Fireborne (THE AURELIAN CYCLE Book 1)

The soldier went on after the Revolution to live a quiet life, retired from military office, and in the great scheme of his changing city, amounting to little.

He would never tell anyone about the time he disobeyed his commander’s orders. The time when he carried a boy into a hallway and kept walking. Looking back on that moment, he tried to tell himself it had been a choice. A choice, for better or for worse, that had defined him.

The truth was, it hadn’t felt like a choice at all. He had simply looked at the boy and seen, not a dragonlord’s son, but a child like any other.

He tended the boy’s wounds, took him to the orphanage, and left him with a new name: Lee.

ANNIE

Back on the ground I escort Lee to the infirmary and make sure he is given a private room. Lee doesn’t question or confirm the choice; in the time it’s taken to descend Pytho’s Keep he seems to have moved past the point of speaking. He remains quiet throughout the nurse’s tending, during which I wash what ash and dragonsblood I’ve been stained with off in a basin to the side of the room. Only after the nurse has left, the door closed behind her, and I have taken him into my arms does he finally speak.

“Atreus asked, but I couldn’t—we’ll have to return the body—”

“I’ll make sure that happens.”

But he barely hears me, because he has realized the word he has used—body—and it’s enough to make him lose it. As I tighten my arms around him, as my heart aches at the sound of his anguish, another part of me, another part that woke when he pinned the fleet commander’s medal on my shoulder, remains calm as still water and hard as steel. That part of me thinks only: You are safe.

I hold him until he’s spent, and then I help him drink the sleeping draft the nurse left us.

“You need to sleep. I’ll be back when you wake up.”

Back in the Cloister I find Power, lounging in the leaf-swept courtyard, the winter wind rippling through his hair.

“Commander,” he says, and his tone, though sardonic as usual, contains what I suspect is satisfaction.

One person, at least, who likes the idea of my promotion.

He smiles, salutes with his characteristic flourish, and leaves me alone among the leaves.

Inside the fleet commander’s office, I stand for a moment and test the thought: my office. Then I sit and begin going through the list of meetings that I’ll need to attend in addition to those already scheduled. I’ll meet with Holmes, to discuss the matter of the body of Julia Stormscourge and Lee’s request that it be returned to New Pythos; and I’ll meet with Miranda Hane, to discuss what kind of propaganda will be needed to ensure Lee’s safe reinstatement in the corps. But before all these, I find a message from Dora Mithrides, inviting me to tea.

For the second time today and in my life, I make my way up the Janiculum.

It’s a quiet walk through the Palace gardens and up the winding streets to Dora’s house, through the riots of fall colors and the blowing leaves, along streets lined with ornate fences and ivy-clad mansions and the occasional trotting carriage. Dora’s porter lets me inside the gate, the valet into her home. Soaring ceilings, great chandeliers, a grand staircase winding upward greet me: It occurs to me that these are all the things I am usually intimidated by. But today they don’t have the same power over me.

“Antigone. Welcome. We’ll take our tea on the veranda.”

Dora Mithrides has dressed properly, applied her rouge, and arranged her hair. Her neck is weighted once again with thick-beaded necklaces. She leads the way through the spacious house to a veranda, sheltered from the wind, that looks out over a private garden and the city. The concentric walls of the Inner and Outer Palace spread below, the arena leaning out over the winding River Fer, which encircles the Palace gardens and the lower Janiculum. Across the river lies Highmarket, bustling and bright; Cheapside and Southside, low-roofed and dirty; and in the distance the Manufacturing District, bleak and hazy with smoke. Beyond that the lowland plains, stretching out to meet the sea and a blue sky.

“Cream or sugar?”

We sit at a glass table, the china arrayed before us so thin light shines through it. There’s enough of a chill in the air that Dora has wrapped herself in a shawl; the leather of my uniform is sufficient to hold my heat. Dora has spoken in Dragontongue, and I sense, this time, that it matters which language I reply in. So, careful of each word, I answer in Dragontongue as well.

“Neither, thank you.”

There are rules to this process, and Lee would know all of them, but Lee is not here.

Even when you don’t feel confident, you fake it.

I smile at the serving girl and thank her for my tea.

When we are alone on the veranda, Dora takes a long drink from her cup, returns it to her saucer, and tells me:

“That was quite an operation you just pulled off, my dear.”

I sip my own tea and find my wrist steady.

“I am curious why you did it. Are you in love with the boy?”

I smile into my teacup. That is how she chooses to reduce it? And then I set it down and level my gaze across the table at Dora.

“I did it because I believe Lee is everything Atreus’s test found him to be.”

Dora hums softly, nodding to herself.

“Yes, I can see why you would think that,” she says. She settles back, blinking at me with beady eyes. “And I can also see why that would make Atreus see him as a threat to everything he’s struggling to build.”

I open my mouth to tell her that Lee isn’t, and no words come.

Because, of course, he is.

The realization is simple, obvious, and terrifying—until it’s answered with a memory from another lifetime. Of a boy who was good to me, who helped me first and asked who my parents were after, who remained my friend in spite of learning truths that hurt.

Maybe Lee does embody threats that Atreus opposes. Maybe he is a part of the shadow of the dragonlords that we must crawl out of by any means necessary. But when we were children and our choices were what mattered, the choices he made were not of the old world, but the new.

“Even after today?” I ask.

Dora smiles.

“I think,” she says, “that Atreus is capable of being shaken, and that today, what you and Lee did shook him a great deal.”

She laces her fingers together across her plump abdomen and straightens against her wicker chair. Stretching, turning talk to business.

“It also attracted my interest. In the boy’s future, and yours as well. And if I am interested, the Janiculum is interested. Do you understand?”

She does not have to say the words Protectorship and succession for me to understand her perfectly.

“I believe I do.”

Dora smiles. She opens her gesture, taking in the tray of biscuits on the table between us, a luxury unaffected by the rationing program that I’m in charge of enforcing.

“Please,” she says. “Eat.”

***

I return to the Palace infirmary later that day, when Lee’s sleeping draft is due to have worn off. I walk down corridors flooded with warm swaths of sunlight down to the final ward and stop on the threshold.

Lee is in bed, awake, and propped on pillows. He has two visitors: Cor, seated at the end of his bed, and Crissa, her chair pulled up close to him. They’re doing most of the talking, passing the thread of conversation back and forth carefully, relieving Lee of pressure to contribute. Lee, between them, does not share their smiles, but neither does he wear the expression of raw agony that I left him with earlier. He has calmed, and even if he doesn’t speak, he seems to take comfort in their presence.

It’s with a pain that feels strangely distant from myself that I notice Crissa has taken his hand. The kiss he and I shared in a darkened cell feels like it already belongs to the lives of former selves, burned away in the fire. What’s left beneath, still raw, doesn’t know what claim to place on this boy, whom I’ve just sent to hell and back.

But then Lee looks past them, as their conversation continues. His gray eyes soften at the sight of me, and the beginning of a line appears at the side of his mouth, like something just a little sadder than a smile, and I know the words without their needing to be said.

Our claim on each other is the same as it’s always been. The fires we walked through today were ones we’ve trained to walk since childhood. And today, the choices that began in childhood made us strong enough to defy two regimes, in the name of revolution.

Together we’ll defy them, step by step through this fire, to the end.