She could understand that. Tyber had looked into Rius’ eyes and saw that her understanding ran deep. She had the wisdom of dragons. He owed her the truth. If he couldn’t be honest with anyone else, then he owed it to the dragon.
But why? He didn’t even like dragons.
He lowered his face to his palms and rubbed his hands over his cheeks. His hands slid behind his head, where his fingers interlaced for a second, then fell to his knees. He stood.
For Theola, that’s why. For all of his brothers and sisters, but especially for Theola. She would never forgive him if he allowed a dragon he wouldn’t ride past the first trial to imprint upon him.
Telling Rius the truth was the right thing to do. And by all that was wild and split, he needed to start doing the right thing. Not doing so was what had led to this situation in the first place.
He would start with Rius, and he would do it right now. This minute, while he still had his nerve.
Tyber crouched and pulled his boots and clothes from the foot trunk beneath his bunk. He dressed slowly and quietly as if trying not to wake a room full of his siblings. With his boots clutched in his hand, he crept to the open window, then sat them gently upon the floor. He turned, then sat on the sill.
This was crazy. What in the wilds was he doing? And why?
He couldn’t let Rius down because of his own shortcomings. For her sake as well as the kingdom’s, she deserved a rider who wanted to be a hordesman.
Tyber pulled on his boots, then slipped out the window. The bunk room was on the third floor providing a clear view of the courtyard below. Off to his left, over the auditorium entrance, a window issued a faint, flickering light. A candle, perhaps. But no one was visible in the window. Otherwise, the courtyard was dark. The tree in the center looked like a tangle of cracks.
A noise fluttered overhead, the rushing of air. Tyber jerked his head back but saw nothing other than the twinkling eyes of the gods.
Tyber moved a little closer to the side of the building and crept forward along the ledge to the closest pole. He grabbed it, and then after taking a deep breath, pulled it to him as he stepped off the ledge.
He hung in the air, the metal of the pole pulling at the flesh of his palms. The ground looked far away, but just underneath him at the same time. It was nothing compared to being on the back of a dragon.
Tyber squeezed the pole between his boots and began to lower himself hand-over-hand for a short bit. Then, he let himself slide down the rest of the way. Finally, his boots hit the ground, and his cheek smacked the pole as the cessation of his momentum pitched him forward.
He stumbled back a step in surprise, then caught himself and glanced around the empty courtyard. It wouldn’t have surprised him in the least to find blindfolded weyrboys slip out from behind the tree and come for him. Nothing moved, however. Above, the dim candlelight in the window guttered and throbbed like a lonely, restless heart.
Tyber slunk along the edge of the courtyard, keeping his weight on the balls of his feet until he rounded the far corner and came to the entrance of the weyr. He paused before the wooden double doors fastened with iron bands and rivets. The metal dragon emblem on each door reflected what little light there was.
His hand drifted to the latch. He gently pushed down and increased the pressure until it clicked. He waited a few seconds, then eased the door back enough to peer in.
The aisle stretched out before him and ended in a pair of doors that closed the other end of the weyr off from the yard and the end of Dragon Lane.
He eased the door back a bit more, enough to look around. Lanterns hung from hooks fastened to the arches that marched back across the aisle. Tyber didn’t see anyone around. Several dragons stood in their stalls, but most were gone. Or so he thought until he saw an elegant, green head lift up over the stone half-wall of a stall and stare at him from the top of a long, graceful neck.
He slipped through the doorway, eased it shut behind him, and crept down the aisle, his eyes never still, seeking signs of someone. But no one appeared. Surely there was someone who stayed with the dragons at night? If so, that person was elsewhere, or perhaps asleep in a stall himself.
Tyber paused before Rius’ stall. She lay inside, curled up on the floor. As soon as his eyes rested upon her, she lifted her head and stared at him. She blinked as if surprised, then stood up.
“No!” Tyber whispered and motioned with his hand for her to settle back down. “Lay down!”
Rius flexed her wings once and then settled them back against herself.
“This is crazy,” Tyber whispered under his breath. He glanced up and down the aisle, then pulled up the latch on the stall gate, stepped quickly inside, and shut it behind himself. He sank into a corner of the stall and drew his knees up to his chest.
Rius settled down onto her elbows and chest before wrapping her tail around herself and dropping her hindquarters to the straw and stone that lined the floor of her stall. She crossed her foreclaws before herself in a surprisingly prim-looking manner and then stared at him as if patiently waiting for an explanation.
Tyber shook his head. “I don’t have one,” he whispered. “I don’t know why I’m doing this. It’s stupid. Crazy.”
He drew a deep breath, then held it and listened for sounds of movement, of footsteps in the weyr around him. Air shuffled across a pair of wings, and then there was silence. A deep silence unlike any that Tyber had ever known, as if the city had vanished leaving him on his own, alone with these dragons.
He shook his head at the thought. Ridiculous. The flight had made him daft.
Tyber wrapped his arms around his knees and met Rius’ gaze. “Look. I want to be honest with you. I respect you. I know that you have to fight and die for the kingdom, and I’m sorry about that. I can’t help it. It’s the King who likes war, not me. I feel bad that will be your life. But I want you to have the truth about me.”
Tyber leaned his head back until his skull rested in the crotch of stone that formed the corner behind him.
Rius lowered her head and moved it forward some, extending her neck slightly as if to lean in and listen to a secret given in supreme confidence.
“I don’t like dragons, all right? It’s nothing personal. As a dragon, you’re fine. Beautiful. Oh, by the scale, you’re gorgeous. Your wings are stunning. But I can’t be your rider. I don’t want to be a hordesman. I can’t. I have a family that needs me. You understand that, right? Oh, I am out of my head now, aren’t I? I can’t believe I sneaked out of my room to talk to a dragon.”
Rius’ head sank a little lower as it moved a closer to him. She was near enough that she could whip her tongue out, wrap it around his ankle, and yank him to her.
His arms tightened around his shins.
“Look, I’m trying to be honest with you. I know you’re young. Ander said as much. And that the ride today was to help us to imprint upon each other. I want to clear things up here. I want you to know that I can’t be your rider. I’m not that great of a guy. I’m here because I stole a money purse. Or rather, it was handed off to me. Nather stole it. But that’s not the point. The point is that I’m not here because I want to ride dragons and fight in the King’s wars. I’m here because I got caught by Ander, and the alternative was prison. If I make it through the first trial, I get some money to help out my family.”
Tyber took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes. It had been a long day, and he needed to get back to his bunk. He looked at Rius and continued.
“My mother is dead, you know. And my father, I love him, he just works all the time and yet never makes enough money to feed all of us. Fafa can’t work because he can hardly stand more than a few minutes for all the trouble in his back. He means well. He whittles wooden toys and spoons and bowls and such when he can get a scrap of wood. We sell them when we can. But by the wilds, it’s just not enough. I try to help out. I’m the oldest. I’m supposed to have a job, but there aren’t any jobs to be had. The few jobs that are out there don’t pay
a thing at all. My father works in a livery stable. He’s had that job since he was a boy. He met my mother there. And she died while giving birth to Lin. Lin’s the same age as you.”
Tyber leaned forward slightly. Rius rested her head at his feet and rolled her dark eyes up to him.
“There’s just so many of us. I can’t be your rider. I just can’t. I have to go home. I have to take care of my brothers and sisters. But I promise you that I won’t steal anymore. I won’t do that. I don’t know what I’ll do, but I’ll think of something. I can’t risk it. I can’t end up—”
Tyber’s teeth shut with a click at the squealing of hinges. A man hummed a tune as his feet whispered over the stone floor. Now and then, he muttered a few words, incomprehensible, but in a loopy, sloppy melody.
Tyber brought a finger to his lips. Rius let out a sigh. Air and bits of straw swept past Tyber’s black boots.
“... and a bottle of wine, I hang from the window, and for the last of her, I find I yearn, I pine…” the voice crooned in a rough, scratchy manner as it passed close to the stall.
Tyber flattened himself against the front wall of the stall as much as he could. As Rius lifted her head and tracked the man’s movement, Tyber willed his heart to silence itself from the rushing and thudding in his ears.
Rius’ eyes stopped along with the shuffling of the feet. The humming died away.
“And how are you, my blue beauty?” a voice like gravel and broken glass asked.
Rius blinked.
The man chuckled, then began to hum again as his feet shuffled off.
Tyber let out a tightly held breath. His heart felt wrung out, as if were he to scoop it from his chest, he’d find it twisted and shapeless as a scrub rag used hard.
What in the wilds was he even doing here? This was stupid. Here he was spilling out his heart to a dragon who couldn’t understand him, and as he promised her he’d do better, he was at the very same moment risking discovery. If Ander found that he had sneaked out, what would he do? Would he send the blindfolded weyrboys after him? Or would he instead call the sheriff’s men and ask them to lead him straight to the King’s dungeon?
As soon as the humming man wandered away, he would sneak back to the bunk hall and pretend that none of this had ever happened. He drew his knees up closer to his chest and waited.
Chapter 18
A tap on the shoulder roused Tyber from sleep.
“Hey,” a voice of gravel and broken glass called. “Hey, wake up!”
Tyber exploded forward, stumbled, and nearly fell back against Rius before he turned around and faced the man who had woken him. He held a long, wooden handle, presumably a broom or a shovel.
“You lost?” the man asked.
Tyber swallowed. Instead of answering the question or whipping up a quick excuse, his attention caught on the gnarl of scar tissue that held the man’s right eye closed. It also cast a good bit of his face into a grotesque mask.
“I…” Tyber started.
The scarred man’s remaining eye roved over Tyber. “I heard they put the lot of you on their backs today. Couldn’t believe they’d do something like that.”
Tyber blushed and looked down at the half-wall between the two of them.
The man snorted. “Guess I can see why now. Go on. Get back to wherever it is you belong. You can’t sleep in here with your dragon.”
Tyber glanced over his shoulder at Rius, then turned back to the man.
“Go on!” the man said and waved a gnarled hand at the back of the weyr. “I only got one wild eye. I can’t see too well, so I never saw you. Just be sure to watch out for Master Groal. He likes to walk the grounds at night dressed in black. Scare the devil from you if you come across him. And he is not likely to turn a blind eye to you.”
“Thank you,” Tyber said.
The man grinned and shook his head. “For all the sky, there’s always one or two like you in each class. All dreamy-eyed. Can’t see a thing more than his dragon. Believe it or not, I was once young. I was even handsome like you. I spent more than one night in that very stall over there.”
The man twisted around and pointed to an empty stall in the back corner.
“You were a recruit?” Tyber asked.
The grin dropped from the man’s face. He snorted once. “I was a hordesman.”
Rather than ask what happened, Tyber lowered his gaze to the stall gate and let himself out. He glanced at the man once more. He was dressed in a simple outfit, much like the clothes Tyber’s father wore. He looked like a livery hand, complete with a shovel in his hand. Except there were no horses. Just dragons.
Tyber nodded once again, then turned and hurried back into the courtyard.
He stopped and let his eyes adjust. The tree stirred. He held his breath, and his back went straight as he expected the blindfolded weyrboys to appear. When the bare branches creaked, and a breeze sighed into the air, he shook his head and took a breath. By the gods, this place made him jumpy.
Above, the window that had been awash in candlelight was now dark.
How long had he been asleep in Rius’ stall?
The night sky offered no clues. The gods had yet to begin to retire for the day. A streak of clouds blotted out the twinkling eyes over the extreme west-end of the courtyard.
Tyber crept up to the pole he had slid down, then began to pull himself up hand-over-hand in the manner Nather had demonstrated when he taught Tyber how to scale drain pipes.
As he climbed, his mind filled with the stars above and the sight of the city below. He couldn’t shake it from his head. As he reached the third level where the bunk halls were, he placed a foot upon the ledge, but merely rested, catching his breath before pushing back off. He climbed higher still, scaling the pole to the point where it turned in an arch and disappeared over the parapet.
He had to climb up and take a peek. He had to peer across the city from above and see it as he had seen it before, or at least as close as he could get to the vantage point he’d had that evening. He had to have a glimpse of what the gods saw.
As he reached up and his fingers wrapped around the top edge of the pole, he knew that was it. He had to see again what Rius had shown him.
With a yank on the pole and a desperate shove with his toes, Tyber heaved himself up, swung a leg over the lip of the parapet, and began to pull himself over the edge.
He froze at the sight of a dragon.
It was a small dragon. A bit smaller than Rius, but not by much. It was hard to see the dragon’s color, as mostly it was silhouetted against the stars of the eastern sky. It sat atop the parapet that fronted the academy, and for a moment, Tyber thought it was a bit of statuary that he’d failed to notice before.
But then the dragon moved. Tyber willed himself to be as still as the stone beneath him as the dragon swung its head back on its long neck to peer into the shadows.
It stayed that way for so long that Tyber’s palm started to sweat and threatened to slide down the pole where he still gripped it. His right leg began to throb as he clutched the edge of the parapet with his thigh to keep himself from rolling off and tumbling to the courtyard below.
The dragon held its position. Tyber began to doubt that he’d seen it move at all, that it had always been in that position, and he had only imagined that it moved. But who would put a dragon statue atop a building and have it looking back into the shadows? His Majesty’s Royal Academy of Dragon Riders was a strange place.
And then the dragon disappeared. Or rather, it changed shape. It shrunk down as if crumpled in a huge, invisible fist, maybe the hand of a god. Then it was nothing more than a man, barely visible against the stars and the front parapet.
With a final heave, Tyber rolled over the edge of the building and landed with a soft thud on the stone roof.
“Who goes there?” a man called.
Tyber’s heart shot up into his throat. He blinked at the eyes above and said a quick prayer for protection. It was said that the gods saw every pr
ayer, and seeing as there were more eyes than people, it seemed that his prayer should not go unnoticed.
Tyber rolled to his left, scrambled to his feet, and lurched behind the sturdy bulk of a chimney. He pressed his back against the cold stone and forced himself not to breathe too loudly, but to sip the air through his nostrils and exhale it in slow, short streams from between his lips.
Boot soles whispered across the stone roof.
Tyber peered out from his hiding place. The roof of the academy was unlike the other buildings in the city. City buildings sported sloped roofs covered with tiles and topped with narrow widow walks. But the academy’s roof was wide and flat and paved with stone and mortar like a market square. The chimneys were shunted to each side. It was a place to land dragons.
Unfortunately, the open design of the rooftop also offered few places to hide. Tyber glanced to his right. The pole he had climbed promised escape. He could slide down, but whoever was on the roof with him would see him dodge back into his hall. He’d have to go all the way to the ground and run off again. Where could he go? Into the weyr? That seemed like a trap.
As the footsteps moved closer, Tyber edged away, keeping his movements slow and steady, his back to the stone. He closed his eyes and listened to the sounds, the slow steps. Whoever was approaching, he was nearing the edge of the chimney.
Tyber slipped around the corner to keep the chimney between himself and the other man.
A flight of pigeons erupted from around him. Tyber swept the air with his hands in panic, then willed himself to be still as the birds’ wings whistled and ruffled with flight. They circled up into the night sky, swung around, and then came to rest on the roof on the other side of the courtyard.
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