PORT SOL WAS BEAUTIFUL WHEN IT WASN’T ON FIRE. THOUGH FARON had visited a handful of times since, she couldn’t separate the capital from the destruction that still played behind her eyes.
During the ember days of the San Irie Revolution, Commander Gavriel Warwick and his family—his wife, Mireya, and his son, Reeve—had occupied Pearl Bay Palace on behalf of the Langlish Empire. The commander’s dragon, Irontooth, had spent his time sitting on the rooftop of the stone manor house, spewing fire into the sky in smug satisfaction. But Port Sol had only been the most valuable jewel in Warwick’s shrinking crown. One by one, the other Iryan cities had been reclaimed by Aveline’s growing power and loyal army. One by one, Faron had channeled the magic of the gods to turn the tide of battles that seemed unwinnable.
Even choking under the violence of Langlish occupation, the islanders had secretly added drakes to their army to launch the revolution, hiding deep in the impenetrable Argent Mountains at the center of San Irie. But for the plan to march on Port Sol—to end this war once and for all—they’d had only four resources, if you could even call them that: a twelve-year-old girl with a direct line to the gods, her thirteen-year-old sister with beginner’s summoning magic, an army led by a newly turned seventeen-year-old queen without a throne, and Nobility.
Just Nobility. The other three drakes had been busy keeping the rest of the island from being conquered again.
They should have died in that final battle. No one had said it, but she was sure everyone had been thinking it. Even now, as Nobility coasted to a landing on the runway of Pearl Bay Airfield, Faron could never forget that they almost did.
There was a circle of Queenshield waiting for them, but that wasn’t what made Faron pause. Behind them was a small crowd of people wearing scowls and waving signs. STOP THE SUMMIT. NO NEGOTIATING WITH NOVANS. ONE PEOPLE, DECOLONIZED. As soon as the exit ramp opened, they began to chant. “No mercy to imperialists! End the Summit now! No mercy to imperialists! End the Summit now!”
Aveline looked out at her people with a lost expression. And then it was gone behind her queenly mask, curtained by distant politeness. Faron shifted so that she was standing half behind Aveline, happier than ever that she did not have to be a queen. “People of San Irie, I understand your outrage. But the Summit is important, and I promise you that I would not invite our enemies back without just cause. I ask that you trust me for now, and, once the Summit is complete, I will hold a public forum where all your concerns will be addressed—”
“We did trust you,” someone snarled from the crowd, “and you organized a welcome for the very people who tried to kill us!”
“My daughters are dead,” another one shouted. “They died to protect us from the empires, and you invite them here as allies?”
“They will never be our allies,” exclaimed a third. “They will never again be welcome on our island. NO MERCY TO IMPERIALISTS!”
The chanting rose to new heights. The mob tried to surge forward. A line of Queenshield threw out their hands, which glowed with summoning magic that formed a barrier between Nobility and the angry throng. As the soldiers moved forward, so did the barrier, corralling the people backward like dogs herding sheep from the pasture. Faron saw Aveline’s throat bob as she swallowed, but the queen’s face remained placid until the protesters were gone. Only then did Aveline glide down the exit ramp, where her remaining guards swept her toward the safety of the palace.
Royal servants appeared next, dressed in cotton shirts and trousers of deep gold. They carried everyone’s bags up the hill, leaving Faron alone on the tarmac with adrenaline pounding through her veins.
Well, almost alone.
“How did they get on the airfield?” Reeve asked, staring in the direction the crowd had gone. “I assumed there would be some outcry, but this close to the palace… That’s dangerous.”
“As long as Queenshield are present to keep things under control, Aveline opens the airfield to the public.” It was a stupid idea, but Faron understood the politics of it. Aveline had taken the throne as a teenager, after all, and people wouldn’t allow for her to rule in the shadows. If her every action would be scrutinized, why not allow that scrutiny on her own terms? “I didn’t think it would be this bad.”
The island must have been in true danger for Aveline to risk all this. Chosen queen from a blessed bloodline or not, she ruled only by the grace of her people. If they stormed the castle to dethrone her, Faron doubted the gods would intervene.
“That wasn’t here five years ago,” Reeve added when it was clear Faron had said her piece.
He nodded his head toward the greenery in the distance, greenery she had forgotten he’d never seen. While she had occasionally been called to the capital for one political reason or another, Elara and Reeve hadn’t been back since the war. Faron had seen the city rebuild in leaps and bounds, scalestone and summoning magic re-creating what the Langlish had tried to destroy. Victory Garden, as it had been named, now cupped the palace grounds with lush palms, giving the ivory manor house the appearance of bursting proudly from a wreath of trees and flowers. Faron tried to muster up some of the awe she had felt when she’d seen it for the first time, but, as the adrenaline of her anxiety drained, there was nothing left inside her but exhaustion.
Elara should be here. She would have known how to comfort Aveline. She might even have had the right words to quell the dissenters. But if Elara became a drake pilot, Faron would almost never see her.
At least her parents had accepted the lie that Elara had gotten up early to take a stagecoach to the nearest temple. Her sister was a saint to them; of course they’d believe that she would pray for her friends out of the goodness of her golden heart. Then Reeve had promised to keep an eye on Faron in Elara’s absence, and that had been that.
“I don’t actually need you to watch out for me, you know,” said Faron, the memory leaving a bad taste in her mouth. “In fact, I think this week will go by faster if we don’t talk to each other at all.”
Reeve stared at her. His hair rippled in the breeze as Nobility’s hatch closed and the drake ferried down the runway toward the hangar opposite the palace. He’d cut it before they’d left, or the Hanlons had, so the wind did little more than tousle the dark strands into something that looked deliberately stylish.
Noticing that made Faron even more annoyed than his silence did.
“Well?” Faron asked. “Do we have a deal?”
No response but a gentle tilt of his head. Sunlight stretched through a break in the clouds, making his blue eyes glow and the red highlights in his hair shine like flame.
She scowled. “What, do you want to shake hands on it or something?”
More silence. But then she caught sight of the mischievous glint in those eyes, the way his mouth twitched as if he were trying not to smile, and she realized what he was doing.
“For Irie’s sake, why are you so annoying?”
Reeve snickered. “I was doing exactly what you told me to. There’s just no winning with you.”
Faron turned toward the palace but didn’t leave. As much as she wanted to, she knew the second she set foot into that building, she would be expected to perform the role of the Childe Empyrean. She’d be expected to act as pious and otherworldly as the adults across the island believed she was. The idea exhausted her more than staying out here being mocked by the enemy. Though it was odd to think of Reeve Warwick as the enemy right now when there were so many more of them flying in to see her.
“Sorry, but I’m not Elara,” she said. Normally, reminders that she was nothing like her sister could ruin her mood, but she wanted to dig her way under his skin the way her anxieties lived under hers. “I don’t make friends with spies.”
Reeve snorted, but he didn’t argue with her. He never did, not about her suspicions. Faron would love to have the freedom to believe that a thirteen-year-old Reeve had run across no-man’s-land with Commander Warwick’s battle plans, turning the tide of the war at the last possible moment, because he was a genuinely good person. But Faron was the Childe Empyrean, and war had taught her to be cautious. Reeve’s father wouldn’t have risen to become the leader of the Langlish Empire without knowing his way around a contingency plan.
And when Reeve turned on them at the end of his long con, it wouldn’t be because Faron had let her guard down around him. The protesters weren’t the only ones who refused to negotiate with Novans.
“I don’t know how to feel about being back here,” he said instead, his brow furrowed as he stared at Pearl Bay Palace. The white stone glistened in the midday sun, so bright it was almost hard to look at, but the deep windows were shadowed, hiding the dangers within. “My whole life changed here. One night, one moment, one decision, and my life was divided into a before and an after.”
“Yeah.” Faron sighed, relating to that more than she would ever admit.
“I know you think I’m a spy,” he continued. “Other people have called me a hostage, as if the queen only keeps me here as insurance to stop Langley from invading again. I’ve even heard that I’m a target, here to be blamed for my family’s crimes.” Faron had no idea what he saw on her face when he looked at her, but it was enough to make him smile faintly. “I’m whatever you guys need me to be. I don’t get a choice. But if you want to know what I think—”
“I admit that I’m curious to hear that as well.”
The delicate moment frayed and dissipated. They turned as one to see Commander Gavriel Warwick approaching them from the direction of the side lawn. The clipped grass looped around the edges of the airfield and filled the space between it and a carved marble wall that blocked the ocean. On the other side of that wall, water seeped onto the shore, and one of the two islets off the coast of San Irie—San Mala or San Obie, both uninhabited but still part of Aveline’s domain—was just visible on the horizon.
Faron would have noticed if he’d flown his dragon overhead, but he could have just been dropped off on the beach, or he could have been taking a walk, and she hadn’t noticed until it was too late, and here he was mere feet away from her, and she was trapped—
Only Reeve’s hand on her shoulder kept her from spiraling at the sight of this figure who had haunted her mind for half a decade. The commander was a tall man with skin the color of old glue, a close-cut beard the deep silver of a blade, and a smile that stretched his square face out to cartoonish proportions. A Langlish starburst pin decorated the right breast pocket of his black military uniform. He looked like someone’s doting uncle, the kind who put sweets alongside the money in children’s birthday cards.
It was hard to believe that he had given the order to burn San Irie’s temples to the ground.
That he’d been planning to burn the rest of the island along with them.
The last time Faron had seen the commander was when Aveline’s army had retaken the palace. He had surrendered in the throne room, his arms around his wife, his heavy gaze on his son, Reeve, standing defiantly among the Iryans. It had been too easy, so easy, as if the commander had known something that they didn’t.
But as he stopped before them now, Faron began to doubt for the first time that his secret weapon was Reeve. Reeve had relaxed beside her, but it was a forced kind of relaxation. Even she could see it was off from how unruffled he usually was.
“Hello, Father,” Reeve deadpanned. “Shouldn’t you be inside with the rest of the dignitaries?”
“I wanted to make sure the Hearthstone Academy students were settled.” The commander examined the hand Reeve still had on Faron’s shoulder. She took a step to the side so it dropped away, but that drew the commander’s predatory attention to her. “Childe Empyrean, it’s an honor.”
Is it? Faron barely managed to hold back. She didn’t want to start an international incident just because she couldn’t play nice as well as Elara could. She forced a smile that almost hurt. “Welcome, Commander. I hope you have time this week to take in more of the sights.”
And she meant it, if only out of spite. She wanted him to see how well they had managed to rebuild, how much they had grown when they were not trapped beneath the claws of Langley’s war beasts. Through centuries of colonization, the Novan empires had destroyed so much of what San Irie could have been, and Iryan culture was a hodgepodge of theirs. Their city names were a mix of languages from the countries that had occupied them. Many of their dishes originated from the parts of animals they were allowed to eat during enslavement. And while newer buildings were crafted in part or in whole with scalestone, older neighborhoods were built from metals and stones that weren’t even native to the island.
But for these five years, they’d been free. They had flourished when no one had believed they would. They had come together under Aveline’s rule, grown strong enough that there were sights to be seen. Faron wanted to rub it in Commander Warwick’s face: You have no power here, and you never will again.
For the first time, she understood why Aveline had planned the Summit. She felt it.
Like his son, however, Commander Warwick smoothly avoided rising to her bait. His smile, when he looked back at Reeve, was a drawn sword waiting to strike. “You speak patois almost like a native. How quickly you adapt to the blood on your hands.” He nodded in Faron’s direction. “See you tomorrow, Empyrean.”
Faron watched him stride toward the palace with the straight-backed posture of a soldier, and, as soon as he disappeared up the hill, she shuddered as if a lizard had crawled down her spine. Something about the commander’s presence sucked all the air out of the area, making her feel as if she were suffocating under his influence. Reeve was silent beside her, his jaw clenched as if he’d lost something he hadn’t expected to.
The look on his face… She’d never seen it before. For the hundredth time that day, Faron wished that Elara were here. Elara would know what to say, what to do, to stop Reeve from looking like an open wound that not even Faron wanted to throw salt in. She hated remembering that he was just an eighteen-year-old boy who was more acquainted with loss than she wanted to acknowledge. His countrymen had died because of his choices. The boy he’d been before that night had died, too.
Faron shoved those thoughts away. She couldn’t stand any reminder that Reeve Warwick was human. It weakened her resolve.
“Adaptable, huh,” she said, and if it lacked the usual amount of venom, then she refused to acknowledge that, either. “What an interesting skill. Useful for a spy.”
That jolted Reeve out of his stupor. He rolled his eyes. “We should go find our rooms.”
“Is that your polite way of saying you want to get away from me?”
“As much as I love letting you accuse me of things I didn’t do, I figured you might want to take a bath and call your sister.”
“How thoughtful of you,” Faron said, mostly to hide the fact that it was thoughtful and she did want to call her sister. “Fine. I’ll see you later, then. Or I won’t. I don’t care.”
Reeve’s slow smile almost reached his eyes. “Of course not.”