Fireborne (THE AURELIAN CYCLE Book 1)

LEE

It’s still dark when we suit up. Annie’s face is pale, with bruises under her eyes that she keeps rubbing, as if she slept as poorly as I did. We don’t speak. In the air, Annie flies ahead of us, hugging close to Aela’s back. It’s quiet and clean after last night’s storm, but the temperature has dropped, leaving the first bitter cold of winter in its wake. We land north of Annie’s village, in a sheltered rock alcove farther up the mountainside where Pallor and Aela can rest, hidden and undisturbed, during our visit.

It’s a half-hour walk down the sloping pastures to Annie’s farm. As we walk, the sky turns gray, grows pink in the east, illuminating a highland skyline that I remember from my childhood—especially the distant, seaside peak on which lies the estate that once, before the Revolution, was my family’s home. Farhall, seat of the Drakarch of the Far Highlands. Though Holbin is miles inland from the manor where I was born, the biting winds, the smell of heather, the fiercely sloping fields are the same as I remember.

And Annie remembers them, too. She picks her way through the rocks and weeds nimbly, barely slowing, mindless of the winds that buffet strands of her cropped hair across her face. I stumble after her. She stops at last beside a magnificently gnarled oak, her fingers fitting into its crevices with the familiarity of old acquaintance as she rests her hand on it.

“It’s down there,” she says, nodding to the clearing below us. There’s a small footpath, mostly overgrown, leading down to it. I look and see nothing but clumps of bushes, gnarled trees, weeds. Farther on, smoke is rising from the chimneys of the other homes of Holbin. Annie surveys all this and inhales slowly.

“I haven’t been back since it happened,” she says.

I have never been so hesitant of every word I say. “We can take it slowly. Do you want to sit here for a minute or two?”

She nods. I start to sit where I’m standing and then I feel her hand on my arm, the touch light, hesitant. “There’s a good spot over here,” she murmurs.

She tugs me over the roots, to a place closer to the trunk where one of the oldest, most prominent roots forms a kind of ledge. It’s smoother than the other parts of the tree, like it’s been the bench of many people before.

“It’s a good place to sit,” she says. “I used to come here with my sister.”

“You had a sister?”

Annie’s eyes dart to me, then back out over the sloping fields. “Two. And—three brothers.”

I ask her for their names.

Annie grips the knees of her flamesuit at the question. I think of what it felt like, Tyndale and Julia pulling those names out of so many years of silence, the shock and the ache of it. “Lila, Hettie,” she says carefully. “My sisters. Hettie and I were closest, we always did chores together.”

“How old—”

“Hettie was eight. Lila was twelve. My brothers were Rory and Garet. Rory was oldest—he was fifteen. He and Dad used to argue all the time. Garet was ten. And then the baby, he died before his naming.”

“And your parents?” I prompt.

Annie squints away from me. “Silas,” she says, her voice still careful. “And—”

Then she looks stricken.

For the first time, it occurs to me that her mother might have passed before Annie was old enough to know her given name. I hasten to backtrack, but before I can, she exhales a single word with sudden relief.

“Anthea.”

She adds, with determination, like she is reciting it: “I have her hair.”

When she speaks again, her voice has regained some of its strength.

“I can go down now.”

She rises first and waits for me. Together we walk down the overgrown path, Annie pressing a hand against her cheek to hold her hair from her eyes. At the base, she looks around and swallows.

“It’s here,” she says. She points around us, and in the growing light I distinguish the foundations of a building emerging from the weeds. “There’s not much left. The house—most of it burned down in the attack. And it’s been years, it’s overgrown now . . .”

Her voice is faint again. She turns away from me, then moves slowly toward the ruins like she’s in a trance. She steps over the first row of bricks and says, “This was the front room . . .”

I step closer so I can see the rest of it more clearly, realize then how small her house was: Its entire floor plan would have fit into my family’s vestibule.

“How many stories—?”

“One. And the outhouse was over there.”

One fireplace, shared by the kitchen and the bedroom. One bedroom, which they shared. She shows me where the kitchen table used to be, where the beds were, where she slept with her sisters. It’s all unrecognizable, this many years gone, whatever was left after the fire long rotted and devoured by vines. But Annie conjures up the furniture and habits of this house as if she can still see them. I’m struck by the reverence with which she describes a world that sounds pitifully poor.

After she’s done walking me around the foundations, she turns to face me.

“Do you want to hear about the attack now?”

I shake my head. “Tell me about the Famine.”

She nods, and I sense that she’s gratified by the fact that I want to start there. “Come on,” she says, turning from me.

About twenty yards from the remains of her house, she shows me a patch of land that looks, at first glance, like all the rest of the land around us. But then I notice the markers—wooden, not stone like those next to the Palace—planted side by side, one smaller than the other.

“Your mother and baby brother.”

“You remember?”

“Of course . . .”

She tells me about the crops failing, the blight no one had ever seen before, the way her father tried to hide his panic after the tax. Then came winter, and during that winter she learned what it was like to be hungry. They ate things that weren’t supposed to be food. She says it concisely like that, but I insist that she elaborate.

“I think we ate our dog,” she says. “Dad said it wandered off, but I never believed that, there was meat on the table for the next week. My brothers tried dirt and got sick for a few days. I figured out how to . . .”

“How to what?”

“Worms,” she says simply, her whole face glowing in humiliation.

The winter she’s talking about, the first winter of the Famine, I only vaguely remember. There were fewer feasts than usual, and crop failure was the explanation offered when anyone complained.

“Anyway, Mum would have probably been all right, but she was pregnant again. Always, always hungry. It was horrible—so horrible—especially for Dad. When the baby finally came, it took a really, really long time, and she was just too weak. You could hear her, it went on for over a day. And then she went to sleep and . . . didn’t wake up. The baby didn’t live much longer before he passed, too.”

By then it was springtime, new crops to plant, and the family pulled themselves together, though things were different now. Less laughter, more anger. Her father began to fixate on the fact that what little usable food their crops had produced had been taken by the dragonlords’ tax. If they’d been able to keep what they had, his wife might have survived. As summer passed, the blight reared its head again. But this time, prepared by their last winter, the farmers of Holbin began to plan for the dragonlord’s next visit.

By now, Annie’s unlikely ability to read had manifested itself, and without the moderating influence of her mother to stop him, Annie’s father began taking her to his meetings with the other villager leaders, and she listened as they planned their countermoves to the palace decrees she read to them. Thus, when Leon Stormscourge visited their house in late autumn and accused Annie’s father of conspiracy and withholding what was owed, Annie had no doubt of her father’s guilt on both counts.

“Holbin was attacked twice,” she says. “The first time was a warning. They knew my father was one of the ringleaders. The second came after the villagers still didn’t meet quota. They set most of Holbin’s buildings on fire. Then they took everything they could find, not just enough to cover the tax. I was living with another family by then, but after the second attack, they couldn’t afford to feed me anymore, so they took me to Albans.”

We’re still by the graves, but she’s staring down the hill at the village now. The sun has climbed over the horizon, enough so that the peaks of the mountains are glowing gold.

“And the first attack?” I prompt her.

Annie hesitates.

“Lee,” she says softly, still staring out at the fields below us. “Are you sure you want to hear . . .”

I don’t know if her hesitation to talk about it is for her sake or mine.

“I need to know.”

She sounds distant, tired. “All right.”

Annie leads me back to the house, then takes me about ten paces into what had been her front yard.

“This was where he stood.”

She stops me, so I’m standing in the same place. She points behind me. “He’d dismounted from the dragon—it was waiting over there. And the soldiers, they were standing there, and there. We were over by the house. And Dad was talking to him. Here.”

She stands about three feet from me, taking the place of her father. We face each other. And then Annie takes a breath and drops to her knees.

As a child, I watched countless people kneel before my father. But I think this is the first time I’ve ever really seen the act for what it is. A protest rises to my lips; my face begins to burn. But then Annie raises her eyes to mine, like she anticipates this, and at her look I fall silent. I asked her to show me, and this is what she wants me to see.

She lowers her head and remains kneeling for three long, measured breaths. I think she’s counting them, just as I am. Her palms are flat against the grass as they support her weight. I stare down at her bowed head, the nape of her neck, her rigid back. It’s a long moment. I have ample time to consider that, in another life, this is how we would have known each other.

Then Annie rises to her feet. A flush has crept into her face, matching mine. She continues her story as if there were no interruption. Her tone is relentless, as if now that she has begun, she’s determined to get through it without stopping.

“My father must have been intimidated; he’d never spoken to one of the dragonborn before. This man, he seemed powerful, terrible and powerful. Like a god. Dad must have been frightened, too, because of the dragon. But he held his ground anyway. He was dignified. It couldn’t have been easy, to be dignified while kneeling in front of someone like that.

“I couldn’t hear a lot of what they said, and it was hard to understand Lord Leon’s accent. But then Leon ordered the rest of us to go into the house. I knew something was wrong because Dad was crying. Leon asked Dad which was his favorite, which I didn’t understand at first. Dad said he didn’t have one. Then . . . my brother must have understood because he told me to walk toward the dragonlord, and I did, I didn’t understand, not until it was too late—”

She sucks in a breath like she’s running out of air.

“I wouldn’t have gone if I’d understood, I didn’t know—”

This is the refrain she must play for herself, on bad days and after nightmares; this is her refrain, and like mine, it is never enough.

“Annie,” I say.

She locks her eyes on me and I know she’s using this to pull herself back. When she speaks again, her voice is shaking.

“They made Dad go into the house with my brothers and sisters, and then the soldiers locked the door and went to guard the windows. They were quiet inside, Dad must have been keeping them calm. I still didn’t understand. And then Leon turned to his dragon and said something in a different language, and the dragon fired.”

She traces the path of the flame across the yard with a finger, so I can imagine it.

“I could feel the heat on my face, my arms. I watched the house catch fire and I started—asking—for him to stop it. Because the soldiers had me standing here, right next to him.”

She takes two steps closer to me and turns so that we’re both facing the house. She’s close enough to touch, barely inches from me.

“I started to hear—”

But she can’t finish this sentence, and the panicked look has come back full force, like she can barely see anything but the things she’s telling me. I make myself look at her, like this, take in the sight of Annie breaking apart.

“—I could smell—”

Her face convulses, and for a moment she trembles, facing away from me and toward the remains of the house. When she looks back at me, her face has set.

“I tried to look away. But he—” She reaches out and takes my hand in hers. Her eyes are fixed on mine. “He put his hand in my hair. Like this.” She lifts my hand behind her head, places it on her streaming hair, and automatically my fingers clutch a handful. Her hair is soft, downy, like a child’s. Her voice begins to lose control. “And he turned my head and made me watch until the screaming stopped.”

I release her, abruptly, like holding her has burned me.

But the sight of it is seared into my vision, my hand gripping her hair like the scruff of an animal, like a dog whose face a trainer might force into its own excrement. She was small and weak and helpless in my hand.

Ruling came naturally to me, Leo.

“By the time he let me go, I was—upset. And he, he—” Annie inhales and then her voice, finally, breaks. “He comforted me. He held me and he comforted me.”

I take a step back from her. Annie gets herself under control again, but barely. Then she says, “That’s what happened, Lee,” in the tone of an apology. “I’d like . . . I’d like a few minutes to myself, if that’s all right.”

“Of course,” I manage.

I make my way up the hill, and as I start to move, I find I can’t get away fast enough.

Which is your favorite. He comforted me. Lord Leon.

And the question that comes with it, since the orphanage, since the beginning, the agonized protest of betrayal that has no one alive to answer it, only memories of a man who was only ever kind and caring and my father—

How could you have done this?

I stop when I reach the oak again, and then I grab the trunk with one hand and double over, my stomach heaving as I gasp for air.

That’s when I notice something glinting in one of the knots of the tree, deep down. I begin to work on retrieving it, with that single-minded kind of focus you only have when you’re distracting yourself. My stomach calms, the gasps subside. I scrabble with my fingers, then prod with a twig.

When I get it out, I realize it’s a woman’s necklace, cheap and crude and rusted, and the nausea comes back. It would have been a lot better if Annie had found this, I realize. I do not want to be the one who gives it to her.

I look down the hill for the first time. She’s kneeling, her head in her hands.

I busy myself with cleaning the necklace while I wait for her, not looking down the slope again. When she rejoins me fifteen minutes later, her eyes are bloodshot but she’s wiped her face dry. I feel a moment of such tenderness for her, it hurts. My Annie, who doesn’t cry in front of people.

She sits beside me, looking tired and drained, and silently I take her hand, turn it palm up, and place the necklace in it.

For a second she just looks at it. And then her whole body hunches, like all her muscles are tensing, like this is just one thing too much. I know from this that it must have belonged to her mother.

I wait for her to move, but she just sits there, paralyzed by a necklace so worthless that the women in my family would have thrown it away without a thought. Before I think about whether or not I should, I shift closer to her and take it back. I unclasp it and gently gather her hair into one hand so her neck is bare. She remains hunched forward, unmoving, while I fasten the necklace around her neck. I try to touch her as little as possible, but still my fingers brush against her skin, her hair, I can’t help thinking that he too touched this neck, this hair—this beautiful hair, this delicate neck, this tiny creature, not tiny in the way women can be naturally, but tiny because when she was young, she was hungry—he touched her, and instead of recognizing her beauty he tore her apart.

She looks up at me when she realizes I’ve finished, and her face is wet.

“That bastard,” I tell her.

After all these years, resisting it, avoiding it, I never thought it would feel like this. Good. Like I’ve been set free.

She swallows, wipes her face on her sleeve, and her fingers rise to touch the rusty chain around her neck. She tucks the pendant into her shirt.

“Thank you,” she says simply. But she says it like she isn’t just talking about the necklace, and she looks at me to make sure I understand.

I nod, because I cannot speak.

***

After that, we fall into silence. The wind cuts across us as we stare down at Holbin, at the skyline that holds, within it, the dragonlord’s estate that I once called home. Though we could have moved apart, we’re still sitting close together.

When she finally speaks, it’s to ask the question I know she’s been withholding. She sounds exhausted.

“What’s going on, Lee?”

“They’ve . . . given me a final chance.”

Annie processes this in silence for a moment.

“How?” she asks.

Meaning, now that she’s turned in Tyndale.

“A servant I didn’t recognize passed me a note.”

I am reaching into my pocket for it as I say this, only to realize I don’t have it. It was the first note from Julia that I didn’t destroy immediately, because it was the first note I’d ever intended to show anyone else.

It’s fine. It’s in the office, and you always lock the door.

I push the rising worry from my mind.

“It said that even if I couldn’t bring myself to, you know, bring Callipolis down from the inside . . . I could still just go home.”

Annie swallows, hard.

I start to explain. “I’ve been telling them no for a while. Since—”

“Since we started having class with Tyndale,” Annie realizes, her voice a murmur. “And you’ve been meeting with them, too?”

There seems no point in telling her anything but the whole truth.

“Just one of them. We’ve met twice. Once before the first attack. I was trying to dissuade her. And before . . . over Midsummer. I didn’t mean to, I just . . .”

“You just missed them.”

My throat tight, I nod. And then I struggle to explain.

“I’ve been telling myself it’s not about that. I know it’s not. There’s so much more to it than whether Midsummer is hard, or whether Palace Day is—” I stop, because I can’t think of a word to fittingly describe the depths. Then I say, “But it’s gotten harder over these past few weeks.”

“I know,” Annie murmurs. “It’s gotten harder for me, too.”

I have been staring at my knees as I speak, but when she says this, I glance at her: Her profile is arrested, staring out over the glowing slopes of the highlands, her gaze unseeing.

“The thing that strikes me, now that I’m older, is that what happened to my family was . . . routine. All of it. I’m not the only child who survived a fire; there was a name for it. I was a designated witness. When it happened, Leon wasn’t acting out of anger; he was completely calm. After all, he was just exercising his legal rights. Another day on the job, for a dragonlord.”

Yes. Which leaves me to wonder which unremarkable night it must have been, when my father came home from one of his visits to our land holdings, smelling of the dragonfire that had just orphaned Annie.

“As much as I’ve hated doing collections these past two weeks,” Annie goes on doggedly, “as much as I felt like a Stormscourge—I also know it was nothing close to the worst of what they did. And so long as that’s the case, this is the side you want to be on. Even if we’re a little evil, we’re still better than the evil they were, before.”

The lesser of two evils. It’s a far cry from what I hoped we’d be. And a far cry from what Annie once hoped for, as well.

I murmur, “Do you remember when you told me . . . that even if the people giving us dragons were bad, we wouldn’t be?”

Annie smiles sadly.

“All the time,” she says. “But . . . I also understand now that it’s more complicated than that. The war’s not over. When it is, maybe . . . there will be time to change the rules.”

The sun has finally risen high enough for light to fall across us. The thinner wisps of Annie’s hair are glowing as they blow around her face. Silence has fallen again. Annie seems to take it as a cue. She reaches into the pocket of her flamesuit, pulls out a piece of paper, and unfolds it on her knee. It’s torn from the banned book about Palace Day, and the page she’s flattening is the one with my family on it.

She folds the page in half, so that only the blurry black-and-white rendition of our portrait is visible, not the descriptions of their deaths underneath. Then she points at the youngest child in the picture.

“This was you?”

I nod.

I ask, “How long have you known?”

Annie’s lips compress. “I’ve known you were dragonborn for almost as long as I can remember. The rest of it . . . I tried not to know for a long time.”

I take the paper from her, press it on my own knee, and look down at my family. All six of us. My father, regal and careless. My mother beside him, her expression warm with pride, my hand held in her lap as I stand beside her; Laertes and Larissa, not an inch of difference in their heights, despite the years that separated them; Penelope, smiling from ear to ear, like she always did.

“You were with them, weren’t you?” Annie says. “On Palace Day.”

I nod again. I flatten the knees of my flamesuit, dredging the words up. Fighting the silence that overcame me like a brick wall as I sat with Julia, because I need Annie to understand that I understand.

“They made me watch, too.”

As soon as I say it, I start to feel sick again.

The tips of Annie’s fingers touch my knee, and remain there. “I’m sorry, Lee.”

She sounds like she means it from the depths of her being. Like she really is sorry about what happened to us, no matter what my family did to hers first. I reach for something to say next and find myself still talking about it.

“Atreus is the reason I’m . . . He came in at the end. Saved me.”

Annie’s eyes widen. “So he knows—?”

I shake my head. “He doesn’t. I used to hope he did, but he has no idea.”

“But if he saw you that night, how could he not recognize . . . ?”

“I used to wonder, too,” I say, “and now I think . . .” I grimace, knowing how this is going to sound. “That night, I think there was blood on my face.”

Annie’s fingers tighten on the leather of my flamesuit. I hand the clipping back to her, keeping my eyes on our hands, so I don’t have to see her expression. She puts it in her pocket.

“And this . . . relative?” she asks, tentative now. “The one who’s been contacting you?”

I nod. “Julia. Julia Stormscourge. My cousin. The one who left that ultimatum after Starved Rock.”

A line has formed between Annie’s brows that she smooths with her thumb. “I met her, I think. At the first tournament. She complimented my flying . . .”

After so much else that’s passed, I feel barely surprised.

“She’s been very persistent,” I mutter.

“She must care about you.”

“We were friends when we were little.”

Annie’s eyebrows draw together. “Is she highly ranked? In their fleet?”

She’s hit upon the salient point surprisingly quickly, and though she’s phrased it obliquely, the sense of the question is clear: Will you have to face her?

I let out a dull laugh and am unable to hide the pain in it.

Annie lets out a slow, half-whistled exhale. “Oh,” she says, her voice filling with sadness. “Oh, Lee.”

It doesn’t make it any better, to know that she sees the choice for what it is, and that it fills her with sorrow to witness; but nevertheless it is, in its way, a balm to hear it marked aloud.

“We should be getting back,” I murmur.

The walk to the dragons is quiet, drained. But it’s the kind of drained that feels cleaner, cleared out. All the tension that I’m so used to feeling around Annie is gone. It was like the whine of a buzzing insect, low and continuous, the kind you forget even as it sets you on edge. Now that it’s gone, I realize I must have lived with it for years.

Try as I might, I can’t remember locking the office door at all.