane asks Duck.
Oh, Lee, I think, don’t lose courage now. Not over a stupid parade.
“No,” says Duck, “do you want me to go—”
But before he can finish his offer, the door opens again and Lee comes in.
One look at him is enough to know that my fear was needless. If I notice that he’s a little pale, a little tight-lipped, it’s only because I’m searching for it. I’m struck instead by his marshalled self-possession: He’s standing especially erect, his expression full of calm confidence. He’s dressed in full ceremonial regalia, and he wears his cloak and armor as though he was born in them, the wings of the Fourth Order on his shoulder, the Firstrider’s ceremonial bugle slung across his back. Instead of taking a seat like the rest of us, he goes to stand beside Hane. He doesn’t apologize for being late; instead, he nods to Hane as if to indicate that the meeting may begin.
I look at him, quiet and dignified and in complete control, and I realize that the hurt, lost boy I remember is just as gone as the smiling one I never met. He’s put both aside today, and he needs none of the comforting that I’d like to give him. The thought fills me with fierce pride.
Hane looks at him, once, measuring, and I can tell that she’s noticed, as I have, the way he assumed power in the room as he entered it, and she’s startled, though not exactly displeased. Then she clears her throat and begins to outline our route.
As she speaks, and I continue to regard Lee, I allow myself to see it. The resemblance that’s haunted me, that I’ve resisted, for as long as I can remember, but that today I have confirmed past ignorance or denial.
I look at Lee and see Leon Stormscourge’s son.
Atreus, mounted on a slate-gray warhorse, leads the way along the Triumphal Way, followed by the cavalcade of the crimson-clad Protector’s Guard. Pallor and Aela come next, leading the rest of the aerial fleet not on patrol. Flashes of what I just read keep returning to my mind, and I find myself sickened by the festivity around me. The Callipolan flags waving, the banners and fanfare, the cheering crowds—all seems like more and more hypocrisy.
The crowds press close to us as we move forward, leaning against barriers constructed and maintained by the city guards, and we move so slowly that we have ample time to study the faces of the people cheering us on. Where once, I used to number myself among them, now I find myself looking upon them with the same aversion with which I once looked on the dragonlords. I watch them cheering themselves hoarse over a massacre and remember how, years ago, they hurled insults at a helpless dragon, even after it had been bound and mutilated, for the sheer pleasure of humiliating an animal that had only followed its master’s orders. I remember being lifted on the shoulders of people in the same tavern outside which, a month later, my service to the city was mocked. I remember how it felt, the wet, cold splatter of a villager’s spit on my face. Atreus’s words, afterward: The anger of the people can be often cruel and ill-placed.
These are not my people; I am not one of them. Not anymore. These people understand justice only as revenge. They are undeserving, ignorant, and cruel.
It goes on, these thoughts, this mounting anger, until it crystallizes into one overriding feeling: disgust.
Then with a jolt I wonder: Was this how the dragonlords thought of us?
Next to me, Lee guides Pallor with agonizingly slow, careful steps, setting the pace for the whole parade. I glance at him periodically, every time seeing his still, calm face, masklike and hard. Only in his posture does any sign of strain show. He sits straighter and straighter as time wears on, stiffening a bit more every time the cheering swells with his name. By the end, he is rigidly upright. Others might perceive this as a sign of pride, but I know the truth. It is the posture of someone receiving a beating and determined to get through it on their feet.
The parade finishes in the People’s Square, separated from the Palace by the river and a wide stone bridge. By now, it’s dusk; the parade was timed so it would end with the kind of light best suited to demonstrations of fire. Lee and I mount the dais where, years ago, Leon Stormscourge’s dragon was beheaded.
Our dragons fire upward, into the deepening blue sky, then launch into the air; behind us, two by two, the other riders follow. We circle each other, the sparked dragons firing in formation, the others weaving round us; we can see the city stretched below, the masses in the main square, in the streets, gathered to watch us, cheering as one. Then at last it is over, and we depart for the caves.
Back in her nest, I take my time scrubbing down Aela, feeding her from a bucket of meat the caretakers left waiting for our return. Since sparking, she’s developed a taste for charred meat, though half the time she overcooks it. When she ends up turning a leg of mutton into a big block of cinder, she attempts to eat it, gags, and then looks at me reproachfully.
“It’s not my fault you can’t figure out your own cook time,” I tell her.
It’s a relief, after the parade, to do something as familiar as having a staring contest with Aela.
“Hey, Annie?”
It’s Duck’s voice, from the cave corridor outside. The coastal patrols must be back.
“How’d it go?” I ask.
Duck shrugs. “Not so much as a sighting,” he says.
He waits on the threshold of Aela’s nest, a black silhouette against the tunnel’s lantern light. “Some of the others are going in to town to see the celebrations,” he says. “Do you want to go with them?”
No. The last thing I need is more celebrating.
“Or we could go for a walk,” he adds, seeming to sense my reaction.
This, I favor: There’s nothing like a walk around the Palace gardens with Duck to make everything a little bit better. “Okay. Let me just finish up here.”
“Sure.”
I turn back to Aela, registering his leaving the mouth of our nest out of the corner of my eye. It’s only as I replay it that I realize Duck was heading off in the direction not of the armory, but of the lower caves.
I drop the bucket and take off after him at a run. I don’t even stop to think why I’m running—all I know is that it’s urgently important for me to stop Duck. More time has passed than I realized; he’s just at the mouth of Pallor’s nest when I stumble up to him. He’s on the verge of looking inside when I catch him by the shoulder, silently, and twist him around to face me.
I’m shaking my head violently, and for a moment Duck opens his mouth in surprise and I think for a split second that he’s going to say something and give us away. But before he can speak, another sound comes from within the nest. Retching, the splat of wet on rocks. Lee is throwing up.
Duck realizes what he’s hearing and closes his mouth abruptly. I stand frozen with sudden shame; even hearing Lee right now seems like an invasion. For a moment, Duck’s eyes linger on my face, and I sense the question there, unspoken: Why did you expect this?
We make our way in silence from Pallor’s nest.
LEE
I had hoped the armory would be empty when I came up from the caves, but instead I find Crissa and Cor stripping along with the rest of the riders from their patrols, faces flushed and hair windswept. I summon up the energy for a single word.
“Anything?”
Crissa and Cor shake their heads.
I should be relieved, but instead I feel something almost like disappointment. Let them take us. Let it come. On Palace Day, I want the world to burn, and I care very little who sets it afire.
But aloud all I say is, “We should rotate out riders and send another guard up.”
“I’ll take it,” Cor says. “I’m not tired, and you look like shit.”
Crissa gives him a reproving look, and he shrugs, unabashed.
I know this is my cue to refuse and take my turn in the air. But tonight, in the wake of the parade, I don’t have it in me.
After I’ve seen them out, I go to the Cloister library and pull the Aurelian Cycle from the shelf. It now bears a stamp of banned material across its front.
Aside from what we go over in class, I haven’t looked at it in years. It’s strange to read it; I remember it as something that was chiefly spoken aloud. Spoken aloud by him. When he told it to us, in riveting installments after dinner, before bed, it was always from memory. He never needed a book. Now, reading it silently in the empty library, I can hear his voice again. It’s been a long time since I’ve let myself remember it.
Time passes and I hardly notice; I just keep reading, skipping to the parts I liked best, flipping backward and forward through the pages as I recall parts I want to revisit. I work my way inward, toward the part of the poem that’s been most on my mind: the part where the lost island of Aureos is overtaken and burned, where the Aurelians are finally defeated and driven into exile. Sometime around one in the morning I summon up the courage to read it. I hear the words in my father’s voice, and the voices of the characters become the voices of my family, till it’s all a little blurred. But still with that separateness like a shield I feel the old grief and don’t feel it, am caught somewhere in the middle, between these words and the real things. And then they are around me, half stories, half real, my family; though we are no longer in the part where they are being hurt; we’ve flipped back, to earlier pages, it’s dinner, my mother is refilling my father’s cup—
“Lee,” she says.
But that’s not my name, I think, and that’s not my mother’s voice.
Around me, the dinner is fading; my sister’s laughter is growing fainter; and then I hear the name that is not my name again.
I open my eyes and look up. In the half second that it takes for Annie’s silhouette to come into focus, when I’ve recognized her but not quite woken, there’s a surge of the old bitterness. For that instant, I think, It’s always like this, you standing between me and them.
But then the bitterness dulls, takes its rightful buried place. In the dim light of the lantern I’ve been reading with, I take in her expression. Her face is tense, set.
Her expression is enough for me to anticipate her next words. I close the Aurelian Cycle without looking at it.
“There’s been an attack,” Annie says. “South, over the Medean, under the cover of yesterday’s fog. We’ve been summoned to the Inner Palace.”