Fireborne (THE AURELIAN CYCLE Book 1)
Fireborne: Chapter 3

He and the girl were in an unofficial alliance. He didn’t think of it as friendship, because it mostly consisted of sitting near her at meals, in the yard, in class, and—at first—not talking. After the episode with the knife, he’d gained a reputation for being deranged and dangerous, and that reputation was useful. People left him alone, and when he was in her vicinity, they left the girl alone, too.

He didn’t really consider why he was doing this, nor did he realize that it helped him. She was a foothold out of the months of sleepwalking. Their silence turned into conversations. Sometimes she would repeat what he said, slightly differently, as if his pronunciation bothered her. At first, he was terrified that she’d realized what the accent meant. That he was someone other people wanted dead.

But she never seemed suspicious. Not even when he imitated her corrections, repeating them under his breath until he could say them right. When teachers called on him in class, he began to answer. The girl remained silent.

“You can read Callish pretty well, right?” he finally asked.

They were in the schoolyard. He handed her what he had learned, recently, was called a newspaper. It was an invention of the new regime.

“Read this to me.”

By then he’d learned a few things about the girl: that she taught herself to read without a teacher, because no one in her village had been literate. And that she came from the Far Highlands, from a village that had been in his father’s land holdings. He felt good about this. It justified his looking after her, because she belonged to him.

The girl took the newspaper and said, “Which part?”

He could think of no way to request news about the Three Families that wouldn’t seem suspicious, and instead he just said: “Everything.”

So the girl read to him. That newspaper, and others, too, as he found them. It was a time of great change on their island, and they couldn’t help being swept up in what they read. The boy listened raptly to all news of the First Protector, the man who had saved him. And he couldn’t help being infected by how excited the girl was about it all, even the things neither of them fully understood.

The most important event that they struggled to understand was a referendum that Atreus’s post-revolutionary People’s Assembly held concerning thirty-two dragon eggs that had survived the Red Month. Should the eggs be destroyed? Should Callipolis do as neighboring Damos had done centuries before, and become dragonless and democratic?

Or, if their dragons were hatched, and Callipolis remained an airborne nation, how would they decide which children would be offered to the dragon hatchlings for their Choosing?

The First Protector proposed a merit-based dragonrider selection process. Delegates from the coast supported this, arguing that air power was necessary to the island’s military defense. But delegates from the inner countryside and the city’s poorer districts argued that dragons had only ever been used to oppress and control. Still others argued that this third way would become something new, unknown since the beginning of dragonriding on the Medean: Guardians would be the dawn of a new era, of dragons in the service of justice.

The boy and girl shuttled back and forth through these arguments, debating them in echoes of what they read. The girl tended to oppose keeping dragons; the boy tended to favor them. But each was not without their wavering moments.

“I suppose it would be different, if the people riding dragons were good,” the girl allowed.

The boy’s concern, meanwhile, was one he didn’t confide: Of course the dragons ought to be kept, he thought—but what would it mean, to have them ridden by commoners? The idea unsettled him deeply.

Atreus’s proposal passed, narrowly. The Guardian program became something their teachers talked about in class, as well as something they read of in newspapers.

Its purpose served, Atreus dissolved the People’s Assembly. He did not call it again.

Instead, the newspapers began to tell of a test that would be administered to all, giving the lowest a chance to rise, the highest to prove their worth, and the children of all an opportunity to test into the dragons’ Choosing ceremony that had, historically, been reserved for the sons of the Three Families alone.

Finally, the article the boy had been hoping for came. It said that not all members of the Three Families had been accounted for during the Red Month. Some of the dragonborn were missing. The article suggested that they had survived. That, their identities hidden, they had escaped to New Pythos and been given refuge. Though the boy’s name was not on the list of missing dragonborn, others he remembered were.

The boy told the girl: “I have to leave.”

“The basement?”

“The orphanage.”

The girl looked up at him. They were doing dishes over a basin of nearly frozen water, their fingers raw and shaking from cold. The girl had by now started doing her chores alongside him. She was teaching him how to work more efficiently, so he would be punished less often.

“Don’t bother washing the backs of those plates, they’re not the dirty part. But why would you want to leave the orphanage? There’s food here.”

“Yeah, but everyone here are just peasants.”

The girl’s brow furrowed. The boy turned his plate over and began to scrub its other side. He hesitated, and then confided what the news article had given him confidence to finally share with her: “The point is, I’ve got people who’re probably waiting for me.”

“In the city?”

“No. Somewhere else. Another island.”

“Can I come with you?”

“Sure,” he said. “Maybe you could be my maidservant or something.”

“I don’t know how to be a maidservant.”

The boy considered: He didn’t know how to be a maid-servant either.

“I think they just wash things,” he said. “You’re really good at that. Want to plan the trip with me?”

It was winter, so they agreed that they mustn’t go now. Spring maybe, or summer. And then there was the question of provisions and a backpack and what you put in the backpack. Sometimes they wrote lists of things they’d need, which was exciting. Sometimes they actually acquired items on the list, which was even better. They began to build a stockpile in an unused closet on the third floor, and sometimes they would go there and make inventories, or just sit next to the pile of goods and read newspapers together.

LEE

It’s a relief to resume our usual routine after the weekend of the tournament. An early breakfast in the Cloister, bread and cheese tucked in my satchel for lunch later, then Cor and I head out of the Palace for a rounds session down in the Manufacturing District. Cor nods at the fourth pair of silver dragon’s wings, pinned on the shoulder of our uniforms, signifying rank of the Fourth Order.

“Dapper, aren’t they?”

“Yeah, I say we keep them.”

Cor lets out a bark of laughter. I wonder if he, like me, is strategically avoiding the thought that in a month we’ll be back in the arena, facing each other.

Early in the morning, this late in spring, the city is in full form. We leave the Palace through the gardens, opened to the public since the Revolution and overlooked by Pytho’s Keep and the Janiculum Hill, the patrician neighborhood on the Palace side of the river. Crossing the bridge over the Fer, Cor takes us along his favorite routes through his native Highmarket, quieter than the main thoroughfares where bustling shopkeepers hawk their wares to wealthier customers from across the river. But even on the quiet streets, Guardian uniforms attract attention. This soon after the public tournament, a few people actually point. A fruitmonger stops us to press cut melon into Cor’s hands, bobbing his head in a half bow. It’s an urban courtesy left over from Aurelian rule over the city, and we’ve been taught to ignore it.

“For the two Guardians as a thank-you for their service to the city . . .”

Cor thanks him for the melon, grinning lopsidedly. Outside the Palace, in his home neighborhood, the hard Highmarket vowels return to Cor’s speech. He begins to gnaw his slice as we continue walking.

“We’re not supposed to accept that kind of thing,” I tell him.

“Do you want your half or not? I’m happy to eat it if you’re too noble.”

I wrest my melon from him.

Thanks to regular rounds with the Ministry of Propaganda, I’m primed to notice the posters changing as we pass through the city: In Highmarket, with its high concentration of skilled laborers, the posters tacked on walls laud the virtues of citizens who’ve tested Bronze: BRONZE IS BORNE OF STRENGTH AND SKILL. But as we pass into the poorer neighborhoods, Southside and the Manufacturing District, where unskilled laborers live and work, the posters change. IRON IS THE STRENGTH OF THE CITY, they read, and in addition to praising the virtues of Iron class, they praise the metals test itself and the wisdom of Atreus for instituting it. ANYONE CAN BECOME GOLD, these posters read. SCHOOL FOR EVERYONE MAKES OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL.

“Laying it on a little thick, don’t you think?” Cor mutters.

“The posters aren’t wrong,” I point out.

I saw enough, during my years at Albans Orphanage, to mark the changes that have been made in the poorer neighborhoods over the years since the Revolution. New housing has been erected, roads are now cobbled, schools have been built in neighborhoods where literacy had been unheard of. For the most part, the people we pass seem well-fed—if a little poorly dressed—and they walk with the purposeful stride of the employed. The posters might be heavy-handed, but they’re heavy-handed about changes that are real.

Cor tsks. “All the same,” he says, “you’ll notice that they don’t bother putting up this stuff in Scholars Row or the Janiculum.”

Scholars Row is the other Gold-heavy neighborhood besides the Janiculum. It contains the Lyceum—Atreus’s university for the Gold students—as well as the War College for the Silvers. When the Guardians aren’t on rounds sessions as a part of our government training, we split our classes between the two academies in Scholars Row. Cor’s never stopped noticing its differences from the poorer neighborhoods, including the one he’s from; my answer, that his home neighborhood is still better off than it used to be, has never been enough for him.

I stop at the door of a hulking warehouse off a dusty, windowless street, its sign faded over an oversize door. “This is it.”

Fullerton’s is one of the city’s most successful new textile houses, on our rounds schedule to tour today before class. Rounds have a way of filling Cor’s and my daylight hours where homework would best be done, leaving classes as something we’re perpetually treading water to keep up with, but that’s not the kind of thing you complain about. Heavy rounds are a sign of favor; and anyway, they’re the real education. They’re the part of the day you see what the city actually does, instead of hearing about it.

The Fullerton foreman is carefully dressed, closely shaven, and begins to sweat through his outer jacket as he gives us his tour. Afterward, we shadow him as he goes about his morning routine among the workers tending looms, bent over dyeing vats, filling stockrooms with shipments bound for Damos and Bassilea. Then Cor goes into his office to occupy him with additional questions while I pull aside one of the class-iron workers. In a lowered voice, I double-check the numbers the foreman gave us: wages, hours, breaks, days off. It’s a system Cor and I devised years ago after we began to notice discrepancies. This is not, technically, part of our obligations on rounds, but it’s become our common practice.

The girl I’ve pulled aside twists her iron wristband the whole time I talk with her, stammering her responses, eyes not traveling higher than the Guardian circlet emblazoned on the breast of my uniform, until I ask her where she’s from. She gives me the answer I can already hear in her accent: Cheapside. I tell her I grew up there; she finally meets my eyes to answer, “I know.” And then I’m able to get more out of her. How she’s treated; if she has any complaints. She’s close to my age, but the accompanying observations—that she’s full-figured, pretty, wisps of brown hair escaping her scarf—I push away with discomfort. Power and Darius might enjoy the high of flirting with awestruck class-irons, but their vulnerability makes me want to do anything but. I pretend I haven’t noticed the flush growing along her neck as we speak.

“Overall, how do you find your work?”

She seems surprised by the question. “It’s honest, and I’m glad I’ve got it.”

Sometimes, with class-irons, you can feel the resentment burning because of their test result, but most Cheapsiders are grateful for Atreus’s programs. The Manufacturing District, the public works programs, the quarries and the mines all provide wages—albeit low ones—for those who previously struggled to find work at all.

Afterward, as Cor and I head back through the dusty streets to Scholars Row for class, we compare the notes from the worker with those of the foreman.

“Her numbers matched his.”

“Did she report anything?” Cor asks.

“Nothing unusual. Her feet hurt, her back hurts. But overall, she’s fine.”

Back on Scholars Row, we enter the gate of the porter’s lodge to the Lyceum. Coming from the barren, oversize proportions of the Manufacturing District, full of grim-faced workers hurrying down dusty streets, the serene beauty of the Lyceum is disorienting, with its intricate stone courtyards and carefully tended greens full of laughing, carefree scholars. Gold students are encouraged to pursue government work after finishing their schooling, but not obligated. Many go on to careers in academia, the arts, in trade. Cor sees a few other Guardians lounging under an oak and goes to join them; I head inside. We’ve got a spare half hour, enough time for me to finish up my reading for Diplomacy in the empty classroom before it starts.

I’m already walking into the lecture hall before I realize I’ve been hearing someone speaking inside it. Too late, I stop. A single person is in the room before me: Annie. Sitting in her usual seat midway up the hall. She’s staring at me, frozen. The room is silent now.

Annie was projecting, I realize. Talking as if she were answering a question, to the empty room. Her voice was raised louder than I’ve ever heard it in class. Practicing.

Good.

She’s beet red. I back out of the room.

“I’ll see you in a bit,” I say.

“No—you can—”

“I’ll finish my reading in the library.”

A half hour later, I return to the lecture hall, where I take my seat beside Cor and Crissa, toward the front. Duck, stiff with bandages and still only allowed out of the infirmary for class, has taken his usual seat beside Annie in the back corner. The rest of the class is filing in, a combination of Guardians and Lyceum students, along with the occasional adult class-gold who’s dropped by for the intellectual exercise. Gold students seated in the row below us twist around to congratulate me and Cor for our performances in the tournament while Crissa looks on, smirking. With anyone but Crissa, being congratulated next to the person you bested in a match would be uncomfortable, but Crissa’s ability to laugh things off is legendary. After we’re done fielding compliments from Gold girls, she leans over.

“Enjoying yourselves?”

“We are doing our civic duty,” Cor says.

We all rise as Professor Perkins enters; when we’ve resumed our seats, he asks for a volunteer to summarize our reading assignment. Fresh off finishing it in the Lyceum library, I know better than to raise my hand. The reading was about New Pythos. It falls solidly into the category of discussions I don’t volunteer to participate in.

For the first time in my memory, Annie’s is among the hands that go up. Perkins’s eyes, clouded with age and accustomed to her region of the classroom being a dead zone for volunteers, passes right over it.

“Lee?”

My stomach lurches. I watch Annie’s hand droop.

“That was some fine flying at the tournament this weekend,” Perkins adds, his light brown wrinkles doubling with a smile. A few appreciative whoops go up around the room, Cor thumps me on the shoulder, and it startles a grin out of me that lasts a half second.

“Thank you.”

Then I look down at the reading, take a half breath, and steel myself. “The article says there’s no way to prove the rumors about New Pythos having dragons aren’t true, and suggests re-assessing them as a threat.”

Perkins nods and provides the counterargument: “But New Pythos has never been allowed access to dragons and lacks the hot springs that make for fertile hatching grounds. How could the ha’Aurelians have air power, Lee?”

Ha’Aurelians—half Aurelians—are the dragonless branch of Aurelian House that colonized New Pythos generations ago. Palms sweating, I answer again. “Offshore egg stockpiles. The author suggests that the Three Families might have hidden eggs. The dragonborn who escaped to New Pythos could have taken that knowledge with them.”

The dragonborn who escaped.

I could practically recite the names of missing dragonborn in my sleep, and the ones I think of most often are my cousins, Ixion and Julia. Ixion was a little older than I, Julia closer to my age. After Palace Day the bodies thought to be theirs were too disfigured to be conclusively identified.

“Very good. Thank you, Lee.” Perkins turns to the class in general. “What do we make of this theory?”

“Rather tenuous,” says a girl with an accent of the liquid melody of the southern vassal islands.

“An excuse for warmongering,” says another boy. Patrician, judging by the fine cut of his tunic and the clipped tones of his Palace-standard accent. “More fodder for the People’s Paper.”

There are chuckles around the room; the People’s Paper is the paper that circulates among the lower class-metals, heavily regulated by the Ministry of Propaganda, and most Golds don’t deign to read it.

Perkins nods. “Perhaps,” he allows. “But the real difficulty with such theories is that, given our diplomatic situation with New Pythos, there is no way to prove them right or wrong. Callipolis and New Pythos have never recognized each other’s sovereignty, and their only means of communication is through embassies of neutral third-party states. With such a lack of transparency, how can we know what they intend? Much less what they are accomplishing, shrouded by all that North Sea fog.”

I leave class lost in memories. It’s rare that I let my thoughts linger on New Pythos these days. The escape I used to plan so eagerly in my spare time with Annie, the distraction that was so welcome amid everything else . . .

The plans that ended up coming to nothing.

“Hey.”

Present-day Annie has materialized in front of me, in the middle of the Lyceum courtyard, Duck at her side. Cor and Crissa are at mine. From Annie’s purposeful expression I half expect her to bring up our encounter before class, but instead she jerks her chin sideways, toward the Lyceum Club.

“I want to have lunch.”

The sounds of laughter come muted through the club’s latticed windows. Neither of us has ever eaten there, though there’s nothing preventing it—the only requirement for admission is a gold wristband.

Duck swings round to look at her, but she isn’t looking at anyone but me. I’ve stopped walking. “You won’t like it.”

Annie has stopped, too, and her arms are folded. “We can go. Other Guardians go.”

Certain other Guardians go. The Lyceum Club has a reputation for being more welcoming to certain Lyceum students than others—in other words, the ones from patrician families. Lotus, Power, Darius, Alexa, and Max, who grew up on Janiculum Hill and like to meet up with their grammar school friends, dine there regularly. For my part, I’ve never been interested in observing how the new aristocracy of Callipolis entertains themselves. The patricians from the Janiculum were intimately involved in Atreus’s Revolution, their betrayal of the dragonlords key to its success—and now the metals test is something they benefit from. They tend, overwhelmingly, to test Gold.

I like the opportunities Atreus has created for the poor from neighborhoods like Cheapside. The opportunities he’s made for the patricians of the Janiculum, I care less for.

“I want to try it,” Annie says.

Then try it without me.

But that doesn’t seem to be an option she’s willing to consider. She looks furiously determined and at the same time frightened—as if, more than the club itself, her own initiative scares her most of all. It hooks me against all reason. I push away my foreboding.

“Fine,” I say.

Duck, Cor, and Crissa are looking between us, mystified. Because, after all, why should I, Lee the slum rat, be the gatekeeper for this rite of passage Annie seems to have created for herself?

“You coming?” I ask Crissa and Cor.

“Got that thrill out of my system ages ago,” Crissa says, hoisting her bag higher on her shoulder. “Cloister for me. Cor?”

Cor shifts, squinting at the club with apprehension. “Yeah, maybe some other time . . .”

“I’ll go,” Duck says to Annie.

The three of us mount the steps of the Lyceum Club. In the foyer, I stare down the host whose job is to check wristbands. Though we’ve never met before, he seems to recognize me and lets us in without even glancing at my wrist.

We enter a dark, wood-paneled dining room full of arguing students, aging professors filling the room with pipe smoke, and all ages in between. Class-golds of any age are welcome to dine in the club whenever they please, regardless of whether they’re attending classes. The polished wooden tables are scattered with today’s edition of the Gold Gazette, the preferred paper of the class-golds because of its greater editorial freedom. It circulates only within Palace and Lyceum walls.

“Lee! How are you?”

A Gold student I know from Damian Philosophy calls my name from a table in the center of the floor, where he sits with a few friends. Their meals are half finished, fluted glasses of summer wine nearly empty. They’ve turned and are smiling in my direction, beckoning.

“Care to join us? We can pull up chairs—”

I can almost feel Annie recoiling beside me: Sitting with barely known acquaintances seems to be more than she bargained for.

“Thanks, Ian. Don’t trouble yourselves. Good to see you all . . .”

I return their smiles, clasp Ian on the arm, then lead Annie and Duck past them. As we cross the floor, I note the presence of other Guardians in the room, easy to spot in their uniforms: Power and Darius, unsurprisingly, with a few girls from rhetoric class; more surprisingly, Rock, at a private table with Lotus in a far corner. I lead us to an empty booth. Annie takes the seat with its back to two walls and scans the room as though she were on dragonback surveying hostile terrain; Duck eases himself in after her, with the care of someone trying not to aggravate burns beneath his uniform.

“Where’s the serving counter?” Annie mutters.

“There isn’t one.”

“So how—”

Annie falls silent. A young woman has appeared at our table, wearing a variation on serving attire I haven’t seen since before the Revolution. Hers is the only iron wristband in sight.

“May I take your orders, sirs and miss?”

Duck looks at the server in fascination; Annie goes red, as she does whenever she interacts with servants.

“What’s on the menu today?” I ask.

The serving girl tells us; it all sounds better than anything I’ve had in years. I order, and then Duck, looking even more stunned by the choices she’s listed, asks for the dish that incorporates bacon. Annie, who does not seem to have processed any of what we’ve said, mutters that she’d like the same as me, please.

“I’ll be back with your drinks in a moment.”

We watch her walk away. Then Annie twitches.

“What do you think her wages are?”

Because I do rounds with the Labor Draft Board, I know exactly what her wages are. “Decent. More than most class-irons make in the textile houses, and loads better than mining.”

I’m beginning to acclimate enough to listen in on conversations around us, and the number of them happening in Dragontongue is startling—in most parts of the city its triarchist associations mean that Callish is preferred. But here, with so many patricians for whom Dragontongue is their native language, it’s used freely. Heard colloquially outside language class, it sounds like a parody of the old life.

It’s not that I’m opposed to censoring, per se, but wouldn’t you agree that he goes too far . . .

I’d take a Damian red over a Callish any day, no question . . .

Our food arrives. We’ve always been well-fed in the Cloister, and coming from Albans I’ve never thought to question its quality; but this is something else entirely. Greens perfectly seasoned, steak that is seared on the outside and pink within, potatoes overflowing with butter. Annie takes one look at her meal, then attacks it with her knife and fork as if determined to consume it before it disappears.

It’s been a long time since I’ve noticed how Annie approaches food—in the earliest years, she scarfed it, and I learned to imitate her—but in this context, a glittering dining room designed for laughter and leisure, it’s hard to watch. As Duck begins to rave about his lunch, how it is the best meal ever, I slide a hand across the table and touch her wrist.

“Slower,” I murmur.

She looks up from her plate. Her eyes widen and blink rapidly. She nods.

It is one of the strangest meals I’ve ever had. I’m aware of how it tastes—good, the way I remember expecting food to taste, before I learned to be grateful to eat at all—and I’m aware of Annie’s eyes tracking me, determined to learn despite her flushed face. I become conscious of every habit of polite dining as I struggle to demonstrate them slowly, clearly, without comment, so Duck doesn’t realize the lesson is taking place at all. Annie imitates how I pace myself, how I place a fork into the steak and a knife beside it to cut, how I don’t let it grind against the plate, how I use the knife to guide peas onto my fork and place the utensils alongside one another when I’ve finished. The things you’re taught to care about, when you’re not afraid of starving.

By the end, I’m sick with shame.

“And how was it?” says the serving girl, returning to ask if we’d like coffee or dessert.

“It was the most amazing meal I’ve ever had,” Duck says, so solemnly that she actually laughs. As we watch her take our plates back to the kitchen, his voice lowers.

“Do you think she finds it strange, being surrounded by people who . . .”

Annie finishes his sentence immediately, like she’d been thinking about it, too. “Who tested better than her?”

“Or were born into the kind of privilege that made them test better,” I mutter.

Fresh off a meal spent demonstrating that privilege, the observation smarts particularly.

Annie’s eyes remain on the dregs of her cider as she tilts the glass back and forth. Her reply is mild, but has a tone of finality to it.

“I like to think that everyone had to get here on their own merits. No matter where they came from.”

I lift my eyes to her, willing her to acknowledge me in this reprieve by looking at me, but she only glances across the floor again. “In any case, most people are speaking Callish. A lot of it’s Palace-standard, but there are Southside accents at that table over there, and Harbortown accents behind us.”

I hadn’t noticed, focused as I had been on the sounds of my mother tongue.

“Even if the Dragontongue representation is a little . . . more than proportionate to the Callipolan population,” Annie adds grimly.

“I hope my sister’s metals test went all right,” Duck mutters.

Annie’s hand slips over his on the table and squeezes it gently. She doesn’t notice the way Duck goes still at her touch.

Then her wandering gaze catches on someone across the room and her hand drops. I twist around in my seat. Power has noticed us, and he’s beckoning Annie over to his and Darius’s booth. Some of the girls from rhetoric class are giggling behind their hands, catching each other’s eyes.

“Don’t do it, Annie,” Duck says at once.

Eyes on Power, Annie tilts her glass of cider back and drains it. She returns the empty glass to the table, rises, and makes her way across the floor.

Duck watches her depart with a line between his eyes. “And she tells me to ignore him?”

ANNIE

In a month, Power and I will be facing each other in the air. But today, I approach his table in the Lyceum Club as if we’re facing off already. When I stand in front of it, he spreads his arms and leans back, his gesture taking in the entirety of the smoke-filled, wood-paneled room.

“Welcome,” he says grandly, in Dragontongue, “to my domain.”

The girls sitting with Power look avidly between us, like they’re getting a pre-tournament sampler for free. When I don’t say anything, Power adds, in Callish, “I just said—”

“I understood you.”

“Good for you!”

Power turns to the table. “Antigone, having beat my mate Darius here”—Darius glowers at him—“will be my opponent in the upcoming match.” He switches to Dragontongue and lowers his voice conspiratorially. “She’s a very ambitious serf.”

Titters go around the table. One of the girls actually lets out a suppressed shriek, scandalized. Power turns back to me, his eyes glittering.

“Isn’t that right, Annie?” he asks in Callish.

I can practically hear those watching us hold their breath. I know how this scene is supposed to go: I’ve seen Crissa stand Power down in front of others, smoothly dousing his ego with a few well-placed words. The delighted guffaws of those listening, to see him burned. I know that’s what the table’s waiting for.

But my mind draws a blank.

You idiot, what did you think would happen if you came over here? You think just because you won a match you’d get better at this?

“Yeah,” I tell him, bitterness filling my mouth both at my words’ inadequacy and the fact that they’re in Callish. “That’s right.”

I turn on my heel and walk away.

That taste of bitterness continues throughout the day. My rounds schedule has never been as extensive as Lee’s or even Duck’s, and this afternoon I have only a single session shadowing Ornby, an elderly researcher who’s vetting old Dragontongue literature for the Censorship Committee. Together in his dusty office we go over which texts should be banned, which should be translated for the general public, and which should be limited to Gold consumption.

“Feeling lenient, are we?” Ornby says as he reviews my choices. “I’d have banned the sympathetic portrait of a dragonlord entirely. You’d make it available to the general public?”

Still prickly from my lunch in the Lyceum Club, I shrug and offer one of Ornby’s favorite phrases back to him. “It could help the people grow in sympathy.”

Ornby’s blue eyes crinkle as he shakes his head. “The Golds, maybe. But we can’t complicate the narrative too much for the lower class-metals, or they’ll get confused. Might even start wanting dragonlords back. You’re cleverer than most people, Annie, you’ve got to remember that! Maybe you can handle the nuance of this piece, but they wouldn’t . . .”

Usually, Ornby’s mention of my cleverness—flattering and always slightly conspiratorial—is enough to stop me from questioning censorship practices, but today my thoughts go to Duck’s father spouting propaganda about New Pythos, and I feel a twinge of unease.

By the end of the day I’ve lost the good mood left over from the tournament entirely. Afternoon training begins with Goran spending a good half hour on the Eyrie praising Lee’s, Cor’s, and Power’s tournament performances and not mentioning mine at all. It feels like evidence that life, far from changing since gaining the Fourth Order, is going to proceed with exactly the same frustrations as before.

After dinner, in another resumption of routine, I help Rock through his aerial-tactics homework in the Cloister solarium before study hall, where Guardians are getting a start on homework at shared tables and easy chairs. I’m more impatient than usual today, and it’s setting us both on edge.

“You’ve got to keep the third dimension in mind. It’s not a field, Rock.”

Rock’s problem set is spread between us, a web of diagrams I’m correcting as I talk him through them; at the other end of the table, Crissa sits doodling on her history reading and Duck applies aloe to his burns, sleeves rolled up to his forearms. The fading sunlight glows on potted plants lining wall-size windows and creeping along a glass ceiling, opened to let in the breeze. The solarium is the only part of the Cloister set aside for recreation.

Rock’s hair is on end, his eyes bloodshot from squinting at my scribbles. “I get it in theory, all right? You’re worse than Goran sometimes.”

“You don’t like how I explain things, go find Lee.”

“I tried,” Rock says. “He was busy.”

Lee’s busy schedule is the last thing I want to hear about. I glare at Rock. He folds his arms and glares back. A voice behind us interrupts.

“Annie! There you are.”

I turn in my chair. The formidable, iron-haired Mistress Mortmane, directress of the Cloister, is on her way to our mailboxes. She hands me a memo that bears the ministry’s seal of the four-tiered city, concentric rings of iron, bronze, silver, and gold.

“I’ll just give you this personally, shall I?”

Her eye flickers in what might just be a wink before she moves on.

The memo, addressed “ATTN: Fourth Order Riders,” contains a list of schedule changes for me, Lee, Power, and Cor, effective immediately. The sight of my name next to the words Fourth Order sends a jolt down my spine.

BEGIN ATTENDING:

ADVANCED DRAGONTONGUE POETRY

WEEKLY HIGH COUNCIL MEETINGS (IF NOT ALREADY ATTENDING)

ADVANCED ETIQUETTE AND DANCE LESSONS (TO BEGIN TWO WEEKS BEFORE LYCEAN BALL)

PRIVATE CLASS WEEKLY WITH THE FIRST PROTECTOR

I feel a smile spreading of its own accord across my face.

It’s happening. Whatever Goran or Power might say or not say, however scanty my rounds schedule might still be, the ship has pushed off from the shore and I’m on it.

I arrive at Dragontongue Poetry the next day a few minutes early; the classroom door is still shut. Of all the changes from the memo, this is the one I’m most certain I’ll like—and do well in. Our study of languages of the Medean has been purely conversational classes until now, but I’ve always been interested in Dragontongue poetry, which is renowned for its beauty. The dragonborn—and Aurelians particularly, whose language it was first, before they came to Callipolis—are known to have lived and breathed their poetry, speaking as often in quotations as not, and began learning it by heart as children.

As far as the Inner Palace is concerned, knowledge of Dragontongue poetry is a form of literacy patrician families of Callipolis still value—and will expect of its rulers.

Lee is waiting outside the classroom, too. Far from sharing my excitement, he’s fuming.

“I don’t believe this. Of all the ways to waste our time—”

There are circles under his eyes; since his promotion to squadron leader he often looks tired during the school week. Cor appears at the end of the hallway, looking similarly sleep-deprived and similarly indignant.

“Is this a joke? This is our reward for making Fourth Order?”

Gold students have begun to arrive, giving us curious glances as they make their way inside the classroom; the Guardians are so outnumbered by Gold students at the Lyceum that our presence in new classes tends to be treated as a novelty. Neither Cor nor Lee moves to follow them; they seem to be agreed on lingering in the hallway for as long as possible.

“It’s a cultural literacy thing,” I tell Cor.

Cor lowers his voice, eyes tracking the arriving Gold students. “Maybe for you. I haven’t got your knack for Dragontongue. I’ll just be embarrassing myself in front of a bunch of patrician kids…ah.”

Power is sidling down the hall, already looking amused.

“Such long faces.”

Cor scowls at him. “Piss off.”

Power drops his bag with a thud between Lee and Cor. Two passing Gold girls glance our way, and Power rakes a hand over his close-cut hair, catching their eyes with a lifted eyebrow. They disappear into the classroom, giggling. “Word is, this class is pretty easy. If you’ve already got the Aurelian Cycle memorized, that is—”

Lee is leaning against the wall, arms folded. His lip curls. “Didn’t know you were such a Dragontongue scholar, Power.”

“I had tutors.”

Lee tosses his head back and laughs. Then he smiles at Power. “Good for you.”

The force of Lee’s disdain makes Power flinch. He recovers with a startled shiver, gives Lee a strange look, and regains some of his confidence to share more Lyceum gossip: “I’ve heard the class is taught by a former court tutor, anyway. Got his start teaching Stormscourge brats before the Revolution. Guess he wasn’t so loyal in the end—”

Cor snorts in spite of himself. Lee’s smile hitches. For the instant before he fixes it, his whole body stills. As far as I can tell, I’m the only one who notices.

“We’re going to be late,” I tell them.

Inside the classroom, the four of us take empty desks at the back; the only other Guardian already enrolled in this class is Lotus, whom I recognize even before he turns and waves by his curly head of hair. His connection to Dragontongue poetry through his father probably means he’s here by choice.

The girl whose desk is next to mine leans in my direction. “Are you Antigone? Antigone sur Aela?”

The way she says it, I feel like she’s talking about someone neither of us has met. I nod and she beams.

“Your flying this weekend was amazing,” she says.

I return her smile with surprise, and the girl extends her hand. Her brown dress, a muted color against her tawny complexion and spiraling black hair, shows the signs of a comfortable patrician life: cut to knee length with the precision of a Janiculum dressmaker, and carefully pressed. “Hanna,” she says. “Hanna Lund. Though I guess there’s no reason you’d want to know who I am!”

I shake her hand, too startled to think of a polite way to disagree with such an unexpected remark.

“Our new students. Welcome.”

The professor, a pale, balding, bespectacled man in his mid-thirties, has entered the room last and notes our presence with a gracious smile as he takes his place at the front of the room. “My name is Richard Tyndale, and I am absolutely delighted to have the four of you in my class. Let’s see”—he consults a list, then looks at me—“you must be Antigone sur Aela?”

“Yes, but I go by Annie.”

“We will use the full Dragontongue in this class, I think, Antigone. Very unusual name, for a highlander. And then we have Power sur Eater—”

Power lifts his fingers to indicate his presence. Tyndale smiles. “Welcome. I’ll be glad to tell your father that I’ve finally got you as my student. Cor sur Maurana—?”

Cor nods. Tyndale’s eyes slide to the only remaining new student and he stills.

“Leo?”

Dragon’s bloody sparkfire.

Lee’s eyes widen for a fraction of an instant. “Lee,” he says. “Lee sur Pallor.”

Tyndale twitches. He hastens to correct himself. “Of course—my mistake—”

Leo. The unfamiliar name reverberates in my ears with the shock of an unexpected obscenity.

I want to hide it away and never hear it again.

As Tyndale turns from us, a few students glance at one another, exchanging looks of perturbed amusement. As if they’re wondering how Tyndale could forget the name of a Guardian in the Fourth Order. Lee has sunk low in his seat beside me.

“I trust the four of you received the assignment I sent along with your primers? Good. Then let’s get started. Volunteers to read the Dragontongue?”

The class is midway through translating the Aurelian Cycle, the epic poem considered the foundational text of Dragon-tongue literature. Hanna volunteers and begins to read. Her Dragontongue is without accent—the mark of a native speaker. I register in surprise that someone with such a background would ever think of me as amazing.

But then, as she begins to read about Uriel sur Aron, leading his people into exile from the destruction of the sun-bright island of old Aureos, Lee closes his eyes and grips the sides of his desk. It’s hard to know whether the sight of his face or the sound of the words I’m listening to provokes my rising sorrow. Even if some of the words escape me, the tragedy of the line is clear enough, and still piercing.

“Antigone, why don’t you translate first.”

I practically jump. Tyndale is smiling in a way that makes me wonder whether I’m imagining the tone of challenge in his voice. I flip open my notebook, conscious of being watched by a classroom of strangers, and look down at my homework. The sight of my translation calms me at once: I’ve triple-checked it. I begin to read, and then, as Lee clears his throat loudly beside me, I remember to raise my voice. The way I’ve been practicing, in empty classrooms, at every spare moment since the Fourth Order tournament. When I’m finished, I look up to find Tyndale staring at me.

“Good,” he says. But he doesn’t sound pleased so much as surprised. “Did you notice anything interesting about that last line? Any figures of speech that caught your eye?”

Hands are going up around the room. Tyndale glances on them, then back at me. Giving me a chance.

Figures of speech aren’t something you learn in conversational Dragontongue classes, but they were listed in the glossary at the back of the primer, and I read that glossary last night. I look down, twisting my hands together beneath my desk. “Ascending tricolon. Chiasmus with the nouns and adjectives. And an enjambment to the next line.”

The hands are going down. Tyndale is nodding.

“Good,” he says again. “What about the form of the verb. Anything interesting there?”

“A historical infinitive.”

“Well spotted. And its paradigm?”

I recite it.

Tyndale catches Lotus’s eye. “Looks like our poet’s son has competition.”

For the remainder of the class, Tyndale calls on me several more times and on Power and Cor enough to determine that Power’s translations are from memory and that Cor’s grasp of the grammar is rudimentary at best. He doesn’t call on Lee.

At the end of class, when he dismisses us, he adds:

“If you have a minute, Lee.”

Lee remains hunched, face downturned, while the rest of us exit the classroom.

In the hallway, I hesitate, foreboding coiling in my stomach. Should I wait for Lee? Make sure he’s all right after whatever conversation Tyndale wants to have with him?

Would he even want that?

Would I want that?

No. I’m pretty sure—actually I’m absolutely certain—I wouldn’t.

“Hey . . . Antigone?” Hanna Lund stands in front of me, bent to one side to counterweigh her book bag, tucking a stray curl behind her ear. A few of the other girls from class wait for her a little apart from us, watching. “Some of us go do homework in the library together, after class? If you want to join?”

It takes me a second to understand what she’s asking.

A Gold student—an almost certainly patrician Gold student—is inviting me to do something with her friends? And nervous to do so, as if she fears my rejecting her? I shift my own book bag higher on my shoulder. She’s taller than me—they’re all taller than me—consistently, patrician kids are. I have to look up to meet her uncertain eyes.

“Yeah . . . I’d love to.”

Hanna grins.

Lee will have to figure out the business with Tyndale on his own.

I don’t begin to worry about him until he starts missing meals. Absent from dinner that evening, absent from breakfast the morning afterward. The first time I see him again is in class later in the morning, and the bruises under his eyes have grown so dark that he looks haggard.

What did Tyndale say to him?

The Fourth Order riders attend our first High Council meeting that afternoon—or at least, it’s a first for some of us. I’m pretty sure Lee’s been going for over a year already. We listen, take notes, and are told to ask questions later, at class with the First Protector.

His class is held in a conference room off his office. Like so many rooms in the Inner Palace, it overlooks the Firemouth, the cavernous central opening to the dragons’ caves that, for the old regime, connected the Three Families’ apartments directly to their dragons, a mere summoning whistle’s blow away. On the other side of a wall of rippling glass, a stone balcony that once doubled as a lord’s dragon perch looks out over the encircling windows of the Inner Palace. In other parts of the Palace, especially the halls repurposed to public use, the original dragonborn heraldry has been effaced, but here the stained glass edging the windows in red roses remains, a traditional symbol of Aurelian House. Atreus’s own additions to the room are austere: simple wooden furniture, unadorned but well-made, and hard-backed chairs.

We rise when he enters.

“Please. Be seated,” Atreus says. “We will not waste time with formalities in this setting.”

We resume our seats, and Atreus takes his own, straightening the collar of a simple tunic that emphasizes his severe, hawklike features and a gray face weathered by experience. Atreus’s monastic lifestyle is almost as legendary as his career: an orphaned patrician; a scholar in Damos; an advisor to the triarchy; and finally, the leader of the Revolution that brought it down. He’s been known to say that Callipolis is his wife, the Revolution his child. That the Guardians will be his legacy.

“I have heard nothing but praise of the four of you,” Atreus tells us, “and consider it a privilege to take part in the final stages of your training. I intend for our class to cover subjects ranging from the philosophical to the poetic. Both will serve a purpose to you as future statesmen: theory for the mind, beauty for the soul.”

He sets two books on the table in front of him: his own Revolutionary Manifesto, written the year before the Revolution, and the Aurelian Cycle, in the original Dragontongue.

“But practical matters to start us off. Do you have questions about the High Council meeting?”

I raise my hand, all the way up.

This time, unlike with Perkins, Atreus’s eyes do not pass over me.

“Antigone?”

LEE

There’s a certain irony, after years of going unrecognized, to being noticed by your family’s old poetry tutor.

After the other students are gone, Tyndale walks to the door, looks out in the hall in both directions, and closes it. His footfalls echo in the empty, stone-walled classroom.

I’m racking my memory for anything about him that points to what he’ll want to do with me now, but there’s nothing. I was only six or seven the last time I saw him, and he mainly taught my older sisters.

“You’re alive.”

He says it with unmistakable relief. He stands in front of me, his palms braced on the desk at the front of the row I’m sitting in, and looks at me like I’m some sort of apparition.

So he doesn’t mean to turn me in. I realize I’ve been holding my breath for the last minute, and exhale.

“How did you survive?”

He’s switched to Dragontongue. Even as my breathing returns to normal, I feel a twinge of irritation. If he’s so happy to see me, so happy to see I survived, why is he risking my safety for a language preference? Anyone could be listening outside the door. They would be more than surprised to hear a Cheapside orphan speaking native-level Dragontongue.

“Atreus intervened,” I say in Callish.

Tyndale’s eyes widen. “He saved you?”

I nod.

“And your family—did he save any of the others?”

He’s still speaking in Dragontongue, and this question has an urgency to it that surprises me.

“No.”

He’s still waiting, staring at me, but for a moment I can’t think of anything more to say that I can put into words. “It was too late for the others.”

I try to say the words without thinking about them, but images flash across my mind and empty it, and for one moment the whole classroom fades away.

Tyndale has turned away, as if swept by a similar emotion. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t usually say—but I suppose there’s no reason not to, now. I was”—he gives a little half-lost laugh—“I was in love with your sister.”

My sister. Which sister? I wonder for a second, then realize who it must have been. As if hearing my thoughts, he adds, “Penelope.” Sᴇaʀ*ᴄh the (F)indNƟvᴇl.ɴet website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

Her name, her face, everything about her comes flooding back. It’s strange to hear her name on another’s tongue—as if, after years of not speaking about my family to anybody, some part of me had stopped believing that anybody else could have known them.

He keeps talking, not like he wants to but like he can’t bring himself to stop. “It obviously wasn’t something that—had a future. I was lowborn, even if I was a scholar, and she was on her way to being betrothed to some Aurelian, I don’t remember his name . . . but I loved her. Dragons, I loved her. Even though I knew she would never love me or be able to have me. I’ve never loved anyone like I loved her.”

Penelope was sixteen when she died. I had not known about a betrothal; I hadn’t thought of her as the sort of being that men fell in love with or married. She had simply been my oldest sister. My beautiful, joyful sister, who was always abandoning grown-up conversations to come and play with me. Her hair was dark, like mine, but it was long and wavy and used to fall around her shoulders like two curtains when she crouched to my height.

I realize that I’m a year older now than she ever got to be.

“When I heard—what happened on Palace Day—I just—”

He doesn’t finish, just stops, and for me everything stops, too.

I sit completely still, feeling the ground beneath me slipping. I lean forward, brace my elbows on the desk, place my head in my hands, and wait for it to stop. Worst of all are the sounds that come with the images.

Tyndale is so lost in his own thoughts, I don’t even think he notices my response. When he speaks again, his narrative has skipped forward. I let the words wash over me, and slowly the other sounds in my head recede and the images fade.

“I think I went mad for a little while, after it happened,” Tyndale is saying, his voice hoarse, cracking a little. “Palace Day was one of the most terrible massacres this city has ever seen. Yes, the guilty were punished—but so were countless numbers who were completely innocent—just for being born into a particular family.”

“Atreus punished them,” I say, my voice sounding distant in my own ears. “Death penalties, life sentences. For the people who . . .”

I don’t finish.

“Yes, he locked them up,” says Tyndale, almost impatiently. “But he still has us celebrate it. Palace Day, a commemoration of the brave beginnings of a new regime. It’s—a blight, a stain on the new regime that Atreus should never have allowed. When he did, that was when I knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That he would be no better. That in the end, he might even be worse. The dragonlords—at least there was nobility in them. Not this cowardly, bureaucratic hypocrisy.”

Tyndale doesn’t speak in the tone of someone interested in a more nuanced point of view. An unexpected resentment comes to me. I remember feeling these things, or something like them. I remember the old dream and the old failure. But I was a child then; Tyndale was an adult. If he was so certain at the time, he could have done something.

“You could have set off for New Pythos, if you’d wanted. If you were so certain the old order was better.”

“I tried,” Tyndale says.

That stops me short. I prompt him.

“But—?”

“But I was told to wait.”

That’s not the reason I expect.

“By whom?”

“By people I think you would like to meet. People,” Tyndale adds, with delicate emphasis, “who have been biding their time.”

The sun is low enough in the sky to send orange rays horizontally across the room, lighting up the desks and Tyndale’s silhouette, strewing jewels of color where it pierces through stained glass.

“You’re talking about New Pythos. The ha’Aurelians.”

I hear my own skepticism, despite my accelerating pulse: I’ve read too many bloviating editorials in the People’s Paper full of such conspiracy theories. The nationalist sentiment they foment is too easily tracked, a predictable chemical reaction that the Ministry of Propaganda sets off when desired. “That’s an idle threat. They’re powerless.”

“Or so they’ve led Callipolis to believe.”

We look at each other, and I say nothing. Though my heart, by now, is pounding. Perkins’s words from Diplomacy return to me: We have no idea what they’re planning, shrouded in the North Sea’s fog.

Tyndale asks, “Does Atreus know who you are?”

I shake my head.

To my surprise, Tyndale smiles. “Perfect,” he says. “You’ll be well-placed.”

Well-placed for what?

But there would only be one what.

“Would you like to meet them?” Tyndale asks. “I’m sure they’d like to see you again. I’m sure they’ve missed you.”

My throat is tight.

Who? Which ones survived? Would they even know me—?

“I’m sure they would appreciate your help,” Tyndale adds.

***

Lashing rain and dark fog blanket the North Sea. We’re drilling by squadron: Crissa leads the skyfish drills; Cor the stormscourge, and I the aurelian. My squadron tails one another through the rain, struggling to stay in formation through the poor visibility, and we race to break the surface of the clouds one after another. The blue sky and glaring sunlight are blinding when we burst through the last layer of rainclouds. Pallor twitches water from his wings with a snort of satisfaction; I can feel his heaving breaths through the saddle as I yank off my helmet and wipe rain from my eyes. We count off, one by one, as the aurelian riders breach the cloud cover, soaked and shivering, but with our formation intact. When all are accounted for, Pallor and I take a moment to regain our breath.

And that’s when I notice it: other dragons on the horizon.

At first I think nothing of it; the squads have divided, and some could have flown farther north than planned.

Until I see a gleam of gold.

Aurelians.

All of my aurelians just counted off.

Which means that the ones on the horizon are not in the Callipolan fleet.

And then gleams of other colors: flashes of blue, blotches of darkness. A full fleet, with all three breeds.

They’re approaching. Growing larger, their outlines becoming clearer against the sky.

The hair on the back of my neck rises.

A full fleet, announcing itself.

They’ve been biding their time.

With the force of an explosion, my emotions—a mixture of surprise and joy and longing—spill into Pallor, who lets out a screeching cry. My feelings, erupting from his mouth.

Then as his cry fades, there’s noise above the whistling of the wind: Annie, shouting.

“Everyone get down!”

Her fist forms the signal for those too far to hear her voice; the rest of the squad begins diving back into the cover of the stratus clouds. It occurs to me, distantly through the fog of our spillover, that I’ve never heard Annie call out orders before, because, as aurelian squadron leader, that’s my job. But I’m transfixed, unable to tear my eyes from the fleet that bears down upon us. What thoughts I can unravel from Pallor’s are focused on a single point.

My people. My family. Close—

“Max, Deirdre, find Cor and Crissa and tell them to call off their squads, the drills are over! Tell them we have a foreign fleet sighting, possible sparked dragons two miles north!”

And then Annie has reined Aela round, facing Pallor, blocking our sight of the Pythian fleet. She, too, has pulled off her helmet, and beneath it her face is white, her eyes wide. Her rain-darkened hair is plastered across her forehead, water still trickling down the sides of her face. For the first time, looking at me, she seems frightened.

“Lee, let’s go!”

Sᴇarch the FindNovel.net website on G𝘰𝘰gle to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.