It’s always cheerful.
Father stands at the front of a podium decorated with red banners and Safire flags, his hands planted on the wooden rail, his uniform grey as the iron monster before us.
“Ten years ago we brought victory,” he declares into the metal microphone, his amplified voice silencing the sailors, the docks, most of Valon probably. “Ten years ago, it was you who united these northeastern territories, forging Savient, Brisal, and Rahmet into one shining nation, glorious beneath our flag. Now we possess the most powerful ship in all the world, the greatest army and airplanes and industry. The old kings of the Royal League watch us with envy. The old empires look in awe as Savient becomes the great power in the east. And this greatness is because you knew the truth. You knew that nothing is gained without sacrifice.”
The crowd roars with appreciation—soldiers and civilians, their disparate faces a mosaic of our nation, unified by their lack of nobility from the warm flats of Rahmet to the endless farms of Brisal to the true mountainous north of Savient proper.
West of us, Northern kingdoms reign as they have for generations, entrenched in their belief that possessing a crown is the only legitimate way to rule. Never mind that they built their fancy palaces on the blood and sweat of their lowest classes, indulging in a thousand years of violent, oblivious luxury before they grew tired of trying to conquer one another and headed south instead. The Royal League is a vain sort of club for debating the merits and vices of the rest of the world in private. It requires royal blood to belong. Father doesn’t have that, but he does have coal and oil and bauxite. While they were busy hunting for treasure in the South, believing gold was power, my father was harnessing an untapped treasure in these mountains and forging something greater.
Motorized vehicles and aluminum airplanes and entire armies don’t run on jewels.
They run on petrol.
I’m sure as hell the royals are regretting the fact they wrote off the east as corrupt and useless, but it’s their loss, and now my father’s going to prove you don’t need a crown in order to last a thousand years. We have power.
“Here’s what I’ve written so far,” Cyar announces to me once the speechifying is finished and Father has stepped back from the microphone, commiserating with men in uniform. There’s a paper between his hands. “This has to be good, you know.”
We’re hiding at the back of the podium, still in Academy uniforms, watching two fighters perform show-off stunts in the empty sky. Black swords gleam on the underside of their wings, the mark of the Safire squadrons. Apparently Cyar’s girlfriend has a birthday soon and she needs a poem. He claims she’s back home in Rahmet, some beauty who’s actually agreed to kiss him and all that, but I think it’s a fraud, since I’ve never seen her picture or anything.
I lean on the rail. “Your lips are so sweet and true, your face so perfect, that sometimes I fear you’re not real,” I suggest.
He squints at me. “I see what you’re doing.”
“I’m writing poetry.”
“What if I worked in how we first met? Can I make a snake romantic?”
“Don’t.”
“But that’s how I won her heart. Haven’t I told you?”
The fighter planes do another showy loop. “You said something about a heroic stunt and a lizard and then she was yours.”
“I was eight and she was ten. I asked her if she’d like to see my snake.”
“You know how terrible that sounds, right?”
He ignores me. “And she said yes, but when I went to pull him from my bag he’d already escaped into the town pool. She thought it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen. Even went and grabbed him for me!” He gives me his triumphant smile that’s all gold, the inner amusement of his private, happy Cyar world. “I hope you get half as romantic a tale as that.”
“I pray every night.” I shade my eyes. “Look at that sway. Trim it up, would you!”
“You’re one to talk,” he replies, watching the plane too. “You can barely land without bouncing the damn thing from east to west.”
He has a point.
The Impressive blasts her deep horn, sound shuddering through our feet, and cheers swell from the dock again.
At the front of the podium, Father now has my older brothers, Arrin and Kalt, on either side of him, each in dress uniform and cap, observing the activity below. Mother and my little sister, Leannya, wait in the shade, their blond hair a mix of sun and shadow. Mother looks like one touch might bring her to tears—she hates crowds and heat and machines of war.
But Father wears his elusive half smile, still studying the giant battleship, entirely pleased. “Wait until this one leads our charge,” he says, no indication of who the observation is directed at. “Our enemies will certainly bow before forty thousand tons of Savien steel.”
And this is why I don’t plan to make Top Flight.
When Father looks at you with a smile, it’s a sure sign you’re in for a terrible fate.
“Or it’s a damn waste of money,” Arrin offers, arms crossed, a cigarette between his lips, already bored by the display. At least he’s sober. At twenty-five, he’s the one with the looks—tall and broad, hair the colour of sandy earth. A hero of the campaign by day and a bastard by night.
“As usual,” Father replies, “your opinions on naval matters aren’t required.”
“Then why did you bring me home from Karkev? To stand here and break a perfectly good bottle of wine on a lump of metal? I have a campaign to win.”
“Lump of metal?” Kalt, my other brother, repeats. He’s offended, a dedicated officer of the Navy, but since his voice never rises above one singular boring octave, it’s difficult to say for sure. “She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen.”
Arrin snorts, trailing smoke. “First time those words have ever left your mouth, isn’t it?”
Kalt glares at him.
Yes, Arrin never ceases to disappoint. He’s entirely unpredictable, part brilliance and part madness when it comes to both war and women. Kalt’s twenty-two and entirely the opposite— darker-haired, serious, the spitting image of Father. Indifferent to girls. His interests run the other way. Mother insists they used to be inseparable, but since it’s a claim that lacks any evidence, I’m fairly certain they’ll just end up killing each other someday. Arrin with his army and Kalt with his boats. It’s the one shortsighted thing Father has ever done, arming the two of them.
In my opinion.
“Karkev is only a sideshow,” Father informs Arrin, which is the best moment of the day. With one sentence, he’s dismissed an entire war and all of Arrin’s part in it. “It was a nest of bandits that needed to be cleaned out, nothing more. The Northern kingdoms will thank us. But the Southern continent? That will be a real campaign, Commander, and soon we’ll have these kings begging us to reckon with their disaster down there.”
Arrin recovers by putting out his cigarette on the railing. “Except that merry royal bunch will be the last to cheer you moving into their territory. You know what they say about you as it is.”
Father smiles again, and this time it falls on me, sharpening with private certainty. “Yes, but I have an ace in the South. One clever ace that will make all the difference.”
I try to go back to watching the show in the sky, but the damage is done. His pointed gaze is lethal, a probing hook that grips at my excuses and tries to pull them into the light. I’m the useless one. The one who most certainly won’t be anywhere near the frontlines. Transport, please. But suddenly I’m imagining the airplanes above us spiraling in flames, metallic tombs of charred limbs and black smoke, and I know, without a doubt, there’s a reckoning coming for me and me alone.
I avoid his gaze.