Tyber’s hands flashed to the lip of the saddle as Rius shifted underneath him, drifting to the left and away from Merilyss with the rest of his group until they formed a diagonal line in the sky. Across the gulf of air to Tyber’s right, the dragons of the other group of recruits had done the same. They formed a large V in the air with Chanson and Merilyss at the point and a proctor bringing up the end of each arm in the V.
Beyond the other group of recruits, away and below, the King’s palace slid past. The spire of Gods’ Reach, the large, stone tower that strained to touch the sky and draw the attention of the gods, was now below Tyber’s eye level. He would never again be able to think that the spire could ever reach the gods.
A shout grabbed Tyber’s attention. On his right, one of the recruits shoved at the lip of his saddle, screaming at his dragon. His face burned red as he raised his fist. Tyber clenched his teeth and drew in a quick, hissing breath as the rider struck the dragon’s light gray neck. She plunged her head forward some, then rocked side-to-side. The recruit yelped, lunged forward, and wrapped his arms around the dragon’s neck.
His panicked eyes caught Tyber’s own.
The air and rush of Rius’ wings washed over Tyber like a soft thunder, if thunder was something that could be draped across the shoulders and worn like a mantle. It drowned out whatever it was the recruit had screamed.
The other proctor, Olsid, pulled up aside the recruit on his rust-colored dragon. He yelled something at the young man.
“I want down!” the recruit yelled in return. “Get me down now!”
Olsid yelled something back.
“No!”
Tyber turned away to spare the young man some dignity. As he did so, his eyes grew wide with the sight before him. They had passed over the city wall, and the outer city was quickly falling behind them. All around him and as far as he could see was a rolling expanse of soft, gray-green hills speckled with patches of pink blossoms. The landscape was broken here and there by the evening sun as it lit the stone of distant villages, low and spread along the tops of the hills. The hills spilled down to the winding path of the Wight River as it worked its way to wherever it went.
Tyber had bathed and swum in the river numerous times. He had even waded out to the center of it, chest-deep among mud and stones. But from up here, it appeared to be nothing more than a ditch reflecting back the silvery clouds and patches of blue of the sky. From the air, everything seemed so small. Small and far apart. The world stretched out wide, opening its arms to the gray haze of the horizon. It beckoned.
Tyber sat back a bit, leaning into the rhythm of Rius’ flight as he scanned the land before him. The horde that had left the yard first was dwarfed, made even smaller in appearance by the space between them. The dragons beat their wings in unison and drifted slowly to the right. Could they fly out to the edge of the kingdom? Surely they could. The kingdom was vast, stretching far beyond the walls of the city, but just how large was it? Beyond the wall of the horizon, did there lay another kingdom? It seemed impossible that he could live in the city as he did, crammed up against everyone else, all the people huddling around the wall when so much vastness surrounded them.
Why didn’t they spread out? Why not take up some of the emptiness that was available?
He began to turn around, to look back to the city. Olsid and his dragon kept pace with the panicked recruit, flying side by side. Olsid’s attention rested squarely on whatever was happening on the back of the light gray dragon.
Tyber twisted around to see what Ander was doing, but his eyes stopped on the mother city below and behind them. The wall stood tall and curved. He knew it was oval in shape, but from the back of Rius, he could actually see it. Gods’ Reach and the King’s palace were both visible in the center, but looked so tiny, marooned in the middle of the oval ring. Against the far wall, the tops of buildings were discernible, their red-tiled roofs plain against the weathered gray stone behind them. The academy was barely visible. The academy hall was tall enough, but its position near where the oval began to curve more sharply inward toward True Gate nearly hid it. What made it stand out was the lack of the red tile roof as well as the space on either side of it.
Outside the city, however, Tyber’s eyes scraped over the low, rough jumble of buildings packed around the edge of the wall. They looked like shavings, chips of stone that gathered around the blocks worked by stone cutters. The city where he lived, the city outside the wall, was nothing more than shavings. Cast-offs.
He reached back and grabbed the cantle of the saddle to steady himself, and leaned into his crooked elbow some to take in the city some more.
Now that Tyber was looking down upon the city that sat atop the confluence of the Gul and Wight Rivers, he thought it looked oddly vulnerable. Along the edge of the western sky, the low, lumpy line of the Cadwaller Mountains sat dark and brooding, like a pack of feral animals curled and sleeping.
The war with the Western kingdom had always seemed so far away. It raged each summer when the mountain passes cleared and had been fought in that manner since before Tyber had been born and would likely simmer on in some distant sky long after he died. But the enemy had always been turned back by the weyrs and hordesmen who lived in the west, at the foot of the mountains. The fighting had never made it to the mother city. When news of it spread through the streets and lanes, it had been news from a distant land, someplace so far away that it would never affect Tyber’s family in the slightest.
But now, sitting in the saddle, seeing the city and the actual edge of the kingdom at the same time threw his idea of the world on its head once again. The kingdom had a border, a line where Cadwaller met the Western Kingdom. And that line was not nearly as far away as was generally assumed. He could see it. Barely, and only on the shoulders of Rius, but it was there. Real. And it was those mountains that had swallowed up the hordes of Cadwaller’s dragons.
Tyber’s hand slipped from the cantle and rested upon the scales of Rius’ back. His eyes dropped back to the mother city, to the scatter among which his family’s cottage lay. He pressed his hand into Rius’ scaled flesh beneath him. Muscles and power shifted under his touch.
The day that Wing Master Gerig took his swell to the west was a day of great fanfare. The city gathered to see him and the brave hordesmen off. Tyber and his siblings had stood in the courtyard outside their cottage and watched them fly away, all one hundred sixty of them. The children had waved, called out wishes of good luck. Tyber’s grip upon their shoulders had tightened.
All that power. Those men had flown full-sized battle dragons out to the West and were never seen again. One hundred and sixty men and dragons were lost in the King’s war.
But they still hadn’t seen a Western dragon in the skies over the mother city. And now, high above, as Rius began to shift and bank slightly to the right to keep up with Merilyss and the others, it struck Tyber what a privilege it was to live in relative safety, free from the firebreath of enemy dragons, free of the swords of enemy soldiers because of the hordesmen and dragons who risked their lives to keep the city safe. It was a powerful enemy that faced Cadwaller and its King.
“For the gods to see,” Tyber whispered. He turned around and gripped the lip of the saddle with both hands.
An odd sensation slid down his spine. It suddenly seemed to Tyber that if he were to become separated from Rius, instead of falling to the rocks and thick heather below, he would simply cease to exist. Now that he’d had this view, how could he possibly go back to living without it?
Chapter 15
Rius landed hard in the weyr yard, and Tyber flopped forward, nearly smacking his face off the back of the dragon’s neck. He pushed himself upright and looked for the recruit on the light gray dragon. The young man clutched the dragon’s neck. His face was turned away, but his chest rose and fell with violent sobs. Tyber’s gut tightened. How awful. He was grateful that he had not fallen apart in Rius’ saddle, yet a part of him understood the other man’s terror. Wha
t in the wilds was Tyber supposed to do with what he had just seen?
Back when his mother was still alive, when Tyber and Theola were not much older than his youngest brother Unther was now, his mother had taken them outside with her on a cold night. She bundled them in blankets and told them how each light in the night sky was the eye of one of the gods. She promised that every person in the world had a god to watch over him or her. Tyber had craned his head up to the night sky, and through a cloud of condensed breath tried to count the eyes. If he could, then he would know how many people lived in the world.
But there were too many eyes for him to count, even with Theola’s help. The world must be packed from end to end with people they decided—an endless, sprawling city filled with shacks and people sleeping shoulder-to-shoulder on the floors. Nothing Tyber had seen since had caused him to think differently. Until now.
But, having been in the sky on Rius’ back, up in the realm of the gods, it seemed impossible that there were enough people for each god to have someone to watch. Wide open spaces he never imagined surrounded Tyber. It was only the mother city, especially on his side of the wall, that was crowded with people who barely had room to breathe.
His mind’s eye picture of what the world must be like was wrong and had been his whole life. If he had never been on a dragon, he probably would never have known. And, if there were far fewer people in the world than he had thought, then what did the gods watch all night?
Tyber looked away from the weeping recruit and focused on untying his restraints. The panicked recruit yelped, and Tyber looked up to see a gaggle of weyrboys pulling him from the saddle of the light gray dragon. He struggled, his fists and booted feet kicking at the air, but the weyrboys overpowered him and rushed him toward the open double doors of the weyr. They moved with such speed it seemed the recruit was being hastened away for the sake of the dragons, rather than for his own good.
“Is everyone all right?” Ander called.
Tyber looked back at the proctor in disbelief. How could any of them be all right after what they had seen? He had looked down on the world as if he were a god. And now he was on the ground again. A man.
He looked at Rius’ wings and was disappointed to see she had folded them against her sides, the white spots hidden. He reached forward and brushed her neck with the tips of his fingers, but she neither stirred nor moved.
Ander walked down the line of dragons. “Unfasten yourselves. Take the reins up and guide your dragons back to their stalls.”
Olsid echoed the statement as he walked along his line of recruits.
Tyber’s hands trembled slightly as he yanked at the knots on the remaining restraint until the cords fell against the saddle’s gullet. He climbed down and was surprised to find the ground felt strange, somehow less stable now as if maybe he had landed on a cloud instead of in the weyr yard.
He glanced at his feet and the green chamomile growing beneath them. He looked up to Rius, and she stared at him with her great, dark eyes, unblinking. There in the depths, Tyber nearly expected to see the twinkle of a god’s eye.
He let out a long, low breath. What in the wilds had gotten into him? He unfastened Rius’ reins from under the lip of the saddle, then followed the line of dragons back to the weyr.
Chapter 16
After dinner that night, the recruits gathered in the parlor. They chattered incessantly, and the room buzzed and trembled with the raw energy of scores of men trying to make sense of the experience they’d shared that evening. Their voices never became loud, and there was a decided lack of teasing and roughhousing. Pockets of subdued silence passed around them at intervals. Tyber heard the conversation stop at a table behind him and knew that someone had mentioned one of the young men who had failed the trial.
When Ander appeared and ordered everyone in his wing to bed, Tyber lagged behind, walking as slowly as he could. The group seemed so small without Nonek, who had simply disappeared. Ren had assured them that his possessions had been returned, his uniform taken, and then he had been dismissed and marched to the edge of Dragon Lane by four weyrboys wearing black blindfolds.
“Blindfolds?” Weiss had asked. “Why were they blindfolded?”
Ren had shrugged. “More dramatic that way, I guess.”
As they made their way back to the bunk hall, Tyber half expected to see the blindfolded weyrboys coming down the hall searching for others to lead away. Surely they must know he was a fraud. Maybe he would be the next recruit to be shunned.
But why did it even matter?
Ander opened the door to the bunk hall and motioned for the recruits to enter. As they filed past, Tyber hung back until he remained alone in the hall with the proctor.
“Tyber?” Ander asked.
“Why did you do that?” Tyber asked. “Why did you do that to us?”
Confusion passed over Ander’s face. “Do what?”
“Why did you put us on the dragons like that? Take us up there…To see like that?”
Ander’s look of confusion became tempered with a bit of concern. “I already told you. These dragons are young. We normally wait for them to mature, for their bond to the alpha to strengthen before we introduce them to riders, but our enemies have taken that luxury from us. We can’t wait for the bond to solidify, so we must risk allowing the dragons to imprint upon their riders. It’s not ideal. There was a great deal of discussion among the masters about whether or not to do it. How could we allow a dragon to imprint upon a recruit who would not make it through the trials?”
Tyber’s posture shifted to add space between the two men as if Ander was getting too close.
“It was decided that putting the recruits on the dragons right away would immediately weed out those who lack the disposition needed for flight,” Ander explained.
Tyber parted his lips to speak, but nothing came.
“Don’t worry,” Ander said with a grin. He clapped his hand on Tyber’s shoulder and gave it a slight shake. “You did a fantastic job. You even surprised me. You took to that like you were born on the back of a dragon.”
Ander didn’t understand, but Tyber was too exhausted to clarify what he meant. He pressed his lips together tightly and nodded once as if satisfied.
“Go on,” Ander said and nudged Tyber to the doorway. “Get some sleep. You’ve earned it.”
Tyber nodded again. He should tell Ander that this was a mistake and that he should not be allowed to be around Rius. He shouldn’t imprint upon the dragon because he wasn’t going to stay. But he couldn’t. It was Ander’s fault he was here to begin with, so what did it matter?
He pictured Rius’ bottomless dark eyes and sighed. Somehow, that dragon made him see the true picture of things. It was not Ander’s fault; it was Tyber’s. He had agreed to help Nather pick pockets at the swearing-in ceremony. It was his fault that he had accepted the hand-off, and his fault that he had gotten caught.
It was his fault he was in this situation, and if anything, he should be grateful to Ander for giving him this opportunity. He ate well and felt awful for finding himself in luxurious settings that were customarily reserved for the sons of the wealthy and well-connected. Hordesmen were elite. Poor men went straight to the infantry. Ander was apparently one of the rare exceptions that they allowed to ride dragons.
Not that Tyber wanted to be an exception as well, but it did beat a cell in the dungeon. And if it did not turn out well, then how could that be his fault? Ander gave him a choice that was not really a choice at all. Who would have taken prison over this? It was Tyber’s fault he was there, but if Rius was allowed to imprint upon him, then that was Ander’s doing. He knew Tyber wasn’t planning to stay but he put him on the dragon anyway.
Tyber shifted with the uncomfortable weight of that logic. He looked over his shoulder, to the men inside already disrobing and falling into their bunks. He looked back to Ander and wished for something to say. He could not bring himself to say thanks, and so he settled for, “Goodnight.”
&
nbsp; “Sleep well,” Ander said and returned Tyber’s nod, then started down the shadowed hall as the last of the day’s sun slipped behind the city wall.
Chapter 17
Tyber stared at the bunk above him and waited to hear the soft sobbing he’d heard the night before. When it didn’t come, and he realized it was Nonek who had cried himself to sleep, his shoulders relaxed. One of the boys snored, and the rest joined in an uneven chorus of deep breathing. Tyber couldn’t still his mind.
He closed his eyes and pictured the mother city spread out far below him. It felt like a trick, as if what he’d seen from the back of Rius was a sleight of hand. How could such a small, insignificant speck of people and buildings and the track of the wall be the same city he had grown up in? His city was crowded and loud, full of too many people with too many needs and not enough of anything to go around. It smelled of sweet baked bread and roasting meat and rot and manure all at the same time. It was loud, and it stank.
That was Tyber’s home. Not what Rius had shown him.
He sat up and swung his feet to the floor. The snoring stopped, and someone rolled over. Tyber sat quietly and tried to be still even though he felt like exploding. He placed his elbows upon his knees and stared out the high-arched window. On the other side of the courtyard, identical dark windows stared back from behind the ledge. It looked like the windows had been placed on a series of shelves like books in a library.
He shook his head and tried to clear his thoughts. He tried to dismiss the feeling that roiled inside him, one that he wished not to acknowledge. The need for understanding gnawed at him. The effort to reconcile what he knew with what he saw on the back of Rius tore at him.
He inhaled deeply through his nose.
If he was honest with her, if she knew he was a fraud, then she wouldn’t imprint upon him. Dragons were wise if Master Gury was to be believed. But Rius was young. Ander had said as much. The youngest. She might be too young to understand that Tyber was no good for her. That she couldn’t depend upon him. He was there to avoid prison, and to get money to help his family, not to become a hordesman that would stick with her for life.
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