Fireborne (THE AURELIAN CYCLE Book 1)

LEE

The lull of the ball is sliding away; all at once, Julia’s words are ringing in my ears. We will strike first to spread fear. My fault, my stupid fault for doing nothing, for letting Holmes make a call that I knew left us absurdly exposed—

But there’s no point in self-recrimination right now. No time for it. I seize Cor by the arm and pull him to his feet, half woken. Crissa presses her hand to her forehead and inhales as the fullness of our unpreparedness rolls over her.

“We need to get into the air—and they’re not even saddled—and I’m in this dress—”

She clutches her gown in disgust, for what good is such clothing against dragonfire?

Cor focuses at last on the tolling bell, the burning beacons, and begins to swear, like a chant, rhythmically. I shake him till he looks at me, then seek Crissa’s eyes.

“We’ve drilled this.”

Crissa shakes her head, clearing it. Then she hums, like a recitation: “Get to the armory and suit up while the keepers saddle the dragons. Summon from the arena gate.”

We don’t have far to sprint: The stretch of the Outer Wall on which we stand connects directly to the Cloister by means of a trapdoor and a ladder, which we scramble down, and then we hurtle through a single corridor to the armory entrance.

“Where do you want us—” Cor asks while we’re running.

The question is directed at me, even though the three of us are, as squadron leaders, equally ranked. But only after I’ve begun to answer do I remember that, or feel surprised that he’s asked me.

“Skyfish squadron ahead, aurelian and stormscourge halfsquadrons coming in behind. We’ll leave the other halfsquadrons covering the city; we can’t leave it unprotected—follow the trail of beacons to the attack, but when you get there, limited attacks only, Crissa, hold them off until we can catch up with you—”

We’ve reached the armory; Crissa seizes my arm before entering, pulling me to a halt. Cor pauses, too, swinging on the doorframe. Inside, the armory is full of riders shouting, scrambling to suit up; many of them are, like us, still in formalwear.

“Lee, what’re we—?” someone calls from within.

“We’re going to give orders in the air, just suit up and get to the gate, you’re fine—” I call, before turning back to Crissa.

Her hair falls in half-pinned clumps from what remains of her bun, loose around her shoulders; in the dark corridor, the blue of her dress looks black against her hair. Her eyes are wide, her chest heaving.

“And if it’s too late?” she asks.

“What do you mean—”

“If it’s an extraction.” She’s clutching the cinched waist of her gown, gasping to catch her breath from the sprint. Cor reaches out an arm to steady her at the elbow. “Lee, if they’ve already—”

If they’ve already landed fire. A single dragon is still enough to level a town. What will Crissa’s skyfish find when they get there? Dragons waiting for them, or just the dragonfire they’ve left behind?

“If they’ve already come, get in wherever the fire’s gone down and bring anyone still moving on the blazesite out.”

We’ve drilled that, too. But all the same it seems hearing the procedure recited aloud is what Crissa needed; she calms once I’ve said it, her face hardening.

Inside, we strip. Those coming directly from the ball are lacking their usual underlayers, but there’s no time for shame; Crissa wrenches her dress up over her shoulders as confidently as if she were in a room alone; I note in a half glance, with a kind of numb disbelief, that a trail of flushed skin spreading down her neck was my doing and that the memory already feels remote.

The door bursts open and Annie enters, followed by Duck. Her hair is disheveled, her sleeves low and uneven on her shoulders. I have a half second to wonder whether she and Duck were occupied as Crissa and I were before she’s beside me in the aurelian row, seizing the flamesuit from her cubby next to mine, reaching awkwardly behind her shoulders for the clasp of her dress. She curses.

“Lee—” she hisses.

“Give me your bootknife.”

I slice the dress open down her back; the luxurious fabric rips like paper. She shoves it off with vindictive fury and dives for her flamesuit, a flash of bare skin that I turn my back on at once. We shimmy into our flamesuits without looking at each other.

“You want me on left or right vanguard?” she calls over her shoulder.

I think of Crissa’s white face as she said the word extraction.

We will strike first to spread fear.

How many minutes have passed since the first beacon lit? How many since we saw the last? What is the likelihood, if any, that the Pythians will still be there?

Annie may be one of the fleet’s strongest assets in battle. But for an extraction? For a blazesite? Annie, who clutched my hand so tightly at the sight of Duck injured by unsparked stormscourge fire that her nails left marks, facing in all likelihood a scene of devastation by dragonfire the likes of which she hasn’t seen since Holbin?

No. That at least I can spare her.

The answer comes out curt.

“Neither. I need you and Power covering the city with your halfsquadrons. We can’t leave it undefended.”

I realize only after I’ve said it what Annie will take from this: Defending is traditionally the role of the Alternus. She freezes, midway through tightening her cuirass. For a moment her fingers open and close on the buckles in time with her breath. And then she lifts her head and looks at me.

Power speaks first. Unlike my and Annie’s voices, his is raised for the room to hear. He stands two yards away, separated by the benches between the aurelian row and stormscourge, paused in the act of lifting his cuirass over his head.

“You’re already ordering Antigone to defend? Is that a joke? Firstrider Tournament’s still two weeks away, Lee.”

Power is glaring at me, disgusted. The disgust isn’t new; having it turned on me on behalf of Annie is.

He’s picked hell of a time for it.

At his challenge, riders around us fall silent and exchange glances. Annie’s brown eyes are still fixed on me, her lips parted. When she speaks, her voice is quiet, close to a whisper, as if determined, despite the scene Power seems bent on creating, to keep our conversation private.

“I want to be part of the counterattack.”

My voice lowers, too. Hissing the words that I need to make her understand. “We’re already too late for a counterattack.”

Annie blinks. As if she hears, though I haven’t said it, the word implicit: blazesite.

But whatever I expect her to make of that, it’s not the contortion of her disappointment into a twisted smile of newfound realization as she continues to look at me. As if I have, somehow, just managed to hurt her in any entirely different way. Instead of explaining herself, she breathes, with that same expression, so twisted with pain and surprise, it almost looks amused:

“Yes, sir.”

She turns away and continues arming with jerking movements.

Power, who’s made no effort to disguise the fact that he’s continued to listen, lets out a snort behind me that makes me practically jump.

“So that’s what this is about,” he says at full volume, sneering. “Annie’s history? You’ve got a lot of nerve, Lee—”

Glances down the row are being shot, anew, in our direction by other Guardians; Cor, two cubbies down from Power, has actually stopped suiting up as he assesses the confrontation, and Crissa’s frown in my direction makes it clear that as far as she’s concerned, I’m on the wrong side of this argument. But by now I’m too angry to care. Since when has anything between Annie and me been any of their business—Power has no idea what he’s talking about—

My fingers are tightening on my leg guards as I strap them on, my jaw clenching. But before I can answer, Annie lifts her head from her armor and turns it toward Power.

“We have orders. The Keep needs defending. Suit up.”

To my surprise, Power doesn’t argue with her.

Crissa has finished arming first from her squadron, and her voice is the next to fill the room. She’s moved to the doorway where she bellows at the remainder of her riders:

“Let’s move, people! Weapons, shields, canteens!”

Outside, in the growing light beside the arena gate, riders arrive two by two at intervals of thirty seconds; dragons emerge from the caves and barely land before their riders mount; keepers are ready at the mouth to help strap boots into stirrups and tighten girths. The skyfish squadron departs first; when they’re off, Cor and I begin launching our own riders. And then at last I’m mounting Pallor, kicking off, and leaving Annie and her blank face behind with the defending halfsquadrons.

She thinks she can handle a blazesite? Fine. But she shouldn’t expect me to wait on her pride when Callipolan lives are at stake. I have more to worry about than her need to prove herself—

In fact, I have family to worry about. Only in the air does that reality finally hit.

Yes, it might be a blazesite. But what if it’s not? What if we aren’t too late, or it’s Julia waiting on dragonback or Ixion or some other long-lost friend or relative—

What will I do?

ANNIE

When Power and I land with our halfsquadrons on the ramparts to take watch, it’s the first time we’ve ever alighted on Pytho’s Keep for anything more than a training exercise. Tonight, in the growing dawn, all I can make out of the citadel and ramparts are rugged silhouettes against the gray sky. The city below us is toylike in the half-light, miniature spires over miniature rooftops; the river glints with the reflected sunrise; the lowland plains stretch out in rolling lines of blue toward the sea to the east, the highlands rise to the west. We watch the rest of the fleet follow the trail of beacons north, their winged silhouettes diminishing against the horizon.

I watch them, and remember Lee’s face at our first sighting of the Pythian fleet.

And now that boy, whose face I’ve seen fill with longing at the sight of our enemy, has ordered me to wait behind while he goes out to face them.

He’s right. We probably will be too late. And it would have gutted me to see it.

But that doesn’t undo the absurdity of the fact that, under threat by dragonfire from people whom Lee counts as family, he just questioned my fitness to face them.

How often have I longed for this boy’s comfort? How often have I remembered and missed how much easier it was, in Albans, when I could still seek it from him?

But now I know what that feels like, delivered unsolicited and unneeded.

Because it’s one thing to be written off by Goran, by the Minister of Propaganda, by every single teacher I’ve ever had or ministry official I’ve ever done rounds with.

It’s another thing entirely to be written off by Lee.

And there’s more to it than just my injured pride.

Will Lee’s determination to keep faith with Callipolis hold, if they aren’t too late and he does face family? And if it doesn’t hold, who will be able to stop him if I’m not there to do it? Who else in the corps has even a hope of matching Lee, if it comes down to that?

I should be out there.

On one side, Power waits quietly beside me, and I sense his anticipation for me to break the silence. On my other side, Aela, her presence like a fire in the back of my mind. When I reach my arm out and lay it on her wing joint, she turns to look at me. Her horned face fills my vision, blocking out the ramparts and the city below and the pink horizon. And as I stare into her golden eyes, the memory rises, like a vision: my father, his voice flowing in my memory from another lifetime, gruff with an accent that my own voice lost long ago.

You see, Annie, they watch us kneel, they see the back of our heads, and they think we’ve given in. They don’t realize you can think from your knees just as well as from your feet.

A calloused hand, large enough to cup my face, tilts my chin up to look at him as he crouches to my height. The lined eyes, the conspiring smile, of a man I once believed would always be there to protect me.

And then the vision fades, and I finally understand.

My father taught me the form of courage that he needed. The courage of thinking from your knees. That was what we had.

But today, as I stood in front of Lee sur Pallor, I realized I’m done with my father’s kind of courage. I felt how those words tasted, yes, sir to a dragonlord’s son, sour and familiar, like old milk turned. And I realized that if I don’t like how those words taste, it’s up to me to do something about it.

I’m done thinking from my knees. It’s time to think from my feet.

All the while Power stands beside me, silent. Waiting. The dawn light renders him little more than an armored silhouette at Eater’s side. A distant part of myself is angry with him. Furious. But the rest of me recognizes that, right now, how I feel about Power is irrelevant.

“When are you free to train?”

Power doesn’t express surprise or triumph or make any remark at all. “Tomorrow. Before patrols. I’ve got a free block.”

“Good. We’ll start then.”

LEE

The coastline has appeared, blue-gray in the early morning. For a heart-stopping instant I think the trail of beacons leads to Fort Aron and its town off Aron’s Cove, one of the few population centers along the northern coast. But then I realize the beacons continue past it. A mile from the fort off the coast, a single island is ablaze. It fills the cove with the light of its fire.

And then nothing: gray sea to the horizon; no signs of hostile dragons, nor the streaks of fire that would show our skyfish locked in sparring matches with sparked dragonfire.

They lit the island and left.

And some part of me, some awful, cowardly part of me, is relieved.

As we approach, I smell it. Sulfurous and heady. A scent I haven’t smelled in years: dragonfire.

I kick Pallor down into a dive, leading the aurelian and stormscourge squadrons into descent. Winged black silhouettes are dipping in and out of the blaze, the skyfish already on the site; the island is tiny, sparsely populated, and the entirety of its few shacks are on fire. A fleet of rescue boats, a combination of civilian vessels and naval ships from Fort Aron, have congregated at a safe distance off the shore, and Crissa’s skyfish dart back and forth from them to the burning island, ferrying whomever they’ve been able to find to safety.

I slice my boot straps to leap off as we descend. On the ground, flames are still licking the buildings around us, wood snapping and cracking, and other Guardians are calling frantically as they search. Even protected by a flamesuit and the filter of my visor, the heat makes me light-headed, and once I begin coughing, I can’t stop.

“Lee—here—”

Lotus and Duck are struggling to lift fallen beams, still partially afire, from the entryway of a burning building. As we clear it, a crash comes within: a floor falling through. Duck raises his arm over his visored face, preparing to go in, when I seize him.

“It’s not sound. No.”

“There are people in there, Lee—we can hear them—”

He’s straining against me as, with another crash, the roof collapses in flames. I have to haul him backward.

“It’s too late, Duck.”

ANNIE

The sun rises as I look out over the city, simmering with the feeling of my own powerlessness. Surely there is no hell like this waiting. This wondering.

What are they facing? And who will return?

The sun is high in the sky by the time the fleet reappears on the horizon. In the interim, my imagination has had time to work, and so when we see them, my relief spirals into unexpected exhaustion. They’re all right. They’re safe.

I assign a lingering guard on the Keep and the rest of us descend. Once back in the caves, my feet take me, not up to the armory, but down the cave corridor. I find Duck in the skyfish nests, where he’s unsaddling Certa with shaking fingers, his pupils still dilated from spillover. He’s blackened from soot and reeks of sparked dragonfire. The smell is enough to awaken memories that bring bile to my mouth.

“Annie . . .”

“Are you hurt?”

It’s difficult to believe that, mere hours ago, we were laughing together as we tried to dance, or that for a few heartbeats I looked up at him and feared that I was about to lose him over something as trivial as a kiss.

Duck shakes his head.

“Lee and some of the others are still there,” he manages, as if forming the words costs him. “Collecting accounts from . . . survivors—”

And then his face, soot-blackened, crumples.

And that’s enough for me to know what happened. They saw no combat; Lee faced no one. But what they did see was almost certainly worse.

I’m not surprised by the memories that rise with my understanding; but I am surprised by the calmness that settles over me as they do. The sudden, rooted sense of place. This is familiar. This I know. These are the paths I’ve wandered, in and out of sleep, for a lifetime.

LEE

The island, called Starved Rock, is one of the handful of vassal islands on the northern coast of Callipolis, named for its barren landscape and a legendary tragedy that took place on it during the Aurelian invasion. Because of its sparse population, it wasn’t provided with additional fortification in the last month; it was assumed to be too close to the greater target of Fort Aron to be endangered.

In the end, the casualty count is low. Seven, out of a total population of twenty-six. The accounts confirm two stormscourge dragons and one skyfish, who departed after setting fire to the buildings, rather than remaining to finish the job. Those who woke in time to escape the fires were not pursued.

Except for one, who finds me on the galley where survivors are being counted and their burns tended. The day has dawned gray and clouded, the deck of the ship rocks gently on the swells.

“Are you Lee sur Pallor?”

The boy, fair-haired beneath soot, has a blanket around his shoulders and a mug of tea he doesn’t drink between still-shaking hands. He’s risen from where he was sitting on the deck with his parents and sister.

“Yes.”

“I was given a message from—Julia Stormscourge.”

The deck is already quiet, despite the number of people on it; but at his words, it falls completely silent. The lapping of waves and the gulls overhead are all we can hear. The sound of Julia’s name on this stranger’s tongue fills me with numb dread.

“For—me?”

The boy nods.

“For the Firstrider,” he says. “For the Firstrider and the First Protector.”

The boy’s voice is too strained for me to think of contradicting him. Beneath so much soot, his expression is indiscernible, although it makes his eyes appear white-rimmed. Crissa and Lotus, crouched nearby to go over accounts from other survivors, have risen to their feet. Crissa has lifted her hand to cover her mouth.

“She landed, spoke to me, made me memorize it, before . . .”

He leaves the sentence unfinished. My voice comes out hoarse.

“Go on.”

The boy inhales, then recites: “Consider this a taste. This was the work of three sparked dragons, but soon there will be more. We will continue until Callipolis is ours again, and the next time, we won’t be so merciful. You have until Palace Day to change your minds. Do you really want to make more—”

But here the boy pauses, eyes scanning my face as if remembering something about me, and it makes him hesitate.

“More?”

“Do you really want to make more orphans of Callipolans?”