The Dragoneer: Book 1: The Bonding

by Vickie Knestaut

  Trysten nodded. “You’re in.”

  Kaylar squealed, her face rocked in surprised. She lunged forward and clasped Trysten in a great hug. “Oh, thank you thank you, thank you!”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” Trysten warned. “You can try out for the position, but you still have to earn it. Practice your archery, and hang out at the edge of the yard, especially at dawn and dusk. Watch us and see what you can pick up of the hand signals. It will give you an edge.”

  “I will,” Kaylar said as she rolled her sweater back into a bundle. “I really will. I’ll be there every morning. You’ll see. Watch me.”

  With a grin and a nod, Kaylar took off. She glanced over her shoulder and flashed Trysten one more wide smile before disappearing through the doorway and into the night.

  Trysten couldn’t help but grin herself. Even if the King was able to stop her, even if he managed to wrench the horde away from her, even though she couldn’t imagine how, Trysten at least had the satisfaction of knowing she had started something. Things would never be the same because of her. And it was good.

  An exhaustive search through the books in her den revealed little about the origin of the uniforms, let alone the braids. The only time the books dealt with the uniforms was in describing them, what they ought to consist of, and that the armor guild would manufacture them at a fair price to be paid from the weyr coffers.

  When Trysten shuffled down the stairs, all but a few of the dragons were curled up asleep on the floor of their stalls. Without knowing precisely why, Trysten walked down the aisle in the glow of the few remaining lanterns. The night watchman stirred, shifted, and propped himself up on his stool to better offer the illusion that he hadn’t been dozing off.

  As she passed each stall, she noted how the dragons all breathed in unison, even in their sleep, as if their connection to her went beyond awareness. They knew the Dragoneer was among them, and even in their sleep they were ready for action, ready for her command.

  The extension of the weyr was nearly complete. The odor of fresh lumber mingled with the dirt and hay. She inhaled deeply of the scent of pine, carted in from the foothills of the mountains.

  Ahead, Elevera lowered her head and stuck her neck out in Trysten’s path. She stopped and ran the tips of her fingers along the golden scales of the dragon’s jaw. The dragon lifted her head slightly, and Trysten stroked the muzzle and ran her hand down the past the side of her mighty jaw, to the top of her neck.

  Elevera closed her eyes and let out a sigh in time with all the other dragons.

  Shivers ran across Trysten’s flesh. Goose pimples spread across her arm. Her hands stilled and her eyelids drifted close. She listened to the breathing of the dragons, and in the power and readiness of the sound, like a great waterwheel engine ready to turn the river into massive, grain-grinding power, the dragons waited at the ready for her command.

  How she missed their song. It snuck up on her at times how much she missed it. She missed the individual patterns of breathing, the interplay between them. There was personality. Mood. A sense of life to the song that she used to hear.

  It was all gone now. One dragon. One great horde of dragons behaving as one, all of them responding to her personality channeled through Elevera.

  “It’ll be all right, girl,” Trysten whispered. She lowered her head and rested her brow on the tip of Elevera’s muzzle. The dragon let out a long, low breath that washed over Trysten’s face. It was warm and full of life and felt as much a caress as anything Elevera could manage.

  Trysten patted the dragon’s cheek. “I won’t let them break us up. If they take the weyr, they cannot have you. You and me and the rest of the horde will go to the mountains if we have to. We’ll live in the wilds. We’ll be fine if we stick together. Understand?”

  Elevera appeared to nod, and then gave a slight shove to Trysten’s shoulder.

  “I should go home and get some sleep, right?”

  Elevera stared at Trysten with her great, brown eyes.

  “All right. All right. I’ll do that.”

  She walked back out of the weyr, passing under the new construction on her way out, mindful of how much the new, fresh lumber looked like a scar upon the seasoned, dark wood of the old weyr.

  Chapter 41

  A pounding on the door whipped Trysten from her sleep. She sat up in bed. She heard her father and mother rising in their bed as well.

  She crossed the room, noted the nearly cold embers in the hearth. It was late. It had to be almost dawn. She cracked open the door and saw the silhouette of a hordesman standing on her stoop.

  “Trysten,” Rast said in his rough voice. “I’ve spotted the enemy.”

  Her heart jumped into the back of her mouth, and there, she knew, it would stay for the next few days.

  As they hurried back to the weyr, Rast explained that he had spotted an enemy encampment at the mouth of the Gul valley, where it emptied out of the mountains. Hordesmen from the Western Kingdom had attempted to conceal their presence, but hadn’t done a complete job of it. Rast had spotted the glint of their fires, and had been able to land discreetly at a small distance, then sneak along the edge of the woods for a closer look.

  A horde of twenty dragons crowded a makeshift campsite near where the river widened out as it cascaded into the hills. They were definitely Western hordesmen with their blue-gray sweaters, and the odd hoods of leather that they placed over the heads of their dragons.

  At the weyr, Trysten roused the night watchmen from his nap upon the stool and set him scurrying with news of an impending attack. He hurried up a ladder at the back of the weyr to a small alcove where a bell waited. Trysten told Rast to get the hordesmen ready to fly at dawn. As he gave a nod and hurried back to the bunk hall, Trysten made her way to the overseer’s cottage. She would meet him at his door as he flew out in response to the bell, which began to peal through the dark lanes of Aerona as if the stars themselves crashed down from above.

  The village erupted into a flurry of activity. After speaking with Trysten, the village overseer went about organizing the village’s defenses. Trysten then went back to the weyr. A wall of tension met her there. Tension and a bustle of activity. Weyrmen hurried throughout the building, darting from one stall to the next as they outfitted every dragon for battle, even the ones that had no riders.

  The dragons themselves fell immediately into their synchronous breathing and every dragon head turned to regard Trysten as she stepped inside. The dragons knew what was coming. They were ready. They weren’t eager for battle, lusting after it like the men would when displaying vulgar bravado, but the dragons knew that this was their lot, and it was a fact of life. They cooperated with the weyrmen and hordesmen and soon sported saddles laden with the weapons of war.

  Trysten eyed each stall and made note of which hordesmen were standing by, ready to take to the wing. Every hordesmen stood by his dragon and assisted and supervised the activity of the weyrmen. Every hordesman except Issod, who was still out on patrol with Verillium. It would be a shame for him to miss the battle, as he, above all of the other hordesmen, had come to live for the thought of vengeance. At the same time, he had a gleam in his eye that frightened Trysten from time to time. The man was haunted by his last battle, as he had told her, he had died in the fight, and drifted through these days in a state of shock, unsure of how he had managed to still be upright, still training and fighting and riding. In his mind, he was already dead, and that felt like a dangerous thing to carry about.

  Trysten made her way up the stairs to her den to make a note in the weyr’s log of Rast’s report and the names of the dragons and hordesmen about to take flight. It was the official record, and it would serve to notify future generations of the sacrifices made by those who failed to return.

  As Trysten scrawled the names across the ledger with haste meant to hide the tremble of her hand, the door to the receiving room opened without a knock. She sat back as her father entered and picked his way across the room. />
  She placed the quill back in the ink well and waited for him.

  Mardoc lowered himself into the seat across the table with a thud. He clutched the staff before him, then arranged it across his lap.

  “Last minute advice?” Trysten asked.

  Her father shook his head. “I wanted to apologize.”

  Trysten’s breath caught in her throat.

  “It was unfair of me to treat you as I did, in the time leading up to Aeronwind’s death. I should not have stood in your way, but I was afraid for you. You have to understand that I know what it is like to do what we do. I have years of experience. I know the cost, the sacrifice, and the danger involved. And I didn’t want you to have to endure what I have endured.”

  He grasped his bad knee.

  She opened her mouth, but was unsure of what to say.

  He shook his head. “It’s more than that, as well. As Dragoneer, it was my duty to stand up for the village and the kingdom, to protect our king and his laws. I could not allow you to violate them so openly.”

  “I understand,” Trysten said.

  “No, you don’t,” Mardoc said with another shake of his head. “There is more to this than you know.”

  Trysten looked from her father to the door on the other side of the receiving room. She wanted to know what he had to say, but at the same time, she had a battle to prepare for. Now was not necessarily the time to cloud her mind with distractions.

  Mardoc raised his hand, the palm facing Trysten. “Hear me out. I know you have a battle to prepare for, but I want to tell you this before you depart. I have no doubt whatsoever in my body, such as it is, that you will prevail, that you will rule the day. It is in your blood. It is who you are. And that is why I want to let you know before you leave. It is your right to know who and what it is you are putting your life on the line for.”

  Her heart had no place higher to climb in her throat, and so her stomach felt as if it were wedging itself up her ribs, trying to climb and crowd her heart. She tried to swallow in order to get everything back into its place, but her throat would not comply.

  “You’ve looked over the ledger,” Mardoc began with a gesture at the book before her. “You know that the weyr has been in our family since our ancestor laid the cornerstone. Our bloodline has mingled with that of war dragons since the beginning. It is the way of things. The dragoneers have passed the weyr on to their sons, who then passed it on to their sons or grandsons since the weyr was built. Until now. And the reason for this is that there is a… talent. There is an innate ability to connect with the dragons that each dragoneer possesses. This ability is present in both the female and male lines, but it only manifests itself in men. So it has been since the beginning of the kingdom. When a dragoneer has more than one son, the younger sons either became hordesmen of exceptional skill, and refrained from having a family of their own, or they traveled to different villages to start a weyr and a family. The reason for this is that dragoneers are prevented from marrying into families of other dragoneers. It is said that if this were to happen, there would be a chance that the offspring of such a marriage would possess the multiplied abilities of a dragoneer.”

  Mardoc stopped and took a deep breath as he leaned back into the chair. His gaze made tiny shifts, nearly imperceptible as he searched Trysten’s face for something, perhaps recognition or realization. He appeared to be content with what he found, for he took another deep breath, and then went on.

  “The notion of a Dragon Lord has taken on new life since the arrival of the Hollin hordesmen. It is an idea rooted, I have no doubt, in the offspring of forbidden marriages, of two parents who each carry the blood of dragoneers. As you have seen, men fear the idea of Dragon Lords, of anyone who can communicate with dragons on such a level as to accomplish the impossible, to rip through a kingdom’s defenses as easily as we tear through a dole of doves. This is why certain marriages are forbidden.”

  Mardoc’s gaze fell to the table, and such an incredible cloak of sadness descended upon his face that it tore the breath from Trysten’s chest.

  “Mother,” Trysten managed, and it came out as a squeak. She covered her mouth with her hand.

  Mardoc gave a single nod without looking up. “Your grandmother, on your mother’s side, came to Aerona as a refugee.” He looked up at Trysten. His eyes glistened.

  “She and her brother fled a fallen village. As is the way of our people, we welcomed them into our homes and made them part of our families. Your grandmother married a stone mason and had a family. Unfortunately, accident and disease took most of them, until only your mother remained. She was beautiful. A fierce thing. I had never seen a woman as brave and relentless and true with a bow and arrow. Your mother challenged my heart like no other woman. Soon we were betrothed, and when news of our betrothal came out, her uncle approached me. He revealed that they were the children of a fallen dragoneer. That he had been unable to bond with the alpha after his father’s death, and that the horde had absconded. As the enemy approached, he and his sister fled, and they hid their identity in order to conceal their shame.”

  “Galelin,” Trysten whispered.

  Mardoc lifted an eyebrow. “How did you know?”

  “He told me. Well, he told me about how he was the son of a dragoneer. That he wasn’t able to keep the horde from absconding. He never said anything about a sister, about my… grandmother.”

  Her father let out a little snort and shook his head. “He’s a hard man to gauge. He came to me and me alone because he didn’t want his niece to know what shame she had descended from. He came to tell me his secret so that I could break off the marriage before we broke the law. But it was too late. Our betrothal was hastened because your mother was already carrying you. I told Galelin to keep his tongue, and to never breathe word of it to anyone, or I would make sure that his shame was known by all.”

  The matter-of-fact nature of her father’s admission startled Trysten. He spoke of such things as if speaking of a meal that didn’t quite agree with him. Trysten’s heart beat hard and loud. She heard it in her ears and felt it in her temples, pounding and pulsing as it sank in that her father knew. Her father knew about her. He knew all along.

  “When you were born, I took measures to make sure that your mother and I would have no more children together. I could not part from your mother anymore than my hand could part from my arm. We were a horde. The three of us. I could no more leave the two of you than Elevera could leave any of the dragons in the weyr.

  “I had hoped that Galelin was mistaken, or exaggerating, or altogether lying about your mother’s heritage. But as you grew up and expressed an affinity for the dragons, with each passing day I grew more and more certain of the man’s story.”

  Mardoc lifted his staff from his lap and planted the end of it on the floor beside him with a thud that startled Trysten.

  “Be honest with me now, Little Heart. How far do your abilities extend?”

  Trysten sat back in her chair. The whole weyr felt unmoored, loosened, as if it had been lifted up during the story and placed on the back of the largest dragon ever to live. It was spreading its wings now, and all that had been solid and dependable was nothing more than air, simple distance between Trysten and the hard stone of truth.

  “Quick, now.”

  Trysten drew in a deep breath and glanced up at the shelf above the table. The scroll from the King lay up there, flattened and folded and stuffed into one of the dryer, stiffer books that never seemed to be of much use.

  “You see,” Mardoc continued, “I must know about your abilities. You should have never been born. I should have never courted your mother. And when you tried to become Dragoneer, I knew that it would invite hardship and sorrow for you. That is why I stood in your way. I wanted to protect you from my indiscretions. If you were to become Dragoneer, and word got out, then I knew it would not be long before word made it out that Aerona weyr had a female dragoneer, and once word reached the mother city, the King would send
someone to investigate. If the investigator discovers the truth, we will lose everything. The horde. The weyr. Everything.

  “I tried to get Paege to be the Dragoneer because the two of you have always been close, and I fancied that you might marry someday. In that way, Paege would have a son to pass the weyr onto, and it would remain in our family, if indirectly. But again, life was to show me what a blind fool I am. Your powers are far greater than I suspected. I doubt there was anything that could have prevented Elevera from bonding with you. I deliberately withheld information from you about your abilities in hope that a little humility would season your powers. At that point, I was thinking of the legend of the Dragon Lords and I was feeling quite concerned. And every time I saw you in the air, I knew with greater certainty that the legends are true. My daughter is a Dragon Lord.”

  A tremble shook Trysten. She blinked away tears as her father leaned forward onto his staff.

  “I had hoped that word of you and your abilities wouldn’t make it back to the mother city until Galelin and I could figure out what to do, but that cad Nillard has undoubtedly upset things. The fact that the King has yet to respond is causing me great concern. I suspect that he is sending another horde up here to replace ours. And I fear for what will happen to you, Little Heart.”

  Her father leaned forward, opened his hand, and rested it palm-up on top of the table as if asking, waiting for her to hand him something.

  “Please. Tell me.”

  Trysten leaned forward. She extended her hand and took her father’s in her own. A hot tear rolled down her cheek as if he had squeezed it from her as he clutched her hand. All the strength and might she knew of her father before the accident was there again. It ran beneath his flesh, simmered through his muscles and rang off his bones as he stared at her with a wall of intensity and concern.