Furysong (The Aurelian Cycle, #3)

by Rosaria Munda

“I want to ride a dragon when I grow up. Like you. I’ll be Firstrider.”

Antigone sur Aela. The drakonym feels like a ward against evil. Her name is Antigone sur Aela.

As I refill his cup, Lee’s fingers take those of my free hand, which is shaking, and press them in his.

I’ve found Lee again, and his smile is every bit as beautiful as I remember it.

The way was always for Annie, for the first lowborn Firstrider of Callipolis, who now flees routed, hunted, and condemned by the regime her people died to overthrow. The light was always meant to shine for her.

What’s real is the girl in my arms and the bloody dragon beside her. They’re my responsibility now. My only responsibility.

He drenches her in freezing water and she shrieks in a very un-Guardian-like manner. It’s adorable.

She looks so vulnerable, so small, I experience a moment of love for her so fierce it feels like panic.

The sight of her face smoothed in sleep, hair mussed from spending a night in my arms, fills me with such sudden happiness that walls can’t contain it.

A smiling, younger person that I’m only just meeting after all these years of knowing her. I think the sight of it breaks my heart.

The second day Becca joins us in the Greatlord’s study, I hold up Lady Electra’s hairbrush. Becca makes a face. “You’ll pull my hair.” “I promise, I won’t. I’m a hair-brushing expert.”

Let the skies be someone else’s to rule. Let me stay grounded, blissfully grounded, like this forever. Not a Guardian but a girl in love.

The word that forms as a bubble on the tip of my tongue, the thing I lost and forgot and denied myself and found again in all its sweetness on these cliffs: home.

For the first time in my life, I’m healed enough to imagine a family in the future rather than the past,

His eyes have flecks of blue in the silver. How have I never looked into them like this before?

“You put it in writing”—my voice shakes—“that we’re wed.” “I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t have. It was just a matter of paperwork—” “Why didn’t you ask me?”

“I just wanted it to be in writing, somewhere. I wanted it to be in writing that it was you. For me. It’s always been you.” He lifts my hand to his lips and kisses it.

And even as he offers me everything he has to give, he doesn’t dare call it what it is. A home.

See, little one? There’s so much left to live for.

All the while, Pallor lies unmoving, and Lee lies curled in his blood like he wishes he were one with it.

And then I’m in his arms, and he’s crunching me into the first embrace I’ve had since I watched the Big House burn, and I don’t want him to let me go.

“Some of the bravest women in our lives have been peasant women, Annie. They’re why we’re here. Even if they go unsung.”

“Antigone?” Her chin has set, and her brown eyes blaze. “Go show them what you’re made of.” I lift a shaking fist to my chest in the Revolutionary salute.

Here lies Pallor Aurelian, who chose a Stormscourge.

Annie blinks rapidly. “Yeah, I still want it,” she says, her shoulders drawn together, and looks away.