Fireborne (THE AURELIAN CYCLE Book 1)
Fireborne: Chapter 11

LEE

The morning of the Firstrider Tournament, I wake from fitful sleep where memories blur with dreams. Sparring with Annie, when we were first learning how; planning our escapes, huddled in the closet in the orphanage; my father and his dragon, in flight. Weaving in and out of these, over and over again, Julia:

I pray to the long-dead gods that this tournament brings sense to you.

I sit next to Crissa and Cor at breakfast. Across the room, on the opposite side of the refectory, sit Annie and Duck. We haven’t spoken since we met in the hallway outside Tyndale’s classroom, four days ago.

The room vibrates with a barely suppressed excitement: The other riders seem to know better than to voice their anticipation in front of either Annie or me. Except, of course, Power, who takes a seat across from me to say:

“Do you know what Annie had me call her, so she could spill over?”

“Get away from us,” Cor says.

Power tells me. Then watches for my reaction. Annie, across the room, glances over at us and then stubbornly away again.

How, I wonder, how could she have stooped to this, to train with this imbecile?

Without acknowledging either of them I drain my glass and rise.

“I’ll see you later,” I tell Cor and Crissa.

The armory is silent, empty. This time of year it collects heat during the day and never quite has time to cool off during the night, so it’s already unpleasantly stuffy as I change into my flamesuit. I’m halfway through buckling on armor, beginning to think we won’t overlap at all, when the door opens and Annie comes in.

“Hey.”

“Hey . . .”

I can think of nothing else to say. And though Annie is one of the few people I’ve ever been comfortable with in silence, right now it’s not the kind of silence that’s comfortable. It’s the silence of two people not speaking to each other.

Then, in that silence, Annie reaches for her flamesuit and freezes. Her back is turned: I can’t see what she’s looking at.

As gingerly as someone removing an unwanted insect from a plate of food, she pulls a sealed letter out of her cubby and rests it unopened on the bench beside her.

“What—”

“It’s from the ministry,” she says, her back still turned to me.

I straighten. Despite the residual cool that’s distanced us since Tyndale’s class, the news shocks me into anger. Now? They’re still pulling this on her?

For a moment, I stare at her back as the discomfort creeps in: Maybe the last time this happened, I was the person to say something—but today? Now? What is there possibly for me to say as her opponent?

But it turns out I don’t have to say anything. Steel has entered Annie’s voice like I’ve never heard before.

“I’m not reading it.”

She yanks on her flamesuit without looking at the letter again, and when her armor is on, she heads out to the nests without me.

A half hour later we’re both on the Eyrie. The blue of the late summer sky is blotted with billowing cumulus clouds, moving fast in a brisk breeze. They hang low, some of them even at the level of Pytho’s Keep. Standing on the Eyrie, surrounded by stands that are completely full and cheering in a deafening roar, feeling the sweat begin to trickle beneath layers of armor and leather, I look up at the racing sun-swept sky and feel the first leapings of anticipation.

Skies like this are meant to be flown in.

At the mouth of the cave, we summon our dragons and wait together. There’s silence again, but it’s a different kind of silence: as if Annie, too, is aching to get into the air. Our backs are turned toward those watching on the Eyrie, and we face the stands that have quieted with expectation.

I feel that stillness awaken all my senses.

Yes. This is it. Finally.

After years of wanting and waiting and training, after dreams lost and regained, I am here. Vying for Firstrider as if the whole world hadn’t changed since I first imagined winning the title.

Pallor and Aela alight on either side of us. Their anticipation fuels ours; Pallor is twitching with impatience to take off, and I have to yank on his reins to hold him still while I double-check his stirrups, his girth, his bridle. I mount, pull on my helmet, and place my hand on my visor. Before I lower it, I look over at Annie for the final check-in. She has mounted and is bent low on Aela’s back with her head lowered, one gloved hand pressed against the side of Aela’s scaled neck. Their eyes are closed.

A ripple goes through them both, Aela’s wings twitch open, and Annie lifts her head. When she opens her eyes and looks at me, her pupils are dilated.

The familiar becomes alien, and my uncertainty becomes foreboding.

She nods at me, I nod at her, and we lower our visors.

Then we’re off, into the air, at last. We leave behind the Eyrie, the arena, the Palace, and the city. The wind on which the cumulus surfs catches the wings of our dragons like sails snapping taut. We assume position, facing each other at a distance of ten meters, wings beating against the currents of air to stay in place. All around us, clouds are shifting and reforming in the summer light.

Distantly, through the roaring wind, we hear the bell ring.

We charge. Full speed, straight at each other. Adrenaline floods in, heady and familiar. We’re close, closer, too close—

At the last second, as we veer and fire and swerve, and the heat of Aela’s blast streams across my back as I flatten myself against Pallor to escape it and we ride a surging gust of wind out of range, I think:

I know this.

This is Antigone sur Aela. Every bit of them. They’re not alien: They are simply more themselves.

And Pallor and I know them in our bones.

I rein him round to engage again and see Aela rising, gaining height, and at once we surge upward to race her for the advantage, and I can’t resist a wind-swallowed cry of sheer delight. I’ve missed this.

This. This is how it’s supposed to be.

She stalls on a hard gust and uses it to leverage a plunge down. Pallor and I roll into a dive. She follows, hot on my tail as we plummet through drifts of cumulus and ripples of turbulence, and my ears are popping from the kind of changes in pressure that only happen when the ground is something you’re accelerating toward with all the speed you can muster. We roll again, come at Annie from the side rather than below, and hit Aela with a contact charge. Aela’s descent becomes, from our momentum, a sideways roll as our dragons struggle in a locked embrace. It seems that the world spins: The horizon rotates on an axis, the cumulus churns around us as it streams past and reforms. Aela gains traction, sinks talons into Pallor’s side, and he screeches and releases her. They take off, and we pursue.

It goes on. I could go on doing it forever; I want to. Annie and Aela’s spillover makes their responses faster, their instincts surer, their assaults harder.

And I love it.

Pallor and I are pushing ourselves like we haven’t in years, every nerve alive as we strain to match Annie and Aela. The challenge works on us like a drug. We’re bursting through barriers that I’d previously thought of as our ceilings, and we push them back. Because even when they’re flying their best, we know their mistakes; we know their weaknesses. We’ve helped them hone their abilities with drill after drill for as long as we’ve flown.

And they know us.

So it becomes a struggle to peel the layers back. To probe for weakness, to expose a mistake. A performance of something intimate. These are the things I alone can find in her, and she alone can find in me.

She finds my weakness first.

I risk opening my guard for a half instant, in order to take aim, a move I can usually pull off without the other rider even noticing—but today, Annie does.

Her shot sears across my exposed shoulder. A penalty hit.

It’s the first penalty I’ve ever received in a public tournament.

The shock of it sobers me at once, and the breathless exhilaration I’ve been riding falters.

We reset. I open my coolant valves, easing the pain searing my shoulder.

Distantly, below, the bell rings. We charge again.

This time it becomes a contact charge at once. The dragons scrabble, fighting to get a clear shot at the other’s rider; and then as we push off again, I catch Annie ceding just a little too much horizontal leverage, a classic Annie mistake, and I have her. She shies, it only grazes her, a penalty hit on the arm.

That’s it.

We reset, Annie opens her coolant shafts, and we charge again. This time, when we ram, I head in sideways, hoping to gain centripetal momentum. It’s not a move most riders know how to predict or respond to, but she responds just fine. She swerves, we misfire, and both leave ourselves exposed. In the opening, Annie fires again.

She lands a second penalty, across my leg.

It is full-heat, an intended kill shot: My leg sears with it and I let out a grunt of pain, which Annie hears.

“You all right?” she calls.

“Fine.”

I’m furious with myself.

I back out of range to release coolant valves and reset, and all the while my mind is racing with a single panicked thought: We’re on our second penalty.

For the first time, the reality really hits:

I could lose.

If we keep flying like we just did, I’m going to.

Annie could make Firstrider.

How is this the first time—though I’ve known all along that she’d be my most formidable opponent, that this would be my hardest match—that this thought really hits home?

Pallor ripples beneath me: The barrier between us has thinned as our emotions have risen. I can feel our anger at our mistakes, our tiredness, pushing us dangerously close to a spillover. I fight to stay in control.

The dragons are facing each other, reset for a charge. Pallor is heaving beneath me, the exertion of the match finally taking its toll. I can feel it wearing on me as well. Annie and Aela have been practicing at this spillover-induced intensity for a month; we haven’t.

We need to calm down, refocus, and finish this. Before we’re too drained.

But to do that, we need to buy time.

The bell rings. Annie surges forward, and instead of meeting her, I rein Pallor round to a retreat. He growls and resists, like he hates me for it, and I don’t blame him, because I hate myself a little bit, too. We plunge into the nearest cumulus and keep going, through the heart of the clouds, keeping cover in their whiteness. I check behind my shoulder, over and over again, but see no sign of her. The cumulus have thickened as we sparred; we’re in and out of seamless stretches of white, so much that it begins to feel like clear patches are the exception rather than the rule.

Have I lost her?

We burst into a clearing, free of clouds either overhead or beneath. The arena is far below; even Pytho’s Keep is distant and small. We’re surrounded on all sides by bulging white cumulus, shifting constantly in the wind.

Unbidden, Pallor grinds to a halt. I slam my heels into his sides, urging him back into the cloud cover, when I realize why he’s stopped: He is shuddering with hawking, painful gasps, different from any he’s ever made before. The sound fills me with alarm.

“Pallor,” I say. “Easy. You’re all right, just breathe—”

I feel him straining beneath me and at the same time his mind strains toward me, and I realize that the thin barrier between us is something he’s fighting to break through. Pallor is straining for a spillover. Disregarding all of his training, all our habits of separation, all the distance that I’ve always asked him to keep. Through what’s left of the barrier I can feel his anger at our weakness, his humiliation at the retreat, his horror at the idea of defeat, his determination, like mine, that we must, at all costs, win. Beyond all that, something else—a strange fear and excitement about something very close to happening, and with it the desperate need for me—

“Stop—stop doing that—”

He seeks the spillover desperately, his mind pressing with urgent need into my own, and I struggle to hold him out. He ripples and stalls and we hover, exposed, in this sun-pierced clearing amid the cumulus.

A shadow passes across us.

It’s Annie, bearing down on us from above, Aela’s wings close to her sides to speed her descent.

Pallor rears up to meet her, his whole body still convulsing, his growl half a hacking splutter, like a cat attempting to be sick.

There’s a split second when Pallor and I realize that they’re in range, that we’re exposed, and that Aela has opened her jaws to fire.

We’re about to lose everything.

The barrier between us shatters.

As the spillover floods my senses, understanding fills me at last.

Pallor’s final convulsion spasms through his body and finds its release. Sparked dragonfire streams from his mouth.

We rock backward with the force of the blast.

I am consumed by Pallor’s emotions, his exhilaration and fear and just a little pain; I am high with them. It is like nothing I’ve ever experienced, the rush of power, of ascendance, that I share with Pallor in his moment of sparking. As though the world were at our feet. Ours for the taking, and we will have all of it.

And as with gods the world quaked, to see them fireborne.

It takes me a gasping moment to emerge from the delirium, to rein him back and tell him to hold fire. But the damage is already done. Pallor’s aim was true, and Annie sur Aela, surging toward us, was within range.

Fire has blanketed them.

Aela is stalling, her wings beating dully against the draft; Annie, astride her, is completely still. Her armor is blackened from head to foot. Steam and smoke rise from cracks of flamesuit exposed beneath as the cloud vapor evaporates and the outer layer of the suit burns.

Sparked dragonfire, undoused and at full heat, is enough to kill a rider. Flamesuit or no, armor or no.

I am, all at once, sick with fear.

“Annie,” I call.

The high of the spillover is fading fast; Pallor is still with me, but now he’s descending from his elation and beginning to feel my numb and growing terror.

Aela rocks on a gust, and Annie’s helmeted head lolls sideways, limp.

I force myself to think. Aela. Look at Aela—

Aela’s slitted eyes are still dilated, her snorts are full of anguish and fear: the signs of a dragon sensing its rider’s pain. The signs of a dragon whose rider is still able to experience pain at all.

Annie’s there. Unconscious, maybe, but alive.

Relief floods through me.

“Annie, wake up! You need to open your coolant valves!”

There’s no response.

Fine, we’ll just get to the ground fast, I think, reining Pallor in, nudging us down—

But Aela makes no move to follow us, and when I turn back to her, I realize she’s convulsing now, too. Just as Pallor was, moments ago.

Of course. Because once one dragon in the fleet sparks, it spreads. And Aela’s next.

My mind still melded to Pallor’s, I feel his perception of her change on a level that’s immediate and primal. He is suddenly aware of her, in a way he never was before.

And then—perhaps again it’s Pallor noticing, or perhaps it’s the sounds I myself hear—I realize that Aela’s shudders and retches are not only frightening her, as they did Pallor; they’re also hurting her. And I remember that sparking, in some cases and particularly with females, can hurt.

Aela is in pain.

And Annie is unconscious, tethered to her like a rag doll, her coolant valves closed, and the ground still far away. Every moment we lose, while Aela struggles to hack up the flames that her body spasms to produce, is a moment longer Annie goes without treatment for burns that could kill her.

The solution feels at once insane and inevitable.

I seize my bootknife from its sheath and cut the leather straps that hold my legs to the stirrups. They’re the only protection I have, should I lose hold of Pallor, from falling to my death thousands of feet below, and I inhale sharply as a wave of vertigo hits me. The distance to the ground, the tiny city and arena and Palace below, that I’m used to thinking of only passingly, transform in an instant into something deadly.

Pallor has flown as close to Aela as I need him to, above her, as near as he can hover over to her without their wings colliding. Aela, twitching and convulsing, doesn’t seem to notice; and Annie’s in no state to notice anything.

I swing my left leg over Pallor’s right side, both legs hanging down over his wing joint, ready to slide off.

And then I think, This is insane, Aela will throw me, she’ll throw me at five thousand feet—

But in answer, something else inside me rises up, unbidden. A feeling that is at once new and feels at the same time ages old, like something I’ve always known but only now remembered: an echo of that delirious power that flooded my senses with Pallor’s sparkfire. The line from the Aurelian Cycle reverberates, fortifying and intoxicating.

And as with gods the world quaked, to see them fireborne.

I steel myself.

“If she bucks me off,” I tell Pallor, “catch me.”

For the first time in my life, I’ve spoken to him in Dragontongue.

And then I slide from one dragon onto the back of the other.

Aela shrieks at the sudden weight, tosses her back upward in rejection of it, but I’ve landed sure, astride her behind Annie, and I’m able to seize the pommel of the saddle while she bucks. I wrap one arm around Annie—in the years since I’ve last held her like this she’s grown from a child into a woman, but her body still, in this moment, seems too small, too fragile, and her armor is smoking, still burning hot—and then I lean forward and run a hand down Aela’s neck, stroking her with firm fingers, willing her to calm. It feels wrong, deeply wrong, to touch another’s dragon like this; and I know Aela feels the same about me as I do about her.

“Easy, easy, I’m trying to help her—you know us, Aela—”

Pallor circles beneath us, and through our lingering spillover, I sense his fear for us and his continuing elation at his sparkfire and still that humming, wild awareness of Aela; and I sense through him that she is aware of him, too, that his presence comforts her.

Aela’s whimpering, but to my amazement, she doesn’t buck again.

With one hand, trembling, I begin to open the coolant valves on Annie’s helmet, her shoulders, her arms, her back. Annie remains unresponsive in my arms, light and limp, but I can feel the temperature of her suit lowering as the coolant flows through it. My other hand is still stroking Aela’s neck as she balks with pain.

“It’ll be over soon, Aela, I know it hurts—”

I think of Pallor, of his straining need to spill over, to be with me, for his release.

She needs Annie, and Annie’s not here to help her through it.

“Annie, you’ve got to wake up—”

But it will mean waking to pain. I’m opening coolant shafts along her hips, her thighs, her calves. I can smell burning leather and under that, burning hair. Her braid, I realize with horror, is gone, reduced to a stub of charred strands visible beneath the neck of her helmet—

I’ve done this to her. To Annie, my Annie—

And the only thing I felt, as I did it, was euphoria—

“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry—”

The words are choking out of me; the world around me blurs.

And then Annie stirs in my arms, just a little, and moans. Aela senses her rider rousing and cries out, a pleading screech, full of anguish. It is a profoundly intimate cry. I feel the hair raise on the back of my neck at the sound of it: I am, in this moment, only an intruder.

“Aela,” Annie murmurs, through their pain, lovingly.

It’s enough. Aela lets out a final, shuddering convulsion, and dragonfire fills the sky.

***

The arena, when we descend close enough to hear it, is roaring. I don’t immediately understand why. And then I remember: Callipolis has a sparked fleet.

And a Firstrider.

Rematch, I tell myself. I’m clinging to the idea desperately; because the alternative, that this is how it has happened, that these were the terms on which I won, is too nightmarish. They’ll give us a rematch, they’ll have to.

I’m still riding Aela, and though I dare not attempt to guide her by rein, Pallor flies ahead of us and she seems content to follow. Annie, unconscious once more, is limp in my arms.

The cheering continues unabated as we land on the Eyrie. There, at least, people realize something is wrong. I descend from the wrong dragon, cut Annie free, and pull her off Aela’s back. The medics are ready with a stretcher; I carry her the few feet to it and lay her in it. When we remove her helmet, her eyes are closed; and what remains of her hair is drenched in coolant.

“Lee, it’s all right, she’ll be all right—”

I only realize from the way people are saying this that I have lost all composure.

“Lee,” Goran says quietly, “you’ve got to go up to the Palace Box, they’re waiting—”

“Please let me stay with her—”

“You can find her as soon as you’re finished. Right now Callipolis wants to see its Firstrider.”

“No—we need a rematch—”

“That’s not how it works, Lee.”

“Please—please, not like this—”

The crowds are chanting: Lee sur Pallor, Firstrider. The title I dreamed of hearing as a child, appended to my name.

For a moment, the irony of my victory is so bitter, it is almost a taste in my mouth. That dream has come true now, years later, in a wholly different world and against all odds. But all I want in the moment is to undo it.

Goran grips me on the shoulder, and his tone hardens.

“In the name of Callipolis, pull yourself together.”

I dry my face as I mount the stairs to the Palace Box.

***

Afterward, I make a single detour before finding the Palace infirmary. I go to the Lyceum, to Tyndale’s office, and I slip a note under his door. The words I’ve written on it come with the ease of premeditated thought, and I write with the same blazing certainty that rose to guide me as I leapt from Pallor’s back.

I was told you await my letter. Here it is. By the time you see this, you’ll know that our fleet is sparked, and the Protector’s answer. Callipolis will not bow.

You wrote me once that you hoped I would know the feeling of the might of the world at my feet. Today, I have known it.

Your choices are your own. My conscience is not your keeper.

Bring what fury you have and I will answer it with ours.

ANNIE

In and out of sleep I take in the nights and days of an unfamiliar room, a single familiar figure sitting at my bedside throughout. Dressings are applied and removed and time passes fitfully, through a haze of pain, but in one of the lucid moments I wake to a single half-heard sentence of Dragon-tongue parsed in its entirety by my sleeping consciousness and now fully intelligible:

Lee told Tyndale, I have nothing more to say to them.

I return to sleep with the utter exhaustion of complete relief.

When I finally awake, I’m in pain.

Slowly the world focuses; I know it after all. An infirmary room, where I’ve lain before, though never with bandaging this extensive or constricting. The window is open, letting in the summer sunlight and breeze. Vases full of flowers fill the space of my bedside table. Seated next to the bed, slumped over in an uncomfortable-looking chair, is Lee. Lines of care have smoothed on his face as he sleeps, though the bruises of exhaustion beneath his closed eyes remain.

How long have I been here? How long has he been here?

Memories of the match are returning in flashes: the gut punch at the sight of that letter from the ministry; the steel-hardened spillover with Aela; the aching relief of finally sparring with Lee sur Pallor again. The mounting anticipation of triumph. And then—dragonfire, like the memory of an old nightmare, and pain. And then Aela, needing me, and Lee, still there, holding me—

That memory is jarring, doesn’t fit. How—?

But the memories are there, impossible: Lee behind me, astride Aela, his fingers fumbling for the valves of my coolant shafts, his hand on Aela’s side, comforting her as she struggled to spark. Because it’s not only my memories that contain him: Aela’s do, too, and I remember her fear and anger at his intrusion and then, as he soothed her by touch and by words, her surrendering trust.

My throat has gone dry to remember it.

Then I realize how he must have done it, and exasperation battles with tenderness as I look at him.

You stupid, fearless flyboy.

Lee stirs, sits up with a start as his eyes snap open. The lines of care return to his forehead and mouth. He looks at me and sees I’m awake. His face fills with relief.

“Hey,” he says.

But he says it bashfully, and I realize he’s nervous, shamefaced. It takes me a moment to understand why.

“I’m all right, Lee,” I tell him.

“I’m so sorry,” he says hoarsely. “Annie, I never—”

I laugh and it hurts, so I stop. He notices, his eyes widening in alarm.

“It’s not your fault Pallor sparked.”

Lee is shaking his head, like that’s not enough. “I asked for a rematch,” he mutters, looking down. “But they wouldn’t . . .”

I’m smiling, though this hurts in a different way.

“Why would they?” I ask.

Pain is filling Lee’s face. “Because you deserved to win.”

My throat tightens to hear the words said. To hear them said by Lee.

I struggle to put words to the feeling overwhelming me, to call it something other than disappointment. Struggle to explain the victory, stupid though it was, that meant everything to me. The little part of it that had nothing to do with Lee, or Callipolis, or anything but myself.

“It was good to really . . . want it. I didn’t know I could—want something that much. And to believe it should be—”

Should be mine.

And now this is what it feels like, when you let yourself want something, fully, and fail to get it. I’m swallowing, willing my vision to clear. Lee is looking at his lap.

“Anyway,” I add. “It’s—probably for the best. You were the one they wanted.”

Lee twitches, drags his fingers through his hair. And then he reaches into his pocket and produces a letter. Crumpled, seal broken, but I recognize it at once.

“I went back . . . while you were sleeping. It didn’t say what we thought it did.”

He hands the note to me. I open it and read the single phrase within.

Antigone,

Go show them what you’re made of.

Miranda

And that’s how I learn that consolation has the power to hurt, too.

I hadn’t imagined this bitterness of disappointment could intensify until it did. To see the words finally written, the affirmation finally given, that I’ve craved and struggled for as long as I can remember—and too late.

All I want to do, all my body wants to do, is pull my knees up against my chest, wrap my arms around them, lower my face, and sob.

Lee is staring at the floor, haggard with shame and guilt, and although I know he’d leave if I asked him, I also know there’s more to say. So I run my thumbs under my eyes, gather my composure, and tell him what he needs to hear. The thing both of us need to hear, and remember.

“You’ll be beautiful at it, Lee.”

My exoneration, from its depths.

Lee’s eyes are bloodshot as he raises them to look at me.

Beautiful: this boy who has grown into a young man, who is ready to become a leader, who’s through it all been my best friend, and the bravest person I’ve ever known.

Whom I will trust to the end.

My voice is shaking as I add: “And it will be my honor to serve as your Alterna.”

The past is behind us, the war ahead, and our fleet is sparked.

That’s what matters.

Lee reaches out, and when his fingers take my bandaged hand, I don’t pull away. For a moment, we’re both still, feeling the pulse between our palms in the silent infirmary ward.

Lee speaks first. Now his voice is the lowest murmur.

“Annie. I need your help. I need you to . . .”

“Report Tyndale. I already did.”

Lee blinks.

My heart is racing, but I keep my voice and my gaze steady. “After I overheard—I wasn’t really . . . sure, what I’d overheard but I knew—” My fingers stiffen, still in his. “I knew I didn’t want you talking to him anymore. To . . . them . . . anymore.”

That was the gamble. Tyndale, not Lee.

And now I know I gambled right. I have nothing more to say to them.

He rubs his forehead and exhales slowly, through his mouth, realizing the danger narrowly missed in retrospect. As though realizing that I could have just as easily reported him.

“I put the report under my name,” I go on, “and I filed it under speaking out against the ban, so it shouldn’t . . . it shouldn’t jeopardize you. The Reeducation Committee should process it within the week.”

Relief is washing over Lee’s face.

“Thank you,” he says hoarsely. “I needed—I couldn’t—”

“I know.”

The next words seem to come choked out of him. “It’s . . . going to get bad, Annie. Soon.”

I wonder if he means for Callipolis or for himself. Because, I realize, looking at him, it will be both. Now that nothing stands between Callipolis and New Pythos but dragonfire. Lee’s choices coming home to roost.

I can think of no consolation to give besides confirmation of the course.

“Then it’s a good thing our fleet’s sparked.”

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