Fledgling (The Dragonrider Chronicles)

by Nicole Conway

  “Then what is?”

  I looked at Felix squarely in the eye. “I’m going to fight for you. You said it yourself, that we’re in this together. We’re partners, right? So I’ll fight to watch your back. It’s the same reason I’m out here trying to save Sile. There aren’t very many people in the world who care what happens to me. You, Sile, Beckah, Katty, even Mavrik are pretty much the only ones. So I’ll do what I can to protect you, even if that means fighting in a war that’ll end up being a no-win situation for me either way. It’s worth it.”

  Felix’s expression wavered. I saw that he wanted to smile, but he didn’t. There was sadness in his eyes, deep heavy sadness. He just nodded some before he went back to eating.

  Even with warm food in my stomach and no strength in my body, it was hard to sleep. I had nightmares about giant turtles and slavers. Early the next morning, I woke up with my heart hammering because I thought I heard the sound of hoof beats. But we were alone—completely alone.

  The gray elves were gone. All that was left of them were a few tracks in the mud, leading away across the marsh. They’d left us there to fend for ourselves, not that I was sad to see them go. Being around them was sometimes worse than being around humans.

  What I’d mistaken for hoof beats started to get louder. When I realized what that sound actually was, I started shaking Beckah awake and yelling for Felix to get up. The sound got even louder and closer, and I heard the familiar bellow of Mavrik’s roar from above the trees.

  Seeing a flash of his blue scales and the sound of his roar made my heart soar. He’d come back for me. I certainly wouldn’t have blamed him for just leaving me there to fend for myself, after the way I’d dismissed him before.

  He and Nova were circling above us, looking for a good place to land. With so many trees growing so close together, there wasn’t a place big enough for them. Suddenly, I got another one of those radical ideas.

  “Come on, I’ll give you a boost.” I said as I pulled Beckah up to her feet. She was still rubbing the sleep from her eyes, blinking up at the sky. I don’t think she really understood what I was doing until I was pushing her up toward the lowest hanging limb of a nearby tree.

  “Are you crazy?” Lyon was awake and already protesting.

  Felix just laughed, and started climbing up after me. “Better stay down here, Lyon. We wouldn’t want you to risk hurting yourself just to follow us, would we?” The sarcasm in his voice made me laugh, too.

  “You’re not leaving me behind!” Lyon declared as he started climbing up the tree after us.

  When I got to the top, to the very skinniest of the limbs that would hold my weight, I looked out across the marshland. I could see the tops of the trees for miles and miles around us. Far in the distance, I could see the mountains like ghostly blue shadows on the horizon.

  Mavrik made a loud screeching noise as he swooped in low and circled around me. Now it was time for my plan. I got Beckah as close to me as I could to wrap an arm around her waist.

  “You have to hang on to me,” I told her.

  She nodded and wrapped her arms around my neck. “I’m not afraid. I trust you.”

  When Mavrik came swooping low again, his powerful wings spread out wide, I gave him the hand signal for doing a roll. I wasn’t sure he’d get it, I mean, we’d never really perfected his understanding of the hand signals we riders used in the air. But as he started to get dangerously close, he whipped over with his back facing down toward us.

  I jumped straight up with all my might, reaching for the saddle handles. Not in a million years did I think I’d actually grab them. He was moving fast, like a streak of blue lightning. My timing had to be absolutely perfect.

  And it was.

  I grabbed the saddle handles, hanging on for dear life as we were suddenly snatched off the top of the tree. Mavrik rolled over, and I quickly got myself settled into the saddle with Beckah sitting right in front of me. We cruised over the tops of the trees, making a wide turn to go back and make sure Felix and Lyon were able to get on Nova.

  I’m pretty sure Lyon was crying when they were finally sitting on Nova’s back, him hugging Felix as he sat in the back of the saddle. Felix gave me a thumb’s up, letting me know they were okay.

  Take the lead, I signed to him. We’ve got to get to Halfax before they do.

  Felix smirked, and I saw him lean down closer to Nova’s neck. He put on the speed, and Nova shot forward like a brown and gold bullet. Mavrik roared at her, and I felt his body go tense and solid beneath the saddle. He beat his wings hard, and we went hurling forward with a new burst of speed.

  Beckah reached to grab my hand, squeezing it until her knuckles were white.

  “It’s okay,” I yelled to her over the rush of the wind. I thought she was afraid, but when I saw her face . . . I could see that she was smiling.

  Her eyes were wide, and she was looking out across the trees that blurred past. She looked at me with a huge grin. “This is amazing!”

  I smiled back at her, and brushed some of her hair away that was blowing into my eyes. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever noticed before, but Beckah was really pretty—even if she did look a lot like her father. When she smiled at me like that, it made me blush.

  Mavrik snapped his wings in sharp, quick beats that sent us bolting forward until we caught up to Nova. We kept our pace fast and our position as low to the ground as we dared. When we reached the other side of the marsh, I could see the royal city of Halfax far in the distance. I knew it right away because of the tall, swirling spires of the king’s castle set back from the rest of the city against the side of a huge cliff. You could see the castle from just about anywhere in the city, even from the gray elf ghetto where I’d lived with my mother.

  Beyond the city’s outskirts and surrounding farmlands was the prison camp. I’d never actually seen it before, but I knew what it was right away. From the air, it looked like a dark patch on the horizon. It was a big complex surrounded by high, black stone walls. The stones for those walls had been mined from the volcanic cliffs along the coast, so they were rough, uneven, and nearly impossible to climb without cutting your hands and feet to shreds. On the tops of the walls, tar mixed with shards of broken glass had been spread over it to keep people from trying to escape.

  The prison camp was built in a big diamond shape with eight watchtowers looking down at the prisoners inside. From where we were, it just looked liked a big tangled mess of scrap surrounding one dark crater in the middle. The crater must have been an abandoned quarry, with layers of rock carved away to the glaring sunlight.

  Seeing it, even from a distance, made my stomach tangle into painful knots. Ending up in a place like that was my absolute worst fear. I didn’t want to go anywhere near it. I wanted to turn Mavrik around and bolt in the opposite direction. But Sile might already be there, trapped in that horrible place. We had to save him. I had given Beckah my word that we would, and I was determined to keep that promise.

  ííí

  “We’ve got to find a way inside,” Felix said as soon as he dismounted. “If we try to take them from the air, chances are, the dragonriders stationed at the castle will come after us, and we’ll all be arrested before we even get a chance to find Sile, that is if the bowmen in the watchtowers don’t shoot us down first. Being stealthy will give us our best chance.”

  We had landed in a big open wheat field outside Halfax, about three miles from the prison camp. From where we stood, we had a straight view of it. Smoke rose up from beyond its tall black gates, and I was beginning to feel sick with dread.

  “Break into a prison camp?” Lyon scoffed. He crossed his arms, and sneered at the idea. “You’re all crazy. I’m not going in there. As if we could even get past the guards in the first place.”

  “It’s your fault Sile is in there in the first place,” Felix reminded him with a threatening growl. “You’re coming with us, one way or another.”

  The two were about to start arguing again, glaring at e
ach other and squaring off. I could sense the tension rising, but I wasn’t eager to jump in the middle and break them up. It wouldn’t exactly hurt my feelings if Felix beat Lyon to a bloody pulp.

  “Y-you did this?” Beckah stammered suddenly. “But you’re a dragonrider too, right?”

  I flinched. Felix and I exchanged a glance. We hadn’t told her Lyon was the one responsible for her father’s abduction. I wasn’t sure how she as going to handle that news.

  Beckah was looking up at him with wide eyes. At first, I thought she might start crying. I could see revelation come over her whole demeanor as she started piecing it together that there was a traitor in our midst. Lyon had betrayed her father, and the reasons why didn’t really matter.

  But Beckah didn’t cry. Instead, she balled her hands into fists and started for him with violent intent blazing in her eyes. “You! You did this! You’re a traitor!” She screamed at him. “What did my daddy ever do to you?! You . . . you selfish coward!”

  I grabbed her by the shoulder before she could actually start hitting him, pulling her back and holding her while she kicked and fought to get away from me. I wasn’t going to take the chance that Lyon wouldn’t hit her back just because she was a girl.

  Lyon was staring back at her, and his expression was difficult to read. If he could have felt any remorse for what he’d done, maybe he did in that moment. I didn’t know Lyon well enough to be sure.

  “I hope you die!” Beckah screamed at him. “You deserve to die!”

  I put a hand over her mouth, holding her tight against my chest as she kept on fighting me. “Hush, Beckah. Don’t say that.” I told her as calmly as I knew how. I started forcing her to walk a few yards away with me. She needed to cool off.

  “How can you defend him?!” She turned on me next, and I saw angry, frustrated tears starting to brim in her eyes. Her cheeks were dark red, and her whole body was trembling.

  As soon as we were far enough away that Felix and Lyon wouldn’t be able to hear us, I grabbed her as tightly as I could. I hugged her. I held her that way, even though she fought me at first.

  “I’m not defending him. He’ll have to pay for what he did. But right now isn’t the time. Right now, we have to concentrate on saving your dad. That’s what’s most important.” I tried to talk gently to her to calm her down. She was just a kid, and even if I wasn’t that much older than her, I felt like it was my responsibility to help her understand. “So just take some deep breaths. I know you’re angry. Just calm down.”

  I heard her start to cry, and she quit fighting me. She put her arms around my waist and hugged me back, hiding her face against my shoulder.

  “I hate him, Jae!” She whimpered.

  “I know.” I patted her head awkwardly. I wasn’t sure what else I was supposed to do. My experience in comforting girls was pretty limited. “I’m not all that wild about him, either. He’s used my face as a doormat before, you know.”

  “You’ll make sure he doesn’t get away with this, right?” she asked, looking up at me with her chin trembling.

  I had already made some steep promises to her—promises I wasn’t sure I could keep. But I’d try. After all, she deserved the very best effort I could give.

  I nodded, “I’ll try.”

  That seemed to satisfy her, and she pushed away from me a little. “People like that, who betray their own kind, they don’t deserve any kind of justice. We should just throw him in the prison camp and see how he likes it.”

  I frowned at her. “You know, that’s exactly the reason humans and gray elves don’t like me, Beckah. They both think I’m a traitor to my race.”

  I saw her expression fall. Her shoulders hunched up some like she was embarrassed, and she looked away uneasily. “That’s not the same thing,” she mumbled stubbornly.

  I knew she was still upset, and most of what she said was just out of anger and frustration. But it still stung. “You can’t just condemn someone, no matter what they’ve done. Everyone deserves justice, even traitors.”

  nineteen

  I had a feeling Felix was going to get us all killed. We had given our dragons the signal to lay low and wait for us to come back, but that didn’t make me feel any better as we snuck into a barn outside one of the little farmhouses nearby. It was a few hours after dark, and Felix had decided we needed to find some weaponry before we tried to get into the prison camp.

  As Felix pushed the barn door open a crack and we all rushed inside, I started to get a queasy feeling. The moonlight filtered through the slats in the ceiling, revealing harvesting scythes, axes, and a whole collection of farm tools hanging on the walls of the barn. There were big clay jugs crowded against the walls, crates stacked to the rafters, and big sacks of grain and feed for horses. Felix went straight for a big hunting knife that was lying on a table that looked like it had been used for butchering and dressing game.

  I picked up a sickle and held it awkwardly, wondering if I could actually hurt anyone other than myself with it. “Felix, how is this going to work?” I turned around to face him. “How can we fight the king’s elite guards with farm tools?”

  He was shoving an axe in Lyon’s hands. But Lyon dropped it as soon as Felix looked away. “Better to have something than nothing at all,” he answered. “Look, hopefully it won’t even come to that. Quick, take off your cloak and shirt.”

  I watched him pick up an empty feed sack off the floor and start cutting holes in it until it looked suspiciously like a tunic. “What for?” I frowned as he handed it to me, and then started making another one for himself. I did as he told me, stripping away my mud-caked tunic and putting on the scratchy burlap sack.

  “We need to blend in. If they see us in fledgling uniforms, they’ll know right away who we are. You, Lyon, and I are going to sneak in first. Once we’re inside, Beckah and the dragons are going to create a diversion for us. We’ll cut Lieutenant Derrick loose in the chaos while Lyon is getting the main gate open, and hopefully the guards will be so distracted, they won’t even notice us escaping.” Felix explained. “Jae, you speak enough elven that we should at least be able to talk to the other prisoners and figure out where they’re holding him.”

  It sounded good, but I was still confused about how we were actually going to get inside in the first place. He didn’t explain that part, and I was sort of afraid to ask.

  “How do we know they’ve even arrived yet?” Beckah was watching us, and she looked really nervous. Not that I could blame her. If everything went according to plan, she’d be the one being shot at by guards and hunted by the dragonriders from the castle. I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to put her in danger, much less imagine what Sile would do to me if she got hurt. But I also trusted Mavrik. I knew he wouldn’t let anything happen to her.

  Felix made himself a crude-looking tunic to match mine out of another empty feed sack, and put it on. Then he took the sickle I’d picked up, and a long coil of rope. “We don’t,” he answered sharply. “But we can’t afford to wait. By now, Commander Rayken has realized we’re missing from Blybrig. They’ll be looking for us. And if we get caught, then there’s no one left to help your dad. This is our one and only chance.”

  Beckah nodded, and I saw her swallow hard. Our eyes met, and I tried to show her a confident smile. “It’ll be fine.” I told her. “Don’t worry. Mavrik is the fastest dragon in Blybrig. Nothing will be able to catch up with you.”

  “You quit worrying,” she insisted stubbornly. “I can do this.”

  Felix stooped down to pick up one of the clay jugs on the floor, pulling the cork out of the top and making a face like it smelled bad. I could smell it too, even from a few feet away. They were jars full of lamp oil. He handed it to her, and gave her a serious look.

  “You better be able to do it,” he warned. “Because it’s our lives on the line.”

  Outfitted with our makeshift farm tool weapons and empty grain sacks for tunics, Felix, Lyon, and I hunkered down in the shadows only a few hundred yard
s away from the huge black wall of the prison camp. Beckah was already with Nova and Mavrik, waiting for our signal to start her diversion. I’d given her the best crash-course in flying I could, showed her how to sit in the saddle, and felt like a complete jerk for leaving her like that. Felix had tied about a dozen of those clay jugs full of oil to Mavrik’s saddle, going over the plan with her several times. She kept insisting she wasn’t scared. At least that made one of us.

  After creeping in as close as we dared, Felix, Lyon and I were laying flat on our stomachs, side by side on the ground, and watching through the tall grass. There was only one gate, just one way in and out of the prison camp, and it was heavily guarded. More armed guards stood at each of the eight watchtowers, looking down over the inside and outside of the walls. Even more of them marched around the wall to keep watch for people trying to escape from inside.

  “It looks like the perimeter patrols are set about five minutes apart,” Felix whispered. “That doesn’t give us much time to climb the wall.”

  “We’ll have to do it one at a time, then. That’s going to take too long. They might see us.” I frowned over at him, hoping he had a better idea.

  “There’s no other choice. We’ll just have to go as fast as possible.” Felix reached to pull the bundle of rope and sickle out from where he’d tucked them in his belt. He started to tie one end of the rope to the sickle, like a makeshift hook and line we’d be able to use for climbing up the wall. “I’ll go first, then you, Jae. After Lyon comes up last, we’ll split up and then give Beckah the signal.”

  When the next guard walked past, we waited a few seconds. It was long enough that I glanced at Felix, wondering if he’d lost his nerve. But suddenly he took off, sprinting toward the wall and swinging the rope and sickle over his head like a lasso.

  The wall was about two storeys tall. If he didn’t hook the top on the first try, he might not have enough time to climb up before the next guard came by. He swung the rope harder and harder, and finally let it go, sending the sickle howling through the air and clattering against the stone. The sickle cracked against the shards of glass on top of the wall, scraped, and finally snagged with a loud crunch. It made me cringe. Someone definitely could have heard that.