“You completed the course?”
I nod and hand over Cyar’s pages, guilt threatening to swallow me whole. But I don’t let it show. I can’t let it show. Father watches with brow raised, glancing at the runway. Skeptical?
I rub at my neck. Then stop.
Torhan studies the map. “We’ve finished our third quarter reviews, Athan, and I’m pleased to say that in academics you have the highest grade here. Nearly a perfect hundred in every subject.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Mathematics has always come easily to me, since I was a child. For a long time, my mother was the only one who knew about my gift. She said it was our secret. She’d kneel before me, begging me not to tell anyone else the truth. She said he’d take me away.
I knew who He was.
But I didn’t know where he’d take me.
She wept when, of course, he did find out, when he finally saw me as more than a useless third son and lured me into the Academy testing with a promise of airplanes. I was too young to understand their war over me. Now I know, and I’m doing my best to honour her plea, to not let him take me any further from her, into those graves that certainly already have my brothers’ names on them.
The way I have it, they all think I’m quite clever on the ground, brilliant with numbers and angles, but a lousy pilot in the air.
Tragic.
Torhan clears his throat. “Your flying, however…”
Here it comes. I don’t dare look at Father.
“Your flying needs a bit more work, and that landing today was proof of it. Careless. You won’t make Top Flight with lazy maneuvers.”
“I know, sir, but it’s difficult to remember everything at once.”
“Not a good trait for a fighter pilot.” Torhan frowns. “A shame.”
“Who’s in highest standing for Top Flight?” Father asks, as if he doesn’t already know.
“Cyar Hajari,” Torhan replies.
“And when Hajari makes Top Flight?”
“He’ll be training with the officer corps, of course. We have high hopes for him in the Karkev campaign.”
“Very good.” Father’s gaze returns to me, cool, pointed. “It’s unfortunate you won’t be joining him on the frontlines. He’ll have to find someone else to watch his back.”
I nod and shrink a few inches on the inside.
I hate the very idea of it.
A transport plane flies in low, halting our conversation. It glides onto the tarmac, flaps raised, smoke hissing from the wheels.
“Athan might yet pull it together,” Torhan suggests once the noise fades. “I’ve seen it happen. Some pilots take more time before everything clicks in the air.” Apparently he’s covering for me now. I’d like to be grateful, but it also feels a bit like unasked for pity, which annoys me.
“Then it had better click soon,” Father observes, sharp, and I barely stop my hand from rubbing my neck again.
Torhan gives me a thin smile. “I’d best get back to the office.”
A convenient excuse, and he departs. We stand in silence. I know Father hoped for a better report. He’s been waiting years for one. But he refuses to pull strings for me or my two older brothers. As he likes to say, we’re not princes, we’re entitled to nothing, and therefore we can very easily lose it all if we don’t play our cards right. Which I’ve been doing an excellent job at.
Father adjusts his cap to block the rising sun, the silver fox emblem on it catching light. “You have leave the rest of the week to join us in Valon,” he says. “We’re launching the Impressive for her first sea trial this afternoon, to coincide with the Victory Week celebrations.”
“You want me there, sir?”
“Your mother requested it.”
He stresses “mother” to be sure it wounds, but it isn’t necessary. Of course he doesn’t want me there. He probably thinks I should stay here and practice hard until my piloting skills magically click.
He meets my eye, his steel gaze slightly shadowed by the peak of his cap, and I see the detachment there. It’s louder than any spoken word. It holds the weight of continual disappointment, perhaps an edge of bitterness, cutting me raw in a clean, precise line. I wait for him to say more—what, I don’t know—but I wait. There’s always something like desperation when I’m standing a foot from him. Like maybe he’ll finally say the thing I need to hear and life will make sense. Like maybe I’ll finally feel like his son.
Like maybe he’ll just pull out a gun and shoot me and get it over with.
But all he says is, “The flight leaves at nine. Bring Hajari if you’d like.”
Another cruel reminder that I only have my best friend until the day we graduate, and unless things change soon, and drastically, it will be goodbye to the one person in the world who’s my true ally.
And Father knows it.
With a curt nod, he turns and strides for the office building beyond.
I walk back for the round hangar, where early morning mechanics are muttering to each other, tools striking metal and ringing off walls, the air smelling like leftover kerosene from night lamps. Cyar waits patiently, pretending not to notice whatever’s taken place outside. He’s good at that.
I shed my gear—gloves, boots, charcoal-toned flight suit—and place them inside my locker, next to my notebooks about strategy and tactics, beside pencil sketches of birds and airplanes and mountain huts I’d like to construct by hand someday. And in the middle of it, taped to the door, a photograph of me and my two older brothers balancing on a rock by the sea—young and scrawny and somehow smiling all at once. Father gave it to me when he left me here. “Nothing’s gained without sacrifice” it says on the back.
It’s what he said to us during the teeth-rattling nights spent hiding from shells. What he said to us when our encampments gave way to mud like soup in the summer, flies crawling into your nose and into your mouth while you slept. It’s what he said to his men before they came back split apart and soaked with blood, skin flayed like fish, bones scattered and buried in graves from one end of Savient to the other.
For a long time, I convinced myself this picture was proof of his love. Some bit of regret when he realized he was leaving his eleven-year-old son alone, five hundred miles away from home in a grey-walled dormitory room with nothing warm or familiar. I wanted to believe he’d miss me. I wanted to believe it meant something else.
But now I’m seventeen and I know it’s only ever meant exactly what it says.
Nothing’s gained without sacrifice.
That’s it. That’s all it is, and worse than that, I’m beginning to suspect it’s the goddamn truth.
I slam the door shut with a fist.
2
AURELIA ISENDARE
Etania
It’s a day for escape, and I’m determined.
My mare, Ivory, is my sole friend in the early morning plot, galloping us hard through royal Northern forest without a flicker of protest. Most horses might balk to be alone, but I’m certain she enjoys our madcap rides as much as I do. She’s all curious energy and pricked ears as we veer off onto a forgotten path, her fur warm beneath me since I didn’t bother with a saddle. Fallen trees from winter winds litter the trail, their stark branches broken and skeletal, much larger than I should be jumping without proper tack. But I count my strides—one, two, three!—and Ivory, the most darling mare in all the world, forgives when I get it a hair wrong, sailing us over with perfect ease. I wish the jumps were even higher. I’m wild for a thrill, and my heart matches Ivory’s eager hoofbeats, sweat soon sticking beneath my braided hair.
Once far enough, I half-halt on the reins and Ivory shifts to an easy trot. A clearing opens ahead, nestled at the foot of the brown peaks, the field thick with winter-yellowed grass trampled by snow and rain, insects flitting between dry stalks of thistle. I dismount and tie Ivory to the narrow trunk of a young chestnut tree.
There.