Furysong (The Aurelian Cycle, #3)

by Rosaria Munda

Griff looks up. “Who was it, who beat you? The same ones from last night?” So we’re talking about it. Idiots must have reminded him. There seems no point denying anything now, not after what he saw happening in the hall. I’m pretty sure I still smell like wet dog. “Seanan’s friends? Probably.” Griff’s eyes narrow. “What does that mean, probably?” “It means they put a bag over my head.” Griff whistles. He rubs the ink-stained crease between his brows again. “Because you’re my damsel?” The translation he’s gone for in Dragontongue is so ridiculous, it puts me past cringing to snorting aloud. “That’s not the right word.” “Did you tell them we take turns?” “Stop,” I say, but now I’m snorting into my hand. “This isn’t funny, stop.”

I asked Lee where all his servants were. His answer, which I found hilarious then and still a little funny now: It’s the off-season. I really hope I dreamed that I kept calling him my lord, giggling. As in, Don’t be silly, my lord, this bed’s more than large enough for the both of us. I think I even said it in a serf’s brogue. Dragons above. No wonder he slept on the floor.

“Sorry about the sleeping arrangements,” Lee says, putting a teapot and two mugs in front of us. “Nigel . . . presumed. I’ll set up different beds for tonight.” “Oh, but I liked that bed.” Lee grunts. “You mentioned. Last night. A few times.” My lord, do you show all your peasant girls such sumptuous beds?

I lean forward, and she parts her lips. I place the shell against them and upturn it. Everything slows down after that. At some point I realize that the hand that was holding the shell has set it down to hold her nape. We are sideways, her still-wet hair tickling my face as she leans her length against me. The taste of oysters and wine is on my tongue and in her mouth. “Do you think this is the dragons?” “I don’t know. I don’t care.” It’s been an hour since either of us has strung a whole sentence together. “I didn’t make the other beds.” “I don’t want another bed.” “Another bed for me, then.” Annie lifts her head to look at me. She says, “I don’t want another bed for you.” It’s the dragons talking, it’s the wine talking, and I try to remember the words to articulate this, to remind her that we can’t have the things we want, the cardinal rule Annie and I live by, our law of gravity. But here in this house, on this night, it feels like gravity has stopped working. I can’t remember, with her mouth on my neck and her hand tracing a line down my waist, why we can’t have what we want like everyone else. Why we can’t just reach out and take it. So with the last of the wine drunk, the oysters eaten, and the fire down, I hoist Annie into my arms and carry her up the stairs to my parents’ bed.

“In case you’ve forgotten, your girlfriend’s capable of summoning her dragon with her mind, through solid rock.” When Lee’s identity was found out, Power and Darius tried to beat us up in the nests after taking our summoners. It turned out Aela and I didn’t need a summoner. Judging by Lee’s slack jaw, he’d forgotten.

“I know it wasn’t what you wanted. But I would have had everything in the world with you. All of it. All my days, and all my nights, all my—” She swallows whatever word comes to her. It’s a bastard, homemade version of the Callish wedding vows. I know, because this morning I saw them written out when I signed the dotted line alone and told myself it was a question of property and inheritance even as I wished she was there with me and couldn’t remember why she wasn’t. I remind myself now: Because other vows come first. I set my lips against hers to stop her making new ones and feel her breath hitch. Flames are in my eyes again, and for all I know, flames will be the last thing I see. “I wish I could have given it to you.” I feel her swallow, her throat against my throat. I taste her tears. Annie’s lips curve against my cheek in the dark. “You and me, we take what we can get.” When she tugs me closer, I let her.

I wake from a sleep so profound it feels I’m floating from the depths of the sea. My body is gloriously, triumphantly sore. Lee was careful. It only hurt a little where I expected it to hurt more, and after the pain such tenderness enveloped me that it didn’t matter that it hurt. I only wanted to hold him closer. The thought I have now—the trivial thought that fills me with unexpected regret—is that I would have liked to have had more nights to learn how to enjoy it properly. I would have liked more than this one night.

“Yesterday I went to the courthouse in Harfast and named you heir to this estate, with Nigel as my witness. Obviously, the house will need some fixing up, after today,” he adds, like this only just occurred to him. I’ve choked on the tea. “You named me your heir?” “Just in case,” Lee says in a rush. “I figured if I’m going to be officially dead, I might as well put my affairs in order. Anyway, highland inheritance laws are tricky, particularly with women, so the language of the paperwork is that you would—in that case—be my . . . widow.” My fingers are curling around the cup. The gray sky is light enough to cast blurred shadows on the wooden table. Lee is looking somewhere south of my elbow, a flush creeping up his neck. “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?” Lee swallows, pinching fingers to his nose, and looks down. “I would have said yes,” I breathe. Lee breathes in slowly once, then out. “I know you would have.” He finally looks at me. “But I didn’t want to be the reason you forswore your vows. Not now, not when you need to—” He breaks off as if this line of thinking hits a brick wall, and I hear him swallow. His hands fold over mine, and close on the silver-and-gold wristband. “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 I know...

“I’m here.” Ixion raises the knife, and as he sets it under Pallor’s chin, the memories course through me. Memories that are mine, and aren’t. Memories that flood over me like a gift— There is a little boy that we love. A sad boy, fierce and not quite broken, and we will teach him how to fly. He throws a tentative boot over our wing, reins clutched too tight in a small fist. His thoughts flicker with memories of a father he misses, memories of another life. He blocks them out, just as he blocks us out. He is determined to need no one. The knife presses, cold iron, against our throat— We launch into the air. Knees hug us tighter, his arms around our neck, as we spread our wings and rise. Delight leaks from his heart to ours and just for a moment, he lets us in. Just long enough to remind him— See, little one? There’s so much left to live for.

Then he drives the tip into soft scales and opens the jugular. Blood begins to pool. Lee and Pallor slump as one. Lee’s fingers curl round Pallor’s horned face. He kneels in the blood, holding Pallor’s gaze, as it fades. When Pallor stills, Lee wraps his arms round his knees and folds into a ball like a second corpse. The thin, straining line that still connects me with Aela pulls taut. Miles away, lost in the white, she shrieks—

Hands pull me up, but the world is streaks of color and sound and none of it matters as beat by beat I lose him. The connection dims like lights being extinguished in a vacated house. I feel that I’m racing, room by room, to catch him. But the lights keep going out. The love that answered me in its first great torrent slows to a trickle. There comes the moment when I wait for the next faint pulse, and it doesn’t come. I’m standing in what was our home, in the darkness, alone. But I’m also still in this body, trapped in this senseless world, and the shadows around me are moving.

Power has no time for it. “Yeah, you got me. I had a plan with Antigone to rustle up her dragon in the arena.” “Why?” Ixion’s voice this time, rising an octave in confusion. “Because I’m nuts for her.” This sidelines Ixion completely. “What?” Power sounds pleased with himself. “Nuts for her. Head over heels, would die to save her, in love with her. It’s completely unrequited, she and I both know it, and yet here I am hopelessly, madly in love with Antigone sur freaking Aela.” Standing on the dark balcony outside, my hand over my mouth, I fight a sudden, wild desire to laugh. “What the hell,” Lucian Orthos mutters. “That’s right,” says Power. “Waste of my time, wasn’t it?”

Power’s voice rises. “Like your mum? Like mine? I’d rather be like them than that excuse for a human being who was my father.” His voice is shaking. He’s talking about his birth parents. “Some of the bravest women in our lives have been peasant women, Annie. They’re why we’re here. Even if they go unsung.”

Well—round the corner, one of her riders found me, bit of an attitude on him. ‘You’d better be glad the Firstrider is more patient with insults than I am.’ Then he gave me a new ration card. I hardly believed it at the time. But I’ve got friends say that happened to them, too. She always did it quiet.” I remember that day. I remember sending Power after her while I waited in shame under the furious eyes of the square. But I did not know, until now, what he told her when he replaced her ration card. I want to ride a dragon when I grow up. Like you. I’ll be Firstrider. It’s not an easy job. I only realize after the woman’s done testifying that tears are coursing down my face.

It’s a poem. Signed Vox Draconis like the fragment Lee and I found in his manor, and styled, as that one was, like the canonized Aurelian Cycle. But this one is in Callish. Sing to me, Muse, of the Revolution’s Daughter who after Uriel sur Aron, after Pytho, after the triarchs of old ages and the corruption of their reign came lowborn to defy them: Who was expelled from her home, fell from all grace, and rose on a dragon’s wings.

Power lifts his fist to his chest in the Revolutionary salute. And then he reaches out to clasp my hand. Cold metal presses into it. “Time I return this.” I look down at the Firstrider’s badge that I left in his keeping, when I went to Norcia. “It’s been an honor, Commander.” At the gesture, I feel as if my heart has been torn open and apart.

“I challenge Ixion sur Niter to the title of Firstrider.” The whispering that lit the hall falls silent. Ixion’s teeth bare. “You and what dragon, Antigone?” I smile at him. Right on cue, the glass of the central archway shatters. Aela perches framed by stone, her wings spread.

Ramming through a door that had been locked because I was tired of waiting to be handed the keys, tired of being afraid, tired of holding myself in. When they don’t give you the tools to win, you make your own.

Niter fires, and ash sputters out. A choking cloud of it. Muttering rumbles through the crowds that watch us. The word I hear, or maybe just imagine I hear, spreading across the arena like fire: sparkforsaken. After all the dragonborn propaganda about the supremacy of their blood, after all their rigged Winnowing Tournaments to prove who deserves to ride, this is what they have to show for it. “You want to try that again?” Ixion screams. The dragon spews ash, billows of it, but no flames come out. The heat passes harmlessly over my unstocked flamesuit. I’m smiling.

Lee holding me and spinning me where we are nothing and no one. He told me once family wasn’t something he wanted, but I remember the way he looked at me when he said that Farhall was mine to come back to, if I wanted it. That he’d wanted it in writing that it was always me. I would have had everything in the world with you. I wish I could have given it to you. What if it’s still something we can have?

Annie brings herbs for a pilgrimage to Dragon’s End and the marble headstone she’s had commissioned in the likeness of Pallor’s brooding features, to be set over the door to the barrow. Tilly, the gray mare I’ve grown fond of, hauls a cart bearing the headstone up the escarpments for us, and with Aela’s help, we set it over the barrow-mound door. In Dragontongue, it reads: Here lies Pallor Aurelian, who chose a Stormscourge.

“I—do you still—you told me once you never wanted it. Was that true?” When she finally turns to look at me, what she sees in my face makes her eyes grow bright. “And you?” I ask. “Do you still want it?” Annie blinks rapidly. “Yeah, I still want it,” she says, her shoulders drawn together, and looks away.

“I know.” Could she think I don’t know that? After what happened, after Pallor—? Annie looks up, surprised. “That’s why we . . . We wanted you, we want you, to do that work.” She hears his name in it, and rubs her eyes with a sudden, jerking gesture. Aela veers from her coasting position and reattaches to the cliff face with a soft crunch. Her tail coils round us, nestlike, as she settles to the ground, and Annie’s hand unconsciously finds her crest and squeezes. Her chin is rippling almost too hard for speech, but she gets it out. “I figured I could still visit. Holidays, like this. If you—wanted. I mean, you might want to see other people. I’d understand—” This nearly makes me laugh. “Annie.” She sits rigidly beside me, her eyes on the dragon. But when I slip an arm around her, she curls closer, and for a moment, she lets me hold her. The pain ebbs, leaving me feeling drained, but my heart and head strangely clear. I feel a familiar scalding heat under my bare palm and find Aela nudging it, seeking my attention exactly the way Pallor used to. Surprise catches at my throat as I begin to scratch her beneath her crest, where Pallor used to itch.

Callipolis begins again. In the best, fairest version of herself, I think we would renounce dragons altogether. And maybe one day, we will. But in the meantime, so long as she depends on their protection, dragons are her best defense and dragonriders must be trained. Atreus once told me I was his greatest mistake, and the more I think about it, the more I’d like to make a career of it.

“You came back to me.” “And you came back to me.” Her lip curves against mine. “Now, my lord,” she says, “wasn’t there something you wanted to practice?”