Dragon Mage (The First Dragon Rider Book 3)

by Ava Richardson

  “He told me the Main Gate, and that he was going to leave at first light.” Nan frowned at the first sliver of orange glow that had reached the top walls of the garden. “You might just catch him on the road.”

  I hastily grabbed my cloak and ran to the stables, where feisty little Stamper was still happily making a living. After a not-so-short wrangle with harnesses (in which he had to be bribed with quite a few dried apples), I was once again astride the tough little pony that had carried me here, and we cantered through the open gates and down the road.

  The sun was already brightening the world as I rode down the wide but steep tracks of the mountainside, and, although cold, it looked to be a beautiful morning. The heathers and the gorse were coming out in full force, but I could take no pleasure in the naturally wild beauties around me. My heart sank as I rode, my body so tired that even the colors appeared wan and drained around me.

  But down there, right at the edge of the forests and woods that skirted the mountain I saw a shape walking beside one of the monastery’s ponies. Stamper underneath me gave an excited little whiny as he saw one of its stablemates, and I waved to the figure.

  “Jodreth! Jodreth – wait, it’s me – Neill!” I called, and, to my relief the black-clad figure slowed, turned, and then stopped at the entrance to the forest.

  By the time I had reached him, he was sitting on the broad way-marker rock that sat at the entrance of the path, chewing a piece of bread as he considered the dawn.

  “I knew that it would be you, you know,” Jodreth said, his tone neither cynical, sad, or even apologetic.

  “Jodreth, my friend – what are you doing?” I slid from Stamper’s back and gasped at him, as the horse gratefully started to nuzzle at the short mountain grass. “You can’t leave us now, please,” I said, looking at the packs on the side of his own pony, and how they were laden with supplies and belongings.

  “I’m not leaving, Neill,” Jodreth said kindly, “I’m just doing what has to be done.” His dark eyes flickered up to the monastery above us. “What you have started here is incredible, but we are beset by dangers, and our academy of dragons needs to be defended,” he said.

  “Academy?” I said, startled by his choice of words.

  “It’s a word I’ve been playing with, ever since the wall came down. The monastery, the Draconis Order, those are the places that I grew up in, and I can see its mark still carved into the hearts of the older monks. It was a cruel, austere place, full of control. But what you and the other students are trying to do here, Neill…” I could see Jodreth searching for the right words. “It’s more about learning new things, new skills. ‘The Dragon School’ seemed a little trite, so I thought maybe ‘academy’ had a better ring to it…”

  The Dragon Academy. It did have a nice ring to it, but Jodreth’s good idea also annoyed me. “Then come back and help defend this new academy!” I said in exasperation, my fatigue getting the better of me, I feared.

  “No, Neill – it needs defending out there.” Jodreth jerked his head to indicate the wide sweep of the Middle Kingdom outside. “Up in the old monastery you need to start re-training the students, you need to find a program that will allow them to work with the dragons, you need to rebuild…” Jodreth ticked off all of the duties that I knew that we were already far behind on. At every task he mentioned, my heart sank just a little deeper and deeper. There was just so much, and I was just one young man.

  “You need to find out which of the remaining Draconis Order monks can be trusted, you need to find out what hidden tunnels that Zaxx had wormed through the mountain…” the list went on and on, as Jodreth turned his attention to the world outside of us. “And all the while, our enemies are amassing. You have heard the news, of course, that the war between North and Middle Kingdoms is on hold, as the princes decide what it means that the Draconis Order and their crater full of dragons has fallen.” Jodreth raised his eyebrows at how the everyday folk described what had happened here.

  “…And my allies in the village below have let me know that Prince Vincent is already calling up more troops, more militia, and more warlords like your own family to come here with him en masse.”

  Oh no, I thought, remembering how hard it was just for us to drive away the Sons of Torvald, let alone the rest of the Middle Kingdom forces. “We will be overrun. Everything that we have achieved…”

  “Lost,” Jodreth agreed. “Now you see the dangers that you face, and you know why it is I have to go. Sometimes, Neill,” he looked at me sharply in the eye, “sometimes you have to put the needs of others ahead of your own, and that is why I have decided to leave and find out what is happening out there, and to act as an advocate for the new Dragon Academy if I can, and to track down the Abbot Ansall as well,” Jodreth said with a growl. “We can’t let him roam free. There’s news that the other monks out there – the old ones from the Draconis Order – have fled their posts stationed at the various warlord’s great houses and halls. I have to ask, where have they gone? What evils are they plotting? Is the Abbot behind all of this?”

  I felt honored and grateful for his dedication of service to the new academy – one that hadn’t even come into being yet. Jodreth must have sensed some of my guilt and shame, as he said in a slightly gentler tone, “We do this, Neill, because we are committed to the future, to tomorrow, to having a better future than we did the past. That is the burden we all have to face, and we all have to live up to, in our own way.”

  But if Jodreth had meant for his words to sound inspiring to me, then he was badly mistaken. Instead, his words sounded like a dire warning, not unlike his warning had sounded to the kitchen staff. My entire life had to be given in service of an idea so fragile it might not even work. Why couldn’t we just fly away on the dragons to somewhere new? I didn’t want to be this important leader of the monastery, and I didn’t want all of these lives depending on me and my actions. I had never expected to lead anything in my life, being the third son, and the one that my father spent the least amount of time with. Always it was Rubin or Rik who had been at my father’s side and discussing important decisions – but with Garf the Lame’s revelations about my father’s real reason for sending me here ringing in my head, I now had to at least admit the possibility that my father had wanted me to lead something all along. He had wanted me to guide the Draconis Monastery away from Prince Vincent. He had wanted me to stand at his side, with the Draconis Order behind me.

  I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t trained. I knew nothing of how to get people to like me.

  “I, I understand why you feel like you have to go,” I said awkwardly. “But still, I would rather that you stay. To help us. To advise us.” To help me, I didn’t add.

  Jodreth barked a self-deprecating laugh. “I don’t think that you need my counsel, young Master Torvald. You seem to be doing a pretty good job all by yourself.”

  “But what of all of those tasks and duties that you said I have to complete?” I burst out, hating myself for sounding childish, but unable to stop it. My father was dead, and I had no one who could tell me what to do. “I know nothing about wall building, about training, about leadership!”

  “Take heart, Master Torvald,” Jodreth said, in that almost mystical way that he had. He must have sensed some of my reticence about what I had to do next. “Maybe it’s no mistake that you caught up with me here. Don’t you remember this place?” He pointed to the way stone, and the path that led back down to the forest behind us, or widened up to the slate and broad avenue that crossed the heath and rock mountain above.

  I did, of course. “This is where you saved me.”

  “No, this is where we talked,” Jodreth corrected me. “I saved you down there, in the Claw Gully. Did you know that it was called that? Because it’s so steep, and that it was supposedly made when the first dragon itself clambered up this hill. I saved you from the assassins down there in the gully, but here is where you first told me your name, and I told you mine.”

  I didn’
t see what he was getting at.

  “The point is, Master Torvald, is that this is a place of beginnings. The beginnings of dragons living here at Mount Hammal, however many thousands of years ago, and the beginnings of your journey here as well. Just as what you are doing up there is also a beginning; a new chapter in the ancient story of the Dragon Mountain.”

  “Okay…” I said, still not quite being able to crack the meaning of the wisdom that he was trying to reveal to me.

  “And do you remember what I said to you, back then when we first met?” Jodreth asked.

  I shook my head. I remembered thanking him for saving my life, and offering to be considered in his debt.

  “I told you that you were more than just a warlord’s son. That you had a good heart, and that you were your own man, Neill,” Jodreth said. “You will know what the right thing to do is, when it is time.” He smiled, before nodding and turning. Feeling more than a little dumbfounded, I watched as my friend walked down the path, away from where we had met, and vanished into the darkness.

  I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that if I had such a good heart, and if I was more than what everyone thought I was – then why did I feel so helplessly out of my depth, then?

  Chapter 10

  Char, Concerned

  “Neill?” I called out to my friend, standing just a little way away from me on the still-intact ramparts of the Dragon Monastery. It was midmorning, and the air was cold and the clouds thin and high, but the sun was shining and we had a slew of students and monks standing below us, waiting for our decision.

  “Neill, everyone is waiting!” I hissed again, making him startle and shake his head, dragging his attention away from the south where he had been gazing.

  “Oh yeah, right.” He blinked, nodding distractedly as if he had forgotten what it was he had been about to say.

  “The training, Neill?” I whispered out of the side of my mouth up at him, reminding him of what we had been talking about just last night, when we had decided to call this general meeting of all the remaining Draconis Order and students. Really, I thought, what the hell happens to boys when they are two steps away from adulthood? I remembered Wurgan becoming an idiot, although, in his case, he had remained an idiot ever since.

  “Er… friends…” Neill called out, in a voice I was sure wasn’t loud enough to carry across the main courtyard.

  “Speak. Up,” I mouthed at him, to which he stuttered, nodded, and started again, this time in a marginally louder voice.

  “Friends!” he called again. “Thank you for coming here this morning at my request. I realize that this may be new for you…” he said, his brow suddenly furrowing as he looked at his hands and sighed, before carrying on again. Neill is looking anxious, fretful even, I thought. He’s changed since hearing about the death of his father... “Anyway. This is new for all of us. A lot of you might be asking just what is going to happen next, what we are going to do now that the Abbot is gone, and now that we have a crater full of dragons to tend to…”

  I heard a ripple of muttered voices from the crowd below us, the audience filled with tonsured monks and bald-headed elders dressed in black, as well as the ragtag sea of younger faces, only a few of whom wore the traditional black robes of the old Order. The assembled throng was only a fraction of the size of some of the gatherings the old Abbot Ansall had regularly convened in the Great Hall, and now it seemed that the students made up at least half of those assembled. We’d lost a lot of the old Draconis Monks when Ansall fled, I thought darkly. Where were they now? What were they plotting?

  “We’ve been doing some thinking…” Neill began.

  “Who has?” A voice I didn’t recognize rose from the group... I was sure it must have been one of the older monks, as I knew all of the students.

  “Who?” Neill looked a little discombobulated by the question. “We, me, Char Nefrette here, Maxal Ganna, Sigrid Fenn…”

  “No one asked us!” the voice shouted up, and I scowled at the crowd. Who was it, causing problems? I wondered, before biting my lip in confusion. Wait. Don’t they have a right to ask these questions? Why should they follow us? I had hated being given orders by the Abbot, Monk Olan, and the others, especially because the orders had always seemed so cruel, like Master Greer commanding women could not be Protectors, just because of our sex. But I also knew that the hopes of whatever we were going to build here hung in the balance. At any moment we could lose the rest of the older monks or the staff could flee, or the dragons could decide to fly and nest somewhere else, especially now they were without a bull.

  “Silly Char.” Paxala’s warm reptilian purr rumbled through my mind. “Dragons will never leave the sacred mountain.”

  “At least you’ll still be here then,” I whispered under my breath, more to myself than to Paxala, but felt her swift rebuke at my sarcasm. It was just all of this talking and negotiating. It was so difficult – why didn’t the older monks down there just see things as we did? Why was it so hard to believe that the dragons were noble and great creatures, and that it would be a pleasure to work and learn with them?

  As I bit my lip in my own worries and anxieties, Neill’s voice rang out above me.

  “Well, we’re asking you now!” he said, sounding like he was arguing with his brothers. “We’ve got an idea. As well as rebuilding the monastery, we also need to start again with the training. No more Scribes, Protectors, and Mages,” Neill called, and I nodded.

  I had been adamant that we not continue with the Mage lessons as the Abbot had taught me, Maxal, and a few others. His methods had created suspicion and jealousy in the monastery, and the magic lessons themselves, with their regime of half starving ourselves and sitting in uncomfortable ‘control postures’ for hours at a time had been torturous. No, even if there were anyone who knew anything about magic enough to teach it (which would be a no, in my opinion), then as sure as the stars I wouldn’t be going to those classes ever again! I had ended up hypnotized, an unwilling puppet commanded by the Abbot’s whims.

  “That’s right. No more of the three-part system!” Neill raised his voice over the rising tide of grumbles coming up from below, mostly coming from the older monks, it seemed.

  “And we are going to reinstate the dragon training,” Neill shouted. “Although, I am sure that everyone here misses Monk Feodor.” I saw Neill’s hand shake just slightly as he mentioned the older dragon trainer and Advanced Protection trainer who had died trying to thwart the Abbot.

  “But how? Those dragons are wild! Feral!” An accusative voice, the same one from before, I thought, rose up from the morass below.

  I couldn’t hold my tongue any longer, “Yes, the dragons of the crater are wild. But they are not vicious, as the old bull Zaxx the Golden was.” I hope they aren’t, anyway… “They are wild, and we are not going to tame them!” I said, which, this time at least, garnered a few cheers and claps from the younger students– particularly Lila and Terrence, who were starting to build an actual relationship with their Green dragon Morax.

  “We are going to befriend them,” I called, seeing Neill shuffling nervously beside me as I nodded to him. “Go on, Neill!” I hissed.

  “Oh yeah, right…. So, our new training isn’t going to be trying to command the dragons to do anything. Instead, it’s going to be teaching you–us–to be better Dragon Riders.” Neill’s voice became a little calmer and clearer as he enthused on the subject that he had been thinking deeply about. “From our studies and experience, we think that riding a dragon is easier with two people, and we already have been trained as Scribes and Protectors in the past, but now we’re going to figure out if we can have a... a fighter maybe? And a scout?” he called. “The fighters will be led by Lila Penn, the best fighter amongst us, and the scouts will be led by Dorf Lesser, the best map-reader!”

  “What about the Mages?” A voice shouted.

  “Anyone who wants to try and study magic can do so,” Neill said firmly, repeating almost exactly what I had
suggested last night. “And you work together, in groups, helping each other. It doesn’t matter if anyone has told you that you can or cannot do it. From now on, anyone who wants to give the meditations a try can form a group and go to the Dragon Library to read the scrolls there. All that we ask is that no scroll leaves the library.”

  Yes. Maxal Ganna, the most skilled of all of the magical recruits would be in charge of overseeing the study groups, and I knew that he was sensible enough to manage it well. And he was kind, which made all of the difference. But from now on, our focus would be on the dragons, not making glowing balls of light with our minds!

  “And everyone here,” Neill said that last part of the proclamation, “Whether you were a Scribe, a Protector, older or younger, even if you are one of the staff…”

  A sudden angry hiss from the crowd, as many of the older monks still cleaved to the old notion that the ‘servants’ and ‘staff’ should best be not seen or not even heard, just able to produce clean linen, good food, and tidy up their messes whenever expected. It made me angry, thinking of poor Nan Barrow in the kitchens, surrounded by her dwindling supplies of both food and workers.

  “Everyone,” Neill insisted, “has to be given the chance to learn dragon training. That is going to be the only daily lesson, every day. Now, if you’ll all wait here for a moment, we’ll get you all organized into different groups and each group will have a time that they are to approach the crater, in order to get to know the dragons.”

  “It’s madness!” someone shouted from below, and I heard mumbles and disagreements break out. “We’ll get eaten!”

  Well, with an attitude like that you will, I thought grimly, before clearing my throat. “No, you won’t,” I said.

  “Oh, go on. Just one,” Paxala intruded upon my thoughts with a gleeful snicker.