Fireborne (THE AURELIAN CYCLE Book 1)

LEE

Julia was a nurse’s nightmare. The kind of girl who always managed to escape, to find the boys and join whatever game we were playing, who always returned covered in dirt, priceless dresses torn, knees scraped. Against all expectations, it was Julia—destined to a suitable match and the domestic confines that came with it—who controlled the orbits of our play with the magnetism of the sun. When Julia arrived, the day began to matter. The trees in the Palace gardens became karst we scaled, the ponds became seas we flew over, the lawns became fields we scorched in great duels to the death by dragonfire.

The fight was always who would be Firstrider and who would be Alternus. It was a fight Julia usually won.

“When I grow up, I’ll be Firstrider and Triarch, like my father,” she proclaimed. “Like Pytho the Unifier, like Uriel sur Aron.”

“You can’t, Julia,” the older boys scoffed. My brother, Laertes, recently found in his ceremony to be a passus, forsaken by dragons; Julia’s brother Ixion, Laertes’s age; and Delo, one of the Skyfish eldest-born. “Girls don’t ride.”

I remember hauling her away as she screamed after them, purple-faced. The most biting swears she knew were centuries-old, phrases we had learned from the Aurelian Cycle, so antiquated that our brothers, who were old enough to learn real swears from our fathers, only laughed harder.

“My father said they’ll change it,” she told me afterward, eyes streaming with fury as we stood in the shade of a copse to regroup. “My father says he’ll change the rules for me. I’ll ride.”

One never disagreed with Julia, but I also played pretend with her enough to know when she was pretending about herself. I knew the power of her lies, which felt so much like life that they were enough, for hours, to convince us both, though we stood squarely on the ground, that we were flying.

“My father,” Julia told me, gray eyes wide as she confided her faith, “can do anything.”

The last time I saw Julia was during the Red Month.

The chronology of the period between the fall of the old regime and the rise of the new is hazy in my memory; flashes are vivid and the rest is lost. When I last saw her, the dragonborn families were under house arrest in the Great Palace. My father’s summoning whistle had been confiscated, Aletheia confined to her nest. The militia who’d taken control of the Inner Palace had sworn themselves loyal to a Revolution and then made the dragonlords they’d captured swear their loyalty as well, in a farce that was all but openly acknowledged, but whose charade remained propped up for weeks. The militia were there, by their own explanation, for our protection—for during those weeks the sounds of protests, of commoners rioting, clamoring for bread and blood outside the Outer walls, could be heard all the way inside the Inner Palace.

During those weeks, my uncle, Crethon, the Triarch of the West, tried to flee to his highland estate with his wife and children. They were caught. When they’d been returned to the city, revolutionaries brought Crethon’s wife and children to our apartments in the Inner Palace and demanded an audience with the Drakarch of the Far Highlands and his family.

My father received them in our parlor. Our cousins showed the signs of rough travel and recent beatings. Julia was, like me, the youngest, but she hadn’t been spared the bruises that darkened all of my cousins’ faces. It was the first time I’d ever seen evidence of violence inflicted on a dragonborn. The rage that filled me was not only at her pain but at the sheer gall of it—to strike a Stormscourge, to strike a dragonlord’s child. It was still, even that late in the Red Month, unthinkable. My aunt, being held by one of the guards, was uttering a moan so low in her throat that I hadn’t immediately realized it was a human sound.

Our chief guard told us, in labored Dragontongue: “This is the fate that will be met by any dragonlord’s family who tries to escape this Revolution.”

At that point I could barely distinguish him from the rest, but his pockmarked face was one I would learn, on Palace Day, to remember. He held Julia, then seven, by the shoulders and shook her, to prove his point.

“Good citizen,” my father answered, rising to stand between us and the guard and employing the egalitarian address then fashionable for the revolutionaries, “my family has no plans to leave the Palace. But where is Lady Helena’s lord? She is distraught.”

I remember noting how wrong it was to hear my father use a tone of deference with such a person. And I remember Julia, holding my gaze from across the room where she was confined beneath the man’s dirty hands. Her eyes were clear, defiant, full of a fury that I wouldn’t feel in its full force until Palace Day.

The guardsman said, “The lady and her children will never see their lord again.”

Julia’s sobbing mother was led away first, Julia after her.

That was how I last saw Julia.

***

That was nine years ago. Now the Palace gardens that we once played in are full of city children. The children of cobblers and bakers and blacksmiths, who are free to enjoy the blossoming summer-smells that were, in my childhood, the privilege of the dragonborn alone. Though the children here today are playing in a different language, they laugh the same way we did and play the same games. They’re still pretending to fly on dragonback.

All the same, as I watch them from the bench I’ve sunk into halfway across the grounds, I find it hard to believe that Julia and I ever acted the way they do. Without a care in the world.

How did she survive?

And the worse thought: What did she survive? What horrors did she witness or endure when the walls were breached—

“Lee?”

I look up, and it takes a moment for me to focus. Crissa is approaching. We’re on our way back from Atreus’s address in the People’s Square across the river, where he broke the news to the public of the Pythian threat and assured them of Callipolis’s readiness to fight. Like me, Crissa is dressed in the ceremonial armor, silver under a black mantle, the Guardian’s emblem a twined circlet on her breastplate. The Guardians and their dragons stood arrayed behind Atreus during his speech as a display of Callipolan air power.

It was the same dais where, eight years ago, Aletheia was executed. The Callipolans in the square today were roaring with the same wild fury, a sea of colors and faces that became, at Atreus’s raised arm, a thunderous single voice. I listened, and remembered Aletheia, and fought nausea.

I shift, making room for her, and Crissa takes a seat beside me. “Hey.”

Three days have passed since I received Julia’s letter. Midsummer, when Julia will come to look for me, is a few days away.

Though I’ve incinerated the letter, its every word remains etched in my memory. Julia’s handwriting has matured, no longer a child’s block letters but a practiced, adult script, comfortable in an alphabet I only use for translation homework.

My mind goes blank when I try to think of what will happen come Midsummer. And then, in that blank, I remind myself: I spend Midsummer with Annie.

Crissa is sitting close enough for her knee to brush mine. Even sweating under layers of thin-plated ceremonial armor, this added heat becomes the most sensitive point on my body at once. The contact is surprising, but not unpleasant, and I don’t pull my knee away.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she says. “I love the Palace gardens at this time of year.”

The sky is blue, the air is sweet but not too warm, and a gentle breeze cools our faces. Crissa sweeps her hair free from her neck so the dark gold curls cascade down her back, radiant against the black of her mantle. When she breathes in, taking in the smell of earth, of roses and honeysuckle, her smile is so full of such simple pleasure that I feel a pang of remembrance. That is what it looks like, to be able to enjoy freely, without the constricting binds of old griefs.

That is what Julia and I used to be.

Though I would not be able to articulate the connection, it’s that thought that leads me to the question I ask her next.

“Do you still draw?”

When we were younger, Crissa drew all the time. Dragons, people, seascapes of her home in Harbortown. At my question she smiles, a little pained, and shakes her head. Her knee is still against mine.

“Not since we were made squadron leaders. But I’d draw this if I had the time.”

The laden oaks, the burbling fountain, the terraced rooftops of the Janiculum leading to the karst of Pytho’s Keep rising magnificent against the cloudless sky.

Crissa sighs, taking it in. Then she rouses herself, produces a folded paper from her pocket, and holds it out to me. “Have you seen this yet? From Propaganda.”

The memo notifies us of a schedule of new obligations for Guardians: morale visits, where we make appearances alongside our dragons before the people, delivering motivational speeches and showing proof of our nation’s strength to defy the Pythian threat.

“I don’t fancy rallying mobs, to be honest,” Crissa mutters.

I share her hesitation. Amid increased training, ramped-up patrol schedules, and back-to-back rounds sessions with the Ministry of Defense, it’s hard to stomach the idea of wasting time with propaganda. And then there’s the crudity of the campaign itself. By the wings of my dragon I will keep her, let my reason guide her to justice, we swore as children becoming Guardians. They were vows that seemed to encompass something nobler than promoting patriotism from dragonback with a bit of cheap rhetoric.

But it’s been a long time since we were children, and if this helps allay the people’s fear, I’ve no reason to balk at it. Even if it feels vulgar.

“We’ve trained for it. We knew this would be a part of our job eventually.”

The lines in Crissa’s brow remain unsmoothed. “I know.”

Implicit in the assignment is its secondary purpose: auditioning which Guardians are best received by the people. A question that will be particularly relevant for the riders of the Fourth Order.

Although the list makes it apparent that the audition has already been under way, not all Guardians have been given an equal number of assignments. Those who routinely do well in oration practice—Cor, Power, Crissa, Rock, and I—have been assigned multiple visits. Those who do poorly have been overlooked.

Including Annie, who despite being a member of the Fourth Order has not been assigned any visits at all.

“She’s going to be furious.”

I realize only after I’ve murmured this that I’ve not used her name. But Crissa doesn’t have to ask whom I mean.

“Won’t she be relieved? Annie hates public obligations.”

I remember Annie alone, practicing a raised voice in a Lyceum lecture hall, and shake my head. “I think that was before she made Fourth Order.”

Crissa takes a last look at the list before rolling it back up. “Good for her.”

Crissa was no-nonsense about the brief hell she experienced when Atreus first promoted her to squadron leader. Goran’s vitriol, his determination to make her pay for it, slid off her back like water. Or at least it did in public. In private, she hyperventilated. When Cor and I found her doing it, she made us swear not to tell anyone.

She must know almost exactly what Annie struggles against, within and without.

“They won’t be able to ignore her forever,” Crissa adds. “Not at this rate.”

In other words, not if Annie beats Power for finalist. The tournament will take place ten days after Midsummer, when the city has returned from its holiday.

I hand the paper back to her and our hands snag on it. For an instant longer than necessary, the tips of Crissa’s fingers linger on the back of my hand. Even after she removes her fingers, the memory of the touch—minute, but for its deliberateness it might as well have been words—leaves my skin burning.

“We should get back,” she says. “Find Cor and do squadron meeting.”

She pushes hair from her face, and I realize she’s flushed, too.

Back inside the Cloister, half the Guardians are still in ceremonial uniform from Atreus’s speech. The other half are on their way out to air patrols, or to classes, which have resumed. Cor is in the boys’ dorm with Duck and Annie. The sight of the Sutter brothers together is enough to tell me that something’s wrong: They only confer in crisis. Then, as I take in Cor’s ashen face and the fact that Duck, sitting on his bed beside Annie, is sniffling, my first thought is that someone in their family died. The dormitory is otherwise empty, its long row of beds crisply made, its desks cleared and clean, ready for evening inspection.

“What happened?”

Cor looks up at me and then away, as if ashamed to be seen in such a moment. It’s Duck’s voice that bursts out in answer. A letter lies, half crumpled, in his lap.

“Our sister’s metals test results came back. She got Iron.”

It’s strange, with my thoughts so often now on the skies and the threat from the North Sea and Julia returned from the dead, to remember that something as banal as the metals test still has the power to upend a life.

Eyes on the ceiling, Cor adds an explanation. “She’s always had this . . . problem where she switches letters around when she tries to read. Vocabulary like you wouldn’t believe, though. Anyway, she was hoping to get passed as Bronze for an apprenticeship as a baker, so she could work in the family shop, but apparently she . . . wasn’t good enough.”

He sounds a little light-headed.

I think of that girl in the Lyceum Club, calling us sirs and miss as she took our orders. The ones from the textile houses, twirling their iron wristbands, not meeting my eyes when I’m on rounds.

“Does she have a work assignment yet, or—”

“Fullerton’s.”

The one we so recently examined, whose workers we were relieved to find had no causes for complaint except for aching feet. But now the memory of that relief makes me feel ashamed. Cor places a hand over his mouth, like he’s catching something. He removes his weight from the desk he’s been leaning on.

“Excuse me.”

The door to the dormitory slams after him, and in its echoing wake Duck sags dully against Annie’s arms.

“I need to go home.”

“Midsummer is in just a few days,” Annie says.

“You’re still coming, right?” Duck asks.

Annie looks up at me, over Duck’s head. She swallows.

Duck feels the change in her and looks up, too. He sobers instantly.

“You’re still welcome, Lee. I know you told Annie no, but the offer stands—”

I cast my mind back, over conversations we might possibly have had in which Annie asked such a thing and I declined. I have to cast back far; it’s been a while since we’ve properly talked. Since before the Pythian sighting. Even since reconciling, words haven’t come easily.

But then I realize why I’m coming up empty. Annie’s closed eyes are evidence enough.

I hear myself say, “Thanks, Duck. But I’ll be all right here.”

Duck looks frustrated, doubtful, but also fundamentally unsurprised; he’s tried before, and my answer has been no. But this is the first time he’s invited us home for Midsummer.

Annie’s eyes, when they open, are bright, and now she cannot look at me.

I spend the next two days preparing myself to spend Midsummer without her.

It’s not that spending it with Annie was ever what either of us would describe as a good time. Unlike the national holidays celebrated in Callipolis, Midsummer and Midwinter center on the family. People go home, wherever home may be; the city—and the Cloister—clears out. The evening is spent at dinner with loved ones, under the summer’s longest sky.

Except for people like Annie and me, who while away the long dusk trying not to think. Not to remember. Not to miss.

I can’t blame her for wanting to upgrade. I certainly don’t feel justified in resenting her for wanting to do it without me. But that doesn’t make the thought of spending one of the hardest holidays of the year alone easier to contemplate.

It also doesn’t make it any easier to contemplate Julia’s offer with a clear head.

Because the fact of the matter is, Annie’s being gone means it would be easy—absurdly easy—to make my way to Cheapside and meet her.

The morning of Midsummer, I head to the armory to suit up for the skeleton-crew patrol that will run today along the north coast, to find Crissa suiting up as well. Windows have been thrown open to let out the gathering heat, and the lazy trill of cicadas from the courtyard outside is the only sound in the room aside from Crissa’s boots as she stomps her feet into them on the skyfish bench.

“You’re not going home?” I ask as I take a seat opposite her and reach for my flamesuit.

Crissa is one of the riders who most vocally misses home—the shore, the docks, the gulls of Harbortown. She always takes leave when it’s offered.

She shakes her head. Her fingers are twisting her hair, with mesmerizing speed, into a braid. “No one else signed up for this shift. And I wasn’t going to ask Cor to cover it, what with the business with his sister. Perks of being a squadron leader, huh?”

She tosses the braid behind her shoulder and lets out a self-conscious laugh. I recognize it as a variation of the response I’ve been making about family holidays for years: laughing off homesickness in the hopes it’ll put a stop to the unwanted pity. I change the subject.

“Good day to fly.”

And that it is. A brisk summer breeze lifts the dragons’ wings; not a cloud is in sight; and visibility on the North Sea stretches for miles. It’s not the kind of skies that bring ambush. The New Pythians probably want to spend this day with their families, too.

And Julia wants to spend it with me.

Surely, whatever side I’ve committed to, whatever regime I’ve chosen—surely I could see her—just this once?

The thoughts are too volatile; I push them away and let the open sky fill my thoughts. Crissa insists on taking the dragons low, the talons of her skyfish practically tickling the crests of the waves as she laughs in delight. Pallor doesn’t have a skyfish’s love of water, but he enjoys chasing Phaedra all the same, and Crissa’s high spirits have a way of catching. The hours pass quickly; before we know it, the day is done, the sun setting, and we’re able to head home.

“Hey.”

We’ve rejoined in the empty solarium after separating to rinse off brine. Crissa, in her ground uniform again, is toweling her glowing hair dry; a lowered sun fills the room with long shadows. I’m suddenly conscious that we’re completely alone and that we’ve both just emerged from the bath. Two facts that should not seem related but suddenly do.

Crissa takes a seat on the opposite side of the empty room. Instead of diminishing the tension I’m feeling, her distance heightens it. As if now, the tension is a thing acknowledged.

“So,” she says. “You told Annie you didn’t want to go to Duck’s.”

“Yeah.” And then, for no good reason at all, I add the truth. “Apparently.”

I regret saying it at once. But Crissa’s nodding like this is what she expected.

“Did something . . . happen, between you two?”

I could say yes, and it would be more than true, but not in the way I know Crissa to be asking.

“Not like that.”

It’s only after I say it that the feeling of emptiness hits. Annie’s absence, tonight of all nights. Perhaps Crissa sees something in my face that betrays me, because she doesn’t press the question.

“With anyone else, then?” Crissa says, releasing her hair from the towel and looking at me from under the wet curls.

It’s startling to find that this kind of turn in conversation, amid everything else on my mind, still has the power to make my mouth go dry. This isn’t the kind of discussion I’ve ever had in the Cloister; it’s as if in this space, the vows we took as children overshadow any such reference. No children, no family, no marriage. Not explicit on anything else, but that never seemed the point. Ten feet apart, alone, phrasing our meanings obliquely, it feels like Crissa and I are doing something forbidden.

“Me?”

“You.”

To my horror, I feel myself blushing. Crissa, maddeningly, does not. She just smiles.

“No.” Then I ask, defensive: “What about you?”

“What about me what?”

My consternation must be showing because suddenly, Crissa laughs. Like she’s releasing me. And then I’m laughing, too. Sheepishly.

She asks, “Do you have plans for tonight?”

A flashing awareness again of this whole wide-empty Cloister, its unchaperoned dorm rooms, and just the two of us. Even Mistress Mortmane has gone home. I take in Crissa’s face, pink from the bath, and her eyes, blue as the Medean, direct as they hold my gaze.

Mouth shut tightly, I shake my head.

“I was just asking,” Crissa goes on, watching me steadily, “because I was wondering if you’d fancy coming to a dinner party with me.”

“Oh.”

Crissa’s eyes twinkle with a mischief she doesn’t acknowledge as I adjust my expression.

“My friend’s in her first year at the War College,” she explains. “She’s not going home either, because Harbortown’s too far. Anyway, she and some of the other Silver cadets are putting together a dinner. Might be fun.”

Annie gone, Julia’s note incinerated, I feel a strange recklessness take hold of me.

“Sure. I’ll go.”

***

The War College is where Callipolis trains its future military officers, and it lies across from the Lyceum, on Scholars Row. I’ve been inside the War College before, but tonight is my first experience of the Silvers’ austere barracks on the edge of the campus. In honor of Midsummer, a fire has been lit on the flagstones for a roast, mismatched chairs and tables have been brought from inside, and an odd assortment of personal dishes and repurposed military gear have been supplied for crockery. The evening shadows are long across the yellowed green as the sun waits out its longest day.

Crissa and her friend Mara embrace with shrieks of delight, golden hair mixing with black, tan arms enfolding brown. I’m welcomed with enthusiasm by Mara’s classmates, who refill my and Crissa’s goblets often as we prepare dinner, and demand our insights about the situation with New Pythos, though most of the questions are ones neither Crissa nor I have answers to.

“What did the Pythians look like? Were you able to see their dragons’ call markings?”

“Do you think their fleet’s sparked?”

“Is there some way to make our fleet spark?”

“I’ve got this theory, about where they’d want to strike first—”

The first-year’s friend elbows him. “Shut up, Lee sur Pallor doesn’t want to hear your theory—”

When the meal is finally cooked—about two hours later than we were aiming for, and several bottles further along than planned—the conversations are uproariously loud, echoing in the courtyard, under the light of candles that have been added to the tables as the sun set. They have by now moved on to less grim topics. Among them is the upcoming Firstrider Tournaments.

“Who are you rooting for to win Firstrider, Crissa?”

There are guffaws around the table as Crissa and I lock eyes. Crissa smiles, seems to greatly enjoy taking her time considering her answer while the cadets snicker and look from her to me. Finally, with the air of making a narrow call, she says: “Oh, probably Lee sur Pallor.”

The cadets cheer; I’m thumped on my back. Crissa is still smiling at me, teasingly; I am returning the smile against my will.

“Don’t tell Cor.”

“Why Lee?” someone shouts.

“Because I think he’d do a fine job leading the fleet. I’d follow him into war.”

My stomach skips again, though this time it is not just because of Crissa’s smile.

Because since Julia’s note, even if the vision of making Firstrider is clearer than ever, the thought of war with New Pythos has become something I can barely imagine, let alone imagine leading.

Three in the morning, Cheapside . . .

More thumps on my back; a toast goes up to Lee sur Pallor, future fleet commander of Callipolis. Then to the coming war. Then to the summer, to Atreus, to the Revolution, to the Guardians; then to the cadets’ mothers, to the highlands and the lowlands and the vassal archipelagos, which some of them hail from. And then, well into their cups, the cadets start complaining about the Gold students in the Lyceum. The rivalry between the schools runs deep, and the cadets take the time to assure me and Crissa that though our wristbands contain gold, they consider us an exception to their slurs: “You ride dragons. You don’t just sit on your asses reading books all day. Plus, you’re not snobs.”

Crissa and I raise our goblets. “To not being snobs!”

The complaints about Golds begin with tall tales of school pranks administered and suffered, but it gradually degenerates into more serious accusations. The first stars are winking into life when Crissa’s friend Mara says:

“The Lyceans are a bunch of Dragontongue-speaking triarchist traitors.”

Crissa, who’s been listening to the Gold-bashing with an expression of detached amusement as she gnaws the last bits off a chicken bone, sits up at this with a noise of indignation.

“Okay, that’s just not true.”

There are a few wolf whistles around the table, encouraging a confrontation between the girls. Mara folds her arms and tosses her hair. She has the long vowels of Harbortown that Crissa began to clip years ago.

“How many of them speak Dragontongue? We all know who tests Gold. With their hoity-toity Lycean Ball and all their old-regime traditions . . .”

Crissa sets her chicken bone down to make a dividing motion with her hands.

“Speaking Dragontongue does not make them triarchists.”

“It makes them patricians from the Janiculum Hill, which is as good as triarchist—”

Crissa snorts. “The Janiculum brought down the triarchy. Then it purged the patricians who’d stood in the way.”

“The people brought down the triarchy,” Mara insists. “It was a people’s revolution.”

There are a few cheers of affirmation from the other cadets at this. Crissa waves them off.

“Oh, spare us the class-iron propaganda sheets,” she snaps. “It was an inside job. Who do you think poisoned the dragons? Farmers and fishermen? The Red Month came about through servants, advisors, courtiers. Atreus’s peers, the patricians who speak Dragontongue. The mob was only let in at the end.”

At the end means Palace Day. Pressure is building in my temple.

There’s silence after Crissa’s pronouncement, and for a moment all we can hear is the chirping of cicadas. One of the cadets, a jocular second year named Gaven, takes it upon himself to dispel the tension Crissa’s passion has left behind. He raises his glass, sparkling in the candlelight.

“To Palace Day!”

I should have seen that coming.

The toast goes round, and I raise my glass like everyone else, though I imagine smashing it into the table and ramming it into Gaven’s neck.

I’m expecting that to be the end of it, but then Gaven leans back and says, “What it must have been like to have been there that day, you know? Making history. The glory of it.”

There are nods around the table. Crissa is the exception; her nose wrinkles as if she’s caught the scent, yet again, of the work of the People’s Paper. Because in the Cloister and the Lyceum at least, the narrative of Palace Day is not glorified.

For the rest of the class metals, it’s touted as the proudest day in our history.

“My brother was there,” Gaven goes on. “The stories he tells about it—”

Crissa lifts up her palms, as if to ward something off.

“If this is the part of the conversation where we start sharing Palace Day stories,” she says quietly, “let’s just not.”

“No, let’s,” I say unexpectedly.

Crissa swings around and looks at me, her face full of surprised disappointment that the long shadows of the candlelight accentuate. In other circumstances I’d appreciate her decency, but mention of Palace Day puts me past appreciating anything. I grin back at Gaven, so wide it feels like my face is splitting.

“Let’s hear it. Tell me, Gaven, about your brother’s glorious achievements on Palace Day.”

Gaven tells me.

Three hours later, I’m in Cheapside.

***

I haven’t been back to the slums since the year and a half in Albans, but my memory of the walking route between the orphanage and the neighborhood school is just enough to get me to the alley where I know the Drowned Dragon to be. It’s strange to navigate in the dark, on Midsummer, with nothing but blurry childhood memories to guide me. Fires are lit here and there among the crumbling buildings, clusters of class-irons gathered at tables set up on street corners and alleyways to drink and feast through the night. None of them takes notice of a cloaked figure passing through the shantytown.

Now that I’m on my way, it seems incredible that I could ever have considered not coming. The path can’t be taken fast enough; anticipation fills me with unbearable impatience.

Until finally, I’m there.

The tavern is so poorly lit that, when I first enter, I have to let my eyes adjust. A few candles light the tables here and there for the handful of patrons with nowhere better to be on Midsummer night and the solitary barman who barely looks at me as I enter.

And in the back, in the booth farthest from the door, sits Julia.

Her long dark hair is loose around her shoulders, her riding cloak still pulled around her. But even shrouded and seated in shadow, it’s plain to see that like her handwriting, Julia has grown. Nothing drives home how many years have passed like seeing the child I remember turned into a young woman.

Nine years, I realize. It’s been nine years since I last saw kin.

Tightness has taken hold of my throat.

“Julia,” I say.

She rises.

“Leo.”

There’s a moment where we stand looking at each other; and then we both take a step forward. When we embrace, the tightness closes in my throat and I choke on it. Julia tightens her embrace and makes a low, murmuring sound. Somehow it’s enough to convey comfort, and at the same time a shared understanding of a bone-deep sorrow. The grief that I’ve grown so accustomed to quieting alone rises from forgotten depths. I have no strength to fight it.

When we finally break apart, she’s smiling, her eyes wet.

“I thought you wouldn’t come,” she says.

“I thought I wouldn’t, either . . .”

“Come, let’s sit . . .”

The booth is tiny, so that even seated across from each other we’re still leaned close. Julia has reached across the table and taken my hands again, like she can’t bear the thought of letting me go. I return her hold tightly.

“You’re all grown up,” she murmurs, her eyes raking my face. “You look like them . . . Leon, of course, but there’s also so much of Niobe . . .”

It’s the first time I’ve heard my mother’s name spoken aloud since the Revolution. I want to beg Julia not to talk about her, and at the same time, to keep talking about her and never stop.

We’re speaking in Dragontongue, I realize. I hadn’t even noticed.

“How did you get out?” I ask.

I hadn’t meant to ask it first, but now, sitting across from her, it’s the only question that matters.

Julia’s fingers squeeze mine.

“We hid,” she says. “Ixion and I. Until it was . . . over.”

Palace Day. She’s talking about Palace Day. Not as an exultant revolutionary, like the cadets from dinner, but as another survivor. Her voice is steady, the pain muted, as if she’s had practice talking about it, and the talking helped her. The kind of practice I’ve never had.

“We could hear—everything. Well, Ixion could hear everything. Ixion”—her voice trembles and rises higher—“covered my ears. He’s never really been the same since that.”

I remember Ixion as someone who had everything before him, and knew it.

“He got us out afterward, to New Pythos. I can’t remember it very well. We don’t really talk about it.”

It’s my turn to tighten my fingers over hers.

“And you?” she whispers.

And me.

Nine years of silence stand between me and the memories like a wall. The words come out in the only way I can think to say them.

“We didn’t have time to hide.”

Julia’s slow breathing, her hands in mine, her gray eyes liquid. The parting of her lips as she swallows.

I try to say more. For once in my life, I want to say more. For once in my life, it’s safe to say more. I’m with kin at last, with the one person in the world who would understand—

But I can’t.

I’ve hit upon the spot where the words stop, and there’s no penetrating it. I look up at her and shake my head, and she understands this, too.

It’s strange, after years taking refuge in silence, to suddenly feel trapped by it.

“Oh, Leo . . .”

Her voice is soft as a caress, and for a moment I think the sound of the name I lost, uttered with such sorrow, will be enough to send me over the edge. I drop my head and wait for the waves of grief to ebb, feeling the steady pulse of her hands in mine. One of them pulls away and returns with a handkerchief, which she slips into my curled palm.

Softly, anticipating my shame, she quotes the Aurelian Cycle:

By my own pain’s knowledge will I comfort the sufferings of men.

It strikes me how often I used to hear the Cycle quoted in conversation, in our conversation—and how rarely I do now.

I dry my face downturned, return the handkerchief, and raise my head. “Thank you.”

Julia nods, tucking it away. “Should we speak of other things?”

“Yes.”

Julie smiles, the lines of worry easing from her face. The next words she offers me like gifts she’s prepared.

“I was at your last tournament, Leo. You fly beautifully.”

No compliment has ever filled me with such warmth.

“That was when you first recognized . . .”

“Yes. Or at least, that was when I first hoped I did. It wasn’t until the tutor contacted us that I knew for sure.”

Julia’s hands are burn-smoothed, her cloak partly disguising the leather of what can only be a flamesuit. I offer, in return, the only conclusion that makes sense.

“You ride, too.”

Julia nods. The corner of her lip quirks as she looks at me. A smirk I remember. The smirk Julia has when she’s won.

“The families started allowing female riders?”

“Desperate times,” Julia says mildly.

But her lifted shoulder doesn’t bely the fact that she moved a mountain, and the smile that plays at her lips shows she knows she did. There’s something gladdening about the realization that, after all we’ve lost, this at least Julia gained.

The next question is stranger, but I can’t fight my curiosity. “Have you had a ranking tournament, or . . . ?”

Julia hesitates for the first time, then nods. “I’m Firstrider.”

Again, the careful nonchalance, and beneath it a pride born of years of anger to which I stood witness. As my thoughts return to the old Julia with her scratched knees and her torn dresses and her stubborn defiance as she stared our brothers down, a smile breaks across my face.

“You did it,” I say.

Julia’s mouth curves with triumph. “Yes. I did it.”

But then, like a settling cloud, I remember what it all adds up to—if I do what I’ve committed to and the set trajectory continues as planned.

Because Julia’s ranking will not just have made her Firstrider, it will have made her commander of the Pythian aerial fleet. Sworn not only to go into battle against Callipolis but to lead those who do.

Our hands have remained entwined throughout the conversation. Julia seems to have the same wakening discomfort as I do; she shifts, in the guise of pulling her cloak tighter around her, but it doesn’t seem coincidence that our hands pull apart and neither of us moves to rejoin them.

Julia breaks the silence first. “The families sent me, Leo. You can imagine what they want. The tutor told us about your reservations. Rhadamanthus wants me to help you see reason. Before it’s too late.”

For a moment I only register her words with a distant pang of longing. The families. Who else—?

And then I hear the rest of what she said.

Too late.

I find my hands reaching forward on the narrow table, seeking hers again in desperation. “Julia, I can’t—you have to talk to them. Please—whatever they’re planning—”

But then Julia’s fingers take one of my own reaching hands in hers and lifts it to press my own fingers against my lips. I fall silent.

“I told them I’d come for that,” she whispers. “But the truth is, I haven’t seen you in nine years. There will be time for those conversations. Do we need to have them so soon? It’s Midsummer, and I’ve missed you, Leo.”

I’m stopped short. “I’ve missed you, too.”

It suddenly hurts, the force of how much I’ve missed her. Them. All of it. Surely that’s allowed, for a little while—just to miss them?

“Let us spend tonight talking of other things,” Julia says.

I see her request for what it is: an offer to pretend together one last time.

And as it was when we were children, the force of her believing is still enough to make the real world fade, for a little while, to nothing.

ANNIE

I’ve always loved Duck’s house—bustling with children, full of laughter, never quiet or calm, but welcoming to you even if you are. It’s the kind of place that feels so immediate that it makes everything else seem less real. The concerns that consume me in the Cloister—the threat of New Pythos and classes and training and that godforsaken list of morale visits on which my name was so noticeably absent—feel like problems from another life. Even the guilt I’ve felt since Duck broke our Midsummer plans to Lee becomes distant. I’d meant to invite him, after we reconciled. I’d been planning on it—

But I’d delayed. Delayed because, if I’m honest with myself, the thought of a weekend with Duck’s family, Lee out of my mind and my sight, was what I wanted more.

I’ve been coming to the Sutter house on leave days since I was nine. It was the first home I’d come to since the Mackys took me to Albans. At first it was overwhelming. All the ways it was good made it hard. Family meals, children screeching and laughing, parents telling you when to go to bed—they were things I’d forgotten I missed. As if sensing my discomfort, Duck buffered. Kept me busy, so the memories couldn’t crowd in. Made sure I was laughing, because when I wasn’t laughing, I wanted to cry.

It got easier over time. Not for Lee. He came once and never again.

Tonight, the house is less full of joy than usual. Ana is packing bags for a new life in the boardinghouse attached to Fullerton’s, where she’ll start in a week. When we talk about it, briefly, in the morning, Ana is matter-of-fact. It was a better posting than most, and she’d never expected to test well. Some of her friends’ postings were worse. All the same I sense her reluctance to meet my eyes. The greater resentment comes from Mr. Sutter, whose anger hangs over the Midsummer dinner like a cloud with the comments he can’t stop making to Cor: What’s the point of our daughters going to school if this is what they get? Before, we’d just have found her a suitable match . . .

Cor drinks long and deep from his cider and lets his father’s dissatisfaction roll over him in waves, the lines growing between his eyebrows as the night wears on. He doesn’t attempt the rebuttals that we’ve learned to such complaints, and I don’t blame him. The arguments justifying class-iron labor postings are offered patly in class—but when you look at Ana, imagine her toiling in a workhouse because she answered a few questions wrong on a test, words like the good of the state begin to make less sense.

After the long dinner outside has finished and the table’s been brought back in, Ana, her father, and Cor sit down to go over her preparations for Fullerton’s.

“Let’s go over your rights as an Iron worker again. I want to make sure you know them.”

“Cor, really—”

“Really.”

Duck has lured his younger siblings out of their hearing; he’s roughhousing with Greg and Merina on the rug between the sofa and the fireplace. A strained line is barely visible between his eyebrows as he distracts them. I watch their scuffling from the sofa, an old quilt pulled up to my chin.

“It’s past their bedtime, Dorian,” Mrs. Sutter calls from the kitchen.

“Can I read them a story first, Mum?”

Duck has leapt without warning onto the sofa, which creaks as he adds his stocky weight, and scoots close to tug the quilt over both of us. His hair is disheveled from Greg’s yanking on it.

“Budge up, you blanket hog,” he tells me.

I’m suddenly conscious of Duck’s body pressed against mine beneath the quilt. Merina plops down on the sofa next to me and tugs the quilt over herself, too. So there are bodies warm on either side of me, and I’m in the middle.

I’d almost forgotten what this feels like.

The book Greg fetches, entitled Tales of the Medean, is one of two books his family owns; the other is Atreus’s Revolutionary Manifesto. The fairy tales are illuminated, images of dragons and lords and ladies alternating with text.

“I learned how to read with this,” Duck tells me.

He shifts his weight so he can see better, and as he does, his arm goes around my shoulders to steady himself, and then when he’s steady, I wonder if he’ll remove it or if I want him to.

His arm remains around me. He begins to read.

It’s not reading aloud like you do in class: It’s a style I’ve never heard before. Duck reads each character with a different kind of voice, some low, some high, some raspy, some thunderous. This is something parents must do with their children, I realize. Parents who know how to read.

Merina and Greg are giggling with delight and within minutes, I am too. By the end of the story Greg has fallen asleep and Merina’s head is slumped against my shoulder. Duck surveys them and then looks at me.

“I should probably put Greg down.”

“One more,” Merina demands sleepily.

Duck resumes reading, more quietly this time. Beneath the quilt, the fingers of the hand not wrapped around my shoulder find mine and slip into them. The patter of my heart as I listen to him read becomes something I can feel and hear.

These feelings—happiness, safety, warmth beside Duck—what do they add up to?

Do they add up to something more than that?

Do they add up to something more for him?

Merina has fallen asleep, too.

“I’m off to bed, dears. You’ll put Greg and Merina down?”

Mrs. Sutter is on her way upstairs. Her eyes are crinkled permanently at the corners, the same that form around Duck’s when he smiles. She kisses Duck on the forehead, and from Duck’s long-suffering expression I sense this is a nighttime routine he considers himself to have outgrown, but will endure for her sake. My school-level Damian is just enough for me to understand her mother tongue.

“So good to have you home for a night, darling. We’ve been worried about you these past few weeks.”

Duck’s Damian is rusty, mumbled. “It’s good to be home, Mum.”

Before she turns away, as easily as if she’s always done it, Mrs. Sutter kisses me on the forehead, too.

There’s silence after she leaves us, except for the crackling fire: Merina’s weight against me on one side, her breathing soft as she sleeps; Duck’s body wrapped around me beneath the quilt; the children’s book open and heavy on my lap; the feeling of a mother’s kiss tingling on my forehead.

Duck speaks first.

“It’s funny,” he murmurs, “when you remember the vows mean we can’t ever have any of this.”

The Guardian vows forswearing marriage and family.

I replay the sentence, and my mind fixes on the ambiguity of a single pronoun: When Duck says we, does he mean the Guardians in general? Or just—?

I’ve looked up at him; our faces are inches apart. His hazel eyes widen as if he, too, realized the ambiguity of what he just said.

And then, suddenly, I feel panicked.

“I meant—”

“The Guardians in general—?”

“Yeah—”

Another feeling, wrong: relief. As if he can read it, Duck untwines his fingers from mine beneath the blanket. I nearly release my breath.

“I’m glad you came, Annie,” he says abruptly.

“I’m glad I came, too.”

And that’s true. I’ve loved every bit of this visit, every unchecked burst of laughter and moment of unfiltered happiness—

Then why this panic?

“Do you think you’ll stay tomorrow, or—”

I hesitate, and though I should be thinking only of Duck in this moment, of the faint lines that have appeared between his eyebrows as he studies me, I realize that I’m thinking about Lee instead.

Lee, who told me, on the arena ramparts, that he would stay, against every reason he had to leave; and whom I’ve now gone and left.

I say, “I’ll probably head back to the Cloister tomorrow morning. I just—”

I have no words to explain the rest of it. But Duck seems to understand from how I swallow.

“I’m glad we could have you for this long, at least,” he says simply.

LEE

I wake in the Cloister dorm disoriented. Slowly, the surroundings resolve themselves: the same long row of beds as always, but the sunlight slanting in at the unfamiliar angle of late morning. It takes me a moment to distinguish the feeling of splintering joy and sorrow and loss that’s mingled with the physical sensation of a headache. Fragmented memories of the conversation with Julia, of the parting that seemed too soon even though it happened hours later, of a dazed walk through the silent predawn city back to the Palace return to me slowly.

“Morning.”

I raise my head, focusing slowly on the small figure perched on the bed next to mine.

“Annie?”

It is the first time she’s sought my company since the Pythian fleet was sighted.

She holds out a muffin.

“From Duck’s mum.”

I sit up and wince, raising my hand to rub my forehead.

“I should be on patrol,” I realize.

“Don’t worry about it. Cor came back early, too; he’s out with Crissa. They decided to let you sleep it off.”

Sleep off having met with one of the riders whom Cor and Crissa are now patrolling our skies to guard against. I feel the weight of guilt, the greater for its delay, settling over me. Except, fresh off of a night spent in the company of Julia, it’s hard to know what I feel most guilty about: that I just had drinks with a cousin who wants to kill my friends; or that my friends want to kill my cousins.

This is why you shouldn’t have met with her.

When I look up at Annie, I see guilt in her expression, too.

“You’re hungover,” she says.

“I went to a Midsummer dinner at the War College. With Crissa.”

“Oh.” Relief, mingled with something else, battles across Annie’s face. “Good,” she says. “I’m glad you did.”

I take the muffin from her and take a bite. It is the most satisfying thing I’ve ever tasted.

“How was Midsummer with the Sutters?”

It sounds like a bad poem. Annie fiddles with auburn wisps of her hair, averting her face slightly. “It was nice.”

“You’re back early,” I observe.

She hesitates. It feels like she’s teetering on the edge of saying something that will embarrass us both. I can’t decide if I want her to. But then, instead, she just says: “We need to train. The tournament’s in a week.” She curls fists in her lap as she adds: “I want to make finalist. And I—really want to beat Power.”

I look at her in surprise. Both at the desires she’s admitting, and what she’s proposing.

“You came back so we could spar?”

Annie, looking just a little bashful, nods. Her braid is freshly done, ready to tuck under a helmet.

The mere thought of taking Pallor out on a morning like this is enough to start clearing my head; and then the thought of sparring with Annie, of feeling the blood-singing clarity of reflex and instinct that it takes to match her, of slipping into the all-minded focus that relieves the need for conscious thought—suddenly that’s the only thing I want.

However complicated Julia has left my thoughts about the Pythians, my thoughts about the tournament are simple. I want to make finalist, too.

“Great. Let’s suit up.”

Last night and the confusion of emotions left over from it are already passing like the memory of a dream.