The dragons stared, their heads low, watching and waiting to see what Trysten would do. They wanted the sky, and anything else was a waste of time.
The sound of heather brushing against leggings caught Trysten's attention. She turned around to find Paege approaching.
"Poekan said you wanted to see me out here?" he asked.
Trysten looked back to the dragons. Now that Paege was here, she could get started. She was going to test the dragons to see how far her powers could go.
"You saw what happened yesterday when our riderless dragons rose up out of the yard and attacked the Western hordes," she began.
Paege stuffed his hands into pockets of his tunic. He stepped into the triangle formed by the troughs and nodded. "I did. How could anyone miss that?"
Trysten swallowed. She looked him right in the eye, held his gaze, and wished, for some reason she couldn't name, that it was cooler out, but yesterday's heat had remained through the night.
"I did that," Trysten said. "I was responsible."
"I figured as much," Paege said. He rocked back on his heels slightly and looked around at the dragons as if looking at a collection of tools and wondering how she had used them.
"We have to figure out how I did it. It's the only way we can defeat the army."
Paege snapped his attention back to her. "You mean you don't know how you did that?"
"It's like when the dragons roared at Quiet Creek. Even Muzad's dragons. I don't know exactly how I did it, but I know they were responding to me," she explained.
Paege looked down into the water filling one of the troughs. In the remains of the night, his black eye seemed as dark as the scale she kept in her pocket. For a second, she wanted to step up to him and touch it, to put her fingers on it.
What a fool he could be at times, but he did it because of her. He threw himself at Muzad because of how Muzad had treated her. And though she had never been quite able to get the complete or factual story out of anyone, his previous black eye had come as a result of defending her against the words of Issod before he had fallen in battle.
"Well," Paege said, and then looked back to her. "How do you propose to do this, then?" He looked out at the dragons. "How are you going to... What exactly are you going to do?"
Trysten shrugged. "I guess I'm going to see what I can do."
"How can I help?" Paege asked.
Trysten shrugged again.
Paege stared at her a moment more. His brow furrowed a bit. "I was told I should meet you out here right away. What do you want me to do?"
"Just be here in case I need help. The truth is..." Trysten looked past the dragons, out toward the empty expanse of the plains. Then as if unable to help herself, she looked to the west, to the low bruise of mountains on the last of the night sky. The bruise from which an army would soon crawl.
"The truth is that I just didn't want to try this alone. It frightens me a bit. I can't explain it," she said.
Paege stared at her. Back in the village, a rooster crowed, and it sounded like the most ridiculous thing ever. It seemed so absurd at the moment that Trysten had to work to keep from giggling.
"What?" Paege asked.
"Nothing, just the rooster. It keeps crowing every morning, not giving a wild thought to any army. For a moment, I wanted to be a rooster," she said.
Paege arched an eyebrow, then shook his head. "I can't imagine you as a creature that can hardly fly. If ever a human was meant for the sky, it is you."
Chapter 32
Trysten inclined her head slightly and was simply thankful for a moment. She took a deep breath, then looked slowly left to right, across the crowd of expectant dragons.
"How did you do it?" Paege asked.
"Do what?"
"The firebreath. With the Western dragons."
Trysten shook her head. "I don't know. It just happened."
She closed her eyes and took another deep breath to calm herself. When she opened her eyes again, she found herself staring at a deep gray dragon that had been captured the day before. Trysten focused on her, staring into the dragon’s blue eyes and opened herself up to the beast. The dragon's thoughts and feelings came rushing in like a bucket overfilled with water. She was curious and a bit sore around her wings. Pain throbbed lightly along her right flank where an arrow had crushed a scale before it skipped off.
Trysten closed her eyes and pictured the dragon opening her wings, holding them up and wide in display.
A whoosh of air stirred before her.
“Wow,” Paege muttered. “Did you do that?"
Trysten opened her eyes. The gray dragon’s wings began to sink and fold now that Trysten was no longer concentrating on the image of her wings unfolded.
She nodded.
“Wow,” Paege repeated. “How did you do it? Do you just give her a command? Just think it?”
“I pictured it, then held the picture in my mind. But it’s not that simple. I have to... open myself up. It’s...” She shook her head. “I don’t have the words to explain it. It’s more than just giving a command.”
"Oh. Is this like when I couldn't get Elevera to bond with me because I couldn't open myself up to her?" Paege asked.
Trysten nearly cringed with the thought of the time she tried to get Paege and Elevera to bond, right before Aeronwind died. "It's like that. But not the same. It's not just opening myself up to one dragon, but staying open to all of them. It's... hard. I feel their wounds. All of them. Every arrow and spear, every rough landing."
Paege flinched. "I didn't know that you felt their wounds. It explains a lot though."
"Like what?" Trysten asked, tilting her head and watching all of the dragons do the same.
"Like how wrung out you are after a battle. I've seen you jerk in the saddle and didn't understand why. It must be awful. How can you stand it?" He stepped closer to her as if to guard her or protect her from more pain.
"Sometimes I barely can," she whispered. "But I also know their joy. Their peace. The exhilaration of flying on great gulps of air. I wouldn't trade that for anything."
"Can you make more than one dragon lift her wings?" Paege asked.
The gray dragon had already folded her wings against her back. Trysten took another deep breath, shuffled her weight from foot to foot, then closed her eyes and pictured all of the dragons opening their wings, spreading them wide, as she had with the gray one.
“Good,” Paege said. “Now can you make them all do it?”
Trysten opened her eyes. The gray one from before stood with her wings open. The rest of the dragons stared at her with a mixture of confusion and curiosity. They weren’t sure what she was doing. No one had ever interacted with them like this before.
“I’m trying,” Trysten muttered. She closed her eyes, took another deep breath, and made an effort to open herself up to all of the dragons around her. She pictured the field to be a bowl dotted with dragons, and all of their thoughts and feelings and sensations ran down the sides to her in the middle.
The cascade of emotions and sensations threatened to overwhelm her. All of their wounds and injuries from the last battle piled up on Trysten. She gritted her teeth. Her left knee trembled with a pain that mirrored the injury felt by one of the dragons who had landed poorly to avoid crashing into another when the combined hordes all set down in the village.
Trysten gasped and snapped herself out of the spell.
“What is it?” Paege asked.
Trysten’s brow furrowed in frustration. “So many of them were hurt yesterday. It was a bit overwhelming to feel it all at once. But I can’t seem to hold them all in my thoughts,” she said with a shake of her head. “There are too many of them. It’s like trying to hold twenty cups in your two hands.”
Paege reached up and rubbed his chin through the growth of his month-old beard. His brow furrowed. "It doesn't make sense."
“What doesn't make sense?” Trysten asked.
Paege shook his head. “Yesterday, you took co
ntrol of three different hordes. Two of those hordes were mounted by hordesmen who were actively trying to counter your orders. Yet the dragons still followed you. And then you had the Western dragons attack from the other direction, and they didn't have any riders at all. You had control of far more dragons yesterday, and you were making them do things way more complicated than opening their wings."
Trysten let out a frustrated sigh. “This is different. I'm trying to make them do individual things, to respond in very specific ways. Yesterday, they were just flocking with Elevera. They were responding to her as much as me.”
Trysten looked away from Paege and out toward the captured dragons. Goose flesh rose along her arms as she recalled the moment that the first set of riderless dragons erupted from behind the roofs of the village and came tearing at the horde of Western riders descending upon the village.
She had not said a word, hadn’t thought about it all. She had merely...
“I felt it,” Trysten said. Another shiver went through her.
The dragons in the yard stirred. They shuffled from foot to foot, flicking their tails and tossing their heads as a sense of excitement and danger flashed over them and was gone like a single breeze on a summer day.
“I didn’t think about it," she continued. "I felt it. I was terrified when I realized that we couldn’t intercept the Western horde before it reached the village. I could sense that the Western dragons were readying their firebreath and I knew what they intended to do. And I was mad. I reached out to our dragons in anger and terror and frustration. And they responded. And that is how it is to be a dragon. They don’t think things through. There is no sitting around and running through scenarios in your head or trying to figure something out. They just know. Stuff pops into their heads. They knew I was terrified, that danger was approaching their weyr. They felt it through me, and they responded. I didn’t make them do anything.”
“Hmm,” Paege muttered.
Trysten looked back to him. She wanted to see in his face, to read in his expression an indication of how strange the idea was to him. How foreign was it? She needed him to be commander of the horde not simply because she needed his support, but she needed him to take charge on the back of Sone should the unthinkable happen to her or Elevera. Could he?
He didn't meet her eyes. His brow furrowed tightly, and his index finger rubbed slightly at his chin as he stared down into the dark waters of the trough. "Maybe it was because the horde was responding to a threat?" He looked up at her and she felt pinned to the vanishing dawn.
Trysten shook her head. "That's not very practical, is it?"
She turned back to the dragons. "If they will only respond to threats, to me feeling threatened, then I'll never be able to control them without riders."
"Unless you fly into harm's way, which I think is what you are planning to do," Paege said, one eyebrow raised. "Correct?"
Trysten looked over her shoulder at Paege. Every muscle in her body tightened, and she crossed her arms over her chest as if to shut herself off from the idea. She shook her head. "It wouldn't work. They would know better. They would know it was a stunt, and they'd be just as likely to look at me like I'm crazy as much as fly to my rescue, if we're talking about what I think we're talking about."
Paege shifted his weight, then folded his arms behind his back as if to brace himself for what he was about to ask.
“When the army attacks, will you be able to do it again? Will you be able to make the dragons attack the army? Will they defend their weyr?” he asked, standing as straight as any royal hordesman.
Another shiver ran through Trysten. She rubbed at her arms absently, then shook her head. “I don’t know.” She looked up at the dragons. She did know.
"It's Elevera," Trysten said.
"Elevera?" Paege asked.
Trysten turned back to him. "She's the key. It's not a matter of what I can do, but it's a matter of what we can do. Together."
Paege's expression nearly dropped into a squint, as if he was having difficulty making something out.
"What is it?" Trysten asked.
Paege stood still a second longer, then shrugged and shook his head. "It just seems odd. I mean, I can understand what you're saying about Elevera. There's no denying the connection between you two. And it is only after her display that the other dragons show her deference and fall into her horde—and it is her horde. But, it seems strange to me that if that is the case, that the Original would make an offer to you alone, and not to you and Elevera."
Trysten looked to the weyr as if she might find the Original there now, sneaking along the wall of the long building that dominated the village.
Would the Originals make an offer to Elevera? No. They couldn't. There was nothing they could offer her that would make her leave, make her go with them. She had Trysten. That was all Elevera wanted. She had her bonded rider, and she had her horde.
Trysten sucked in a gasp of air. She covered her lips with the tips of her fingers.
"What?" Paege asked. His hands left the small of his back and came out to his sides. They were in fists as if he was ready to pummel whatever had startled her.
"It's not just me that they're after. They need Elevera, too. But they know she won't go unless I go. They know she won't leave me."
"They? The army?" Paege asked.
"The Originals. Whatever it is they want, they need both of us. But they need me to agree to go with them because Elevera won't go if I don't go willingly," Trysten said quietly. Now that she had put the pieces of the puzzle together, she wasn't sure if she was relieved or more intensely afraid than ever.
Paege's eyes grew wide. "And so if one of them was to grab you, toss you over his shoulder, and just run—"
"Would you want the full wrath of Elevera and her entire horde coming down on you?"
Paege shook his head.
"They need me to agree. That is what this is about. They need me to agree to go with them so that they can have her as well. They need us both. That is why they don't run into this village and snatch me. I'm no good to them without Elevera."
Trysten turned to the west, to the gray block of mountains against the dark blue sky. She wouldn't have been surprised to see the army pop up then and there, running and screaming across the plains, bringing their attack on full now that Trysten had figured out their plan.
Paege turned around to survey the horizon by her side.
"And so the army..." he began.
"And so the army is not an invasion," Trysten said. "It's a vise meant to squeeze me into agreeing. That has been their plan all along. This army was never meant to reach Aerona, never meant to press into the kingdom. The dragons in the Carathia valley were meant to cut us off, to keep us from asking for reinforcements in the first place. All of this has been about pressuring me into agreeing to go with them."
Silence stacked up around them, like a wall circling them.
"Why?" Paege finally asked.
"I don't know. But I know they are not counting on resistance. Let's go get Elevera. I think she might be the key to this," Trysten said as she waved a hand at the dragons gathered around them.
Chapter 33
Soon, Trysten and Elevera swooped low over the secondary yard. Each of the dragons below watched intently as the alpha sped past, barely clearing the tallest of the captured dragons. They kept going, flying fast and low over the stone and heather, heading south, out toward the burial mounds.
As usual, Trysten's mind returned to the fantasy where the two of them kept turning the sky over and over in the cups of Elevera’s wings as they flew away from the responsibilities and obligations that waited for them back home. It was something she would never do, but it appealed to her all the same. If she could have anything she wished, Trysten would want the endless flight, the domain of sky. And if she asked Elevera, that is all she would want as well.
But such selfishness was not their duty, and so when enough time had passed for Paege to walk back to the sec
ondary yard, Trysten hitched her right heel against Elevera’s shoulder. The gold dragon banked around on stiff wings, then began the return flight to the village.
When they approached the yard, Paege once again stood in the small clearing formed by the troughs. He lifted his head, as did all of the dragons and a few villagers who had stopped their morning routines, and watched Trysten and Elevera own the sky.
With nothing more from Trysten than half a thought, Elevera banked and fell into an oblong circle over the secondary yard. Trysten completed two loops and thought about how to elicit a response from the dragons. She took a deep breath to steady herself even though she felt more secure in Elevera’s saddle than she felt anywhere else as if the center of the entire world rested on the backs of Elevera’s shoulders.
“Come on, Lady. Let’s do this,” Trysten whispered.
She closed her eyes and pictured the dragons below opening their wings and raising up on their hind legs. She filled her mind and heart with a longing for the sky and the clouds that scoot along beneath a dragon's dangling claws.
She opened her eyes and knew. She didn’t have to look back, but she did. She peered over her shoulder as fifty dragons lifted from the ground, pulling their stakes up behind them, and flocking to take up position behind Elevera.
Elation swept through Trysten. The dragons flooded her with joy and excitement, the peculiar sensation that they felt when flying. It was like no human feeling Trysten had ever known.
With all of the riderless dragons behind her, Trysten ordered Elevera to head off to the south again and pick up some elevation. The dragon rose into the southern sky, and despite herself, Trysten’s gaze flickered down to the burial mounds of Aerona off in the distance. Aeronwind and Trysten's grandfather and his dragon and so much history laid and watched Trysten do what had never been done before.
She closed her eyes, drew another deep breath, then pictured dozens of dragons closing in around her, sliding past her as they fell into a U formation.
Again, without having to look, she knew. She felt it. She opened her eyes and gasped to see the great dragons, free of saddles and riders, all flying around her, taking up the U formation as their stakes dangled and danced from the reins tied to their harnesses.
The Dragoneer Trilogy Page 71