The rooftops of the Fire Nation fell away beneath me.
The girl's weight sat high on my shoulder, wrists bound behind her back, cloak slapping my thigh with each downbeat. She didn't beg. She didn't sob. She tested the rope once—clever little saw-cuts against the dragon scale armour and when it didn't give, she went still and saved her breath. Smart.
The palace stood due east, a crown of black spires and red wards rising clean above the city smog. Habit, said I should fly straight for its gates and let the stone swallow us. But for days the wards had hummed the wrong note, the old magic vibrating. Patrols returned with their counts perfect but their eyes empty, reciting their reports rehearsed in unison. Something brighter threaded the air—oiled rope, fresh-cut timber, pitch that had not seen fire yet. The smell of Siege.
I banked north instead of east, let cold air slick my scales, and felt the girl's whole body tighten against me. she felt the course change in her bones, the way prey feels a shadow. "Is this a scenic tour," she shouted, voice hoarse but steady, "or do you enjoy freezing people alive?"
"You're warmer than most cargo," I said, and kept my eyes on the horizon.
She huffed a sound that might have been a laugh. "How flattering." There was grit behind the joke.
Zaius's page came up unbidden, as it always did when I tried not to think about it.
"Superstition," I had said at the time. Zaius had smiled: relieved and unkind. "Of course," he had said. "Let us call it that until it is not."
A hawk's shadow skimmed the cloud below us and then rose, beating for my shoulder. Revik's bird. I fished three bronze clips from the seam of my pauldron and snapped them to the anklet in quick succession—silent language we'd made as boys on roofs we should not have climbed. Thin the walls. Northwest quiet. No spectacle. The hawk dipped once and peeled away, already spending my command.
The girl shifted again.
"So what am I to you?" she asked. "A prize? A problem? Or an inconvenient babysitting job?"
"An answer," I said.
"To what question?"
"Why the world keeps pretending balance is dead."
If she heard the seriousness, she didn't show it. "You need better hobbies."
"I'm told," I said dryly, but my jaw had tightened. The last Fire King to ask the world that question had put a blade in the Primal's heart to get it, and the world had answered with a millenium of destruction. In the wreckage lightning had taken up residence in my line like a scar, uncontrollably at times. Punishment for what my family had done.
I had been born to a nation fluent in war and to a throne that taught boys to sharpen fear into justice. If this girl wasn't the answer, then I'd chased an orphan through half a city because my instincts wanted a story.
We climbed to a height where the city's noises flattened. The air thinned and turned clean, Her hair streamed free of its hood and took the moon without asking—white, not pale, shot with silver like metal threads hidden in a frost. When it whipped across my knuckles I felt the prickle of storm-pressure sharpen. My hand tightened before I realized it had moved. I looked away because men have lost battles to less.
Moonlight laid a faint sheen across a ridge that should have been black. The shine wasn't water or glass. It was a line of small glints set in patient order, like teeth in a jaw. Ballistae. Not two or three to dissuade raiders. Dozens, varying heights and offsets so a single dodge would not suffice. Clever crews. Quiet crews. Men who had studied our patterns and the wind. Earthlin discipline. Willow's father minted as many engines as he did coins.
I tasted the trap the way a sailor tastes a storm on the tongue— If they assumed I would be a dutiful prince and trust the black spires and their wards. They were wrong.
The girl stilled against me.
"What is it?" she asked, and the bravado had thinned to wire.
"Quiet," I said,
She did. It is a quality I admire—obedience not to rank but to sense. For two breaths there was nothing but wind. Then a small sound bled upward through the cold. The hum of torsion ropes settling under tension, the soft complaint of wood bent and held, the tests a careful crew makes with their fingers before they touch the release. That sound lives under the skin of any man who has ever stood within reach of an engine and tried not to die.
Memories I don't indulge often pressed in at the edges. A hillside in the north where the snow clung to the ground and a line of ballistae had been dug into the ice. The sound bolts make when they chew a man in half, Revik's hand on my collar bone, dragging me into a crease of ice and cursing me for being tall.
I flattened my wings and angled us for a seam between sightlines,
"Whatever happens," I said, voice falling into command by long habit, "hold on."
"To wh—" she began, a spike of temper in it because she is made of it.
The first bolt screamed through the sky and tore a clean line in the night where my shoulder had been a heartbeat before.
The sound isn't a whistle. It is a ripping, a sudden change in the agreement between air and the thing it touches. Four more followed in a clever rhythm—one to herd, one to punish, two to convince a target that the second gap is safer than the first. Trained, then. Royal crews. Willow's.
I folded and dropped. Cloud took us in a cold fist, and the bolts that were meant for where we no longer were stitched pale scars into the vapor instead. The girl's fingers bit my neck. She did not scream. Her nails drew blood and I was perversely pleased to feel it. People who cling properly tend to keep living long enough to ask better questions.
Lightning walked along my skin in thin veins, not bright enough yet to give us away but enough to remind my body what it was. I banked hard into the seam I'd chosen and felt the pressure change as we slid between two armadas.
"Why not the palace?" the girl shouted over wind. She had caught the line—caught that I had no intention of flying for the gates.
"Because the palace is the loudest room," I said, teeth against the cold. "Answers choose quiet."
"You rehearse that kind of sentence?" There it was again, the grit. "Or is it a natural gift?"
"Curse," I said, and smiled without meaning to.
The ballista crews adjusted well. Someone down there had a mind for angles. The third volley hunted our wake instead of our path, which meant a commander who listened to the men who watched the sky, not just the ones who wore the pretty metal. The left flank lagged—less disciplined, a gap where night and arrogance took turns. The right moved like a spine, each segment correcting when the one ahead twitched. If I had trained them I would have been mildly proud. As it was, I counted their errors like debts and paid one: a slim kiss of lightning laid across the rightmost platform as we broke cloud, enough to blind the crewman with the best eyes without giving them my position long enough to triangulate. The girl flinched at the flash.
A green slash of motion caught at the edge of sight, too fast to be anything but a dragon, Willow. She was far enough not to matter yet and close enough to ruin a man's confidence if he thought too much about it. I filed her under "soon" and kept my breath on the count. The hawk brushed past us in the dark—Revik's acknowledgment.
We reached the seam I had wanted and found it thinner than I liked and more beautiful than I would admit. Beauty in combat is a dangerous indulgence, but I have never trusted a man who cannot see it. We cut through. A bolt raked the air at my right and shaved along the edge of my wing. Pain brightened everything for a breath. I banked into it and let the body remember that it was made to laugh at injuries like this. The girl's grip slipped, bit again, and held.
"Whatever happens," I said a second time.
"I'm not letting go," she snapped,
The crews below loosed again, disciplined, patient. They had misjudged one thing only: the wind's loyalty. Tonight it preferred me. I folded and rolled and felt the bolts comb past. We slid into another seam, lower now, the air warmer, the smell of pitch thicker. Between shots I heard the small off-beats that tell you a crew is tiring—breath taken wrong, a rope twisted a quarter turn more than the man meant. Fatigue makes men miss.
I could have gone straight at them then, but there were two reasons not to. The first was simple: I had a bound girl on my shoulder whose bones would not thank me for sudden heroics. The second was less simple and had been sitting behind my teeth all night: if their trap was anchored here, it was because they wanted me to commit here.
We climbed one last time to regain an altitude they couldn't comfortably touch, drew a long curve that would put us on the black shadow of the aqueduct's spine, and I felt the air change—the tiny drop in pressure. It is the breath before lightning leaves a scar.
"Hold," I said again
The next volley rose like a black staircase.
The sky ripped open.