Fireborne (THE AURELIAN CYCLE Book 1)

The children were given a quarter of an hour after the Choosing Ceremony to say farewell to their parents. The boy and the girl watched from the side of the room as the others’ parents wept, embraced their children, and made promises to write.

“Maybe we shouldn’t do it,” he said.

She looked at him like he was mad. “Of course we should do it. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to us.”

The next thing needed to be said very carefully, and he had been choosing the words for it all afternoon. “I know you think the people who used to have the dragons were bad,” he said. “But what if the new people are bad, too?”

She considered this. “You don’t think he’s bad, do you? That man we met?”

She was referring to the First Protector, who’d talked with the Chosen children after the ceremony about the future they could expect in his new program. And the boy had to admit, he didn’t think of that man as bad. That man had once saved him, after all.

“No, I don’t think he’s bad,” he said.

But somehow, this didn’t seem enough. She seemed to sense that he was still worried.

“Think about it this way,” she said. “Even if they’re bad, we’ll be the ones with dragons in the end. We’ll make the rules. And we’d never be bad, would we?”

LEE

I’m back on the ground by early morning and head to the Outer Wall with Cor to review alarm procedures. When we spot Annie and Rock descending into the Firemouth, back from their first collection, I return to the armory to wait for them. Annie comes in first, dumping Aela’s gear on a bench and pushing past me for the washroom. She slams the door behind her and then I hear her sobbing.

“Don’t,” Rock says, grabbing me by the shoulder.

I look him in the face for the first time and realize it’s ashen.

“What happened?”

Rock lets out a dull, horrified laugh, the kind of laugh I’ve never heard him make before. “We made an example of someone,” he says.

The possibilities spread out before me. “You killed him?”

Rock shakes his head. “He wasn’t in good shape, that’s for sure.”

“And then—?”

“It got results.” His voice is dead. “Just like it used to.”

Annie’s sobs are drilling into me, that particular sound that I’m primed, from so many years ago, to respond to. Hopeless, lost, frightened. The desire to go to her is almost overwhelming.

“She said she could handle it.”

“She handled it,” Rock says. “She was the one who did it.”

Then Rock turns away from me and begins to strip off his armor. He moves with the exhaustion of an old man.

“When do you go again?”

I’m expecting him to say tomorrow, but he just squints like he’s counting bell tolls. “An hour and a half? They want us to hit another village before nightfall.”

So Annie’s going to have to do it again, in a few hours. It seemed so clear, so simple last night, when she said she should be the one to do it, but it’s less clear now, listening to her through the washroom door. She asked for this. She wanted it.

He leans forward, puts his head in his hands, and I know she isn’t the only one feeling the weight.

“Rock. You did good. You did what you had to do.”

“It sure as hell didn’t feel good.”

ANNIE

The sun has barely risen when we begin the first collection.

We wait in the makeshift, unpaved square, surrounded by a handful of crumbling, thatch-roofed buildings, while the crier makes the announcement to a straggle of villagers, many of whom our visit has woken. Then the troops start making house calls, and Rock and I wait, on dragonback, beside the collection wagons.

The villagers whose houses the soldiers visit are obliging enough, but I’m pretty sure they don’t believe us about the Medean attack. I know my father wouldn’t if a crier showed up and used it as an excuse to demand his harvest. Rock and I watch as the wagons are loaded, and together we compare inventories with maps of the village, shaded boxes showing fields, labeled with this year’s crops. We realize soon enough that the soldiers—who are from the city and don’t know better—are missing things. The village is producing less than it should.

We look at each other, and I know he and I are thinking the same thing; and after that, we know what to do, because we’ve both seen it happen before.

“Get the villagers into the square again,” I tell the village leaders.

Though I’ve never met a single one of these people before, in this moment they all feel familiar: the men, built and browned from years of hard labor, with the same lines around their eyes that my father had, graying young; the women with their hair bound in the same kinds of scarves my mother wore, the children in their arms and at their sides, clinging, as I remember doing during these visits when my presence was required by our lord. I feel that I’m not so much looking at them as remembering them.

I tell the crier to reiterate the message delivered initially: that the welfare of Callipolis is at stake, that our need is imminent, and that food will be redistributed fairly once it’s collected. I ask him to make clear that, upon assessing the collection results, we know we’ve been shortchanged.

The crier’s voice is clear, stronger than mine would ever be on the wind, but the villagers don’t look at him. They look at me and Rock, and our dragons.

When, at the end of his address, the square is silent, the rest of it proceeds like a script we all know by heart. Except now, my role is changed.

I already know which ones shortchanged us, so it’s just a matter of picking one.

It should never be easy.

They all have families. One of them has older kids, though, they’re nearly grown up, so that’s the one I tell Rock to follow back to his property.

It takes Rock and the soldiers a while to find the hidden storeroom, but in the square, the villagers wait quietly, and fear hums in the air. I wait, my fingers balled to fists, feeling that fear focused on me and on Aela. I’ve dismounted and wait beside her. She senses my disquiet, and when I feel her mind seeking mine, seeking closeness, I expel her advance with such force that Aela whimpers.

No. I owe these people at least the fullness of my mind’s focus, unfiltered by a dragon’s comforting haze.

Instead I reach down, place my hand on Aela’s haunch, and steady myself.

When Rock and the family return, the man is handcuffed. He’s shaking, apologizing, crying. His wife begins to cry, too.

I tell one of the soldiers to escort his family back to his house. This, at least, is one thing we can do differently. Then I ask another soldier to fetch a bucket of water and a blanket. The village leaders begin to protest, and they, too, are led away.

Rock’s eyes meet mine in a silent question. I nod once to show I’ll do it. Though, I suppose, I have to. Rock’s dragon hasn’t sparked yet. He could cause injuries, but for the full effect of this demonstration, we require flames.

“You’ll all be given a second chance to remember if you have more food,” I tell the murmuring crowd. “If there’s more, and you fail to remember it, you will meet a fate similar to this man’s. Bring him forward.”

Soldiers push the man toward me. I feel as though the scene has begun to move in frames of stillness, each heartbeat matched to an image rather than a moving world: the man in front of us, standing; then forced to his knees, kneeling; Aela’s wings half lifted in expectation as she looks down on him.

Your father would be ashamed of you, girl.

I tell Aela to fire.

The fire catches on his clothes and spreads as the man screams. I count the seconds. One for it to catch; two for it to spread; three for it to burn. I raise my hand at three, and the blanket is thrown over him, the bucket emptied, the fire smothered. More than that, four seconds, five, would cause burns severe enough to incapacitate him or endanger his life. Three seconds leaves wounds that heal.

The man crouches under the smoking blanket, gasping. I know what lies beneath: the reddened skin, the clothes that are mostly gone. It smells like it did the day my family died. Instead of vomiting, like I want to, I look past him, to the frightened faces of his neighbors.

“Let’s try this again,” I say.

We visit each house a second time, and this time, they give us everything.

LEE

I go with Rock on the second day, when he and Annie start training the rest of us. Annie takes Cor. I’ve drawn up a schedule with two goals in mind: that Annie and I never do collections together, and that Power never does them at all. It shouldn’t matter, but I’m relieved the village Rock and I are going to is in the lowlands. Skyfish lands, not Stormscourge. It’s one less thing to think about.

Although it’s still not enough to keep me from thinking of my father.

“So, how long will this go on?” Rock asks me as we get suited up.

“Depends on how long it takes,” I tell Rock. “A few weeks?”

Rock’s thick fingers tighten on the laces of his boots as he yanks them. “Right,” he says.

When we land in the village, Rock makes the announcement. The same rural lilt I’ve heard in his speech sometimes with Annie, but never around Lotus, softens his Palace-standard accent now. But Rock’s appeasing tones don’t stop the tired, unwashed villagers emerging from their cottages from looking alarmed at the sight of us. It’s the first really cold day this autumn, and many of those listening are hunched to keep warm, clothes too thin to keep out the chill from the winds that blow relentlessly across the flat, rippling plains of Callipolis’s eastern lowlands.

As the collection starts, Rock shows me the map of the village and explains how much we should expect of different crops by acreage. I remember my father explaining similar things to my brother, with similar maps, though I never paid attention then. As the villagers make their contributions to the collections carts, Rock stands next to me and offers insights in a low voice. Who doesn’t believe us, what they’re holding back. Who we’ll have to deal with later.

Deal with: the ambiguous phrase that Rock uses so matter-of-factly, but that I realize, with freezing blood, will be the part of this job that I’ve read about for years, smelled the results of on my father, and that Pallor and I are about to perform ourselves. Deal with.

“This village, they’re being a little sneaky,” Rock mutters finally. “We were hoping word would spread after yesterday’s crackdowns, but I guess this one is pretty far from the villages we visited yesterday. Also, we’re on Skyfish land.”

I’m surprised Rock even knows.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, Stormscourge villages know the drill. The Skyfish lords were more lenient when it came to crop taxes. All right, let’s get this over with.”

He shows me the map again, makes me tell him who’s shortchanged us so far. In another life, these would have been the exercises I’d have done with my father, and while we talk about it, I appreciate, with a kind of numb fascination, how calmly Rock and I are able to discuss this, these sterile words deal with and shortchange, divorced from the practice, legendary for its terror, that I’m about to perform in their name—

“Good,” Rock says, after I give him my estimates. “And now we pick somebody.”

He talks me through it beforehand, so I can carry out the entire procedure without asking him what to do. I recite it back to him with numb lips, and though I know I’m projecting the kind of confidence I’ve had years to practice faking, Rock seems to sense the truth. His deep voice softens as he impresses, a final time, the most important thing.

“Two to three seconds, Lee. Then you douse.”

For a moment the protest sits on the tip of my tongue, as I stare back at Rock’s wide face and kindly eyes, so clearly full of sympathy: I can’t do this. But who is there to say it to? Rock, whom I outrank and must lead in resolve? Atreus, who gave me this order? Callipolis, whose citizens will depend on this food for winter?

No. There’s no one to hear my protest, and there’s no one to do this in my stead. Which means it can’t be said, and must be done, and I must do it.

We walk a guilty farmer back to his house, kick around in the weeds until we find a hidden cellar, open it up. Then we bring him back to the square, make sure all his neighbors are present, and I give the order to Pallor.

A little later, we’re standing to the side and watching as wagons are loaded with what wasn’t offered on the first try. My heart is still hammering from the sounds of the man’s shrieking. He’s been carried away, his burns to be tended in one of the neighboring homes with salves that—I appreciate this with only more horror—we, on behalf of the Callipolan ministry, have brought and offered.

As if this somehow makes us better than the dragonlords from the old regime, who left burned serfs to their fates.

Pallor nudges my hand, like he can tell something is wrong, and I reach behind to rub his neck absently, warming my palm on his hide. It’s clear that he shares none of my disquiet about what just happened, and even though I know it’s not in his nature, I can’t help wishing he did.

Rock, standing beside me, finally speaks. “I just keep thinking—I feel like a Stormscourge.”

I remember Annie, falling apart in the washroom yesterday, and know that must have been her thought, too.

We’re all thinking it.

“This was how . . . they did it?”

How he did it, is what I want to ask. But Rock wasn’t from the Far Highlands; he would have had a different lord, though their methods would have been similar enough.

“Yeah.”

I reflect that, even dead, with a revolution between us, my father has left a trail behind him such that I can still be trained in his methods, a degree removed, by the same people who suffered under them.

Trained to repeat them.

You believe his regime is better than what came before? Julia asked. Wake up.

But surely this is different, surely this crisis, our need, justifies what looks so terrifyingly like a repetition of past wrongs . . .

Rock rouses me from my thoughts. “Lee, you’re in charge of the schedules, right?”

I nod.

“Do you think you could—make sure we don’t have to do our own villages? I can do Annie’s. And she can do mine. I just don’t think I can . . .”

He trails off, as though he’s a little frightened by his own request, and I recognize the look: the one people have when they want something from Goran badly enough to beg for it, but don’t want him to realize.

“Of course,” I say.

“Thanks,” Rock says. Relief floods his voice, along with shame, and he turns away from me.

***

It’s three days after the Medean attack when my schedule overlaps with Crissa’s again. We share a meal in the refectory when she’s getting off and I’m on my way out. I’ve been stewing in the horror of collections and the nightmares that follow them so deeply that it’s a surprise—almost a relief—to rouse from them for a little while in concern for another’s grief.

“How are you doing?” I ask.

Her eyes are sunk deep with bruises beneath them, her habitual smile gone. Even so, I note irrelevantly, she’s beautiful, the flush of the Medean sun warming her cheeks and lips. She lifts both shoulders, spreading her fingers on the table.

“I’ve been keeping busy. It helps. I’m just . . . I’m really worried about my mum.”

By now, lists of lost vessels have been drawn up; Crissa’s father’s went down under Stormscourge fire. But we’ve been stretched too thin, with collections, for Crissa to be allowed leave. She hasn’t been home since the news.

“I’m sorry. I’ll make sure they approve your leave as soon as we can spare it—”

“I know. Thank you.”

She looks up at me. Her voice is quiet, but it doesn’t hide her feeling.

“What was it like for you, after?”

The corps has always been pretty good about not asking this sort of thing, so I don’t have an answer prepared. I think about it and then find myself telling her the truth.

“I didn’t speak for months.”

Crissa raises her eyebrows, like she isn’t sure if I’m joking. When she decides I’m not, she says, “Oh.”

“You’re doing really well.”

By the end of the week, scheduling has become a calculation of the riders’ limits. Who can stay awake for another back-to-back shift, who can do with a little less sleep, who can keep their cool for just one more collection. The brunt of duties falls on the sparked aurelian and stormscourge riders; and then on the ones who can handle even more.

Which means I’ve begun scheduling shifts for myself, Annie, and Rock back to back. Neither of them questions it, and when the fatigue sets in, neither complains. The first indication that something is wrong comes not from Annie, but from Duck. He finds me in the spare classroom that I’ve been using as an office and eases onto the edge of the chair across the desk from me.

“So you know how Annie used to not . . . sleep? When we were kids? Just do homework all night?”

It was a strategy she used for avoiding nightmares. I found out about it because, when we were in Albans and too young to be embarrassed by such conversations, she suggested I try it, too.

“She’s started . . . doing it again, I think. Not sleeping. No one’s seen her sleep since the attack.”

I feel like my insides are shrinking as they tighten. I’ve got Annie doing two, sometimes three collections a day, usually patrols after that; the days are long, grueling, and leave you ill with exhaustion. They are only barely doable on the allotted time I’ve given her to sleep here and there. But if she’s refusing even that—

“I was just wondering,” Duck goes on, squinting at the desk, “if you could maybe ease up on her . . . a bit? Take her off some of the collections?”

I remember Annie staring down the general as he attempted to dissuade her from this assignment, telling him in a tone of steel that she would do what it takes.

“This was her choice, Duck.”

Duck’s square jaw is clenched, twitching. “It’s your call, too.”

When the words weigh on me and I don’t answer, he adds: “Surely it doesn’t matter that much who—”

I shake my head, clearing it. “It does.”

Duck’s voice begins to strain. “Does it?”

“She and Rock are getting better results than anyone else. We need her out there.”

But the numbers don’t seem to make an impression on him. “Lee, it’s horrible for her,” he says. His voice has started to shake. “Come on. You know how her family—”

My patience snaps.

“I am aware of what happened to Annie’s family.”

For a second we stare at each other. I hold my face rigid, impassive; Duck looks so furious that for a moment, I wonder if he’s going to hit me. I also wonder if I’ll hit him back.

“Let me help you understand,” I say slowly. “Callipolis lost almost everything in the attack. We won’t have enough to make it through the winter, even if the collections go perfectly. People are going to starve. Right now it’s just a matter of how many. Every bushel Annie extracts, every wagon she sends back to the depot, means we’ll be able to spread resources further. We’re talking lives, Duck. Your mother’s, your brothers’ and sisters’. With stakes like that, we can’t afford to think about Annie’s feelings.”

By the end, I know that I’ve won. All the same, my insides are knotted, riddled with the thought of Annie—not this Annie, but the one from before, the child-Annie who used to let me take care of her—leaning close to whisper: Sometimes when the nightmares get really bad, I just don’t sleep. It’s okay, really. You just get a little tired during the day—

“Could you maybe just,” Duck says, hoarse, “give me a few hours off at the same time as her, Lee? I haven’t . . . I haven’t seen her since it started. Maybe I could convince her—”

I’ve gone hoarse, too.

“Of course.”

ANNIE

I’m emerging from the washroom when I hear a knock on the dorm room door.

“Who is it?”

“Me,” Duck’s voice says. “Can I come in?”

I’ve been able to avoid Duck all week without even trying, but there seems no good way to avoid him now. I open the door and am torn between wanting to pull him to me and slamming the door closed in his face.

“What do you want?”

“We’ve both got the afternoon off.”

I turn away from him, take my towel back up, and resume scrunching water out of my hair. I’ve been bathing for at least a half hour, scrubbing every inch of myself until it hurt. It’s late afternoon; the room is warm from accumulated sunlight. “You want me to do what, go for a walk with you? Enjoy the changing leaves?”

Duck’s voice is soft, calm. “Of course not.”

I’ve gone still, the towel bunched in my hair, staring at the contents of my dresser trays, unable to turn to him, though suddenly it’s the only thing I want to do. And then he’s taken a step closer and said my name, and I’ve spun toward him and he’s wrapped his arms around me. The pressure that’s been building in my throat and eyes mounts and reaches the breaking point.

“I’m sorry—”

He holds me, not speaking. It feels good, unutterably good, to have his arms around me. My face against his chest, my head cupped by his hand. As though he’s holding me together so that I can fall apart. It’s the first time we’ve embraced since the night of the Lycean Ball.

“Duck, I’m sorry,” I blurt out. “I’m sorry—that night—I never wanted to hurt you—”

Duck’s arms around me have gone very still.

“You’re talking about the Lycean Ball?”

I nod, mortified. Duck inhales, then shakes his head.

“That doesn’t matter right now, Annie. And you shouldn’t apologize for it. Ever.”

He speaks so forcefully, with such assurance, that it almost disguises the way his voice strains. But I’m too tired to focus on that. I sink deeper into his arms, squeeze my eyes shut, and will the world out. The dorm, the rows of crisply made beds and desks cluttered with the schoolwork of forgotten classes fade to nothing as I close my eyes.

But then that smell comes back.

“Can you smell it?” I whisper.

Duck’s arms tighten around me. “Smell what?”

“Dragonfire. I smell like dragonfire. Even after I bathe. It’s there when I eat and when I sleep and when . . .”

The words are spilling out like they’re coming of their own accord. Duck makes a murmured noise of comfort, and there is pain in his voice, matching mine. Then he pulls away from me just enough to look me over, his tan face crinkled at the corner of his eyes with worry.

“Annie,” he says, “you need to sleep.”

When he takes my hand and pulls me toward my bed, I let him.

He tosses my discarded flamesuit to the floor and pulls down the covers, and after I get into bed he pulls the blanket over me, like he’s tucking me in. And then he crawls onto the bed next to me, atop the covers. The blanket separating our bodies a message that is clear, if unspoken: I’m here as your friend, and nothing else.

Of all the ways Duck has ever been sweet to me, this is the gesture that seems sweetest of all, and that makes my eyes fill all over again. I curl closer, rest my head against his chest, and breathe in the smell of salt air, lingering from Duck’s last sea patrol. It’s the first reprieve from dragonfire I’ve had in hours.

“It’s almost over, Annie,” he murmurs, wrapping an arm over my shoulder. My face buried against him, my wet hair dampening his uniform, I feel the words rumble through his chest. I’ve calmed, by now, enough to let out a dull laugh.

“It’s just begun,” I answer. Can’t he see that? “This is all there is. We’re monsters, even if they call us something else.”

Duck’s breathing shifts. For a moment, its ragged rise and fall is all I hear. The arm he has draped over me shifts, as if, where I couldn’t see, he’s just reached up to wipe his eyes. But when he speaks, his voice remains steady.

“Did I ever tell you the story my mother used to tell us, of the time old Aron tricked the sun into lending him its fire?”

He’s adopted the low murmur I remember him using at bedtime with his siblings, and already I can feel my shoulders loosening, my breath lengthening. I shake my head.

“Well then,” Duck murmurs. “Listen closely.”