The Dragoneer: Book 1: The Bonding

by Vickie Knestaut

  Vickie Knestaut & Danny Knestaut

  The Dragoneer

  Book 1: The Bonding

  First published by BL Books in 2018

  Copyright © Vickie Knestaut & Danny Knestaut, 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  First edition

  For Kayla

  It’s hardly an adventure without you.

  Contents

  Acknowledgement

  I. THE BONDING

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  II. THE SECOND HORDE

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  About the Authors

  Acknowledgement

  Special thanks to Michael O’Brien for help and feedback. We appreciate it!

  I

  The Bonding

  Chapter 1

  Ulbeg flicked his tail and caught Trysten across the shins, knocking her and the two buckets she carried off balance. Water sloshed across the stall floor. Trysten sighed and straightened herself, then emptied what was left of the water into the dragon’s trough. She turned and patted his flank. “It’s okay. I feel it too. No need to apologize.”

  The emerald green dragon dipped his head, brushing his muzzle against her sleeve as if to say thank you.

  She moved on down the center aisle of the weyr, stopping to pick up more water buckets on the way. The dragons watched from their stalls as she passed. Ahead, a deep red female flicked her wings out, then drew them back. Straw skittered across the weyr in her wake. The dragons were unsettled. They knew Trysten’s father was coming, paying a visit for the first time since the accident.

  In the middle of the weyr, she stopped before a gold dragon. The dragon lowered her head to meet Trysten’s outstretched palm.

  “He’s coming, Elevera,” she whispered to the dragon. Her palm touched the small scales along the dragon’s muzzle. The entire length of Elevera’s head was longer than Trysten’s arm. Despite the tension in the weyr, Trysten smiled when Elevera nuzzled her palm. Not that it wasn’t a happy day. Ignoring protests from herself, her mother, and Galelin, the village healer, her father had decided he’d had enough of his bed and was going to the weyr. He was still Dragoneer of Aerona weyr and Aeronwind needed to see him, to see that he could stand once again.

  Trysten closed her eyes and listened. The soft hush of a brush against leather whispered through the dim shadows. Her breath slowed. She could hear her own heartbeat in her ears, but around it the whispered song of the dragons rose like smoke up to the vaulted roof. The quiet, rushing breath, the shift of leathery skin, a quick click of a jaw, a flick of wings all added to a shifting, whirring song, a whispered chorus as the dragons spoke with each other in quiet and subtle cues that few ever noticed, let alone understood as Trysten did.

  Her fingers curled a bit beneath Elevera’s golden muzzle as she picked out the individual notes and rhythms of the song. The dragons were excited, pleased to know that Mardoc was coming back. But woven through their song a deep, barely audible rumble rolled, a noise that Trysten imagined the heart of a mountain might make. Expressions of concern, of sadness deepening into sorrow. The sorrow was new.

  Trysten’s blue eyes snapped open. She peered into the next stall. There, Aeronwind, the iron gray dragon that led and held the horde together, her father’s dragon, lay curled in a ball upon a heap of straw. She no longer seemed the indomitable, timeless and majestic beast that Trysten had known her to be all her life.

  Trysten jumped as around her the tones and notes of the dragons drew together, collapsed from a rolling, swirling song and fell into a single, pulsing beat. One breath breathing. Every dragon breathed in time, as if under a single mind, honed and at the ready as the Dragoneer entered the weyr.

  The sudden absence of the song left Trysten disoriented. Her own breath ceased and her fingers clutched slightly at Elevera’s muzzle as if she might grasp the song and pull it back to her. Oh, how she had enjoyed the time in the weyr while her father had been confined to bed, and how guilty she felt for that. But the dragons only sang when he was absent. Now that he was back, she would miss their ever-present song while she did the morning chores. Her hand dropped away from the face of the gold dragon. Trysten touched her fingertips to her breastbone in order to remind herself to expand her lungs again, to draw the air on her own, to breathe without the dragon horde.

  She looked back to the entrance of the weyr. A dark figure stood silhouetted against the morning light. Leaning on a crooked walking stick, her father limped into the building, looking as if he had trekked a long distance, even as far as the mountains that lay gray and blunt along the horizon.

  Her breath caught to see him struggle so. She looked away, back to the shadow-strewn stalls and the dragons that still responded to him as if he were the powerful, commanding man that he had been at the beginning of the past fighting season. Even as he limped along on a twisted leg, he was still the Dragoneer, the one who had bonded with and rode mighty Aeronwind, the alpha. The horde still responded to him as his own heart did, beating in time, obeying as long as life coursed through him.

  The horde did not sing for her father or any other dragoneer. It breathed as one. It thought as one. It stood as one, waiting for the Dragoneer’s next command. She would miss that song when she became the Dragoneer.

  Her throat tightened at the thought and at the memory of that awful day she first told her father she wanted to be the next Dragoneer. She blinked hard and drew a long breath through her nose as if she might strike up the song and nudge the dragons to sing, but they would not as long as their dragoneer stood in the weyr.

  Her father turned towards the hopper.

  “Let me get that for you,” Trysten said as she hurried towards him. If she beat him to the hopper, he’d give her less grief. If he got there first and gripped the handle of one of the feed pails inside, she wouldn’t get it away from him until it sat empty outside Aeronwind’s stall.

  “Mind your place,” Mardoc said.

  Trysten stopped. Her father continued on to the hopper, pulled the d
oor open, and surveyed the pails inside. He leaned forward and inhaled several times, judging the fitness of the meat. After giving a nod, he hefted a pail by its wooden handle, and gripping it in his left hand, limped forward, leaning on the staff in his right hand.

  “If Mother saw you—”

  “I’d tell her the same thing,” Mardoc said. His back straightened a bit as he approached. Enough light remained behind him that Trysten couldn’t make out his features, but she could still see the pain on his face. More so with the effort he used to hide it.

  The strain of being out of bed weighed on him far more than he cared to let on. She turned her attention from him to the hopper. This was all about proving that he was still vital, that he was still capable of caring for his dragon. It was what the Dragoneer did, and as long as he and Aeronwind both lived, it was his duty to care for the dragon that held together his horde.

  “Tell Paege that the hopper is nearly empty,” Mardoc said.

  Trysten nodded to the side of the weyr that bordered a small pen. “It’s already being taken care of.”

  Mardoc stopped and lifted a heavy eyebrow, visible even in the shadows. “And how do you know that?”

  Trysten glanced to her father’s goatskin boots. The right foot still twisted out at an odd, unnatural angle. She closed her eyes against the memory of seeing his leg when she ran to him in the field. When Aeronwind bellowed a noise that sounded like an entire blizzard condensed into half a minute.

  They had argued that day before he left for training exercises. Argued about her wanting to be Dragoneer. The argument weighed on her as heavy as the weight of his dragon on his crumpled leg. She couldn’t have known how the exercise would end, yet she felt guilty. Why did sticking up for what she wanted always seem to hurt him?

  “Trysten,” Mardoc said.

  She looked up at him, wide and thick as a wall. The walking staff made him seem smaller. Even if she didn’t look at his feet, the staff always invited her to look down, to see how even her father, the Dragoneer, was vulnerable in the end, and his mighty dragon, there behind them, lay curled on a bed of hay, dying.

  “Did someone tell you that more feed is being prepared?” Mardoc asked.

  Trysten shook her head. Her blonde braids shifted against her vest.

  “Then how do you know?”

  “The dragons know. They can smell it.”

  Mardoc shifted. His grip on the staff tightened momentarily. It betrayed the grimace that he tried to hide in the shadows. She shouldn’t keep him from his work. She reached for the handle of the pail. If caught off guard, she could slip it from his hand, and he would follow along behind her, berate her for taking it while secretly feeling relief.

  Her hand wrapped around the handle. She tugged. Mardoc’s grip tightened.

  “They can smell it?” he asked. “How do you know this? Did you ask them?”

  She waited for a little noise, a hint of a chuckle hung at the end of the question. None came.

  The best thing to do would be to let the pail go. She gave it another tug, added a slight twisting motion with her wrist, as if the pail were but a root needing wrested from the rocky soil.

  “How do you know?” Mardoc asked.

  Trysten looked up at her father. She had grown accustomed to the light and could almost see his eyes in the shadows of his thick eyebrows and bushy beard.

  She swallowed. Her heart flitted in her chest as she thought of telling him the truth, again. He hadn’t believed her weeks ago when she told him the first time that she could hear the dragons. Not just their songs, but what they thought. Though it wasn’t quite as simple as that. They did not think in words. They did not think in sound at all. Or maybe they did. She couldn’t ask them. She had no words for it. She just knew. The first time she had told him, he had laughed and passed it off as the romantic imaginings of the Dragoneer’s daughter. But he did not laugh when she insisted again that she would be Dragoneer one day soon. She worked with the dragons every morning, cleaning stalls, dragging buckets of food and water until her muscles ached. She had few romantic notions about them.

  “The way they act,” she finally said. “They’re impatient. They fidget. They can smell the blood.”

  Mardoc peered into the shadows, over his daughter’s head. His brow furrowed. His eyes squinted as he searched the shadows for evidence of this himself.

  He shook his head. “No. They’re just nervous. Aeronwind’s injury has shaken us all.”

  With his staff, he attempted to brush her aside, gently, and continue on. Before thinking it through, Trysten stepped away, out of his path, and as she did so, she twisted the handle on the pail again. With his weight shifted to the staff and his shattered right leg, he let go rather than risk toppling over.

  Trysten stepped away, back half a step to prevent her father from recovering and reaching out for the pail. He continued on, as if she had done nothing more than exactly what he had willed her to do.

  “Strike a light there,” Mardoc called back.

  One of the weyrmen lit a lantern and hung it on a post outside of Aeronwind’s stall. With a glance between Mardoc and Trysten, he then disappeared into the shadows again. Soon a brush whispered against the leather of a saddle.

  Mardoc stopped before Aeronwind’s stall, set the staff aside, and planted his elbows atop the half-wall. The lantern light fell on his dragon, her breath coming in slow rumbles.

  Sensing the Dragoneer’s presence, Aeronwind opened one gray, cat-like eye and uncoiled her long neck to stare at him leaning against the stall. If a dragon could smile, then Aeronwind would be smiling to see Mardoc on his feet. Trysten felt the dragon’s joy and relief as Aeronwind extended her neck to the Dragoneer. A forked tongue flicked out and landed atop the back of Mardoc’s hand, as if patting it. Then a sense of sorrow took the dragon. Guilt shook her for not being stronger, not being mighty enough to hold her rider up and protect him. Aeronwind’s regret flooded into Trysten. She covered her lips with the tips of her fingers and blinked away the sudden wetness in her eyes. Mardoc reached out to his dragon as if her drooping head was nothing more than an invitation to scratch her snout.

  “There, there, my lady. See? I’m all right.” He scratched at the small scales that covered the dragon’s snout.

  “I’m right as rain. A few more days of rest, and then we’ll be up in the air again, you and me, putting terror back in the hearts of hawks.”

  Trysten swallowed hard and glanced at Elevera. The dragon’s dark brown eyes did not reflect Mardoc’s reassurances. Instead, Trysten saw only concern and a deep resolve. The horde’s beta dragon knew that Aeronwind would not recover.

  “I brought you a morsel or two,” Mardoc said. He began to stoop, to reach towards the ground, and then stopped. He cocked an eyebrow at Trysten, who, reminded of the pail, placed the handle over a hook in the wall. Mardoc reached in, removed a fist-sized chunk of meat, and held it out to Aeronwind.

  The dragon plucked the offering from Mardoc’s hand with a grace and delicacy that betrayed her size, nearly that of a small cottage. With a flick of her mighty head, the meat was gone. Her eyes tracked from Mardoc’s hand to the bucket.

  Trysten pulled in a deep breath, pulled it in time with the dragons, and their power and might coursed through her as well. Elevera stirred in her stall. She swept her head down, reaching behind Mardoc, but not enough to take meat from the pail. The stalls were merely suggestions, a place to put the dragons in shelter. If they wanted to leave the stall, smash open the hopper, or even leave the weyr and terrorize the livestock around the village, nothing could be done to stop them. They obeyed the alpha, and the alpha always honored the Dragoneer to which she was bonded.

  Trysten reached for a piece of meat in the pail.

  “What are you doing?” Mardoc asked.

  Trysten froze, her fingers inches from the food. “I was going to give Elevera—”

  “Paege should feed her.”

  Despite herself, she let out a terse breat
h that betrayed her frustration.

  Mardoc chose another piece of meat and fed it to Aeronwind. “Do you understand? They must bond. They must be ready. The fighting season will be on us soon. And… We’ve already discussed this, Trysten.”

  Heat flushed over Trysten, baked off her skin and made her scalp itch. The urge to tell him no crowded at the back of her tongue and reached for her teeth, ready to wrench her mouth open and spill it. To the wilds with it. She would tell him again, then and there, that she would be the next Dragoneer, that she would enter the consideration and take the title and carry on the family tradition even if he didn’t have a son.

  But then her father offered another bite to Aeronwind, and as the dragon gulped it down, he reached up and ran his fingers along the side of her neck. Though turned away from her, Trysten could see enough of his face to know that he felt just as bad as Aeronwind did. He felt as if he had failed her. He should have been stronger. Should have had legs of iron to withstand her weight. Should have leaped off her back, or done a better job of flying. As far as he was concerned, their broken bones were all his fault.

  The declaration dried up on Trysten’s tongue. It could wait. There would be time enough to hash it out again. The fighting season was months off yet. It was Mardoc’s first day out of their cottage since the accident. Surely she could wait until tomorrow.

  As Mardoc took his hand away, the dragon stretched and lowered her neck, prolonging the physical contact between the two as long as possible. “Have you seen Galelin?” Mardoc asked. He glanced back at Trysten as if to assure that it was she to whom he spoke, and not the dragon.

  “Yes, a bit ago.”

  “Tell Paege to bring him around. I would have a word with him.”

  Trysten nodded.

  Mardoc gave Aeronwind another bite, then turned back to Trysten once again. “Is there something you need, Little Heart?”

  She blushed at the nickname. She was not Little Heart anymore. She was no longer a little girl. She was ready to be the Dragoneer. Soon. Regardless, she turned and started up the central aisle of the weyr to look for Paege.