The Dragoneer Trilogy

by Vickie Knestaut

  “They will get only sorrow for their troubles," she said.

  Prince Aymon leaned back against his chair. “Sorrow? Like that felt by the families of the fallen?”

  Trysten swallowed. She forced herself to lock her gaze on the Prince’s look of agitation and disdain.

  “This is not a matter of pride,” the Prince continued. “This is not a game. Not a test. This is a battle. A war. And you are the first objective in this war, and it pains me to say this, but our defensive position is rather weak at the moment.”

  “You said reinforcements are coming.”

  Prince Aymon nodded and sat up again in his chair. His discomfort was starting to be a bit unsettling.

  “They will be here. But will they be enough?” he asked.

  “We have a plan.”

  Prince Aymon snorted. “My mentor was a sour old man bound together by scar tissue and rage. The first lesson he taught me was that plans are as indispensable as they are useless.”

  Trysten’s brow furrowed in confusion at the contradiction.

  “You must have a plan. Or you get fiascos like today, where you lose half your wild horde in a battle that ends in a draw. Today was a waste, Trysten. A wild waste. If you and Muzad had made a plan before taking flight, then it still would have ended in a draw most likely, but more men and more dragons would have returned, and we’d be in a stronger position. Instead, we’re reduced in forces, and the enemy has been emboldened by our defeat.”

  “You said draw,” Trysten said, still slightly confused.

  “If you didn’t win, then you lost.”

  Trysten swallowed hard. It did feel like a loss.

  “A plan isn’t enough. You encountered things you didn’t expect. Things didn’t go your way. The enemy learns and adapts. They are not a nameless, faceless force to be turned back like a fire, a wind, or a storm. They are free-thinking men who, with every step, are imagining new ways to kill you and destroy your forces. When they get here, they will throw things at us we didn’t plan for. Things we couldn’t plan for. We will be forced to think on our feet, adapt. Plans are worthless. But planning is essential, and there is a better plan than the one we've got.”

  “Make your point,” Trysten said. "This is taking time I don't have to waste. What are you trying to say?"

  “They are fighting to capture you. We remove you from the field of battle, then there is no reason to assault Aerona. They will turn back,” Aymon said, nodding as if he couldn't agree with himself more.

  He leaned forward and placed an elbow upon the table. The corner of his eyes twitched slightly as he struggled to bury the pain in his expression.

  “Come with me to the mother city, and no one has to die, Trysten.”

  She took another deep breath. Her chest felt tight. Her palm went to the hilt of the sword and her fingers wrapped around it absently. “You can’t assure me that no one will die.”

  Prince Aymon leaned back. He reached out for his cup, grasped it, and rotated it a quarter of a turn before letting it go and turning back to Trysten.

  “There are no guarantees. I can’t assure you that no one will die any more than I can assure you that we will win if you stay and fight. I can only assure you that if you stay, people will die. Many people will die. Many of your people will die. Their dragons, too.”

  Her fist clenched even tighter in agitation around the hilt of her sword. The scabbard rubbed against her hip.

  “It is the army that will bring about death. Not me,” Trysten seethed.

  Prince Aymon leaned forward again. This time he hardly bothered to hide the pain on his face as he shifted his weight off his thigh and propped himself up on his elbow. “Yes, but I’m giving you a chance to save these people. They don’t have to die. And even if by the wisdom of dragons we are able to hold out against this army and survive the week, we will not be safe. The Originals will only come back. A bigger army. Something even—”

  “No!” Trysten said and slammed her own hands down upon the table. “Stop it, Aymon. I’m no idiot. I know that if the Originals really wanted to take me away, there would be no stopping them. How could I stand up against them if all nineteen of them were to whisk into this village right now and try to take me?”

  Prince Aymon’s gaze dipped to her chest where the pendant lay beneath her armor.

  Trysten stood upright. Her hand went to the pendant. Her arms nearly trembled with the effort to resist the urge to rip off her bodice and pull the pendant out from beneath her tunic. Her skin itched with a sudden flush of heat.

  “The pendant?” she asked.

  “I heard you are wearing it now,” the Prince said as if finding it curious.

  “Is that it? They can't simply take me away because of the pendant? They have to get me to agree to leave?” Trysten asked.

  Prince Aymon didn’t answer for a few seconds, then he shrugged and sat back in his chair, pain crossing his face.

  “Help me up, please.” He extended a hand to Trysten.

  “What do you know about the pendant?” Trysten asked as she held out her hand.

  Prince Aymon gripped her hand and allowed himself to be pulled to a standing position. “I know that it is a powerful talisman. But it is also like those spear launchers. They are powerful too, but only when armed and used correctly.”

  “They can’t touch me. Not while I’m wearing the pendant, can they?”

  Trysten steadied the Prince on his feet, then he limped over to his cot and sat with a groan. He lifted his injured leg onto the cot, then settled into it.

  “Are you familiar with the Order of Eternal Wings?” he asked.

  She suffered a moment of surprise, then had to stifle an urge to chuckle at such an absurd name. She shook her head.

  “They are a religious order. A group of men and women who wander about from city to city—”

  “The Strolls?” Trysten asked.

  Prince Aymon leaned back until he was horizontal against the cot. “Yes. Some people call them the Strolls.”

  “They came through here once when I was a little girl. They made me uneasy," she said as she recalled their tattoos.

  “Their odd manner of dress aside, they have a few pendants, and their practitioners have managed to incorporate them into a variety of rites.”

  “But only my mother and I—”

  “There are dragoneers among them," Aymon said. "They see the dragoneers as direct descendants from the Originals. They are priests. They are holy men. And women. What I know of the pendants I have learned from them. I cannot see its true nature.”

  Prince Aymon let out a grin as he closed his eyes. He looked suddenly quite pale. “They say I am not a true believer.”

  “Really? The son of the man who has banned them?” Trysten retorted.

  “They are not banned. They are just not allowed to beg.”

  “Begging has been outlawed now in the kingdom? All of these rules are hard to keep up with," she asked, trying and failing to keep her disdain at bay.

  “Of course not," he said. "They are not allowed to beg. They frighten people. It is for their own good. The law is meant to protect them. But that is neither here nor there. My point is that I have heard of... priestesses among them who have managed to use the pendants in certain ways. They have given the bearers the strength of dragons. Flight. Firebreath.”

  Trysten crossed her arms over her chest. Now she felt as if she were being made fun of. “You don’t believe that, do you? People flying through the air without dragons?”

  Prince Aymon rested his forearm against his brow. He opened one brown eye and stared at Trysten. “Not flight like that. Flight like...”

  “Like?”

  His eye drifted closed. He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. They’re a bit eccentric, and it’s probably for show as it is. But the point I’m trying to make is that there is probably some truth to their stories. Not that they’ve unlocked the abilities, but that they know of them. They may have an inkling of what
the pendants are capable of... in the right hands. And I am fairly certain your hands are the right ones.”

  Trysten let her hands fall to her side as if she suddenly had no use for them, no idea of where to put them.

  “It’s quite possible to believe that putting that pendant around your neck has saved your life.” A wry grin teased at the corner of Prince Aymon’s lips.

  “What?” Trysten asked.

  “It’s nothing,” Prince Aymon said.

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s just the irony of it, that’s all. You may have saved your own life by putting on that pendant. It may very well be the thing that protects you from the Originals. At the same time, if you were to fall in battle...”

  “That thought has already occurred to me.”

  Prince Aymon’s eye opened. “My men already have orders to burn your body and scatter your ashes should you die in battle. I strongly recommend that you give similar orders to your own men... To your own people.” His eye drifted shut again.

  “And what of the pendant?”

  “What of it?”

  “What are your men to do with it if I should fall?”

  “Return it to me, of course.”

  “Return it to you? You make it sound like I stole it,” Trysten said.

  Prince Aymon did not respond. He laid still on his cot, his breathing slow and rhythmic. It went on long enough that Trysten began to consider leaving.

  “To be clear,” the Prince finally said, “here is our situation. The Originals will destroy Aerona to get to you. Your options are to fight here, where we are vastly outnumbered, or fall back to the mother city where we can mount a proper defense for you while sparing Aerona the slaughter that is approaching from the horizon. And to add to it all, if you should fall with that pendant about your neck, you risk becoming one of them.”

  Trysten took a deep breath. “You are mistaken.”

  Prince Aymon’s face grew still. The constant tease of pain dropped away and left him looking almost a little worried. “How is that?” he asked without opening his eyes.

  “If the Originals truly wanted me to go with them and they could not force me against my will, then the one who spoke to me would have explained what it is they want. He did not.”

  The Prince opened his eye once more. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

  “You can’t force me to go with you to the mother city. Not now. So you have made up stories and threatened and cajoled me to go with you. You can’t drag me along on a chain, as you said, and so you try to gain my cooperation by telling me stories, like the parents who tell children that the Originals will steal away the misbehaving children and feed them to wild dragons.”

  “It would be a different matter if an Original stood in the room while the parents told such a story, would it not?” Prince Aymon asked.

  “But the Originals haven’t tried to do such a thing," Trysten answered. "They haven’t tried to convince me of anything. They made an offer. That is all. It isn’t me that they’re after.”

  “Oh?” Prince Aymon said. A grin widened on his face as if she were but a silly little child. “Please, then, enlighten me. What is it that the Originals are after?”

  Trysten let out a pent-up breath. “I don’t know. But until they also come up with fake excuses as to why I should flee with them for my safety, I don’t think we have a thing to worry about.”

  Prince Aymon turned his head to the side and stared at Trysten with both eyes. “Tell that to my fallen riders.”

  “It was the army that killed them, Aymon. Not the Originals. Not Muzad with his knee-jerk strategies aimed to humiliate me. Not even you, full of your misleading threats and royal pride that closed the ears of your men to my warnings. It was the army."

  “You wear their sword at your side,” he said. “You have their pendant around your neck. They are trophies you have taken after you emerged victorious from a battle in which they tried to kill you, and you mean to tell me that they are not the ones we have to worry about?”

  Trysten reached down and grabbed the hilt of the sword, to still it, to claim it.

  “We don’t know what the Originals want. I can’t react to an assumption of their intent, especially not an assumption based on your imagination. I can only fight the enemy I see."

  Prince Aymon turned his face back toward the top of the tent. He closed his eyes. “I have learned that I don’t have to ask a charging army what its intent is.”

  Trysten looked at the ground and shook her head.

  "You have cared to learn nothing about me, Aymon, satisfied with your own preconceived judgments," she said quietly. "Don't expect me to take your word for things you cannot possibly know. Despite my experiences with you and your hordesmen, I don’t expect that everyone with power will challenge my authority. I will fear the Originals when I know they mean me harm, not when you tell me to."

  Prince Aymon’s eye snapped open. A little color filled in his cheeks.

  Trysten held his gaze for a long moment, pinning him to his cot. Then she turned and left without another word.

  Chapter 20

  Trysten stormed into the weyr. Clusters of weyrboys and hordesmen gathered around several of the stalls. Their presence indicated which dragons were in trouble. Not that she needed to know. The pain struck her hard as soon as she walked in.

  Elevera stood tall in her stall and stared at Trysten. She swept her face over to a stall across the aisle. The hordesmen and weyrboys were arranged around the edge of the stall, leaning on the half-wall.

  Trysten stopped outside of the stall, and the hordesmen parted for her. Inside, Galelin stooped over the pale pink of Belara’s belly as she lay on her side. Her breathing came in rapid, panting bursts that slowed to match the breath rate of the other dragons. It lasted a minute, perhaps, and then she broke back into her ragged pant.

  “This would be easier if you weren’t here right now, Trysten,” Galelin said without looking up.

  “How are they?”

  Galelin pressed a square of fabric against Belara’s belly, then looked up long enough to signal one of the weyrboys to enter. He scurried in and placed his hand over the bandage as Galelin indicated.

  “They are like dragons that have been through a particularly rough battle,” Galelin said, then pushed himself to his feet. His knees popped, and he shuffled to the back of the stall where his supplies sat atop the tack trunk, in two wooden boxes with braided leather handles on each side.

  Trysten took a deep breath. “Casualties?”

  Galelin opened the lid on one of the boxes and pulled out a clay jar. He studied the markings on it for a second, and then put it back before pulling out a different one.

  “None as of yet,” Galelin said. He turned around and watched his feet as he stepped between Belara’s forelegs. “But I dare say that things would be a bit smoother if these dragons weren’t trying to impress their dragoneer at the moment.”

  He gestured at Belara with his free hand as she began to pant, unable to hold the synchronous breathing of the horde. She wasn’t the biggest dragon in the horde, or the most fierce, but she’d always been steady, reliable, and a delight to see in the sky with her pink scales and a wash of bright green along her wings.

  “What of Avice’s dragons?”

  Galelin dropped to his knees too quickly. He grimaced, then hid his pain by making a show of pulling the wide, flat cork from the mouth of the clay jar.

  “Several of Muzad's dragons didn’t make it back. One of them won’t leave again until she’s carried out on a funerary platform.”

  Trysten closed her eyes and lowered her face.

  “Please, Trysten,” Galelin said. “It’s your weyr, but I need these dragons to focus on healing right now.”

  She looked up. All of the hordesmen and weyrboys stared at her, including Brand, Belara’s rider. His face was creased in worry, a near pleading panic for Trysten to leave.

  “If you need anything...” She stepped back fro
m the stall.

  “I’ll send someone to your cottage,” Galelin said as he rubbed his fingers inside the jar, then wiped the pasty-looking goo on the back of a strip of linen.

  She caught sight of Paege, at the back of the weyr, sitting on the stool next to Maejel’s stall. He sat with his arms over his chest, a sword hanging from his hip. He stared at her with no expression on his face.

  Trysten clapped her hands once to get everyone’s attention. “All right. Listen up. Everyone who is not needed by Galelin at this moment, I want you to go out and report to Tuse. Tell him I said you are to help with the firebreak, or whatever defenses need to be built. Understood?”

  The hordesmen drifted away from the stalls and toward the head of the weyr.

  She walked to the back of the weyr to Rodden’s stall. As she approached, Paege sat up straight on the stool.

  “Sending me out to the pasture?” he asked.

  She looked into the stall at Rodden. Seeing her sword, he jumped up and began speaking an agitated stream of Western words that meant nothing to her or any of them. Trysten sighed and turned to Paege.

  “Galelin wants me out of here,” she said.

  Paege nodded once. “That makes sense.”

  "Find someone to relieve you. I want to talk to you. I'll be down by the river."

  "Yes, ma'am," he dipped his head in her direction. "I'll be there as soon as I can."

  Trysten smiled and left the weyr. Fish and birds, why couldn't the Prince and his infernal hordesmen be as easy to get along with as Paege? She took a deep breath and looked up. The sun felt good on her face as she turned toward the river.

  Chapter 21

  The shores of the Gul river were rarely empty. When the weather was pleasant, as it was that day, Trysten could typically find people fishing or dragging nets through the shallow waters. Farther down the river, people would be hunting hares in the grassy meadow that spread out behind the village. If nothing else, she often encountered children playing in the water or among the rocks, screaming and laughing, chasing each other as Trysten had done with Paege and the other village children when they were young.