You break through the clouds and meet a shining world. Sunlight all around. The wind fights you side to side, but still you push higher. This beautiful plane won’t let you down. She’s on your side. Your ally.
15,000 feet. The birds have disappeared because even they don’t come this high. It’s just vibrating metal, endless blue. Up here in this perfect and untouched world, I see your face in the sky, Ali. Your warm eyes in the golden dawn. You’re the sky I love so much, the place I want to be, and I feel like there’s nothing that can take that away. You and I, we could run as far as we’d like and not look back. We could escape earth and beat her at her own game. Maybe I’ll fly away from here and never come back. Go west and never stop, leave all this behind.
How far to you, girl of the dawn sky?
But someone calls over the radio and the slipping western horizon betrays me. It’s getting farther and farther, and they need me here. If anyone challenges our sky, I have to be ready to fight. Today. At least for today. But I promise you, when those dark planes come for the chase, I won’t let them touch me. I won’t let them touch us, Ali. I was born in war and I will not let them even come close. We’ll go right into the smoking storm, beautiful plane and all. We’ll ignore the chaos, ignore the flaming wings and spiraling metal stars that streak through the blue. We’ll ignore the panic that scrapes like fire to get free. We’ll just keep running. Just be quick enough to stay ahead. It’s what I’ll always do. Because I have you. And I fly for you.
And that’s what it’s like, Ali, every day.
Yours always,
Athan
VIII
CHOICE
33
AURELIA
Hathene, Etania
The exam sits before me, taunting with its final questions.
They’ve allowed me to write in a secluded room of the palace, an instructor sent to oversee, his skeptical gaze and bushy brows bearing down while he circles my desk. I’ve already taken the first half—three hours of math and science, then a break, and now literature and history. It’s asking me about the Wars of Discontent, about the final terrible rout where ten thousand Etanian soldiers were lost at once, but stars, I’m tired. Everything’s blurring together.
And as always, Lark’s photographs bleed into my thoughts.
Ten thousand men lost a hundred years ago, but what about the mothers today, whose boys were murdered before that wall? Did they watch and beg? Or did they simply cover their eyes and weep? The scene plays out in my head, over and over, in different ways. Sunny. Rainy. Dusk. The soldiers line their rifles, and I’m ordering them to stop, because I’m a princess and they have to do what I say, they must, and then I’m the one being blindfolded, stuck before the wall in the hot sun, waiting for death, and then it shifts again and suddenly I’m the one holding a gun.
I’m staring at the Landorian soldier, with a gun in my hands, and I wonder if I’d shoot.
I wonder if it’s the right thing to do. If it would save the boys.
There’s a cough, and the instructor gives me another pointed look. I haven’t written a thing for at least five minutes.
What would you think about those photographs, sir? Would you care if you saw those children? Surely you would. You’re stern, yes, but perhaps you have sons yourself. Wouldn’t you protect them in any way you could? Wouldn’t you imagine them in front of the wall?
He appears offended by my stare.
I see, suddenly, in this proud and educated man, the vanity of the North, and I’m glad Lark can’t witness it. We get to read about tragedies far away and long ago. Study them in papers and presentations, debate solutions and strategies.
We don’t have to live them.
He raps his pen on the desk and I hurry down some answers, then surrender the exam.
* * *
Three days later, I find Lark alone by the target range. The air is cold and wet, feeling more like early spring than late summer. He fires a pistol at the wood boards. Over and over, like he might right the world with a single, flawless shot. The thick pine trees round him absorb light and sound.
He lowers the weapon when he spots me, and I catch the glint of hope. Of gladness to see me. When I arrive, he kisses me on the cheek and I return it. It makes me feel better about the world, because if we can be friends, then surely this negotiation is possible, and soon.
“You’re very good,” I greet in Resyan, offering him my secret at last.
His smile warms further. “Thank you,” he replies, evidently pleased to hear me speak his tongue. “You look like you have a question. What shall we discuss today?”
I stop beside him, arms wrapped about myself. “Only a small one.”
“Then ask.”
“What does your father do?”
“Ah, small question indeed.” Lark gives me a half grin, then fires a sudden shot like a show-off, making my ears burn with the sharp sound. “He’s a translator, in Rahian’s court,” he explains after. “We’re not so impressive as your mother, I’m afraid. She’s the one who claimed a Northern king’s heart—and his crown.”
I shift beneath Lark’s teasing gaze. I know how fantastical it must seem to them, that she has risen so high and they’ve remained behind, forgotten characters in a story I don’t know. I’ve always imagined that moment my parents first saw each other like a childish myth—she visiting from a foreign kingdom, beautiful, wearing Resya’s colours, and he watching from across a ball or a reception, young and handsome and with no family left. Only his books. I’m certain my father was lonely. There was no one left to stop him from marrying a woman he shouldn’t.
Why, then, did no one stop Lark from following the Nahir?
Desperately curious to hear, at last, how he ended up this way, I ask, “Did you always want to be…?”
For some reason, I can’t bring myself to say the word aloud. It’s too strange to talk of the Nahir like it is a title, a thing one can be, no different from a doctor. But it is. In Lark’s world, it is.
He pauses, sensing my meaning. “No. Not at first.”
Unsettled pain wrinkles his face.
I wait.
“My mother was a nurse,” he admits eventually, which explains certain aspects of his knowledge. “She believed in healing others. Civilians. Nahir. Even the wounded Landorian soldiers left behind by their own officers. Back then, the revolt was young, and she believed if she could save people, she could save the world.”
“Was a nurse?”
“Was.” He nods. “You can save other people, but you can’t save yourself from a misspent bullet.”
We stand in silence, in the memory of this woman—my aunt—whom I will never know.
“I’ve seen the lives that are wasted through inaction, Aurelia,” he continues after a moment, his mouth gentle around my name, like he’s holding out a flower of goodwill. “It makes little sense to you, here, I know, but I don’t want to die for no reason. I want to die with purpose. That’s why I am what I am.”
“I don’t think she died without purpose,” I say.
“You haven’t lived half your life without a mother,” he replies.
I turn away, acknowledging the wet woods so he can’t see my face. I don’t want to witness his grief, nor do I want him to see my pity.
There’s a tap on my arm after a moment.
I find him offering me the pistol. “Your turn,” he says.
I shake my head. “I don’t shoot.”
“Come on. You must. My father says your mother was the best shot he ever saw. She could shoot the tail off a cat.”
“My mother?” I make a face. “She’d hate that I’m even here.”
“And yet you are.”
His excited gaze wears me down. “One time, then,” I say, taking the pistol for the sake of our friendship.
I stretch my arms out straight, the way I’ve seen others do, and aim the pistol at the board with its large red circle. Lifeless, distant. Paint chipping from seasons of harsh weather.
“Keep steady,” Lark says. “Watch your breath. If you flinch, you miss.”
I try to still myself. Still everything.
“And you need to balance forward more. The force will knock you off your heels.”
I grimace, adjusting, standing on the balls of my feet instead, then I focus again, clutching the pistol.
One shot.