by Audrey Faye
Kellan snorted. “Lotus would rile up the babies all day long with her antics, and Kis would probably set both of you on fire before sundown.”
Probably. But Irin loved Lotus, even when she was a total troublemaker. Sapphire sighed and looked over at their silent teacher. “I’m guessing we don’t get to quit after our first lesson.”
Karis’s smile was slight, but there was approval in her eyes. “You guess rightly. If the two of you truly can’t figure out how to fly together, we’ll find a way for you to make your contribution to the world from the ground. But that would be a decision made many lessons down the road. You need to fight your way through the learning first, just like Alonia doesn’t get to give up on languages or Lily on cooking or Kellan here on holding her own in a fight.”
Kellan was even tinier than Sapphire, and she took a bruising every time they went for weapons training. Which meant the next part of the answer was the same one Irin always gave to Kellan when she picked herself out of the dirt and glared at him. “You want us to be as prepared as we can be when we leave the village.”
“Indeed.” Karis looked down into her mug for a long moment. “We do that for all of our students and young dragons, but with you and Lotus, it goes beyond the usual need to prepare. Elhen bade us get you ready, and that’s a responsibility Afran in particular takes very seriously.”
She hadn’t known that—but she knew why. Something lurched inside Sapphire’s chest. She never liked thinking about this part. “Because we’re one of the five.” Two years ago, that had felt wonderfully special. These days, it just felt like a blacksmith’s anvil waiting to fall on their heads. She knew how many dragons and kin never came back from their tours, and they were the ones out on the ordinary kinds of assignments.
She and Lotus had been picked for something far scarier. If the old stories were true, they were part of a very small, very special group that would save all of dragonkind. Something Sapphire mostly managed not to think about because it just made her teeth chatter. “I don’t even know what that means, or what we’re supposed to do.” They were just one small dragon and one bruised elf. Maybe the Dragon Star made a mistake.
Karis’s hand on her shoulder was gentle. “We assume you were chosen for a reason, and that in the fullness of time, we’ll know what it is that you’re meant to do. In the meantime, we’ll prepare you like every other youngling of this village so that you’re as ready to face life as we can possibly make you. Which means nourishing both your strengths and your weaknesses.”
Sapphire wanted to have a temper tantrum just thinking about more bruises, because she knew exactly what their weakness was—but something Karis had said stopped her. Her body felt thoroughly abused, but she was pretty sure she didn’t have any more dings than Kellan had after a hard weapons lesson—and her best friend never complained. She just stood up, dusted herself off, made a face at Irin, and attacked him again.
Not once in the two years Sapphire had been here had it ever worked. Irin always plunked her right back in the dust, and he never did it gently. But it never stopped Kellan from trying. Sapphire looked over at her best friend, seeing her in a new light. “One of your strengths is that you never stop trying, no matter what happens.”
Kellan flushed, embarrassed by the praise. “I’m just stubborn. That’s all.”
“It’s far more than that.” Karis emptied the last of her cup. “You’ve got a deep and steady faith, and you hold on to it when others might give up.”
Kellan sat wordless, her cheeks bright pink.
“That will be needed,” Karis said quietly. “The dragons are depending on us to save them, and they will need all our strengths. Not just those of the five.”
Sapphire swallowed hard. Two years ago, Elhen’s tale had been a pretty story about saving the dragons of old—until one night in the dark about a week later when she’d realized that if the ancient dragons perished, there wouldn’t be any dragons in the here and now, either. No Afran, no Kis, no Elhen—and definitely no peach-pink, barrel-rolling, bed-stealing most amazing dragon in all the world.
Life without Lotus wasn’t something she even wanted to think about. Sapphire reached out to her best friend and took her small, sturdy hand. “I need you to teach me how to be as tough as you are when Irin beats you up with a sword.”
Kellan flashed a grin. “I can teach you all the swear words I say in my head. Those help the most.”
Sapphire bit back a snort and glanced at Karis.
Karis raised a wry eyebrow. “Once Kellan runs out of curses, come see me.” She winked at Kellan. “The weapons master before Irin wasn’t any friendlier, and I wasn’t much bigger than you are.”
Nobody who rode on Afran’s back had any need for a sword, but swear words might be useful for all kinds of reasons. Lily knew some pretty good ones from hanging around the docks in the fishing village where she’d been born. And Alonia knew how to say things so politely that people didn’t even realize they’d been cursed.
None of that would help Sapphire and Lotus fly any better, but it did help move the scary anvil a little farther away from her head. She might be one of the five, but she had a lot of friends at her back.
Which was as good a reason as any to get up tomorrow and go drown in some more dust.
Chapter 11
Sapphire groaned as she walked out the door of the small rondo she shared with Kellan and headed toward the nursery. Everyone kept telling her that flying would hurt less with practice, but it had been almost two weeks now, hours every day, and getting out of her bed each morning was still the hardest part of her day.
Which was saying something because it had plenty of competition. Lotus had mastered her wing tilts and tail curls well enough to keep them out of accidental nose dives, but the crashes due to lack of thought on the part of a certain peach-pink dragon’s immature brain were still happening frequently enough that Sapphire’s whole body had turned into one big bruise.
Hopefully, whatever Irin wanted her for would be quick and easy and very soft.
He looked up as she ducked inside the dim nursery. “Good morning.”
She’d take his word for it. “I got a message that you wanted to see me.” It wasn’t an unusual request—Lotus still spent a lot of time with Irin and Kis, and there was a never-ending list of chores associated with raising baby dragons, including the oversized ones.
Irin grunted. “I’ll be doing your flying lesson this morning.”
She blinked—that was pretty much the last thing she’d expected. Kis had been wing-wounded many seasons past and didn’t fly any farther than the nearest sunning rock.
“You think I’ve forgotten all I know just because we don’t take to the skies anymore, missy?” Irin’s voice was testier than usual. “I’ll have you know that in our day, there wasn’t any dragon who could outfly Kis, and not a rider who could stick like I could, either.”
Things were starting to make a bit more sense. “You can teach me not to fall off?”
“I can try.” He raised a wry eyebrow. “Afran tells me that teaching Lotus to be more thoughtful about which way she’s pointing her feet hasn’t been all that successful.”
Sapphire sighed. “She barrel-rolled me again yesterday.” Barrel smash was more like it. “I managed to hang on long enough to hit the ground feet first, but I’m not sure that’s a big improvement.” Her hips ached like demons this morning.
“Not if you’re any higher up than the rooftops, anyhow.” Irin clapped a hand on her shoulder. “Come. I sent Lotus out to practice earlier. Let’s go see what she’s learned.”
She didn’t need a dragon with more tricks. Sapphire limped along after Irin as he stomped out the nursery door and headed out the back way to the north edge of the village. That worried her—the land was a lot rockier up there. “We’ve been practicing in the south fields.”
“Too flat for what we need.”
She suddenly felt positively nostalgic about the clouds of dust. “I’m no
t sure I’m ready for anything else.”
Irin turned to her, his eyes flashing fiercely. “Life doesn’t always wait for you to be ready, missy. It’s time to practice somewhere that doesn’t offer you and that girl of yours a soft landing. Get both of you paying better attention to the job you need to do.”
He stomped off and she followed his back, abashed, looking at the hunched set of his shoulders. However harsh his words might have been, he’d paid a steep price to learn them. One she hadn’t thought about very much, and that suddenly shamed her. He probably hadn’t felt ready to fly into an oncoming army with no backup either—but she was very certain he wouldn’t want to talk about that. So she asked the other question that was making her feel guilty and sad. “Do you miss flying?”
His shoulders hunched a little further. “Like I’d miss my right arm, but Kis can’t manage the wing tilts anymore, and we’d be a sad ghost of what we used to be even if we managed it.”
Which would embarrass the old, proud dragon even more than it would his rider. Sapphire tried to imagine Kis’s rich gold wings flapping in the sunlight. “I wish I’d seen you.”
“Ah, we were a sight, we were.” Irin looked up at the sky, smiling. “Kis could dive from the sky like a hawk and pull up so close to the grass, I could have picked myself a four-leaf clover.”
That sounded like something she wanted to try exactly never. “Did you ever fall off?”
The silence stretched for long enough that Sapphire thought it might never break. Finally, Irin sighed. “Only once. The day Kis got hurt.”
And he’d never gotten back on. Her heart ached for him and his dragon both.
“Come.” Irin turned left on a small trail leading to a rocky outcropping.
Sapphire’s legs groaned in protest, but she didn’t have time to listen to them. She was far too busy looking at a peach-pink dragon perched on the top of a boulder almost as high as her head.
Irin’s hand stretched out to stop her. “She hasn’t seen us yet. Watch.”
Lotus tiptoed up to the edge of the boulder, wings curled around her protectively, tail stretched out behind for ballast. Then she spread her wings, puffed smoke out both nostrils, and jumped.
Sapphire held her breath as Lotus caught a small updraft and glided several feet, wings barely moving, before she dropped to the ground light as a cat. “Oh. That was beautiful.” Graceful and elegant and a lot of things she’d never associated with Lotus in flight before.
“She’s doing well.” Irin’s words were brisk, but his eyes held something different. “She’s still a young one. People would do well not to forget that.”
Sapphire hoped he remembered that she was still young too—and would very much like to live to see her next birthing day.
“Let’s get you on, then.” Irin was moving again, headed for the small boulder.
“I’m going to ride her while she does that?” That seemed like a really bad idea. Sapphire remembered the nose dives in the field all too well.
“You are.” He scrambled up the last pitch of scree and reached up and gave Lotus a pat on the shoulder. “Climb on up now, and I’ll show you a couple of tricks to help you stay on her when she does the unexpected.”
Unless he had a pot of tar to glue her down, Sapphire was pretty sure there wasn’t anything that was going to keep her from meeting up with a boulder head first. She clambered up, thinking she probably should have just jumped out of the tree back when Lotus had first hatched and been done with it. This way of dying came with way too many broken bones.
“Not there.” Irin’s hands pulled her toes from the spot where Karis had told her to put them. “That works fine with nice sedate dragons who mostly fly on diplomatic missions, but it’s a damn fool way to ride a dragon who might fly upside down.”
Sapphire couldn’t argue with that.
“Bend your knees and tuck your heels in right here.” He was positioning her feet back under Lotus’s wings, in tight to her body. “Feel that ridge there? Find a good solid place to tuck your toes along that.”
It felt totally weird, and from the way Lotus was squirming, it was also ticklish. But Sapphire finally got one foot situated, and then she understood what Irin was trying to get her to do. In between the wing bones and the flexible skin that attached to Lotus’s back, there was almost a pocket. One that surrounded her foot and held it tight and steady.
“Just like that.” Irin scratched under Lotus’s chin and sounded pleased. “Now stand up a little—get your weight off her back.”
Sapphire was astonished to find that she could do so with ease.
Irin nodded his approval. “Good. Now try hanging off to the side.”
She eyed him like he might be crazy, but did as she was told. The foot pockets were surprisingly helpful—she could push against them from any angle, or flex her feet up to hold herself against the forces of gravity trying to pull her off sideways.
“Just like that. Once your feet get strong, you’ll be able to hang on like that for hours, even if this silly girl decides to roll herself upside down.”
Everything in her wanted to deny that was possible, but she could feel the beginnings of the truth of what he said in her own feet. They were warm and anchored and secure, and it didn’t take nearly as much effort as the other ways she’d been trying to stay on. “I think this will help. Thank you.”
“You’re light. That makes this easy.” He patted Lotus on the shoulder. “Back up on the rocks, missy. Same exercise, but with your rider this time.” He looked up at Sapphire as she reached for the neck spines. “No hands. You hold on with your feet. You never know what you might need those hands for someday.”
She stared at him. “You want me to jump off a rock and not hold on?”
His grin was the scariest thing she’d seen all morning. “No. I want Lotus to jump off a rock. You’re just the passenger.” He tossed her an apple from his pocket. “I don’t want you to take any bites from this unless you’re in the air. You can stop your lesson for the day once the apple is gone or when the sun sets, whichever comes first.”
The cool, firm skin of the apple in her hands felt like her last slim hold on reality. “I’m going to fall off long before that.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Then your apple will be dirty and your head will hurt from whatever rock you banged it into, and you’ll get back on and try again.”
Words fired up in her throat. Angry ones. Scared ones.
He leaned in, his head at the level of her knee, his eyes locked on hers. “I would give both my legs and every other body part I could spare to get to do this even one more time. Stop thinking about what you’re scared to do and start remembering that you’re dragon kin and your dragon is healthy and young and capable of dancing in the sky, and that’s a rare privilege.”
Sapphire gulped. His eyes looked a bit like Kellan’s. Full of yearning.
She tucked her feet a little deeper under Lotus’s wings. “Okay. Let’s go fly off some rocks.”
Irin nodded and turned to go.
She stared at him. “Aren’t you going to stay and watch?” Someone had to pick up the pieces when she broke.
He shook his head without turning back. “This is something the two of you need to do.”
She heard the words he didn’t say. It would hurt him too much to stay.
Chapter 12
Sapphire plunked down on a tuft of moss at the edge of the river. There were flat sunning rocks nearby, but she didn’t want to so much as touch a rock ever again. Her head had more than one fist-sized lump, courtesy of some boulder that didn’t have the decency to get out of the way of her wild tumbles. One of her ears bore a dent that was probably permanent, and the rest of her body looked like it had fought with an avalanche and lost.
She looked over at Lotus, who had flopped down in a patch of sun and laid her head morosely on a fallen tree trunk. Her dragon wasn’t in any better shape than she was. “We’re a sorry pair, aren’t we, girl?”
&n
bsp; Lotus managed a feeble chirrup. Her scales didn’t bash and dent as easily as elf skin, but her normal ebullient confidence had taken some very hard hits. They’d managed a few short flights off a couple of boulders, which was more than they’d ever accomplished in the south field, but the landings had not been pretty. And that was the best of what they’d managed to do. The rest of the rock-and-roll day didn’t bear thinking about.
At least there hadn’t been anyone watching. They’d always had an audience while they’d practiced in the fields, and even Kellan’s hopeful encouragement had gotten heavy after a while. It had been easier to dent and bruise alone.
Guilt had kept her at it for a while, and then sheer determination to outlast a bunch of rocks, which wasn’t going to win her any smart-elf awards. The last couple of times, she’d dragged herself up onto the boulder fueled solely by the desire to knock herself unconscious for a week.
That would probably excuse them from flying practice.
Sapphire reached into her rucksack, which she’d wisely stowed well away from their practice boulder, and pulled out a fruit tart that was only a little mushed. “Here, I saved this for you. You fell asleep before you got to eat yours last night.” It was in far better shape than the apple that had tumbled out of her hands so many times it had eventually turned into sauce. Irin might think holding on was optional, but Sapphire was wildly unconvinced.
Not that two hands had kept her attached to her dragon, either.
A long pink tongue reached out and slurped up the treat, and this time, when Lotus laid her head back down on the fallen tree, her mood didn’t feel quite so morose.
Sapphire wished the rest of what ailed them could be fixed with something as simple as a sweet treat. However, she was done worrying about that for the day. They’d come here to recover, not to dig themselves deeper into the pits of despair. She looked over at the small pool of water separated from the river by a painstakingly built stone wall. Sometimes rocks could be useful. “Do you have enough energy left to heat up the water, beautiful?”