Dragon Mage (The First Dragon Rider Book 3)

by Ava Richardson

  “You’re not helping,” I told her with my thoughts, before continuing to speak. “You won’t get eaten with me and my Crimson Red watching over you, and the other Dragon Riders here to help you…”

  “No! We refuse!” someone shouted from below, and I could see that there were now more grumbles from below. The crowd was clearly splitting into the older monks and the younger students. I looked up at Neill, desperate for him to say something that might bring some order to this mess. Sometimes, I think, we really need someone to just be able to bark at the crowd and make them see sense! But Neill was once again looking far to the southern distance, distracted and anxious himself, as if maybe the monks below would get eaten.

  “…Council?” someone was saying, and I looked around to see that it was Dorf, climbing the stone steps up the side of the wall to where Neill and I were. He waved at me once again in that worried and over-excited way that he always seemed to have.

  “What did you say, Dorf?” I said hurriedly.

  “A council,” he said again, his words only reaching us here on the wall. “Why not have a council? Like, where people can air their disagreements.”

  That was it! I thought. “Dorf, you’re a genius.” I congratulated him.

  “Er... I am?” he said, flushing pink.

  “Yes!” I turned to the crowd. “We’re also going to organize a council,” I shouted, raising my voice in order to be heard over the general grumbling and mumbling from below.

  “What? We are?” I could hear the assembled throng saying below me.

  “Yes! A council for people to air their concerns. Like this, but where we can organize how to conduct the trainings, and how to run the monastery. Every dorm room could send someone…” I said, looking over at Dorf, who nodded.

  “I’ll organize it,” he said, looking almost ecstatic at the prospect of all that paperwork.

  They can come up with a new set of laws, as well, I thought gratefully, turning to see if Neill agreed.

  But once again, Neill was just biting his nails, nodding and waving his hands that this was all a good idea, but nothing that he wanted to add to. I could have groaned.

  “Okay, everyone. That’s it! Stay around to get organized into dragon training classes, and to sort out your representatives for the council,” I shouted, clapping my hands to signal that the meeting was over. Below us, the crowd started to mumble and move. Dorf raced back down the steps, and joined Sigrid and Terrence as they moved around the crowd, taking names and organizing groups.

  Phew. At least that is over, I thought with a heavy sigh, as Neill brushed past me. “Neill! Wait – we should talk about this,” I said. Where was he going now? “You know, work out the training regime and all of that…”

  Neill paused, looking at me with shadowed eyes. “You can do that, can’t you? I mean, you know more about dragons than anyone here, right? You’re the one who befriended Paxala in the first place, after all. And Dorf is great at all of that paperwork and scrolls stuff, and Lila spent her childhood learning how to fight…” He shrugged. “I just need to get some air, just to think…”

  But we need you, I thought, but my surprise stopped the words from reaching my mouth. He was the first rider. He had been the first human to actually ride a dragon. He had changed the way the others looked at dragons. They respected him. Well, I corrected myself, the older monks might not actually respect him, as they don’t seem to respect anyone, but still… Neill is the one who made the change happen.

  But somehow, I found myself watching my friend’s disappearing back as he hurried the opposite way from the assembled throng down there, head hunched. Neill hadn’t been the same since his conversation with Jodreth, just yesterday. Something had happened, but he wouldn’t tell me what.

  Well, the guy has just lost his father, I thought with a twinge of sympathy. That is bound to mess you up, isn’t it? How would I feel if I had lost my father?

  A knot of awkward emotions welled up in my heart. Hurt. Anger. Shame. My father had tried to poison Paxala, and then tried to enslave her so that he could make his own rival Dragon Monastery in my home, the Northern Kingdom. I didn’t think that I could ever forget that or forgive him for it. But that didn’t mean that I wanted him to die, just, sorta – be sorry. Beg my forgiveness. Tell me that he had been wrong all along and that he knew that I was his little princess! But I still had a chance with my father, a chance that Neill will never have.

  Oh nuts, I thought, as my ugly emotions turned into misery, and a tear crept down over my cheek. That was never going to happen now, and my father wasn’t the sort of man to beg forgiveness from anyone. He was as good as dead, for all the chance that we’d ever be reconciled to each other.

  We were on our own up here. Me and Neill and all of the others. We’d all had to break our ties with the past to build something new.

  “You are not alone.” Paxala’s voice rose in my mind, wrapping me with the fiery warmth of her heart.

  “I know,” I whispered to her where I stood, feeling better that in my heart of hearts, I still had a dragon there, waiting for me and looking out for me. Who did Neill have?

  Chapter 11

  Neill, Hopeless

  I managed to avoid the throngs in the main courtyard, threading my way past several of the older monks who scowled at me, as though they wanted to further elaborate on how much of a failure I was. Then I headed through the servants’ corridor back to the boys’ dormitory tower, and up to the same old room that I shared with Dorf.

  I didn’t really want to bump into anyone at the moment, I just wanted space to think. By myself. Not have people asking me questions about this, that, and everything else. It just seemed that the whole business of ‘leading’ - if that’s what you could even call what I was doing—was really just arguing with people. No matter what great idea you had, or heard, there was always going to be someone who disagreed with it. It was infuriating, and I had no idea how my father had put up with it.

  My father. The thought added to the weight that I was already feeling in my stomach. He would have known what to do. And even if he didn’t, everyone would still have listened to him anyway, just out of respect.

  Luckily for me, my guess that mostly everyone would be outside at the general meeting had been correct, and the dormitory was pretty deserted as I clambered the steps wearily.

  My father knew how to lead, I didn’t, my thoughts circled. My father knew exactly how to address a crowd, and how to organize people so that they weren’t always at each other’s throats. What did I know? I emerged into my room, and my eyes slid naturally to the one thing that I didn’t even know that I had been looking for.

  The single splash of color in the whole room. Back under the old regime of Abbot Ansall, such things as luxuries and decorations had been forbidden as distractions from studying, but I had managed to bring one brightly-woven red and blue blanket, inlaid with fabulous cross-hatching designs of my mother’s people, the Gypsies. To be honest, I didn’t have to argue to have it, nor fight to keep it during the old Order, as I had hidden the blanket when Quartermaster Greer and Monk Olan had been running the day-to-day training of us students. I hadn’t even brought the blanket, but had been given it one freezing night by my Uncle Lett and Jodreth, after suffering a particularly cruel punishment at the hands of the Abbot.

  I hadn’t known that this simple homespun cloth had been what my heart needed, but I knew that it was as I sat down heavily on the bed, kicked off my boots and pulled the blanket around me. My Uncle Lett had always told me that I was a Gypsy, no matter what, and that he was proud of me – that all of my mothers’ people were proud of me. I didn’t have to be able to unseat a horseman with a spear, or be able to fight off two attackers at once, or to defeat an enemy in battle in order to win their respect.

  Just by virtue of being my mother’s son, my Uncle Lett had bound his life to mine, I thought, as I breathed in the warm dark under the blanket, the delicate hints of cinnamon, patchouli, and cardamom
still detectable.

  What would my mother think of me now? I wondered as I allowed myself to fall into a fitful and restless sleep. In charge of a monastery. Exiled from Clan Torvald lands. Half the world wanting to either destroy us or was jealous of us.

  My dark dreams of warfare, fighting, and of my dead father didn’t provide me with any answers.

  “Here he is!”

  I awoke at some point in what must have been the late afternoon to the sound of voices at my door. Instantly, I tensed, for some reason my mind replaying that horrible image of Monk Feodor, my friend, engulfed in a ball of flame as I struggled out from under the scratchy red blanket.

  “Dorf,” I muttered, rubbing my eyes to see that it was indeed Dorf and Terrence coming to get me. Both looked tired, and were wearing the heavy, padded leather suits that the Protector students had worn for their training.

  “Morning.” Terrence rolled his eyes at my apparent sluggishness. “Come on, group one is approaching the crater, and we might just be able to meet them there, if we’re quick.”

  “Group one?” I echoed, swinging my legs from the bed. In actual fact, I didn’t feel rested at all.

  “Dragon training. You announced it just this morning, remember?” Terrence almost snapped at me.

  “Are you sure that you’re feeling all right, Neill?” Dorf’s quieter voice said at my side, already offering me the padded leather overalls. The question made me stop and think. Was I feeling all right? What was wrong with me? I just felt so very heavy and slow, as if I were about to catch a cold.

  “Maybe I’m coming down with something,” I muttered, shaking my head at Dorf’s worried looks.

  “Put these on,” Dorf said, holding out a leather training vest and greaves.

  “I’m sure I won’t need them,” I said, loathe to expend any more energy, but Dorf and Terence gave me looks that said they weren’t going to back down.

  “It’s not like dragons are fire-breathing lizards or anything,” I said with a wry smile and acquiesced, following my friends out of the dorm room with just one longing look back at my warm bed and the red Gypsy blanket.

  The first dragon training lesson had been devised by Char, and she looked nervous as we hurried along the path out of the collapsed wreckage that was the rear of the monastery, and climbed the stone trail that curled up to the crater.

  “Where have you been?” Char said at me in a sharp tone. “What if I’d needed you this afternoon?”

  “I, uh…” I didn’t have an excuse or an answer. “I guess I’ve failed the monastery again,” I muttered.

  “Neill!” Char looked at me strangely, like I’d just insulted her or something. But, before she could say anything else, we had arrived and there were students and monks looking at us expectantly.

  There, at the edge of the crater in the fading afternoon, Char, Dorf, Terrence, and I stood, along with about a dozen assorted older monks and students. It was clear to me that the group was divided into two camps: those who were terrified of what was to happen next, and those who were excited, and it was no surprise that the older monks were the terrified ones.

  “Voices down, please,” Char said distractedly. “Dragons have very sensitive hearing.”

  The idea, I remembered, for the first few training sessions was only to ‘meet’ the dragons, and hopefully, perhaps encourage a choosing between a human and a dragon. Previously, the monks had come up here to throw meat down to the dragons, in order to placate them (and to placate Zaxx the Gold, no less). Char had decided that we should continue that tradition, but only when we wanted to meet them – she wanted the monastery to abandon having set feeding times.

  “Are you sure that this is a good idea – they might be hungry?” one of the older monks asked nervously.

  Char snorted her disdain for the question. “Dragons can hunt. They need to hunt for themselves, and anyway, I am reliably informed that humans don’t taste that great anyway, compared to fish and deer.”

  “Wonderful,” the nervous monk said dryly, taking a step back from the edge.

  “Okay.” Char nodded at me, and I raised the short red hand flag I had brought with me, holding it in the air and signaling to what remained of the Astrographer’s Tower.

  A moment of silence. I wondered if the monks inside had seen my signal, even though they should have been waiting for it – and then it came, a pleasingly deep, sonorous BWAAARM, BWAARM, that was nothing like the raucous shrieking of the old dragon pipes.

  “Char?” I looked at her in worry. We still didn’t know how the dragons would react to this new dragon horn, but both Dorf and Maxal had spent the last few days studying the books to try and create a sound that would mimic a den mother’s encouraging rumble. The old dragon pipes had been used as a weapon of torture, high-pitched and sharp enough to damage tender dragon ears, but this one we wanted to use as a signal for the dragons, not against them.

  BWAARM, BWAARM….

  “It’s working.” Char was grinning breathlessly, cocking her head as if listening to the updrafts of wind that came up the side of the steep crater. Her pale hair streamed out beside her. She was a vision, as wild as the rocks and the beasts below. “Paxala is telling me that she isn’t in pain. That the dragons are alarmed and surprised, but not in pain…”

  “Great,” the nervous monk said sarcastically.

  Down below us, the foliage of the ever-warm dragon crater was swathed in mists from the hot pools and springs that bubbled up through the rocks. Something made me raise my head just a moment before the mists parted, and there, flaring towards us with a joyful cry was Paxala the Crimson Red.

  “Skreeyar!”

  “Duck!” one of the other monks said, throwing themselves to the rocky floor as a few students and some of the more skittish adults scattered, but Char laughed where she stood, just a few meters beneath the passing body of the Red. I joined her in grinning at the sight. How could anyone not look at the creature and feel awe and wonder? Her body was a tight suit of gleaming red, orange, and blood scales. Her wings made a thrumming noise as they passed by. The fact that she could fly at all when she was so large and had such thick slabs of muscle was astonishing. She was a beauty—and she wasn’t alone.

  “Srech, Srrekh!” Out of the disturbance of mists below also came the young Sinuous Blue Morax, following the larger Crimson Red as if trying to chase her. Morax was Terrence and Lila’s dragon, I knew, and Terrence raised a joyous fist at the sight of her.

  The two dragons flew high over the slopes of the mountain, darting and turning their wings to perform sudden and fast movements, before sweeping back around to the crater.

  “You shouldn’t be afraid,” Char was saying to those who were still huddled at the crater (all younger students like us, I saw, as well as a few of the older monks who had some grit about them), before I saw her consider with a smile, “well, maybe you should be a little afraid – but you have to learn how to control your fear around them. Look!” Char reached down to the sackcloth bag that she had brought, which was layered with cured lake fish – each one silver and as long as her forearm. I watched as she seized one up and held it aloft in the air, and, even though the dragons were now on the other side of the crater and looking no bigger than herons, Paxala suddenly turned on a wing tip and flashed towards us.

  “Their sense of smell is even better than their hearing, you see,” Char said. “Which is something you can use when you’re flying, isn’t that right, Neill?” She looked at me encouragingly as she threw the cured fish high into the air above her, and, with a wooosh, Paxala flickered her wings and caught the treat with an audible snap in the air above our heads. I thought that I heard a low groan from the more nervy-looking monk.

  “Neill?” Char prodded. “Trusting your dragon’s senses?”

  “Oh yeah.” I cleared my throat. “Well, it’s more those who are lucky enough to hear the dragons’ thoughts who can take advantage of them, but for the rest of us, we have to learn how to rely on the dragons’
responses. When they suddenly don’t want to go somewhere, or are seeming alarmed, then that usually means that they’ve caught wind of something that they don’t like...”

  Char was looking at me a little oddly, like I had failed once again. How do I know how to train a dragon? My father never even let me train clansmen warriors! My heart lurched once again at the thought of my father. I had lost so much now that he was gone, and I hadn’t even realized what the loss of my father might mean until it was too late.

  All of those lessons. All of that wisdom. All of those hours he spent with my brothers, and not with me… The dark thoughts whirled, as Char continued her lesson in the background.

  “Well, who wants to meet a dragon then?” she asked the other students, who were all eager and excited to get their hands on the fish and do the same as Char had.

  As I stood there, feeling awkward, Char showed the students how to offer the fish to the dragons without making sudden movements, helping the humans to get over their fears and anxieties around the larger beasts more than allaying any qualms that the dragons might have. A few students threw the food just as skillfully as Char had, before Paxala, and then Morax alighted on the crater’s edge (their claws dislodging rocks and gravel the size of cart wheels). She then encouraged the students to approach Paxala, and the much younger Blue (with Terrence standing protectively close by, like a young father hovering near his child).

  “There now, who’s a brave dragon?” Terrence cooed at Morax, and I found myself pleasantly surprised at just how protective he was. Terrence Griffith, the youngest son of the Southern Prince had gone from a stuck-up princeling to a slightly-less stuck up princeling, who was in love with a dragon.

  “This is going well.” Char was beside me. “If this lot take to it, then we can start with trying to get them down into the crater and see if any of the younger dragons wants to bond with them.”