CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

FARON

IN HINDSIGHT, IT WAS A WONDER THAT IT HAD TAKEN FARON THIS long to try sneaking out of Renard Hall.

The longer she stayed in this admittedly grand house, the more restless she got. Gael had visited her every day since her dream, but they had made no further headway on unlocking her power to command dragons. He never seemed impatient or annoyed with her lack of progress, but Faron wanted to scream. Her sister had been trapped among the enemy for almost two months now. Faron couldn’t suffer through a dry text like Reeve could, so the least she could do was use her magic to bring Elara home. Gael was supposed to be the key to that.

And yet she continued to make no improvements.

“You were in a state of desperation the first time,” Gael suggested one day, when Faron kicked over one of the wicker chairs on the patio just to feel some satisfaction. “Maybe you need to be in that state again.”

“I am desperate,” snapped Faron. “I keep talking to you, don’t I?”

A smile as slow as honey dripped over his face. “I don’t think that has to do with desperation. I think you like talking to me.”

“I think you like talking to me.”

“Have I denied it?” he asked, eyes dancing. “This is the most like myself I’ve felt in centuries.”

Faron hadn’t known what to do with that, so she’d decided to ignore it. Several deep breaths later, she’d tried again only to fail again.

At this point, she caught herself fantasizing about setting fire to one of the servants’ shirts just to see what excitement might result, and that was when she figured it was about time she got herself out of here. Just for a few hours, at least. Just to see what else Seaview had to offer besides the ocean and a house too large for any one person to be anything but alone in.

Of course, as soon as she climbed down her balcony and landed soundlessly in the grass far below, a hand darted out of the night to grab her wrist.

“You’re so predictable,” Reeve said before she could call on the powers of the gods. “I knew that look in your eye today meant trouble.”

“Ugh,” Faron replied. “I’m not even doing anything.”

He raised his eyebrows at her, then gazed pointedly from where she’d just climbed down, then looked back at her.

Faron folded her arms. “What about you? How long have you been lurking around outside my window, you creep?”

“I wasn’t ‘lurking around’ outside your window,” said Reeve, rolling his eyes. “I was sitting on the patio, trying to figure out if your lessons with the Gray Saint are playing into my father’s hands, like you asked, when I heard you clambering down the side of the house like a crocodile on wheels.”

“His name is Gael,” Faron muttered. “And I was not—” She stopped herself, but only barely. She didn’t want to knock him out and leave him here, but she would if he tried to stop her. She took a deep breath for the patience to try diplomacy first. “I just need a break from the studying and the pacing and the worrying. There’s a whole town at the base of this cliff. Don’t you want to see what goes on there besides the temple?”

“It doesn’t matter if I do or not. You’re going, so I’m going.”

“Oh, please. You want to see it as much as I do. Don’t pretend you have some noble reason for it.”

Reeve gestured for her to lead the way. Faron held her head high and did just that.

Seaview was a completely different experience at night. The first things that Faron saw were the lights. The town glowed against the starry night sky, and she could hear calypso music luring them in, drowning out the sound of the ocean. She had put on a navy head wrap to cover her hair and wore nondescript clothes in the hopes that few people out here would recognize the Empyrean. Maybe finding a dance hall would be the best way to keep her identity under wraps. People drinking and dancing under dim lights weren’t likely to look too closely at whom they were dancing with, and she wouldn’t mind attending a party right now.

She wouldn’t mind having a moment of joy in the middle of so much frustration.

“Are you hungry?” Reeve asked, nodding his chin toward a grill surrounded by savory smoke. There were already a couple of customers milling by it, drinking and exchanging gossip. It wasn’t that Faron had tired of the elaborate meals that the servants prepared for them every day, but there was something irreplaceable about fried street foods. Maybe it was the slightly burned taste from spending too long on the grill, or the rowdy company and conversation, or the echoing smacks of people trying to stop a mosquito from stealing their blood.

Maybe it was all the above. That was the real San Irie, the San Irie that Faron knew when she wasn’t busy being taken from one gilded cage to another.

“I’d love some,” she said, shivering a little at the cold. That was another thing the grill would help with. “I hope that means you’re paying.”

Faron and Reeve found a table near the back that seemed to be out of the blast zone for most of the smoke. He got them two sliced-up pieces of jerk chicken as well as a paper bowl filled with festival. Faron began attacking those curved fried dumplings while he showered his chicken in hot sauce.

“I can’t believe the queen let them come back here,” said a portly man at the bar, taking a long drag of his beer bottle. “It’s disgraceful, is what it is.”

“I’m not too mad about it,” said his companion, a tall man with locs drawn up into a knitted cap. “I understand the urge to show those Novan pigs how far we’ve come since they thought they could claim us.”

“We didn’t fight for our independence so we could roll out the welcome mat for them the second they decided to recognize it!”

“It’s been two months, mon.”

“I don’t care if it’s been two years. It never should have happened!”

Faron looked at the men more closely. The first was dressed in a white collared shirt and black trousers, but there was a medal glinting on his breast pocket that caught her eye. She recognized it from some of Elara’s posters; it indicated that he had fought in the San Irie Revolution in one of the branches of the army. She only knew it wasn’t the Sky Battalion because she knew that symbol intimately, thanks to Elara. The other man had no such decoration, but looking closer revealed that half his face was twisted and scarred from burns. It didn’t take much of a leap to guess he’d fallen victim to a dragon attack.

That was one of life’s most tragic secrets: War never actually ended. It survived in the lives destroyed by things large and small. The soldiers whose nightmares haunted them even with their eyes open, whose reflexes were forever set on kill, whose adjustments to peacetime came with the sobering knowledge that they were forever out of sync with a world that was desperate to move on from what they couldn’t. The families whose loved ones were the soldiers who never made it home, whose lives had been bisected into the before and after of having them around. The civilians who had lost mobility, lost property, lost sanity, or lost sleep to the shadow of a beast that announced itself with a roar before the roaring fire—if you were lucky.

War survived in the buildings now built to withstand fires, as well as hurricanes and floods; in the redrawn town lines; in the landmarks turned to ruin. And it survived in the hearts now filled with a hatred, suspicion, and paranoia that hadn’t existed before they were forced to grapple with all the ways humans could hurt one another.

Faron understood the pain rotting away inside the first man, bleeding out now that he’d had a few beers. She’d felt it herself. But she still thought it very bold of both of them to be talking about the queen like this in full view of her ancestral home, even if they knew she wasn’t there.

“What would you have her do, then?” the man with the locs asked.

“Show them that we fought our way out from under their thumbs and they can’t shove us back there.”

“And risk another war?”

“I’ve always been ready for another war.” The first man finished his beer and slammed the bottle on the bar so hard that Faron thought she heard it crack. “When a country’s used to having everything, it doesn’t let anything walk away. I’ve heard the rumors.”

“What rumors?”

Reeve started to say something. Faron hushed him and tipped sideways in her chair a bit, straining to hear the conversation.

“—were looking for something here, and they used the whole thing as a distraction to get it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Locs scoffed. “What could they possibly want? I mean, besides the scalestone, and they know the Queenshield have that under guard.”

“I’m just telling you what I’ve heard. I’ve also heard that they’ve got the Childe Empyrean’s sister.”

“Got her? What do you mean, got her?”

“They took her to Langley in secret.”

“I think we’d have heard about that.”

“Not if the queen was keeping it quiet to avoid a panic.” Beer Man’s chest puffed out. “I have a cousin who knows a girl who works at the palace, and she said there was a huge commotion on the first night that the queen covered up.”

“We’d know if the Empyrean’s sister was missing, Roger! You’re drunk, mon.”

“So what? It doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

Faron frowned, adjusting her head wrap so that it hid more of her hair. The half-finished meal in front of her no longer looked appetizing. She turned her face away from it, and from the men, hoping they would leave before she did.

“Hey,” whispered Reeve, touching her wrist for attention. “What’s wrong?”

“Rumors are traveling farther across the island than the queen might have wanted,” Faron whispered back before summarizing everything she’d just overheard. “We have to let the queen know that she has to address this. Nationally, rather than locally. Otherwise…”

Instead of dying down in the wake of the Summit, things seemed to be getting worse. And if the unrest had spread across the island rather than being limited to the capital, that was dangerous. The last thing that San Irie needed was to fall into a civil war with Langley circling like a vulture, trying to awaken the First Dragon and Rider.

This whole night had been a mistake.

“Listen, maybe we should go back to the—”

“I hear music,” Reeve said suddenly, wrapping up the bones of his chicken and tossing them into the nearby wastebasket. “Want to dance?”

“Now?” Faron asked. Though she’d barely touched her own food, she couldn’t deny the excited thump of her heart at the idea of one more distraction. “Here? Don’t we have more important things to—”

“Yes, now,” Reeve interrupted. His hand touched her wrist again and then, when she didn’t pull away, wrapped around it. Faron glanced down at the point of contact and then up at him, confused and strangely warm. He didn’t blink, and neither did she. “Listen, I’m not ready to go back to that house yet. So let’s just stay out a little while longer. Okay?”

This was so out of character for him that Faron knew without asking that he was doing this for her. She just didn’t know why he would do it, and her heart was pounding too loudly for her to gather her thoughts. She looked back down at their hands, and her gaze stayed there. “Okay.”

The closer they got to the thumping call of the music, the more the beat seemed to slide through Faron’s body, energizing her legs, her hips, her heart. The anxiety of what she’d overheard fell away, replaced by simple joy. Her hand was in Reeve’s, and she refused to waste time questioning why she didn’t mind. Under the cover of darkness, wrapped in the blanket of melody, nothing mattered. Nothing but this.

An open field appeared at the end of the block, and a crowd was milling across the grass, drinking beer and listening to a live band set up in the center of it all. A woman strummed a cuatro, the small guitar keeping perfect time with the vibrating thump of her companion’s steel drum. Another two musicians played an abeng horn and a tambourine, respectively, and the final one sang a bright, unknown song in the heavy patois common in the countryside. Faron saw adults dancing, laughing, talking as the makeshift party brought the community of Seaview together beneath the half-moon.

Reeve grinned at her and Faron grinned back as she tugged him into the fray. Once she found a clear patch of grass, she whirled around to face Reeve, feeling strangely shy. With the moon lining his face in silver and shadows, he looked like a different person, unknowable and strange.

But then he smiled and he was Reeve, frustratingly familiar. Comfortingly constant.

“Ready to watch me make a fool of myself?” he asked, squeezing her hand.

Faron squeezed back. “You always make a fool of yourself.”

They danced. Neither of them was any good, but that just made things more interesting. More fun. Between her obligation to the queen, her obligation to the country, her obligation to her family, and her obligation to the gods, Faron rarely had time for something so simple and wholesome. To just be a girl, holding hands with a boy, bouncing up and down as if that were dancing.

Her cheeks hurt from laughing so hard, and, when Reeve tried to spin her, she nearly swiveled right off her feet and into the grass. He danced like a chicken with his head cut off, all flailing limbs and wide-open mouth, winking when she bent over cackling. Her cheeks hurt, her ribs hurt, but her chest was light, full of nothing but the music and the starlight and the surprisingly bright presence of this stupid, stupid boy.

Impulsively, she threw her arms around his waist between songs, pressing her cheek against his chest. “Thanks for this. I’m having a good time.”

Reeve froze for a moment, clearly shocked, but then he hugged her back. “I’m glad. I could tell that you needed it. You looked…” He cleared his throat. “I don’t like to see you look like that, is all.”

She didn’t have the words for how badly she had needed this, so she pressed even closer for as long as she dared before letting go. He was a good hugger, she told herself, and it had been ages since she’d gotten one. That was all. She gestured toward a nearby bag juice cart and Reeve nodded, wandering closer to the band while she went to get them some drinks. There was a line at the cart now that the set had paused, and Faron joined it with a small sigh.

She tipped her head back to look at the stars and watched them twinkle uncaringly up above. She hoped that they were watching over Elara, too. She hoped that Elara was safely looking up at these same stars and maybe thinking of her. She was so happy in this moment that all she wanted was to share some of that joy with her sister. Faron smiled at the thought of how Elara would have nagged at her for sneaking out of the queen’s house just to go to some party, barely disguised and unnecessarily reckless. How she would have chided Reeve for going with her. How she would have gotten dragged along anyway and ended up having more fun than she’d be willing to admit.

Gods, she wanted her sister back.

Faron was somber by the time she collected the bag juices. Reeve took his with a grateful smile that fell when he looked at her face. “What’s wrong?”

“I miss Elara,” she confessed.

“I miss her, too,” Reeve replied. “Even though no one has ever broken a bond between a dragon and a Rider before, I thought for sure we’d have found something that would allow her to come back by now. Over there… she’s not safe.”

Faron bit a hole into her bag juice, let the cool, fruity flavor moisten her tongue. “You lived there for almost thirteen years, but you talk about Langley like an Iryan. Is it really so dangerous?”

Instead of answering right away, Reeve watched the band with a furrow in his brow. The musicians were mingling with the crowd, taking requests, laughing as they prepared for the next set, but Faron knew that Reeve didn’t really see them. What she didn’t know was if he would actually share what was on his mind, even on this night when the tentative companionship between them felt fragile but real.

“Langley is my home. Even without…” He gestured into the distance, to encompass the pain the Iryan people still felt from the war. The wounds that Langley had caused. “It was all I knew for a very long time. But because it was my home, I know that it could be better than it is. I see its flaws, its corruption.” His fingers tightened around his bag juice. “After the war, I looked up the names of the soldiers who had died in the final battle. I looked up their faces, their families. I see it all every time I close my eyes. I wonder if I did the right thing, if there had been a different way to do the right thing, if those deaths were worth everything that came after. If my country can truly be good, or if it will only find new ways to be cruel. If San Irie will ever feel like home. If I’ll ever be allowed to find a home here. If I even deserve it.”

Faron’s hand was on his arm before she’d made the conscious decision to move. Reeve’s smile was fleeting.

“I don’t mean to complain. I just… Elara is not seeing Langley at its best, and I don’t know how much worse it’s gotten since I left. That’s why I worry. She’s too good for a place like that.”

“You’re not complaining,” Faron said softly. “I asked. And you never… You’ve never told me any of this.”

“You’re the Childe Empyrean. If we stack our burdens against each other’s, you’ll win every time.”

“That doesn’t mean we’re not both carrying them.”

Reeve looked at her then, and Faron could no longer feel the chill of the bag juice in her hands. His eyes were bright, and for once it didn’t feel alien and alarming, that soft blue shade. Those were Reeve’s eyes, the same boy who had forgone sleep to help her sister; the same boy who had dragged her to this party because he could tell she needed it; the same boy who had taken the time to learn her, despite her barbed words and poisonous glances. This was her sister’s best friend, the Langlish traitor, the smug intellectual, the silent guardian.

Faron had seen Reeve Warwick almost every day for the last five years, but this was the first time she had ever really seen him. The first time she had ever liked what she saw.

The band launched into another song, a fast-paced version of the Iryan national anthem. Reeve laughed and held out a free hand.

“Shall we dance?” he asked, azure eyes eclipsing every bright star in the sky.

Faron cleared her throat. Took his hand. Heard the pounding of her heart, louder than the steel drum. “Okay.”