Dragon God (The First Dragon Rider Book 1)

by Ava Richardson

  “Jodreth said that you were hypnotized,” I explained. “That the Abbot was doing something to all of you Mages up there in that tower, turning you into his personal fanatics or something.”

  “Jodreth?” Char collapsed against Paxala’s neck, who hunched over us warily, her nostrils flaring at the sounds of the disturbed night around us. “Who’s Jodreth?”

  “He’s a monk. Or was a monk. He’s a rebel of the Order, and a Mage like you,” I explained, telling Char the brief bits of history that I knew and how Jodreth had saved my life several times already and helped take care of Paxala too.

  “And now we know,” Char said, her face pale and appalled. “They kill dragons. The Abbot and Zaxx. It’s not a sacred order, it’s, it’s more like a farm.” She sounded revolted. “It must be what happened to your parents.” Char looked up to Paxala, who purred and crooned mournfully at Char below.

  “Paxala came to your rescue,” I explained. “When you were hypnotized, she started circling the monastery looking for you, and that set off the alarms,” I said proudly.

  But just then there was another blast from the dragon pipes, and the magical battle went completely silent. As I looked at Char’s owlish, worried eyes, it was clear we both knew that the feared magical battle between Jodreth and the Abbot was over, and that the Abbot could have won. Someone must have won. The dragon pipes called again.

  “We should find Jodreth, in case…” I hazarded.

  “You’re right, and get Paxala hidden away, before they send out search parties for her…” Char agreed.

  She was interrupted by a new sound rolling through the night from somewhere below us.

  “What is that?” Char said in alarm, while Paxala called a trumpeting alarm down the mountain, across the forests, and towards the foothills of what was coming towards us.

  As the sound grew louder from the darkness down there, it was a sound that I knew very well indeed. It was the sound of an army marching to its band. And I recognized its song.

  “I thought that the dragon pipes were blowing because they were warning the Abbot about Paxala,” I said. “But now I see—they were blowing because they were warning the prince about what is coming for him.” I looked out into the night, my legs still shaking. Beyond the wilds, off in the distance, I could see the stone road that led past Dragon Mountain. It was clogged and glittering with torches and lanterns.

  “Who are they?” Char stood up to look at the snaking river of torches marching towards Mount Hammal. Paxala started to growl in the back of her throat.

  “Those are the war drums of the Sons of Torvald,” I said.

  Chapter 24

  The Demand

  “Everyone to their guard stations!” The Quartermaster was shouting by the time we stumbled through the Kitchen Garden gate and the old storehouses. Although Char appeared almost fine, she was pale and thin after the weeks of not eating nor sleeping enough. I on the other hand, felt like my entire body had been pummeled and bruised – which I guess that it had, after falling from the Abbot’s tower like that. With Paxala swooping and attacking the towers of the Dragon Monastery, we had sought to get to her first, knowing as we did that if Jodreth failed, we were no match for the Abbot and needed to get to Paxala first, and if Jodreth had succeeded he would either follow hard behind us, or send us on our way to convince Paxala to come to safety. By the time we reached the monastery itself, we found it in turmoil.

  With the Abbot and Jodreth locked in some sort of mystical battle that neither I nor Char knew how to break – and with all my brothers’ armies approaching–we had decided it best to try and get everyone that we could to safety. To hide Paxala. To encourage our friends Dorf and Sigrid and Maxal to flee…

  The monastery was a den of calamity and activity. The visiting monks raced this way and that, batting students out of their way as they buckled on leather jerkins and seized bows. A phalanx of the Dark Prince’s knights, his honor guard at the feast, formed up by the main gate.

  “Will Paxala be okay?” I hissed to Char, who nodded, her eyes darting here and there.

  “Better than us. I told her to stay on the other side of the ridge until we had a chance to find out what had happened to Jodreth, and help the others.”

  We had to check if our friends at the monastery were okay. There were Dorf and Sigrid, and even Lila, whom we couldn’t leave here to be captured by my brothers. I dreaded to think what Rik and the others might do to the monks here – or what even they might do to me, as they had been searching for an excuse to get rid of me for a long time. My brothers, I kept thinking – but somehow, I couldn’t feel the same companionship to them that I did to Char or Paxala. I knew exactly what my brothers were capable of – I had once seen Rik drag a soldier through the marketplace by his feet for daring to be insolent. Rik had been drunk at the time – which had made the punishment worse but it still unsettled me. My brothers reveled in war. They were born for it in a way I was not. They were merciless, and savage in their campaigns against any Torvald enemy.

  But these students – at least some of them – are my friends, I reminded myself. They were not enemies of Torvald. Finding a way to communicate that to my brothers though? It seemed impossible. Let alone convincing them some of the monastery’s inhabitants were our allies...

  It was easy to sneak our way back into the monastery during all of this confusion, and I thought we might even get all the way to the Main Hall, where I had last seen Dorf and Sigrid and Maxal, when a voice caught us.

  “Torvald! Nefrette!” It was the Quartermaster Greer, standing in the center of the main practice yard with a little leather crop. Every time he barked an order he gave it a swish, as if he wanted it to taste flesh rather than air. “There you are! Get over here!” he barked.

  “Char?” I whispered to her in confusion, and hoped she understood my question from the look on my face. Should we run now, or…?

  Char shook her head. She was right—there were too many people around – knights and monks and the scowling eyes of the Quartermaster himself. We turned slowly, and found the Quartermaster striding towards us, as well as two others. One was a woman with long blonde hair and full armor (one of the Prince Vincent’s knights, it appeared) and the other was Monk Feodor, now wearing a leather cuirass and leather arm greaves. As my gaze went from one to the other, I found myself wishing that I had a weapon at my belt.

  “Here, Torvald,” Feodor said as he thrust a large dagger with a sheaf into my hands. “Strap this to the small of your back, so you can reach for it under your cloak when you need to.” I noticed Feodor didn’t say “if”, and his face was serious and grim as he instructed me how to use it.

  “Monk? What are you doing?” hissed the blonde knight. “You should be taking him in for questioning – he’s the son of the traitor!”

  “He’s my student,” Feodor growled back.

  “This is ridiculous. The prince will want the Torvald boy’s head. Along with the rest of his kin. Unless…we could ransom it for the treacherous Warden’s surrender…” The blonde woman huffed and shook her hair. “Do I need to get an order from the prince himself?”

  “This is still my province, Madame Knight…” coughed a fourth voice, and we turned to see hobbling towards us, leaning heavily was none other than the Abbot Ansall himself. As soon as Char and I saw him, my blood froze. He hadn’t died. Jodreth hadn’t beaten him.

  “Neill,” Char whispered at me, and I nodded that I understood. Jodreth must have died down there. He had been too weak compared to the centuries-old Abbot in his magic.

  Does this mean that Jodreth, my friend, lay dead at the bottom of the feeding chamber somewhere below us? The very idea sickened me.

  Converging on us, the Abbot looked haggard and his skin was blotchy and discolored. I wondered if he was holding a leg strangely as he hobbled – was he wounded? Did Jodreth at least manage to get close to stopping his vile plans?

  “My province,” the Abbot repeated, his eyes flickering at th
e captain, and then me and Char. “Torvald, Nefrette. What a surprise to see you here, at the heart of things… As usual.” He looked calculatingly at Char in particular.

  My throat closed up, unable to speak in terror and anger. He has just killed my friend. He has killed my friend, and now he wants to kill my brothers and warriors and scouts that I had grown up with. I opened my mouth to accuse him, but Char stood on my foot as she stepped forward, saying, “Abbot – I am sorry for neglecting my duty.” She looked confused, wiping a hand over her brow. “I remember you asking me to guard your study rooms, but then I don’t remember anything else….” She was play-acting I knew, but would it fool Ansall?

  “And I woke up, sire, I cannot explain it, but—I was on the hillside. Do you think that I sleepwalked?” Char said.

  “Really, you remember nothing of how you got there?” The Abbot hobbled closer, and I felt my skin crawl. He now stood over the girl, peering at her with coal-dark eyes.

  “No, nothing, sire. What was I doing down there?” Char asked innocently, causing the Abbot to scowl and mutter to himself. It was clear the Abbot didn’t entirely buy Char’s story – and I rather suspected from the sharp looks that he sent her way that he thought that it was all a lie – but he must know as well as we did that he had a lot of other more pressing problems right now than a teenaged girl. Like my brothers about to burn this place to the ground.

  “Well, no matter. Probably just as you say; you were sleep walking,” the Abbot said sharply, turning back to the others. “Madame Knight, tell the prince that I will handle this situation – and that the prince can be assured of his safety. We do, after all, live next door to a crater full of dragons! Who would be fool enough to actually launch an attack on us? This is nothing but bluster on the Torvalds part. They’ll never get up the mountainside unscathed.”

  “Quite, your excellency!” the Quartermaster Greer crowed.

  “Torvald. I am going to send you to negotiate with your brothers, on behalf of the monastery. I do not need to remind you just how serious the ramifications of your failure would be.” He looked at me. You mean the Healer Garret poisoning my father, don’t you? I thought, but nodded.

  “Monk Feodor, see to the boy’s equipment, and then take charge of the defenses of the gate,” Ansall barked.

  “Yes, your grace.” Feodor bowed his head, giving me and Char a serious look, before the Abbot beckoned me closer to him.

  “I want their full and complete withdrawal by dawn, you understand me, Torvald?” Ansall said.

  “Yes, sire,” I nodded.

  “But even that will not save them from my lord’s wrath,” added the blonde knight. “Tell them to expect punishment for this outrage.”

  The Abbot winced at the knight-marshal’s apparent lack of diplomacy, but I knew that was to be the case anyway. When my brothers went to war, they did so with just one intention: to not leave until they had fought, and had either won or been defeated. I do not remember my brothers or my father accepting a parley at all in my lifetime. The Abbot and the knight must surely have known this – so were they merely hoping for me to get killed in the crossfire when the monastery refused to surrender?

  “Never mind, boy, come with me. Follow my advice – and you might just live.” Feodor was mumbling as he turned me around and led me away.

  Char? I turned to look worriedly at her, as Ansall laid a bony hand on her shoulder.

  “Now, Char, you and the other Mage students will come with me. It is time to put all of your training into practice, to save the Draconis Order.”

  Char face was full of alarm and disgust, but as she turned toward the Abbot, her expression became mild and blank, and she muttered, “Yes, sire.”

  “Wear this, under your tunic.” Feodor threw a small leather cuirass at me, which I caught awkwardly, and started stripping clothes to strap it on. We were in the area of storehouses known as the Arms Locker, and monks were coming and going all around us, seizing armor, weapons, and getting themselves ready.

  “Seven Hells, lad,” Feodor swore when he saw my body, festooned with old scars as well as recent scrapes and bruises. “Is that all from training? Because if it is, you are doing it wrong.”

  “No, sir.” I shook my head, pulling the leather sort of padded jerkin tight, and allowing the monk to cinch it tight at shoulder, ribs, and across the chest. Even though it constricted my movement a little, it actually made my many recent injuries a little easier to carry. “No, I fell down the stairs,” I lied.

  “Huh.” Feodor was regarding me unhappily, clearly not buying a word of it. “And the scars? The white lines on your shoulders, arms, side?”

  “Oh,” they were much easier to explain. “They are from my childhood, sir. Growing up in the Torvald Clan had always been a fierce business. My father encouraged his sons to train and fight each other.” I shrugged. To me it was normal – it was only since hearing about soft Midlander Dorf Lesser’s life that I came to understand that not all children lived like that, with every day of their life designing them for war.

  “Well, that fills me with confidence,” Feodor muttered doubtfully, nodding towards the constant thud and rattle of my brother’s war drums. It didn’t bother me so much because I knew the special unit of Drummer’s Guard who played them. Those men were all as wide as an ox and with arms as thick as tree trunks, daubed in blue war paint. They hammered their war drums in complicated rhythms, designed to terrify and scare the opponent before battle and rally our own troops. Looking around the other monks here, the approach seemed to be working.

  But not on Feodor though, as he said, “Well, we’ll show them yet.” He knelt down on one knee before me. “Now, lad, I know your brothers are out there, and I know what the Abbot himself has told you, but I want you to forget all of that.”

  “I’m sorry, sir?” I said, confused as to what the Protector thought he was doing, giving me orders.

  “I’m the one in charge of the defense of this place, so I think I have a right to say this,” Feodor nodded. “I want you to ask for parley. I want you to tell your brothers that we have the Good Prince Vincent himself up here, and that I am sure that we can come to some arrangement, you understand?” Feodor hissed the words so that only my ears could hear them. “You also tell them that we have children of the Northern and the Southern Princes here as well… That will mean that, by morning a Messenger dragon will be arriving at castles and forts up and down the Three Kingdoms with word of what the Sons of Torvald are up to.

  “Your brothers like a scrap – but do they want a Three Kingdom War? A civil war again, like the old one? What if north and south united to move against them? Do you understand what I am saying, lad?” Feodor said.

  I nodded. “I do, sir.” I had spent a lot of my childhood playing in my father’s war room, underneath his table of maps and overhearing his strategists and captains discussing this or that campaign. “It’s a battle that no one can win, sir.”

  “There we go. Now you go and ask them for parley. We have the prince here, so we have a mighty big bargaining chip,” Feodor said, a little uneasily.

  “They won’t do it,” I said to him, as I slipped on my tunic and cloak, and added arm greaves. I carried no weapons save for the hidden blade under the crook of my back.

  “They will if they have sense, lad,” Feodor growled and reached for the very last item I was to take. It was stowed in its very own wooden carved trunk, longer than Feodor was tall. The monk set it on the ground between us and unlocked it, to reveal long wooden shafts of banner poled, with a variety of rolled up cloth banners in different colors.

  “A long time since we used these, lad,” he said with a roll of his eye, flicking through reds, purples and blacks. “The Monastery at War,” he pointed to one of a red dragon rampant. “The Monastery in Mourning,” a pure sable black bolt of cloth. “Quarantine,” a green cloth. “Now, here we have it. Parley.” Feodor took out a white banner, with a red dragon standing in the center. He took out the pole, and th
en affixed the white cloth banner to it, before handing it to me. “Here, carry this high, so no one can claim that they misread your intention.”

  I told him that I understood, and Feodor escorted me to the front gates, which had been closed with a heavy bang, and metal stanchions had been placed to brace them – save for one small wooden door that was cut into the larger wooden gates, which was opened especially for me.

  I craned my neck to see where the Abbot and Char had got to, but I couldn’t see them. Instead, there was an eerie silence. The dragon pipes stopped, and so did my brothers’ war drums. More than one hundred eyes were on me as the monks and the prince’s knights all watched me with a mixture of pity and hatred. The knights had formed up in two ranks inside the gates, and the monks stood along the walls and clustered the towers, bows in their hands and arrows filling the iron brackets on the walls. In the torchlight, I could see large metal cauldrons had been brought up to the gates, some of which steamed, others of which appeared filled with rocks. There was no way that people weren’t going to die tonight if my brothers attacked, I knew.

  Maybe I could parley with them, as Feodor suggested, I thought, despairingly. I could offer them Vincent for the lives of the students here. Surely, even my brothers had to recognize the value of that? When had my brothers ever seen sense? But I had to try, otherwise a lot of innocent students were going to die here.

  “Go on now, lad, get it over and done with and keep your head straight,” Monk Feodor said to me, not altogether unkindly.

  “Thank you,” I said a little awkwardly to him, but he shook his head.

  “Don’t thank me yet, boy,” he said, and I stepped through the smaller door and out onto the mountainside in the dark hours of the morning, and heard the slam of wood and metal bars behind me.

  I could just run away. The thought flew through my mind as I trudged down road from the slope of the upper mountain, past rocks and gorse and heather, towards the lower slopes where my brothers must be. I knew that I wouldn’t run, of course – there were too many things holding me here; Char, Paxala, and Jodreth first of all, but also Dorf and the others who had been kind to me in my time here; Nan, Feodor, Sigrid…